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h0useofwax · 1 year

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Hanif Abdurraqib: On Seatbelts and Sunsets

AND DAMN IT / WE ARE GONNA FIGURE SOMETHING OUT / IF IT TAKES ME / ALL NIGHT

— JULIEN BAKER, "HURT LESS"

I was born to a woman who died because she took medicine that was supposed to make her less sad, but instead it forced a hive to swell in her throat while she slept. And I guess that’s an act of God.

We buried her the summer and the sun stayed out for weeks after, sitting wide and low over the blacktop, so that it was the only unforgettable presence the city could claim, and that was an act of God.

Once, someone built a boat out of sinkable materials and told the world it was impossible to sink, and that was an act of Man.

The ship was so massive that it couldn’t steer out of the way of an iceberg which tore through the ship’s hull, sinking it and claiming the lives of over 1,500 of its passengers, and I am sorry, but that was probably an act of God.

The Julien Baker song “Hurt Less” is about loving someone so much that they make you want to stay alive on whatever corner of Earth you figured was wretched and unbearable before you met them. And, look, it ain’t nobody’s job to keep any of us alive other than ourselves, and I get that. But I’ve been to the funerals, and I’ve held friends on the cold tile of their apartments with pills spilled out at their feet, and I’ve washed bed sheets three times in a row to get blood out of them, and I have been both the arms reaching and the arms pulling back. And so it’s all a matter of perspective is what I’m saying. On “Hurt Less” Julien Baker opens with a statement about how she never wore seatbelts in her car because she maybe wanted to be alive, but not enough to stop herself from dying if she happened to be thrown from a car. This is a small measure, in some ways: the choices we make to stay alive or not are sometimes a matter of the smallest circumstance. To unbuckle a seatbelt on a highway and to take a knife to your own skin aren’t equal measures. One action, once taken, forces a darkness to descend, and the other is taken to not prevent the darkness from descending once it arrives. But what Julien Baker wants a listener to hear is that life was something she was willing to opt out of.

I haven’t always wanted to be alive, but the only time I ever thought I might actually die was in an airplane over what I will remember as somewhere in the middle of the country. There was an unnatural turbulence – the kind that even rattles the pilots, when you can hear in their voices that they themselves aren’t sure the plane is going to descend safely. Turbulence isn’t something that often causes planes to crash, but it’s easy to forget that when wrapped in the arms of it, tossing a plane from side to side. I remember, in the moment, running my hands along the frayed edges of my seat belt’s thin fabric and wondering if it would hold me in place while the plane broke apart over a field, or became swallowed by a river. The thing about Otis Redding’s plane crash is that he died because when the plane crashed into the river, his seatbelt got stuck and trapped him in his rapidly sinking seat. No one ever talks about that part. How that which protects us can also be our undoing. And so sometimes it’s our saviors that do us in. I have played the card of God on the table so that I can say I think sometimes there is a God who wants us to arrive earlier than we normally would, because the party has gotten boring up there. I was on a plane that felt like it was being stretched to its limits. I think life flashing before your eyes is a cliché. I remember, instead, the future parading itself in front of me. All of the things I wanted to do, but hadn’t yet. Death is a bed of unkept promises, and in the moment I thought I might die, I got to see all of them, and how happy I would perhaps be reveling in them. And then, like that, the plane steadied. I had unbuckled my seat belt without even realizing it.

Once, I was in Ohio, in the middle of a summer where it rained so violently and consistently that I spent what felt like hours at a time in the driver’s seat of my parked car watching the water gather and then cascade down my windshield outside of the grocery store or the post office or the bar where my friends sat inside laughing, waiting for me. And I could convince myself, briefly, that the world outside was flooding and I would be carried away to anywhere else. And I’ve read enough of The Book to know that floods and sickness are both acts of God.

In that same Once, I lived in Columbus, Ohio and liked a woman from miles away, a woman who was almost an entire country away from where her father became sick, and laughed at her jokes on twitter and read and re-read her poems and we sent each other copies of small books we wrote and then the only plane she could take that would get her back to her sick father in time had a long layover in Columbus, Ohio. And nothing else makes sense but for that to be an act of God.

And in that same Once, I sat in my car on a day it didn’t rain. And I held a bag on my lap. And inside the bag was a nervously written letter, and some candy, and a few books. And on the bag I scrawled the name of a woman who was flying back home to care for her sick father and I sat outside of the airport because in a message, she’d told me that she was flying in, that she had hours to be stuck in an airport terminal, and she’d first asked if there was anything fun to do, and then asked if I could maybe stop by and say hello, and I am saying now that I know a sick father and a worried daughter is not a landscape upon which to prop up a monument to romantics and I think now that when I say act of God I am really saying who will suffer so that I might be able to wrap my hands around the neck of some fleeting blessing.

Despite what I knew in that moment, what I know and have known forever is that the people you dream of standing across from don’t just drift to you on accident, and they may never drift to you again, and so I grabbed the bag and left my car and went to stand at the exit to the Southwest Terminal in the Columbus Airport, and I will call that an act of faith.

Today, months beyond the summer where it felt like Columbus, Ohio might flood and be carried away, the father is healthy again. And on a couch in her city which is far from my city, the woman who flew home to him laughs at a joke on television. When she laughs, she covers her face with both of her hands, so that all that can be seen are her eyes, small slivers of themselves. Her body trembles from the shoulders down. She is the kind of person who laughs as if she knows joy has an expiration date. You can see it vibrate through her entire body before exiting. She drops her palms from her face, and smiles, satisfied. I suppose the mundane things a person does that we imagine as art are subjective, usually tied to how in love we are with the person carrying out the action. I do not know what it is called when watching a person laugh for a brief moment is the thing you want to capture in a bottle. I think you realize that you love a person when they do something they would consider forgettable, but you see it every time you close your eyes. I don’t know what this is an act of, but it is an act of something I don’t imagine myself deserving.

There is a very particular hour in a very particular season in Columbus, and it’s not always the same time. Some moment, where the end of spring pulls its fingers through the start of summer before finally letting go. The college students filling the town go back to their corners of Ohio, and the thick humidity hasn’t settled over the city yet, and the season hasn’t yet turned to a violent coughing of storms along the neighborhoods. The sun stays out late, and really fights to go down, making a mess of colors on its way out. It’s the type of weather that invites open windows before air conditioning.

The central refrain in “Hurt Less” is more of a plea than anything else. With intensity growing after each rotation of it, Julien Baker sings, twice:

OH, LEAVE THE CAR RUNNING I’M NOT READY TO GO AND IT DOESN’T MATTER WHERE I JUST DON’T WANT TO BE ALONE AND AS LONG AS YOU’RE NOT TIRED YET OF TALKING, IT HELPS TO MAKE IT HURT LESS

Interstate 270 is an outerbelt that circles entirely around Columbus in a continuous loop, taking a driver through the heart of the city, and through its sleepy suburbs, and past the airport where, if you time the drive correctly, you can see a plane pushing into the sky, scraping past the descending sun and the final living moments of its miraculous painting. You can drive past the clutter of chain businesses at the edge of Sawmill Road and see the signs pushing high into the air: Applebees, Speedway, an inflatable car from the Toyota dealership. You can get a glimpse of downtown from two different angles, and then do it all over again. It is the only freeway in the city that doesn’t end by taking you somewhere outside of the city. If you were young and had little money but a full tank of gas and a person you wanted to spend time with in the golden hours when day turned to night, you might get a couple of shakes from United Dairy Farmers and circle the city with a person who looked perfect first in the sunlight and then the streetlight, and you would get to watch the city from all of its angles, in all of its light and darkness. And sometimes you’d talk, or sometimes you’d listen to a single song on repeat, or sometimes you’d roll down the windows and let the wind rush in and kiss every corner of silence built up in the car while the skyline echoes in a rearview mirror. It can take about an hour to traverse the entire outerbelt, and there are times I miss it, even with money in my pocket, I miss the intimacy that financial restraints could grant me. When I first moved back to Columbus, I would miss my exits on 270 on purpose, just to remember the romance of aimlessness.

Few things know loneliness like a highway, for all of the people going to places they don’t want to go, or driving away from people they don’t want to be driving away from. I most love the refrain of “Hurt Less” because it’s begging for a simplicity. Sit with me in this car, and we don’t need to have a destination other than a place where we are next to each other in our shared sadness which seems a little less impossible in a moving car, with only one other person who is there because they want to be there with you, no matter what you both are moving towards.

My first car was a 1995 Nissan Maxima, and it was a hideous shade of brown. The car had automatic seat belts. In 1996, when side airbags became mandatory, most vehicle companies did away with the automatic seat belt. The automatic seat belt was a hassle, but its main function was to exist in a way that made safety something a driver didn’t think about. When you opened the door, the mechanical seat belt would jerk forward, inviting you to sit down. When you closed the door, it would retract, clasping around your body. They were faulty though – if your car underwent any impact, there was no telling how they’d react. Some of them would stick, trapping people inside. My car was the last Nissan model that had the automatic seat belt. I would often forget my seatbelt until it briefly malfunctioned, staying stuck to my body when I opened the door, or staying still when I closed the door. In a car with a loud muffler and a broken car alarm that would go off at will, the seat belts were the least of my problem.

In 2004, my car was stolen from the apartment complex parking lot it was in. Because I didn’t trust my car alarm, I had no idea it was taken until I went to go grocery shopping and saw my spot empty. Having a car stolen is one of those things which creates an absence that doesn’t seem real, where you stare at a space where something familiar lived and try to will the familiar thing back to you.

Two nights later, a friend called me and told me to turn on the news. There was my car, flipped upside down on I-270, surrounded by the flashing lights of police cars. The person who’d stole my car got into a high-speed chase with police, but he made the mistake of thinking he could get out of the city by getting on I-270. I never found out how long the chase lasted, but I imagine long enough for the culprit to realize that the freeway would only take him in a circle. In a panic, he attempted to swerve off of an exit ramp to avoid a police car, and the car flipped over and rolled three times. With the car upside down, the airbag deployed, trapping the car thief’s neck around the spiral of the automatic seat belt, which had tightened, due to impact. While police officers drew their guns and cautiously approached my car, he was strangled to death. That’s the thing about something holding you so close that it actually becomes a part of your body. You can forget about it until it consumes you entirely.

The thing about being in love with someone who does not live where you live is that the two of you have to think of new and inventive ways to see each other, sometimes based around a shared hectic travel schedule. And so, through the winding roads of New Hampshire, cloaked by ice, I am driving to a place where someone I love is, because I could afford the few days, even if they will skip by quicker than I’d like. There are several churches, all of their signs offering advice, or statements:

TO BE ALMOST SAVED IS TO BE TOTALLY LOST

START YOUR WEEK IN THE ARMS OF THE LORD

DON’T WORRY ABOUT THE THINGS YOU HAVE NO CONTROL OVER

And God, if you are listening, I do worry. God, if you are listening, I count the miles between my body and the body of the person I love and I worry about each of them. God, I worry about the planes we take to each other and the sky that might not hold them. God, I wear seatbelts and visit the graves of my friends in spring to kick away the dirt from winter. God, it is just us talking now, and I worry about everything I can’t control. God, can you tell me how much longer I’ll get to be alive and in love. God, I am sorry for the times I didn’t want to stick around. God, there is a scroll of things I have taken for granted in order to survive this long, and it is endless. And it is maybe too late to want to live forever after everything I’ve seen and done. But there are freeways between me and the person I love, God. And I don’t have enough time to travel all of them. I worry that I can’t bend them all into a giant circle from where I begin to where she begins. God, I don’t know what I believe in except the shrinking of distance. God, do you worry about the things you can control? I am enough in love to worry about everything that might cast a shadow over it. God, I have touched the living face of a person I love with the same hands I have touched the dying face of someone I love and none of that seems fair. God, I am enough in love that I want to make everything about it an endless circle, with a sunset at the top of every hour. I know this is all too much, God. But as long as you’re not tired yet of talking, it helps.

Julien Baker sings the last lines of “Hurt Less” with nothing but a faint piano, growing fainter as she squeezes each syllable for all it is worth:

THIS YEAR I’VE STARTED WEARING SAFETY BELTS WHEN I’M DRIVING BECAUSE WHEN I’M WITH YOU I DON’T HAVE TO THINK ABOUT MYSELF AND IT HURTS LESS

That’s the thing about something holding you so close that it actually becomes a part of your body.

-Hanif Abdurraqib

“Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. His first collection of poems, The Crown Ain't Worth Much was released in 2016 and was nominated for the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award. His first collection of essays, They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us, was released in fall 2017 by Two Dollar Radio.”

https://www.triangle.house/hanif-abdurraqib-on-seatbelts-and-sunsets

#Hanif Abdurraqib #poem #on seatbelts and sunsets

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sihaya74 · 1 year

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NEW The Lessons of Bryan Fuller's Hannibal S1:E3 -- THE GOOD SHIP WOLF TRAP

Lessons of Bryan Fuller’s Hannibal

S1:E3 – THE GOOD SHIP WOLF TRAP

As metaphors go, boats are fabulous vessels of meaning. If you think about it, boats are one of humankind’s greatest inventions. From the humblest rowboat to those massive cruise ships the size of small cities, the fact that humans, who are inherently sinkable, found a way to float on the surface of the water is truly amazing.

And boats don’t just float – they sail, they fly, they carve out their passage through the waves like a giant, power-driven blade. A beautiful description of a boat as a presence of power is in Thomas Hardy’s “The Convergence of the Twain,” his poem about the cruel fate of the Titanic and its passengers and crew. While discussing the construction of the Titanic, which Hardy rivets with mythological imagery, he calls the ship a “creature of cleaving wing” (17).

A boat is a thing that can cut as well as it floats. It can be a home, an escape, a bridge, a cage; ships are many things to many people. Even the ships that science fiction authors launched into the skies, like Star Trek’s Enterprise and Battlestar Galactica, come to mind – sailing through a sea of stars filled with symbolism and significance.

Human beings once looked out over the grey-blue waves of an ancient ocean and saw nothing on the horizon but water and clouds. To all appearances, there was nothing past the horizon. Word was, if you sailed far enough, you would sail right over the edge. But still, in different locales all over the world, humans said, “Fuck it. I wanna see what’s out there.” And they built boats and went to go have a look see.

Authors love to use boats as metaphors and symbols – just check the works of Homer and Coleridge, Shakespeare and Dickens, Melville and Hemingway. The list goes on and on.

In Season 1, Episode 3 of Bryan Fuller’s Hannibal, we are introduced to the concept of an important boat; it is inside the hull of that very boat that our lesson is stored, wrapped up lovingly in a water-proof tarp and tucked away under our feet. But first, let’s discuss how we come to this lesson, through the tempestuous sea of Hannibal’s characters – namely the turbulent emotional lives of Abigail Hobbs and as always, my darling Will Graham.

S1E3 is called “Potage.” A potage like the English word, “pottage,” is a thick soup – similar to a stew. Potage can be fancy, but its origins were with the peasantry, who threw whatever odds and ends they had left over from cooking into a pot with broth and let it simmer on low for a few days, or a whole week even. The result was a thick, hearty, highly concentrated meal, redolent with the scents and the flavors of its many and varied ingredients.

With “Apéritif” and “Amuse-Bouche,” Fuller and his fellow chefs teased our palates and stimulated our appetites. With S1E3, we are indeed served a potage, a hearty issue that has been simmering since Episode 1 – the issue of Abigail Hobbs and what she knows about her father’s life as the Minnesota Shrike.

“Potage’s” story is credited to David Fury. The script was written by Fury, Chris Brancato, and our creator and visionary, Bryan Fuller. It was directed by David Slade.

At the beginning of the episode, as we dig our spoons into the bowl, we are gifted a large chunk of significance. Now in an upscale mental hospital, Abigail Hobbs awakens from her coma. She has emerged from a nightmare about her father – one filled with hunting and gutting and bleeding. She is frightened and confused when she wakes up, and we as the audience cannot blame her. The last time we saw her, her father had killed her mother, then slashed her throat. As she lay exsanguinating on her family kitchen floor, a strange, trembling man shot her father to death. The strange man tried to save her life but was too shaken. Thankfully, another man with a very strong hand clamped down on her wound until help could arrive. She eventually loses consciousness, but not until after she sees Will Graham kill her father and Hannibal Lecter save her from the flood of crimson darkness that awaited her.

Only a scene later, the audience is given another tasty morsel to chew upon. This being Will Graham standing out in front of his quaint, clean farm house in a t-shirt and underwear – garments that cling in all the right places and make me personally thankful for Hannibal’s costume and wardrobe department. Alana Bloom has come to inform Will about Abigail’s reemergence into the waking world. Will wants to go see her immediately. Alana convinces him that she should test the waters with Abigail first. Alana very rightly concludes that the first person from the BAU’s team who approaches Abigail should not be the man who killed her father or the man the who saved her life. That’s a lot of baggage to start off with. I have to say that I feel that poor Abigail is never really given a chance – that she and her fate have its own message attached to it – something about victimhood and patriarchy that I will discuss much later in this series of blog posts. Still, Alana is right – (she often is) – and she heads off to visit Abigail in the mental hospital with a bunch of clothes and music and gift cards.

In their exchange, as Alana examines Abigail’s state of mind, in an effort to build rapport, Alana admits to Abigail, “I’ve got a stack of gift cards. I don’t do well redeeming gift cards;” Abigail replies, “Probably says something about you” (Fury et al. 10). I am also a person that doesn’t do well at redeeming gift cards, and I would love to know “what it says about me.” As far as I can tell, I think it means I work too much, but any other deep meaning is lost on me.

Soon, Alana, Hannibal, and Jack Crawford have a conference about Alana’s impressions of Abigail and whether she should be exposed to Will yet. It is very apparent from this scene that there are two people who definitely suspect Abigail of having helped her father kill his victims: Jack and Hannibal. Jack’s belief is based on a cop’s instinct; Hannibal’s is based on a killer’s. You get the feeling somewhere deep inside that Alana believes it too, but she will not allow that belief to manifest. It is also apparent in this scene that because Hannibal is convinced that Abigail helped her father commit his crimes, that he automatically begins deflecting suspicion away from her saying things like, “I would suggest she can be practical without being a murderer” and that the impression of secrecy she radiates may “simply be her trauma” (Fury et al. 11). The fact that Hannibal begins tossing out red herrings this early on is important considering the end of the episode and how Abigail and Hannibal come to understand each other.

Hannibal talks quite a lot about God – in Harris’ works and in all on-screen depictions. Hannibal is not an atheist – he lives in defiance of God. He continually dares the deity to stop his reign of tasty terror and continually God chooses not to. So, Hannibal goes on killing and eating victims knowing he is doing so either because of God’s indifference or with God’s tacit approval. Even though later in Season 3, Will Graham says that “Hannibal’s not God. Wouldn’t have any fun being God,” Hannibal perseveres in the same actions as God, namely making others in his image (Vlaming and Fuller 11). He persists in the nurturing of fledgling killers. Murder is Hannibal’s answer for all things that ail you, especially for the people he finds interesting enough to invest time into.

He believes Abigail has assisted her father in his slew of murders and so Hannibal encourages Abigail to carry on a life of killing; to Hannibal, it only makes sense. Randall Tier is sad and depressed and thinks he’s a beast who wants to ambush, kill, and gnaw on people – Hannibal gives him the go ahead. Bedelia has a troublesome patient – trouble courtesy of Dr. Hannibal Lecter, but still… Neal Frank dies with Bedelia’s arm down his throat and Hannibal is pleased as punch. Margot Bloom has a sadistic, abusive brother? You know Hannibal’s answer. Will Graham thinks exactly like a killer. But Will Graham is a murderer who doesn’t murder – a sad, specter of himself like a vampire living on animal blood. Will can’t sleep; he has nightmares. Will is barely comfortable in his own skin. Hannibal’s answer – walk down to the dark end of the street with me and never feel pain again, Will. So many people Hannibal attempts to make in his own image – at a certain point, we must assume it’s because he’s lonely. Since Mischa, Hannibal has had no family. That’s why in Seasons 1-2, he tries to make himself one.

It's agreed upon that Will should now be allowed to interact with Abigail, as long as Hannibal goes along for the ride. When Hannigram arrive at Abigail’s hospital room, they find it already occupied by the persistent, nosy Freddie Lounds, who is attempting to scoop Abigail’s story by endearing herself to the confused girl. Whether or not Freddie truly cares about Abigail is immaterial, but I think she ultimately comes to care about Abigail. Freddie is a creature of ambition and as such, is one of the most honest characters in the story, even in Harris’ original male Freddy Lounds – both Loundses are clever, dogged, and can often be extremely annoying – that’s the paparazzi for you. Freddie has already begun trying to turn Abigail against Will Graham, hence Will’s snippy dismissal of her.

After the visit at the hospital, Hannibal, Will, and Alana escort Abigail back to her family home in Bloomington, Minnesota. As the group arrives, they discover that vandals have spraypainted the word “CANNIBALS” on the doors of the house. There are two important moments in this homecoming exercise: 1. Abigail reveals that she knows Hannibal is the man who called her house on the morning her father was killed and 2. Abigail crosses paths with Nick Boyle. While they go through items in the family’s living room, Abigail asks about recreation of the crime. She indicates that in this portrayal, Alana should play her mother, Will should play her father, and she turns to Hannibal and with a piercing stare says, “And you be the man on the phone” (Fury et al. 26). I remember gasping the first time I saw this. Even after all my rewatches, it still gets me. It’s a great moment.

Later, Nick Boyle has come looking for Abigail, who he blames for his sister Cassie’s murder. As Abigail stands in her backyard talking to her one remaining friend, Marissa Schuur, Nick appears from the woods, accusing Abigail of helping her father pull Cassie’s lungs out as she died. For repeat viewers of the series, this scene is always rife with irony because we know good and Goddamned well who pulled out Marissa’s lungs, and it sure ain’t Abigail. It’s the plaid-suited meow meow who stands in the winter sun looking as innocent as a kitten. Marissa throws a rock at Nick and tags him in the head – a piece of convenient carnage Hannibal will use to maximum benefit later.

Then, the whole BAU crew take Abigail to her father’s hunting cabin. Abigail explains that her father believed that the only way to “honor” a kill, speaking about deer and other game, was to use every part of the animal. She details the process, saying, “He sold the pelts on Ebay or in town. He made pillows. Carved knives out of leg bones. No parts went to waste. Otherwise it was murder” (Fury et al. 31). She then comes to the realization that her father was feeding his victims to she and her mother. Immediately after this, the whole team discovers the mostly nude body of Marissa Schuur impaled on a stag’s head in the antler garden of an attic Hobbs crafted for himself. Abigail is whisked away by Alana. Jack, Hannibal, and Will examine the crime scene.

Jack questions Will’s powers of deduction, and expresses, in a huffy, petulant fashion, that Abigail could be manipulating Will – he is an empath, after all. Will is confident that the same person who killed Cassie Boyle in the “field kabuki” murder has killed Marissa Schuur. They have named this killer the Copy Cat. Both girls have been impaled on racks of antlers. Cassie is displayed horizontally, like a coffee table. Marissa is hung on the wall, a tapestry of murder. Will now theorizes that Nick Boyle is this Copy Cat based on the presence of some of his blood and tissue on Marissa’s front tooth, which he surmises was lodged there when Nick punched her in the face.

The audience thrills with dramatic irony at this point again knowing that Nick’s tissue came from the rock Marissa threw at him that Hannibal cleverly hid and then obviously, absconded with. This is why Hannibal deserves many viewings – the dramatic irony is not fully enjoyed until the viewer has done so. And, the absolute mastery of Mads Mikkelsen’s performance does not truly hit home until you realize how often he is directing the character of Hannibal about like a agile cat, always on its toes, always twisting mid-fall, to cushion its landing.

Jack buys the Nick Boyle theory, albeit reluctantly. He sends Hannibal to retrieve Abigail and take her back to Baltimore/DC. Will stays at the crime scene with Jack.

When Hannibal and Alana return Abigail to her family home before the journey back to Baltimore, Freddie Lounds is waiting for them. And so is Marissa Schuur’s mother, who is driven wild with grief. Hannibal cooly and skillfully deals with both and Abigail is sent inside.

It is in this moment of isolation – the first Abigail has had in a day fraught with trauma and heartbreak that Nick Boyle breaks into her home and confronts her. He says he just wants to talk. Abigail is terrified, shaking with fear. Just as she was taught, she kills Nick – gutting him from belly to chin with a kitchen knife. His corpse is laid out on the floor like an opened deer, his eyes as black as onyx. Alana and Hannibal then enter the house. In a mirror, Hannibal sees the bloody Abigail ascending the stairs and in a moment of almost Bond-like badassness, he knocks Alana’s head sideways against the wall, rendering her unconscious.

Slipping immediately into a paternal role, Hannibal commands Abigail to show him what she has done. His exterior is calm, but the viewer knows that internally, Hannibal is overjoyed. Abigail has natural killer instinct – a thing that cannot be taught. He explains to Abigail that based on the condition of Nick’s body, no one will believe that Abigail was simply “defending herself” when she killed him – and the method of slaughter will definitively signal to Jack that she participated in her father’s crimes.

Then, in a weighty moment, in a line of dialogue that is echoed later in Season 3, Hannibal says to Abigail, “I can help you, if you ask me to” (Fury et al. 40).

The character of Hannibal Lecter, specifically as written by Bryan Fuller, is vampiric in so many ways. One being that he always wants to be asked for help. He offers a lifeline, a way out, but he insists on being asked before he intervenes. He is a Narcissist King of the highest order. By helping Abigail hide Nick’s body, Hannibal locks her into an unbreakable contract with him. She has quite literally made a deal with the Devil. At the end of the episode, when Abigail sneaks out of the hospital and comes to Hannibal’s office, she confronts Hannibal about being the man on the phone the morning her father died. Hannibal explains the circumstance away as a random coincidence, although Abigail knows better. They agree to keep each other’s secrets. But the viewer feels the dreadful weight of the agreement Abigail has just entered into when Hannibal says, “Reassuring to recognize when the bolt of our fates slides home” (Fury et al. 45). The imagery is that of being imprisoned, jailed. Hannibal and Abigail are now locked in a cage together – and as we all know…two men enter, one man leave. In this case, two liars. But the MadMaxian theorem holds true.

Just before the end of the episode, after Nick Boyle’s supposed “escape,” Will sits in a therapy session in Hannibal’s office, discussing the confusing and emotional events of the past few days. And this, my lovely reader, is where the vessel of our lesson rocks back and forth slowly on glass-smooth sea.

Will describes his home – his lovely farmhouse in Wolf Trap, Virginia.

WILL: Sometimes at night, I leave the lights on in my little house and walk across the flat fields. When I look back from a distance, the house is like a boat at sea. It’s really the only time I feel safe (Fury et al. 42).

The original source of this line, along with Hannibal’s comments about “the bolt of our fates sliding home” in from the Foreword to Red Dragon that Thomas Harris wrote when the book was reissued in 2000. This Foreword is a beautiful and astonishing look into how an author works with his characters. In Harris’ case, it is almost like spiritual possession or haunting. He “goes along” with his characters into their fates. He never makes the decisions for them. They decide for themselves and Harris merely bears witness…and takes copious notes.

Harris tells the reader that in the fall of 1979 when he was working on Red Dragon, a family illness caused him to return to his home state of Mississippi, where he was to remain for eighteen months. He was housed a shotgun cabin in the middle of a cotton field, kindly loaned to him by family friend. There, in the dark, cold nights – he and Will Graham journeyed forward into both of their fates. Harris then explains that it was he who walked out into the “flat fields” surrounding his cabin in the bitter oblivion of night and looked back at the little house, which resembled “a boat at sea” (Harris IX). Harris also tells the reader the story of the pack of feral dogs who lived in the fields outside his abode and how he befriended them with pounds of dog food. A Hannibal fan cannot help but tear up a little reading Harris’ description of his pack: “They walked with me in the fields at night and when I couldn’t see them, I could hear them all around me, breathing and snuffling along in the dark. When I was working in the cabin, they waited on the front porch, and when the moon was full they would sing” (Harris X).

Will’s love of dogs comes from Harris’ love of dogs. And in Hannibal, Will’s love of dogs is extended by Bryan Fuller’s love of dogs. And who can blame them? You gotta love dogs. They’re better than all of us.

In the “Potage” script is the addition of the line where Will says, “It’s really the only time I feel safe” (Fury et al. 42).

Will feels safe because his house is like a boat. Will grew up on boats. His father was a fisherman who Will followed to ports all over the Gulf Coast and up to New England. The boat of Will’s home, let’s call it the S.S. Wolf Trap, is adrift in an ocean of snow as a boat is scudding among the waves of sea. The point is, the boat is isolated, alone, away from land. And being away from land – Will is away from people. People and all their words and faces and insinuations and manipulations – all of it rubbing against his empathic nerves. People put him on edge, wring him out, stretch his patience, test his politeness, but mostly, they suck him dry. They fuse themselves into his being and Will becomes a twisted hybrid of every person he interfaces with. It is well documented in both Harris and Fuller that Will’s empathy causes him to take on other people’s speech patterns and mannerisms without even knowing it. He becomes other people. And then they use him. And when he realizes, he feels empty and alone. This idea returns many times throughout the series. Deep down, Will just wants someone to love his INNER MONGOOSE (see my blog post for S1:E1), but people just want to train the mongoose and use it to hunt snakes.

Will feels safest when he’s alone surrounded by a pack of dogs. That says a lot about Will, but it also says a lot about other people and just how truly shitty they can be.

And so, my friends, THE LESSON.

WE ALL DESERVE A SAFE PLACE.

Whether it is a real, physical place or a mental refuge, not unlike a mind palace, some might say… all of us, every one of us deserves a place we can go to get away from the shitty people of the world.

My friends, do whatever you have to do to find that place. To you, it might be someplace you go alone or it might be in a room with thousands of other people.

It could be in your cozy bed under the covers or it could be at a fan convention surrounded by music and noise and laughter. It could in a movie theater by the light of a silver screen or it could be at the gym with only the sound of your pulse drumming away in your head.

In your car, in the shower, behind your eyelids when you lay down your head at night – wherever it may be, be like Will Graham, and find your safe place. And do not feel ashamed of the need to retreat into your personal fort whenever you need to. Life is hard.

We all deserve a little boat of our own.

Here endeth the lesson…

References:

Hardy, Thomas. “The Convergence of the Twain.” Poetry Foundation. poetryfoundation.org/poems/47266/the-convergence-of-the-twain. Accessed 15 Dec. 2022.

Harris, Thomas. “Foreword to a Fatal Interview.” Red Dragon, by Harris, Berkley, 2000, pp. IX-XIII).

Fury, David, Chris Brancato, and Bryan Fuller. Writers. “Potage.” Hannibal, season 1, episode 3, Chiswick Productions, 2012.

Vlaming, Jeff and Bryan Fuller. Writers. “Primavera.” Hannibal, season 3, episode 2, Chiswick Productions, 2015.

#lessonsofhannibal #hannibal #fannibals #fannibalfamilyforever

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