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shinelikethunder · 4 years

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Rewatching Hannibal 1x07 Sorbet, and noticing how much of it is about what happens when you don’t become the mask you wear for the rest of the world. What happens to the part of you that’s stubbornly distinct from your façade, when it’s been trapped behind it for so long that even you aren’t sure what it might look like when viewed (...seen). The fear that it’s malformed and pitiable, followed by the slim, terrifying hope that the person who glimpses it might care more about it than about your meticulously-ornamented shell. (Which, among other things, hoo boy if that ain’t a Big Queer Mood... fitting, really, that this is the episode with a gratifying little revenge fantasy about medical homophobia, serophobia, and hostile assumptions about what “ugly little secret” you must be hiding.)

And in that context, one of the Thomas Harris quotes remixed into this episode makes a lot more sense to me than it did on previous viewings: “I see [the Ripper] as one of those pitiful things sometimes born in hospitals [...] They let it die. But he doesn’t die. He looks normal. Nobody can tell what he is.” It’s a demonstration of the thing Hannibal finds most terrifying and alluring about Will: he keeps seeing through all the personae and person suits. At this point it’s through a glass darkly, but still with shocking clarity, considering he doesn’t even know what--who--he’s seeing. Hannibal spends the episode coming up with new misdirections on the spot to test him: the “Chesapeake Ripper or organ harvesters?” red herring, the little game of “two lies and a truth” with the Ripper photos in Quantico. And every time, Will demolishes the misdirections and acknowledges the tiny scraps of truth, almost effortlessly, without even realizing what he’s doing. The episode ends with Will skipping out on the Extremely Person Suit dinner party to go examine its ugly underbelly: the Ripper cases that put the food on the table. Of course Hannibal is secretly delighted at the snub.

It’s the prospect of being seen that forces Hannibal to reckon with what the thing under his many masks might look like. The thing that so stubbornly refuses to die, even when starved of connection or recognition. And the unpleasant truth is that that thing looks a lot more like Franklyn than he’d ever want to admit.

Franklyn is so cringe-inducing to watch as a character--and no doubt even more unpleasant to interact with--that, as with Freddie Lounds, the audience kinda has to wonder why Hannibal hasn’t killed him already. I suspect the answer is that he has a weird soft spot for Franklyn as a form of painful self-recognition. Trying to help Mr. Secondhand Embarrassment Personified is like watching a well-hidden, well-guarded part of himself walk around naked, no manners or charm or cultivation, none of the protections that make his person suit so well-tailored. The part that craves connection but has no idea how to go about it, the part that’s fascinated with (curious about) other people but avoids looking at the stunted void it fears is where its sense of self should be. Or, to get all purple about it: Franklyn is a man who flinches at the threshold of his innermost self, but shorn of all the exquisite mental architecture Hannibal's built himself to live in, reduced to begging anyone nearby for shelter.

Even in the next episode, Hannibal goes out of his way to encourage Tobias not to murder Franklyn, which is about as much mercy as he ever shows to people he has personal affection for but wouldn’t hesitate to kill for pragmatic reasons. Of course, because he’s Hannibal, he ends up murdering the poor bastard himself with no hesitation or remorse--but it’s not because of some line of unbearableness that Franklyn finally crossed. It’s because his desire to spite Tobias was stronger than any hope of sparing Franklyn, who by that point had probably seen too much anyway. In his next session with Bedelia he tells her one of his little sideways truths--yes, it’s funny on its face to see him go “I feel responsible for what happened to him” about the man whose neck he snapped with his own hands, but I do think he feels regret if not remorse, for not managing to engineer a situation that kept his cringey shadow self out of the line of fire.

(Side note: I suspect the reason Freddie Lounds didn’t get eaten in the very second episode is that she was the only other person to see through Will’s protective suit of “socially inept smol bean who is very distressed by the insights he gets from his Unspecified Problems Disorder.” Sure, she’s an absolute bitch about it, but she’s an absolute bitch who can pull off outfits even more outrageous than Hannibal’s--she appeals to his sense of fun. As soon as he realized she’d clocked Will as absolutely fucking seething with all kinds of dark potential 24/7, he decided her rudeness and vulgarity were far outweighed by the entertainment value of having her around to cause problems on purpose.)

(Side note #2: All of this neglects the main casefic plot, which does connect to the same themes, but somewhat less directly. The other person going around without a mask in 1x07 is Devon Silvestri, who’s also kind of an inept schlub when viewed for what he really is. He didn’t arrange that crime scene to look like a Ripper murder, he just panicked and GTFO’d--all the conflation comes from Jack Crawford’s desire to find the Ripper and from Hannibal seizing on it as an opportunity for misdirection. It does lead to some fun playing with “are the mutilations for Art (artifice, performance) or for more prosaic uses of the organs?” when the answer, of course, is that the difference between the Ripper murders and the botched organ theft is “why not both?” Silvestri’s one real deception is to pass himself off as an emergency first responder (his day job) while he’s working his less altruistic sideline, and we also get some fun triangulation when Hannibal has to take on that role for real. Will sees him, gets his first good look at Hannibal’s mastery of this skillset that he once cultivated as part of his person suit, but also sees him looking absolutely in his element as he uses his power over life and death to preserve life. He sees it even more clearly against the backdrop of Silvestri’s dubious competence and furtive discomfort with what he’s doing. In his conscious mind he accepts the best possible interpretation of that glimpse, even as he feels a bunch of less-conscious connections snap into place at the sight--ones he isn’t ready to face yet, but boy is he having Big Feelings about it. Some of which may or may not be diverting blood from his brain, and/or setting him up for uncomfortable wet dreams about Hannibal’s hands in his viscera, but thaaat’s probably a topic for another post.)

Anyway. Sorbet as an episode is about the exact opposite of “fake it ‘til you make it”--it’s about the self that doesn’t become what it performs, the wonder of having someone glimpse it no matter how well-hidden it is, and, crucially, the terror of finally examining what someone else may have glimpsed and finding it stunted, ugly, even pitiable in its isolation. Neither the “thing that doesn’t die” quote nor any of the stuff with Franklyn makes sense, IMO, without the realization that Franklyn is an uncomfortable mirror of what’s under Hannibal’s human veil--and that Hannibal is equal parts intrigued and freaked the fuck out that Will keeps catching glimpses of him through the veil.

#hannibal #meta #sorbet #hannibal lecter #will graham #franklyn froideveaux #freddie lounds #sure is a bunch of tasty Mortifying Ordeal bullshit in this episode #here have some tl;dr about it

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