COFFINMAKER’S BLUES
STEPHEN VOLK
MIRRORS FOR EYES (PART 2/2)
Thinking about Humans and the dead unfathomability of the robot gaze (which I explored last issue) makes me consider another hit series which has not just pushed but torn to shreds the envelope for television horror – and that is Hannibal.
Like everyone, I was highly sceptical that an NBC police procedural could match the scene-munching joy that was Anthony Hopkins’ big-screen serial killer, let alone the sublimely creepy (and perhaps definitive) performance of Brian Cox in Manhunter. I was wrong. Not only does Bryan Fuller’s baroque re-imagining in terms of an exquisite aesthetic experience fulfil and expand on our ghoulish expectations, the entire world he creates seems to reflect Hannibal’s ludicrously elaborate dishes – the disgustingly elaborate murder scenes seeming merely, almost casually, a further outlet for the serial killer’s creativity, as cool as his dapper suits, while the imagery of such tableaux (reminiscent of the art photographs of Joel-Peter Witkin) buries itself in the guts of our revulsion in a way that is, as Eric Thurn says, “hard to scrub from your unconscious”.
From the get-go Will Graham (Hugh Dancy) is dancing on the edge of madness, his only hope a shrink even more insane than he is. Stuck in the psychotherapeutic swamp of patient and doctor, we find no delineation between dream and reality, objectivity and subjectivity. We are fully immersed, courtesy partly of an astonishing soundscape by Brian Reitzell, in a Jungian jungle of violent fantasies (“Peter, is your social worker inside that horse?”) and slick horned beasts, a mind trap that imprisons not only Will, but us, even as it seduces us. And who better to do that than the ludicrously cool Mads Mikkelsen, the only man who could be a heartthrob whilst holding a throbbing heart? But it is his performance that makes Hannibal truly remarkable, beyond the surrealistic pyrotechnics and Fuller’s avowed “pretentious art film” ethic – because, knowing that the films and novels (and Hopkins) have told us everything about the character, Mikkelsen does precisely nothing. No nods, no winks. No flickers of emotion, or evil intent. And that is a decision of absolute genius. He is cultured, intellectual and precise while the cops are inept, plodding and dull. Yet we can see nothing behind his eyes. Nothing.
This almost-absence reminds me of the Sebastian character in Joseph Mankiewicz’s Suddenly Last Summer (1959), the startling horror film of gothic abandon and psychosexual angst, based on the play by Tennessee Williams and co-scripted by Gore Vidal. As film critic Hannah McGill describes it: “Sebastian observes black birds devouring newly hatched sea turtles, turning them over, as Violet (Elizabeth Taylor) relates ‘to expose their soft undersides, tearing the undersides open and rending and eating the flesh.’ The spectacle of turtle mothers abandoning their offspring to near certain death is an epiphany for Sebastian: it convinces him that God’s creation is malign and conventional morality an irrelevance, and so confirms his commitment to a sex life that is not only non-procreative, but predatory and exploitative.” One can only imagine the blank-eyed Hannibal to be the perfect therapist for the traumatised and neurotic Liz Taylor of the movie.
The central, subversive idea behind Hannibal is, of course, murder as a work of art, as the highest act of a civilised man. But there’s a parallel theme, a secondary joke, if you will – and that is the predator as hero. (And not even the brilliant stage play An Audience With Jimmy Savile dared to do that.)
Hannibal is also, to me – like Westworld – a chilling picture of America. Even though a foreigner (and who in the USA isn’t an immigrant?) Lecter can be read as America itself. Where everything is enmeshed in psychiatry and neurosis. Where you can be anything you want to be – even insane. Listen to Harold Pinter’s Nobel Prize speech, which includes a list of world dictatorships for which the United States is directly responsible. He says: “You wouldn’t know it. It never happened.” The acts (like those of the Chesapeake Ripper) were abominable, secret, unstoppable and serving a monstrous ego. “The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite criminal manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.” And who uses hypnosis but a psychiatrist? A brilliant, witty, elegantly attired but completely lethal psychiatrist? The very emblem (again like Westworld) of civilisation gone bad. Look in the eyes of the killer responsible for the Charleston church shooting and what do you see looking back? Devilish evil, or an even more disturbing blankness? As one nineteen-year-old said of the perpetrator: “You can’t tell by looking at him.” Which is to say that psychopaths don’t come with neat little labels or flashing red lights to tell them apart from normal human beings – and neither do robots. Sociopaths and androids are both creatures we are fascinated by in fiction because of the flaws that make them apart. The absence of the very feelings we hold so dear. Or any feelings at all. Which is the most scary thing of all.
A recent Tumblr post condensed the entire output of Pixar, nailing the reason they succeed so often in melting our hearts with movies driven by laughably obvious subtexts: 1995: “What if toys had feelings?” 1998: “What if bugs had feelings?” 2003: “What if fish had feelings?” But there are other templates equal and you could say opposite in storytelling. And that is: “What if people DON’T have feelings?” What then? “A monster is an unnatural, dangerous creature” says Dr Mathias Clasen, assistant professor of literature and media at Aarhus University, Denmark. “[They] play a huge role in our dreamscapes – stories, myths and so on – so that means monsters say something about [our] psychology. I would argue [that] to understand that strange phenomenon we have to look at human evolution and biology.” He continues: “Humans are paradoxically probably the most successful large animal on the planet. We have colonised all climate zones on the planet but we are also fragile and unspecialised and we are possibly the most fearful organism on the planet. So, given our species’ relative weakness and our relative inability to defend ourselves against predators, for example, what we do to cope is we anticipate, and we imagine danger. That’s one of the things we use our marvellously developed brains for. And we tend to exaggerate and embellish.”
So, in evolutionary terms, our monsters are invented as having attributes and features that tell us what to run way from. But it is easy to recognise a soulless eating machine if it’s shaped like the shark in Jaws, and easy to spot Ridley Scott’s Alien with its intrinsic threat of bodily violation, and even a dream-infiltrating Freddy Krueger with his meatball face and stripy top – but how do you deal with a physical and spiritual danger that looks on the outside just like you? This is surely the greatest fear of all. Often monsters wear skins not their own, pod people, werewolves, Norman Bates, all the better to fool you. And perhaps fool themselves. But lifelike robots and human psychopaths, by their very definition, are undetectable as “other” – yet psychologically and morally outside the grasp of our understanding. Which makes their aberrant biologies both terrifying and tantalising.
Just as Yul Brynner’s mirror eyes reflect us back at ourselves, and prevent us seeing his lack of soul, so Mads Mikkelsen’s eyes as Hannibal give us nothing except what we want to see there. Again in his Nobel speech, Harold Pinter said: “When we look into a mirror we think the image that confronts us is accurate, but move a millimetre and the image changes. We are actually looking at a never-ending range of reflections. But sometimes a writer has to smash the mirror, for it is on the other side of that mirror the truth stares at us.”