(no subject)
The trouble with Hannibal is -- well, it's exceedingly slow; and exists in that bright-colored universe where vast numbers of people get murdered artistically by strangers who are always organized and tidy and terrifyingly good at what they do; and what psychiatrist on the planet has a two-story office with a balcony? -- I say, the other trouble with Hannibal is that within the first 10 minutes of its pilot it betrays an unfortunate tension with the source material to which it is otherwise surprisingly faithful.
Which is to say: the killer in the pilot episode is described in detail in the backstory of the novel Red Dragon; the secondary characters are all the same (some of them genderbent); and as in the novel, it's Will Graham who stumbles over the killer more or less by chance and shoots him to stop him slitting a young woman's throat.* And, you know, in the book, Graham and Lecter didn't meet till Graham was investigating Lecter's own victims.** But that doesn't bother me. Reworking the material to try out a new what-if scenario is cool by me.
(* In the novel, the killer got her windpipe but not her arteries, and much was made of how she was stubbornly fighting him, head down, when Graham walked in. She also wasn't the killer's own daughter, and was able to walk out under her own power. Although the novel has many female victims, most of them fight pretty hard for their lives, and sometimes succeed.)
(** It's a striking scene, really, which Graham retells in a subdued way so you have to imagine the impact of it: Graham has only met Lecter twice and is re-interviewing him in his role as the victim's shrink, and looks up and sees something on the wall that reminds him of the victim's positioning in death. And makes the connection right there, in front of Lecter, and has to cross his fingers that such a perceptive person as Lecter wouldn't see that connection being made right in front of him. Graham steals away to find a pay phone to report his discovery, and Lecter sneaks up behind him in stocking feet to unseam him nave to chops.)
The difference is in Graham, in how he's presented. It's kind of a cliche these days, the angsty lone investigator who makes surprising leaps of logic, which is why I would think that such a faithful novel adaptation would throw out the layers of pop-culture accretion and go back to the source. But TV-Graham explicitly states in the pilot that he's vaguely (and self-diagnosedly) Asperger's, when the whole point of book-Graham's talent is his remarkably excellent social perception. Others describe him as picking up accents and verbal rhythms in conversation. His rapport with victims is uncommon. The narrative shows how he manipulates a witness to provoke a clearer memory than the witness thought he had. Graham isn't a loner except when he's an investigator: sleeping badly, drinking too much, on the road and in danger for his life. At home, with his wife and stepson, he's reasonably sane and communicative. (He does a very good job of explaining to a child about a previous bout with depression, for instance.)
The other key feature of book-Graham is the leaps he makes. The book has other people describe him as eidetic, but he never calls himself that. What we do see, though, is the process of his thinking. In addition to (**) above, there's a great scene where he figures out how the present killer he's tracking finds his victims: it's all information the audience has been given before, laid out clearly (but hidden in a sea of other information), and he stands in front of a window tying and untying knots in the string of a set of blinds, thinking, thinking, like trying to remember a tip-of-the-tongue word except that he gets it, finally. He literally processes all the visual cues he's been given until they lead him to a logical conclusion, a path that the audience probably couldn't blaze, but can follow. On the TV show, Graham just blurts out things he can't possibly know, as if they're guesses, except they're all correct guesses. We see him furrow his brows and produce an answer, but he's a black box of answers. He's not an intelligent man blessed with vast table memory and a disturbing imagination; he's a walking plot device.
(AND he mispronounces "ketoacidosis", in front of a sciency bunch who would all know the correct pronunciation. I mean, if I do, and I haven't taken chemistry in 21 years. Do your research, people!)
Others have described the potential problems with the character of Lecter himself. (My main problem with him is that Lecter is not a man whose accent would diminish his comprehensibility. His pronunciation would be exquisite, don't you think?) On the one hand, I kind of like the idea of following someone's fanficcy turn at a canon, and seeing where it goes. On the other hand, it's far enough from its "canon" that I don't really recognize the source, and have to treat it as an original story. But without my goodwill towards the source, it doesn't have a lot to win me over with. Potential, maybe, given the cast, but you have to work pretty hard to get me over my basic antipathy for all-serial-killers-all-the-time. I've watched way too much Homicide to believe that killers on the whole are smart enough to get away with it twice.
Now I have to go re-watch the (awesomely 80s and totally a Michael Mann production) earlier adaptation Manhunter which is also very different from the book, but keeps a lot of the same mood, and sense of how investigation is a process rather than an instantaneous result.
This entry was originally posted at http://vehemently.dreamwidth.org/27084.html. Comment wherever you like.
Which is to say: the killer in the pilot episode is described in detail in the backstory of the novel Red Dragon; the secondary characters are all the same (some of them genderbent); and as in the novel, it's Will Graham who stumbles over the killer more or less by chance and shoots him to stop him slitting a young woman's throat.* And, you know, in the book, Graham and Lecter didn't meet till Graham was investigating Lecter's own victims.** But that doesn't bother me. Reworking the material to try out a new what-if scenario is cool by me.
(* In the novel, the killer got her windpipe but not her arteries, and much was made of how she was stubbornly fighting him, head down, when Graham walked in. She also wasn't the killer's own daughter, and was able to walk out under her own power. Although the novel has many female victims, most of them fight pretty hard for their lives, and sometimes succeed.)
(** It's a striking scene, really, which Graham retells in a subdued way so you have to imagine the impact of it: Graham has only met Lecter twice and is re-interviewing him in his role as the victim's shrink, and looks up and sees something on the wall that reminds him of the victim's positioning in death. And makes the connection right there, in front of Lecter, and has to cross his fingers that such a perceptive person as Lecter wouldn't see that connection being made right in front of him. Graham steals away to find a pay phone to report his discovery, and Lecter sneaks up behind him in stocking feet to unseam him nave to chops.)
The difference is in Graham, in how he's presented. It's kind of a cliche these days, the angsty lone investigator who makes surprising leaps of logic, which is why I would think that such a faithful novel adaptation would throw out the layers of pop-culture accretion and go back to the source. But TV-Graham explicitly states in the pilot that he's vaguely (and self-diagnosedly) Asperger's, when the whole point of book-Graham's talent is his remarkably excellent social perception. Others describe him as picking up accents and verbal rhythms in conversation. His rapport with victims is uncommon. The narrative shows how he manipulates a witness to provoke a clearer memory than the witness thought he had. Graham isn't a loner except when he's an investigator: sleeping badly, drinking too much, on the road and in danger for his life. At home, with his wife and stepson, he's reasonably sane and communicative. (He does a very good job of explaining to a child about a previous bout with depression, for instance.)
The other key feature of book-Graham is the leaps he makes. The book has other people describe him as eidetic, but he never calls himself that. What we do see, though, is the process of his thinking. In addition to (**) above, there's a great scene where he figures out how the present killer he's tracking finds his victims: it's all information the audience has been given before, laid out clearly (but hidden in a sea of other information), and he stands in front of a window tying and untying knots in the string of a set of blinds, thinking, thinking, like trying to remember a tip-of-the-tongue word except that he gets it, finally. He literally processes all the visual cues he's been given until they lead him to a logical conclusion, a path that the audience probably couldn't blaze, but can follow. On the TV show, Graham just blurts out things he can't possibly know, as if they're guesses, except they're all correct guesses. We see him furrow his brows and produce an answer, but he's a black box of answers. He's not an intelligent man blessed with vast table memory and a disturbing imagination; he's a walking plot device.
(AND he mispronounces "ketoacidosis", in front of a sciency bunch who would all know the correct pronunciation. I mean, if I do, and I haven't taken chemistry in 21 years. Do your research, people!)
Others have described the potential problems with the character of Lecter himself. (My main problem with him is that Lecter is not a man whose accent would diminish his comprehensibility. His pronunciation would be exquisite, don't you think?) On the one hand, I kind of like the idea of following someone's fanficcy turn at a canon, and seeing where it goes. On the other hand, it's far enough from its "canon" that I don't really recognize the source, and have to treat it as an original story. But without my goodwill towards the source, it doesn't have a lot to win me over with. Potential, maybe, given the cast, but you have to work pretty hard to get me over my basic antipathy for all-serial-killers-all-the-time. I've watched way too much Homicide to believe that killers on the whole are smart enough to get away with it twice.
Now I have to go re-watch the (awesomely 80s and totally a Michael Mann production) earlier adaptation Manhunter which is also very different from the book, but keeps a lot of the same mood, and sense of how investigation is a process rather than an instantaneous result.
This entry was originally posted at http://vehemently.dreamwidth.org/27084.html. Comment wherever you like.