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On eating Will’s brain

Spoilers for all of Hannibal, tl;dr at the end, if you don’t feel like reading 2500 words.

This very long meta post will attempt to answer the common question: why did Hannibal try to eat Will’s brain in Dolce (3.6)?

Introduction

There’s a beautiful ambiguity to Fuller’s characters in Hannibal. Character is primarily revealed not by direct statement of thoughts and feelings (as characters’ statements are often ambiguous and about what appear to be peripheral issues), but by juxtaposition. This includes juxtaposition of a character’s actions over time, thematic mirrors of their situations in the case-of-the-week, and the many mirrored/foiled relationships that pop up, whereby the characters are defined against each other. (For example, Will/Tobias, Will/Peter, Will/Pazzi, Will/Gideon, Will/Chiyoh, etc.–Fuller uses these pairings to tell us something about Will in the ways that he is or is not like them, according to his own perceptions, those of others, and that of the audience). The show uses this ambiguity of character to raise questions about key themes, such as human capacity or potential for evil. 

While this is a riveting artistic strategy, it makes the characters’ interactions and intentions increasingly unclear, especially when even the more straightforward characters like Alana drift toward ambiguity by season 3. This is why I think there’s so much confusion about what will heretofore be known as the head-sawing incident, and also why I also consider this post to be a reading of the situation, and not necessarily the authoritative one.

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