The Problem With Hannibal

Bryan Fuller’s TV adaptation of Robert Harris’ characters has, at time of writing, reached the mid-point of its third season and things are looking rocky. NBC cancelled it and Fuller has been shopping around to different distributors in the hopes of saving it. Amazon and Netflix both declined to take the show, but Fuller says he’s not given up hope yet. This is a startling about-face in the fortunes of a show that was winning awards for the last several years.

So, what went wrong?

Let’s make this clear early on; Hannibal is one of my favourite TV shows ever. It’s a beast all it’s own and you’re unlikely to see anything like it for a long time. Over the course of this article, I’ll be breaking down the strengths of the first two seasons and then why the third season has been so trouble.

Point one: The man himself. Mads Mikkelsen is a great actor, Hannibal Lector is a great character and they mesh really well together. But what’s genius about the show is how it uses him as a source of tension. Everyone knows Hannibal. He’s a pop culture icon. Everyone’s seen Silence of the Lambs or can at least quote the census-taker line. (Fff-ff-ff!) So Fuller did the smart thing with the character and never aimed for any surprises or deconstructions with the character; he’s a killer, we know he’s a killer and there’s no attempt to defend his killing. Instead, he builds tension. He’s a time-bomb, ticking down; when he’s on screen you’re waiting to see what he’s going to do next.

And when he cooks? It’s morbidly fascinating. Adding Hannibal Lector to the scene turns footage of a man frying steak to classical music into something way more stimulating and dreadful than it has any right to be. This is Hannibal the Cannibal, your brain tells you. That steak is people. Maybe. Probably. But is it? The implication, of course, is that he’s cooking his victims but rarely is it ever shown or stated that he’s doing that. Still, you’re dissecting the shape of the meat, the colour. The flavour. In a sense, you’re taking part in his cannibalism.

Point Two: The tension. When you hear that a story’s about a serial killer, you’re probably imagining very schlocky and brainless material that throws out kills left and right. Hannibal’s not like that. The structure of the tension-building in the show is long, slow build-ups and then a sudden release of extreme and intense gore. In a lot of ways, this is the classic horror structure of Lovecraft or Silent Hill. Then the kill is deconstructed, turned into something abstract and rarefied. It walks you through the meaning and psychological purpose behind each slice, each cut.

This is Will’s whole schtick; as a hyper-empathic criminal profiler, Will mentally reconstructs the crime and understands the criminal through their actions. His character, somewhat of a blank slate intentionally, is imprinted on by these internal recreations and he inherits the killer’s dark traits. In other words, his entire character arc is this same “slow burn, sudden explosion” structure writ large.

Point Three: A treat for the senses. Hannibal is shot sumptuously, with deep and moody colours. Characters are immaculately dressed, the sets are decadent and each kill is played out as a tableau. We zoom straight in on extreme close-ups – a drop of milk streaking through black coffee – that become like impressionist art. Every establishing shot becomes an “ah-ha!” moment, engaging the creative and deductive parts of the viewer.

Now, let’s talk about where things have started going awry.

Season two ended with Hannibal escaping to Italy after severely wounding (or killing) most of the other major characters. Season three begins with a time skip and concerns Hannibal’s life and new identity in Florence. In fact, the episode is all Hannibal and Bedelia. There’s no Will, no Jack Crawford. From a structural perspective, relatively little of that episode “needs” to be there; the sections that justify how Hannibal gets a new identity and a cushy job in Italy make up relatively little of the episode and whole thing comes across as a little.. flabby.

After re-watching the first episodes of the season, I began noting places where a lot could have been cut without needing explanation. A lot of time is spent reliving the Season Two finale from different angles. Characters spend a great deal of time navel-gazing – plotting, yes, but also just talking about their feelings and not trying to catch the serial killer they know to be on the loose. A lot of this comes from Hannibal’s capture being pinned at the season’s mid-point and needing to pad things out till then. The tension that pervaded the first two series died a death and a sense of inevitability set in.

This isn’t helped by the fact that Mason Verger just isn’t a particularly compelling villain in this season. He gets too little screen time for one thing and is extremely detached from the actual manhunt. His desire to eat Hannibal is an interesting inversion, but not previously established.

None of these are unsolvable problems; moving Hannibal’s capture forwards or making the manhunt for Hannibal more immediately apparent solves the problem of tension easily. While still gory and still visually lush, without a firmer structure propping it up Hannibal feels loose and even hollow, moving from one psychodramatic rambling to the next. By making Margo a more active role in her brother’s manhunt – and bringing the bodybuilder aspects of her character over from the books, to make her more physically threatening – Mason in turn becomes a more credible threat.

What do you think?

Good Games, Bad Sequels

Note: This post is an unfinished draft of an article that appeared on the Invert-On gaming news website on January 12th, 2013. It was taken down when the site closed. The original article had pictures and alterations provided by editorial, which are not in this version.

GREAT GAMES, BAD SEQUELS

The last few years have been a bad time for novelty. Did you know that in 2011, all of the top 10 movies were sequels or adaptations? And 2012 wasn’t exactly better. And the future is shaping up to be… well, more of the same.

Gaming isn’t that different. The Call of Duty franchise barely has to try and regularly drowns in money. Originality has almost been entirely relegated to the indie scene.

Now, sequels aren’t all bad in principle. A good sequel can take new ideas and add to the previous games. It can build lore, tighten up mistakes from previous games or explore new parts of the game world. A good sequel isn’t just eating the same meal a second time; it’s having a tasty dessert after your juicy steak. A bad sequel, on the other hand, is a second steak, burnt, when all you want is something light and sweet.

But here’s the really tricky thing – a good game can be a bad sequel. A fun, well-designed game with fantastic graphics and wonderful story – but that turns your favorite character from a paragon to a genocidal maniac? Or a series that used to be all about smart puzzle solving suddenly turning into a twitchy shooter?

Let’s talk about games that tread that fine line between good and bad – great games, bad sequels.

RESIDENT EVIL 4

The Resident Evil franchise (Biohazard in Japan) was the main example of the survival horror genre for a long time. The game concerned zombies (of course) and other monsters, created by the evil Umbrella mega-corporation and their mutating viruses. The first game, released in 1996, had two playable protagonists trapped in a maniac’s mansion – which was also full of the living dead.

Combat was difficult, thanks in no small part due to difficult aiming controls and how rare ammo was. One zombie could take seven bullets and headshots were not easy. Your best bet was often evasion, not combat. These carried through fairly well in the sequel, Resident Evil 2, which widened the outbreak from one mansion to an entire city.

By 2005, the games had been gradually getting more cinematic in their action scenes. Resident Evil 4 released and became a smash hit right away. It was 2005’s Game of The Year in the Spike Awards, for Nintendo Power Magazine (issue 105) and Game Informer (issue 134). Edge and IGN rate it as one of the best computer games of all time.  So, okay, it was a good game. A tight and well-crafted experience, people are still playing and replaying it today despite its age.

So what makes it a bad sequel?

Let’s break down what a Resident Evil game had meant up until that point. Zombies. Mutants. Umbrella and its viruses as a main antagonist. Difficult combat. Sparse resources. Relatively few enemies, but hard to kill without high-power weapons. Strange, mind-bending architectural puzzles and improbable building designs. But for all that complication, your objectives were simple – survive. Get to safety.

In Resident Evil 4, basically everything changed. A returning protagonist – Leon S. Kennedy – had transformed from a rookie cop having the worst new-job first-day imaginable to the prettiest incarnation of Jean Claude Van Damme ever to grace our screens. He was a secret agent on a mission to rescue the President’s daughter, which involved copious amounts of suplexing and laser-backflipping. Also, a friendly dog sidekick who went on to star in his own game (Haunting Ground) and fought a cave troll for you. Zombies were gone and replaced with head-splattering parasites and statues of giant Napoleonic midgets.

I am not making a single word of that up.

The game was clearly heavily influenced by the 2002 movie adaptation, which had been more action-oriented than the game source material. The laser-hallway scene actually first appeared in the movie and then went into the game series. What’s more, Resi 4’s success had a major impact not on the game’s industry – specifically, the action and adventure genres. There were horror moments, sure – those creepy Regenerators, for example. But Resident Evil 4 clearly marked the series transitioning fully from ‘horror game’ to ‘action game with uglier enemies’. The future games in the series just made this even more obvious, with Resident Evil 6 being pure shooters. Umbrella was gone and the role of series villain fell to Albert Wesker, who went all Matrix with super-speed kung-fu.

In contrast, Resident Evil: Revelations for the 3DS, was praised critically for a return to horror. Players were trapped on an abandoned ship and had to fend off mutants resembling awful deep-sea creatures. Food for thought.

SILENT HILL 4: THE ROOM

Golly, another horror title? Almost as if certain genres don’t lend themselves well to sequels…

Alongside Resident Evil, the Silent Hill series was the other titanic powerhouse of survival horror. The games centered around the titular town, Silent Hill, and its occult-heavy history. The first game centered around the events that led to the town’s corruption and a man named Harry Mason looking for his daughter. The second game is more psychological in theme, dealing with James Sunderland’s grief over the death of his wife. The third game returns to the occultism, with Heather Mason (daughter of Harry) being harassed by the cult and journeying back into the nightmarish town.

The games were immediately distinctive for their unique atmosphere, using darkness and fog to make the player feel confined even while stood in open spaces, alone and yet always afraid that the next step will expose them to something horrible just out of sight. This actually began as a work-around to limitations on the PS1’s hardware – it had a low draw distance and by lowering visible range, they could hide that and keep their big distances.

Another distinctive element was the existence of nightmarish “other world” being inflicted upon the normal world, or perhaps existing separate from our own (depending on your interpretation). From this came the series’ famously unsettling monsters, twisted versions of human forms. From the second game came Pyramid Head, or ‘the red pyramid thing’, a unkillable brute that became the series mascot. He even appeared in several other Silent Hill related media, such as the movies, which was… controversial to some fans.

In Silent Hill 4: The Room, you play as Henry Townshend. Henry wakes up one day to find his apartment door locked and chained, trapping him inside. Over the next few days, Henry starts experiencing hauntings. Eventually, he learns that his apartment is connected to a dead serial killer, whose ghost is still out and about raising hell. Henry finds holes opening in his apartment, which he goes into in order to enter the mind of Walter Sullivan, the serial killer.

The game was reviewed pretty well and got a good amount of praise for smart use of the camera and well-constructed tension. The environments of Walter’s mind were also praised, taking elements of his childhood and skewing them eerily. Many of the enemies were Walter’s previous victims and, being ghosts, could not be killed, which added to the tension.

A lot of the fans that disliked The Room cited Henry’s boring nature compared to his predecessors; unlike the others he lacks clear motivation or strong character traits and always seemed too calm for the situations he was in. One of the big problems with the story was that for a game called Silent Hill, you never actually went to Silent Hill; Henry lives in the next town over and the surreal worlds he enters are parts of Walter’s mind. The plot does reference previous games fairly substantially – Walter was first mentioned in Silent Hill 2 and his backstory prominently features the cult from 1 and 3 – but ends up creating quite a few plot holes. The best that people could describe the game was as a ‘side story‘ as a whole, not as part of the main series.

Like Resident Evil 4, this also marked the beginning of the end for the series as it plunged into the abysmal depths it has struggled to claw its way out from ever since. Silent Hill: Origins for the PSP was broken, full of plot holes and poor mechanics. Silent Hill: Homecoming was probably the utter nadir of Silent Hill (if you don’t count the movies). Shattered Memories was generally inoffensive but totally unrelated to Silent Hill at all. Downpour has one or two decent moments but was otherwise mediocre at best. Book of Memories for the Vita basically did away with horror and went full Gauntlet-style hack-and-slash.

“Mere” Semantics: The Case For Pedantry

Let’s get one thing straight: I love linguistics. It’s my pet discipline. It occupies this fun space between an art and a science, so no-one’s really sure how serious to act around it. It gives off mixed signals, like that guy you think has a crush on you but then blanks you for a week at a time. The best descriptor I’ve come across for it is an ’empirical art’.

So while I do understand when people dismiss linguistic arguments as being somehow lesser than other disciplines, that doesn’t mean I particularly like it. One phrase that really gets under my skin is the derisive, dismissive ‘mere semantics’. Semantics, for those of you who don’t know, is the study of meaning. It means calling people out when their meaning is ambiguous, or when they’re saying the opposite of what they actually mean. And it’s really useful.

Don’t believe me? Okay, let me introduce you to someone. Class, this is Larry Silverstein.

Hi Larry!

Larry’s a pretty wealthy guy. He’s a businessman and a real estate developer worth billions. He knows the importance of semantics, having graduated from Brooklyn Law School. He owns a lot of property in the Manhattan area. Specifically, he owned the land on which the World Trade Centre was built. He’s quite lucky too, in that he was able to finish insuring that property before tragedy struck.

If the property was victim of a “destructive occurence”, that insurance policy said that Larry was good for a payout in the neighbourhood of three point five-five billion U.S Dollars.

Also worth 3.5 billion

Now, here’s where it gets interesting. How many “occurences” was 9/11? How many “destructive occurences” hit the World Trade Centre?

Larry’s lawyers argued that each individual plane constituted an “occurence” and therefore the insurance policy should pay out not $3.55 billion (billion) but $7.1 billion; two pay outs for two seperate events. Naturally, the insurance companies didn’t want that to fly and argued instead that 9/11 as a whole was a single destructive occurence or event; despite the difference of time between the two plane impacts, the whole attack should be taken as one whole.

What was once “mere semantics” suddenly became a debate worth literally more money than I can properly imagine.

You can read a little more about the debate and the linguistic processes behind it in Steven Pinker’s excellent “The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window Into Human Nature”, but to cut a story short the courts decided to go with the “two occurences” interpretation. Larry “only” got $4.577 billion for his troubles, though.

Then there’s the case of Derek Bentley, one of the last people to be hanged in the United Kingdom before capital punishment was abolished in the 1960’s. Derek was involved the shooting of police constable Sidney Miles, but didn’t actually pull the trigger. His friend and accomplice, Christopher Craig, actually shot Miles but at age 16 was too young to hang for the crime. Bentley, at age 19, was eligible for the noose and the courts were determined to see someone hang for the shooting of a police officer.

The whole case hinged on what witnesses heard Bentley shout to Craig moments before the killing: “Let him have it, Craig!”

Dr Who actor Christopher Eccleston played Bentley in the 1991 film "Let Him Have It"

Again, the courts were divided over what this actually meant. The prosecution interpreted what Bentley said as “Go ahead, shoot him!” and hence that he was responsible for the shooting; that meant he could hang. The defense was that Bentley was actually saying “Give him the gun!” and that therefore Bentley was not responsible for Miles’ death. Unfortunately, the prosecution won that day, and Bentley was hanged. Craig was sent to prison for ten years.

His conviction was eventually quashed posthumously in 1998 with the help of forensic linguist Malcolm Coulthard. Coulthard went over the police records and found that a “confession” Bentley had given was clearly forged – it was written using the word ‘then’ far more often than normal. That linguistic quirk was, however, extremely common in police reports. This led Coulthard to conclude that the confession was faked by the police to sway the case against Bentley, leading to his tragic death.

Far more important than mere money, semantics can sometimes mean life and death.

Greetings, Salutations etc.

Hello and welcome to my particular corner of this big ol’ Internet!

I suppose that, as this is my first post on this blog, I should tell you a little bit about myself. Just so you know what you’re getting yourself into. (You have no-one to blame but yourself.)

My name is Patrick Harkin. I live in Leeds, England, and am currently employed as a copy writer. I am 6″ 5, wear size 15 shoes (16 depending on the brand) and am basically a gigantic nerd. I know I am a nerd because my favourite satchel is my favourite for the sole reason that it has robots on it.

I’m going to be blogging about things that interest me and hopefully interest you – and if it doesn’t interest you, that’s your problem. For reference, things that interest me include literature, movies, video games, linguistics, philosophy and writing. Why should you guys care about that? Because believe it or not, all of those are important things. To certain defintions of ‘important’, I admit – no-one’s ever cured cancer by explaining the difference between ‘who’ and ‘whom’ – but hopefully you’ll come to see why I think they’re important.

Like I say, this is just a simple introduction to say “hi”. The next post will have what we in the business call ‘actual content’, so you have that to look forward to.

Little preview about what next post will be about:

The Crossed Threshold

Hope you enjoy reading!

-The Harkin