handsome, haunted, naive

“A handsome, haunted man with a naive focus.” (click: "A handsome, haunted man with a naive focus.")[ This is how we meet Will Graham. It’s the first line of the pilot episode. It suggests that we are not wrong to perceive the simple fact of NBC Hannibal’s Will Graham as fundamentally {[ <div class="modal"> <div class="modal-content"> <span class="close"> {(link-repeat:"&times")[(hide: ?modal)[] ]} </span> I use boyish here in the line of Carol Mavor’s Reading Boyishly, where she uses the “boy-like; puerile” as being of principal importance as she analyzes the lives and work (often interchanging the two) of Barthes, Proust, Barrie, etc. I owe her work a debt for its conceit, but it is by no means required reading. </div> </div> ](modal|} (link-repeat:"boyish.")[(show:?modal)] In Mavor’s words: <blockquote>(border: "solid")+(corner-radius:8)[to read boyishly is to embrace effeminophobia (when it comes to the bodies of the boy, the boy-man, and even the man) and to boldly, if quietly, articulate the effeminizing relation between a boy and his mother as a [[specific and beautiful production.]]] ] </blockquote>

Now, a fact that connects Will Graham and Hannibal Lecter: they both have no mother. So we look to substitute mothers, the boy-as-mother, and the orphan-boy. Another fact: Will Graham is an adult man. This is a fair objection, to which I respond that boy-like is an adjective that can never be applied to a true boy—would we say a man is like himself? Rather, boyishness is more interesting as it pertains to people who aren’t technically within its purview. Second: boy<em>ish,</em> -ish in the colloquial sense; only to some extent. A final note on the boyish: (click:"A final note on the boyish")[it has, in my view, a privileged relationship with transmasculinity, with its late puberty, and stretched out boyhood. It is a troubled identification. I imagine some readers here protesting that trans men are men. Well, good for them. There is no shortage of trans mascs who find themselves as adult boys, negotiating their masculinity clumsily and belatedly. This is for them. And for me, mostly. This is my essay. And, at any rate, the disavowal of agency inherent in counterfactually identifying as a boy, is also very Graham-ish, [[as we’ll come to see.]] ]

[[ON EMPATHY]] ON JACK ON OEUF ON PHANTOMS

In <em>Playing and Reality,</em> Donald Winnicott formulates the idea of the “good-enough mother.” As he puts it: <blockquote>(border: "solid")+(corner-radius:8)[The good-enough ‘mother’ (not necessarily the infant’s own mother) is one who makes active adaptation to the infant’s needs, an active adaptation that gradually lessens, according to the infant’s growing ability to account for failure of adaptation and to tolerate the results of frustration.]</blockquote>(click: "(not necessarily the infant’s own mother)")[At the start she must be perfect, “adaptation needs to be almost exact,” creating an illusion that “her breast is part of the infant.” That is, when the infant is hungry, the infant is immediately fed. The breast appears “under the baby’s magical control… Omnipotence is nearly a fact of experience.” The mother’s task, Winnicott argues, is “gradually to disillusion the infant,” so that the infant can enter a [[relationship with the world.]]]

(link: "<img src='https://longposter.neocities.org/hhn.png'>")[(go-to:"Untitled Passage")]

Hannibal assists in this task, telling Will early on, “Jack gave you his word he would protect your headspace, yet he leaves you to your mental devices.” Jack said he would perfectly nurse you, maintain your mental state, and yet… He proves to be only a man, only “good-enough.” Nursing, in this view, becomes Jack drip-feeding Will stability. As Winnicott explains, before the infant knows that there is an “other,” “The precursor of the mirror is the mother’s face… the mother’s role `[is]` giving back to the baby the baby’s own self.” (click:"giving back to the baby the baby’s own self.")[Through Jack, Will’s sanity is certified, and even contested via arguments with Alana over Will’s care and management. Watching those discussions is like watching his parents fight over him. Tantalizing. This is made explicit in the parallels the show offers. In Season 1’s “{[ <div class="modal"> <div class="modal-content"> <span class="close"> {(link-repeat:"&times")[(hide: ?modal)[] ]} </span> “Buffet Froid” also offers some of the most potently motherly Jack. Read: “I just want to be careful with you. We don’t want to break you here. Is that what’s happening? Have I broken you?” Has your mother ever apologized to you for the way she raised you? This is what she might say. </div> </div> ](modal|}(link-repeat:"Buffet Froid")[(show:?modal)]” he is contrasted against Mrs. Madchen, both reflecting on the process of “managing your expectations” with regard to their [[delicate charges.]]]

What is Hannibal then? To continue the Winnicottian metaphor, he becomes the transitional object breaking up, or perhaps weaning, the nursing couple. And “couple’ is apt. The two bleed together, Jack’s breast being Will’s sanity, his certification of Will’s sanity standing in for Will’s sanity itself. Everytime Will demands the breast, the breast is provided. (click:"the breast is provided.")[“Stability requires strong foundations, Jack. My moorings are built on sand.”] (click:"My moorings are built on sand.")[“I’m not sand. [[I am bedrock.”]]]

{[ <div class="modal"> <div class="modal-content"> <span class="close"> {(link-repeat:"&times")[(hide: ?modal)[] ]} </span> Winnicott says: <blockquote>(border: "solid")+(corner-radius:8)[ 0. The infant assumes rights over the object, and we agree to this assumption. Nevertheless, some abrogation of omnipotence is a feature from the start. 0. The object is affectionately cuddled as well as excitedly loved and mutilated. 0. It must never change, unless changed by the infant. 0. It must survive instinctual loving, and also hating and, if it be a feature, pure aggression. 0. Yet it must seem to the infant to give warmth, or to move, or to have texture, or to do something that seems to show it has vitality or reality of its own. 0. It comes from without from our point of view, but not so from the point of view of the baby. Neither does it come from within, it is not a hallucination. 0. Its fate is to be gradually allowed to be decathected, so that in the course of years it becomes not so much forgotten as relegated to limbo.] </blockquote> </div> </div> ](modal|} (link-repeat:"He is endowed with various qualities.")[(show:?modal)] The //transition// that takes place is a transition from unity with the mother—Will’s attempt at stable empathy—to the empathy’s swelling omnipresence, bleeding into every aspect of his life, to finally understanding himself as separate from the world. The latter is represented by the rupture at the end of Season 1 when Will, in defiance of available evidence, asserts that he knows he didn’t kill all the murders being attributed to him. I know I did not do this. I know this is the not-me object. Hannibal stands in for the not-me, while [[Jack stands in for unity.]]

Anyway, it’s worth mentioning that Jack rejects his parentification at the hands of the show. In Season 1’s “Coquilles,” when Will protests at his handling, he rejoins, “I’m not your father, Will. I’m not gonna tell you what you ought to do.” Will disagrees with Jack’s assessment. “Seems like that’s exactly what you’re gonna do.” [[Mother.]]

[[ON EMPATHY]] [[ON JACK]] [[ON OEUF]] ON PHANTOMS

That brings us nicely back to him. What is boyish about Will Graham? I want to avoid low-hanging fruit here, like his floppy hair, or anything about his appearance for that matter. What’s more interesting to me is the fundamental conceit of his character, his empathy. As Hannibal phrases it: <blockquote>(border: "solid")+(corner-radius:8)[“What he has is pure empathy. And projection. He can assume your point of view, or mine—and maybe some other points of view that scare him. It’s an uncomfortable gift, Jack. Perception’s a tool that’s pointed on both ends.”]</blockquote>(click:"pure empathy.")[It is boyish to imagine oneself as having special powers, much less the power of imagination so pronounced that you may totally know another. In fact, Will’s power is having no theory of mind, no understanding that another’s mental state may not in fact be his own; his power is… not having hit a [[developmental milestone.]]]

The pseudo-scientific explanation Hannibal gives in universe for Will’s empathy also infantilizes him. He explains: “The problem Will has is too many mirror neurons. Our heads are filled with them when we are children—supposed to help us socialize and then melt away. But Will hung onto his…” He is framed as a boy who never grew up, attached to his childhood mindset, a thumb-sucker. (click:"when we are children")[His empathy is described in boyish terms as well. Hannibal describes Will’s empathy as “becoming,” or if you’d like, a transition. Trans themes set aside, his empathy is an adolescence, a state in-between. And in the show, it is portrayed as reversing time, as literal age play, if you will. These crime scene reenactments blur the line between Will-as-voyeur and Will-as-culprit. Is he watching, or is he doing? He—and we—are squeamish about this distinction. Is he a boy? [[Or is he a man?]]]

And now, finally, we arrive at the psychoanalytic, by returning to the earlier point about theory of mind. When you think you are the same as someone else, when you fancy yourself to be one, when there is no “I” bounding off the world from the self, that is the relation of the infant and the mother. That’s right. Will’s superpower is literally being everyone’s baby boy. I am not alone in infantilizing him. The show regularly does so in his interactions with the older men who nurture him, patronize him, feed him, adjust his glasses on the first meeting, and change him. He’s Jack’s broken pony, he’s Jack’s fragile little teacup, [[he’s Jack’s baby.]] Well, I made the last one up. The others they really did say. <img src="https://longposter.neocities.org/hhn3.png">

[[ON EMPATHY]] [[ON JACK]] ON OEUF ON PHANTOMS

Season 1’s “Oeuf” is the episode that deals most directly with boyhood. It follows the “Lost Boys,” a group of kidnapped boys that revenge themselves upon their respective birth families, led by a new mother figure. Abigail and Will both mirror these lost boys so boyishly—not as boys but identified with them. (click:"identified with them")[Abigail shares the boyish disdain for little girls. She complains, with regard to group therapy, “Some of these women aren’t even sharing. They speak in “little girl voices”, telling everyone what was done to them without saying a word about it.” Of course, Abigail herself is stuck in childhood as well. She cannot move on past her father’s death due to her notoriety, both emotionally as well as logistically. After all, her father killed girls at all the colleges she wanted to attend. [[If a little girl can tell a secret without uttering it, what does a little boy voice? ]]]

Hannibal explains to Jack: <blockquote>(border: "solid")+(corner-radius:8)[“Children transport us to our childhoods. Will may feel the tug of life before the FBI, before you. Simpler times in boatyards with dad. That life is an anchor streamed behind him in heavy weather. He needs an anchor, Jack.”]</blockquote>The anchor streamed behind him, his umbilical cord still attached—a mother drags you down. But, of course, Will has no mother. So it is the absent mother who weighs him down, [[the mother in her tomb]] that Jack replaces.

The episode has much to say about mothers. For it is the bond with a mother that marks a boy from a man. Will himself explains capture-bonding simply: “Bond with your captor, you survive. You don’t… You’re breakfast.” The captor in this episode is a mother, who sets up a surrogate family. So mother-as-captor is neatly set up, but also more potently, Hannibal-the-cannibal as mother. He becomes not merely a doll upon which Will may content himself amidst Jack’s failures, but a [[rival maternal figure in his own right.]] <img src="https://longposter.neocities.org/hhn2.jpg">

Now I have tastefully avoided all references to the ultimate boy and his mother, when it comes to psychoanalysis. This is because Hannibal suberts the Oedipal. You become your father to kill your mother. Where is the sex? It, like the mother, is absent. Boyish excess instead imagines violence as the ultimate act of closeness and control. (click:"Boyish excess")[Hannibal, chameleon-like, continues to take on qualities of the other characters, becoming boyish as well. He retains as an attachment to the wound of his absent mother, replicating her silences and violences. And after all, what is more boyish than to break someone. just to see [[what would happen?]]]

[[ON EMPATHY]] [[ON JACK]] [[ON OEUF]] [[ON PHANTOMS]]

Now, I have written at length about the naivete mentioned in that opening line, but have devoted far less attention to any other part, including the part that keeps surfacing: “A handsome, //haunted// man…” For it isn’t just the absent mother, but the all-too-present father that also haunts the story. Garrett Jacob Hobbes is the father who will not die, who will not stop exerting his presence. He is the father who haunts Will, who seeps into him. [[And what does him haunting Will signify?]]

Abraham and Torok write in “Poetics of Psychoanalysis: "The Lost Object-Me" that a phantom is: <blockquote>(border: "solid")+(corner-radius:8)[a memory he buried //without legal burial place,// the memory of an idyll experienced with a prestigious object that for some reason has become unspeakable, a memory thus entombed in a fast and secure place, awaiting its resurrection.]</blockquote>They argue that an empathetic identification takes place and [[“the subject, consequently, now appears to be painfully missed by the ‘object,’”]] rather than the reverse, which is more simply true.

But why would Will miss Garrett Jacob Hobbes? What idyll did they experience? He seems to be identifying less with the man he feels possessed by, and more with his daughter. In this view, Will wishes for Abigail’s place, to be so seduced by the father into accomplicehood, rather than to be the killer himself. (click:"the killer himself")[This, incidentally, squares with the case study of the Wolfman that Abraham and Torok bring up. The Wolfman did not entomb his own secret, but his sister’s. <blockquote>(border: "solid")+(corner-radius:8)[His wound does not seem to be—as Freud was inclined to think—the loss of his own object, the sister, but the fact that he was neither able to participate in the scene (which, according to us, had been narrated by the sister and renewed with him), nor tell anyone about it and thereby legitimize it.]</blockquote>(click:"the loss of his own object")[The wound is hers, and because of that it is unspeakable for him. When Will identifies with Hobbes, he becomes the parent who longs to be his own child. Abigail herself notices this in “Trou Normand,” commenting “He avoids me because I make him feel like my father” rather than—[[ Rather than—]]]]

Now the Oedipal triangle is thoroughly confused. The boy is holding tight to the absent mother; the father has his hand on his shoulder; he has become refracted through the father, the sister-mother. What is the point of all that? What kind of knowledge does this prismatic reading produce? (click:"What kind of knowledge does this prismatic reading produce?")[In my view, it illuminates that the erotic thrust of the show is through effeminization. Empathy tells us this: at the heart of a boy is a girl. We are never whole people. We are always contested identifications. We are the people we love and wish to have been loved by, and this leaves us childish, speaking in a little boy voice. (click:"little boy voice.")[END.]]

So, Hannibal. Mavor explains that: <blockquote>(border: "solid")+(corner-radius:8)[“The mother, in sympathy with this enormous intellectual work of coming to terms with the world understands that ‘an attachment to a teddy, a doll or soft toy, or to a hard toy’ can ease the child’s transition.”] She quotes Winnicott, saying: (border: "solid")+(corner-radius:8)[“it is… well known that after a few months infants of either sex become fond of playing with dolls, and that most mothers allow their infants some special object and expect them to become, as it were, addicted to such objects.”]</blockquote>The transitional object, the soft toy, can take a [[variety of shapes.]] But what is key is that it is not part of the infant’s body, but also not yet realized as some external reality.