Story time:
Idk where else to talk about this one other than this platform. I have been so deep into NBC's Hannibal that I seriously can't get out of it. I had first watched it back in November 2022. And at first, I was like, "Yeah, let's just join the fandom for fun. Let's see what happens." But after my second rewatch, I decided that I'd let the show make me worse, build up my personality and just let it absolutely consume my soul.
I haven't posted anything here yet because firstly I was a bit shy, more introverted and I really find it hard to express but let me just tell you what I feel about the show. I mean, the day I stop yapping about Hannibal, just consider me dead that day.
I feel like Hannibal is a very poetically metaphorically layered show. Besides the absolute chaos going between Hannibal and Will, each and every one of the tableaux is a fucking piece of art!! Each of them is made so artistically, I can never truly feel disgusted because largely I was awestruck by their beauty. My first time watching Hannibal was like, "Yeah, that's a good watch. That's a masterpiece."
My second time watching it was unpacking the layers of the show. Every time you watch it, you find more meanings and more metaphors behind all those conversations, the dialogues, the tableaux. I don't know if anyone else is gonna agree but, I feel like that one truly can never understand Hannibal by watching it just for once. I honestly have lost count but I think this is my sixth or seventh time rewatching it. And till date, even after 3 years, I keep looking for newer meanings and deeper layers.
The show is so poetically written that with every rewatch, you'll find newer meanings to it. I mean, it isn't just a mere psychological thriller. It feels like some dark, intimately deep, symphonic poem rendered using bloodbath, poetry, horror and the utter darkness. Even the colour palette speaks to me now that I am watching it again. I mean, it transforms violence into utter audiovisual poetry, horror into art and madness into such an intricate dance of beauty and decay. It isn't just spectacle. It is metaphorically beautiful, alluring.
At its core, Hannibal is just a meditation on the human condition. The constant tug and war, the constant push and pull, the constant intimacy between creation and destruction. The constant power to feel over life and death. The way the show embraces art and monstrosity, hunger and affection, love and aesthetics, will forever amaze me.
Every frame feels like a painting, every dialogue feels like a verse. The show wields its aestheticism not just as an ornament merely but as philosophy. The constant layering of literary allusions, the poetic way of conversation between Will and Hannibal, maybe even the silence that passes between them, feels like a blurring line between confession and seduction.
I mean, the relationship between Hannibal and Will, is itself the core theme of the whole poem. The slow, haunting exploration of moral erosion, emotional dependence. Their exchanges, their conversations, they feel like echoes of a tragic epic of love, manipulation- intellectual, erotic and so devastatingly intimate that you'd want to inject their conversations in your veins. The silence, even the mere eye contact between them says so much more than words, carrying the same weight as the ending line of a poem or the conclusion of a story, that lingers long after you read it.
That makes you stare at the wall for a while and wonder, "The beauty it was!"
The deaths in the show are treated not just as death, but more like transformations. More like using those as a form of art. It is like how a poet would use sorrow as the raw material for art and beauty. Corpses, or the tableaux are used as installations, for the mere attention, bloodshed feels like a brushstroke and the gnawing human desire? It becomes the ultimate twisted purity through which the story speaks.
