From a psychological/origins perspective where do you think Will's "pure empathy" came from? I think the show laid hints: (Will never "connecting with the concept of family", never knowing his mom, unstable childhood, no strong bonds, etc). It sort of parallels Hannibal's unstable childhood (bonding traumas from being an orphan? ) but Will went one way (righteous lamb) while Hannibal became a great red dragon. Jesus. The beauty and layers in this show will take centuries to appreciate.
I’ve actually got a serious bone to pick with that phrase, so thanks for this excellent opportunity to rant about it! xD
Hannibal says this patently ridiculous thing after one (1) very short interaction with Will. While it’s somewhat implied that he might be aware of Will as a particularly talented investigator by reputation beforehand, he absolutely does not have a basis to make such sweeping pronouncements about Will’s psychology when he does.
What we see demonstrated by Will is a very flexible and comprehensive theory of mind. His particular talent is, as he puts it, an active imagination. And that is the most accurate accounting of what it takes to do what he does.
Empathy is fundamentally reactive, it’s the ability (or compulsion) to share emotions that are being expressed in some way by another party present. It’s not the ability to recreate the likely mindset and motivations of a person upon examining the evidence pertaining to their recent actions. Will’s got plenty of both, but I’d argue that terming his crime scene re-creation as an application of “empathy” is imprecise.
Will can “assume anyone’s point of view” because his imagination is unbounded by social norms and colloquially defined “decency.” He can look at the evidence of acts outside the boundaries of typical human experience and apply human thoughts and motivation to them, because he doesn’t just blue screen of death in the face of socially unacceptable acts of cruelty. Rather than label anyone who carries out such acts as an incomprehensible monster, he applies his understanding of the human condition and psychology to imagine what it might take to produce what he sees in front of him, regardless of how strange it may be.
The key here is that lack of boundaries for defining human behavior, which I think has much more to do with the fact that Will isn’t neurotypical than with his background.
The emotional crux of the show - his and Hannibal’s ability to understand one another in ways no one else has ever been able to - comes directly from this. When most other characters find out that Hannibal’s the Chesapeake Ripper, their whole concept of him as a person is permanently blown out of the water. They start treating him like something Other, some malicious fae creature, maybe. (Which is played with in the narrative in ways that I enjoy!) But Will, after at least somewhat recovering from his shock and fury at the betrayal, still sees Hannibal as a person. The fact that he has a murder art hobby and eats pieces of the people he kills doesn’t make the rest of who he is incomprehensible to Will.
That “pure empathy” line is one of my least favorite lines from the show; now, one of my favorite - “An abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behavior.” That’s actually a dead-ass quote from Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search For Meaning (which I could write a whole ‘nother essay about regarding its apparent influence on the show and Hannibal’s character in it, and I may someday, but probably not quite right now; regardless, it delights me), but anyway, it very neatly encompasses, in a way, both Hannibal’s psychology and Will’s. Hannibal being aware and comfortable with his deviations from the norm, and Will being for the most part uncomfortable with it. But the point is, people’s actions must be understood in terms of their experience, and that experience may be outside the boundaries of what is considered “normal,” even if the actual circumstances aren’t. Will is able to think about and really dig into the actions and motivations of serial killers when everyone else is just kind of stuck on “what the actual fuck?”
Anyway, to get more specific about it: Will is autistic. Most autistic people have to study human behavior in a much more conscious, intentional way than neurotypical people do in order to develop a functional theory of mind for other people and/or to “pass” socially (to whatever degree), and Will has not only done that, but his career revolves around it. And (speaking from experience) when everything other people say and do starts out as hard to understand, it actually ends up being easier to develop an understanding of highly atypical psychologies than it would be for someone whose general understanding for other humans is more instinctive.
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