I don't know if you've done an analysis of the scene where Will remembers how Hannibal had him swallow Abigail's ear, and I'd like to know your opinion. This scene was difficult to watch because it looks like ... a rape. I can't stop seeing it as such.
Your reading is absolutely on point. It’s definitely meant to evoke sexual assault or at the very least sexual violence (which is why it disgust me when people on this website label it as a ‘romantic’ moment— it is anything, anything but).
The significance of the scene in the greater narrative is this: in Hannibal, violence and desire (romantic or erotic) is intimately linked. During his sex scene with Alana, Hannibal wraps his hand around her throat. With Margot, Will orgasms imagining the stag-man — the spirit that he attacks and which attacks him.
Hannibal is a Gothic Romance, and all Gothic romances are concerned with the nature of boundaries. (Or, more specifically, their transgression). Boundaries of class, boundaries of gender, boundaries between human and not-human. Hannibal is transgressing a boundary in that scene. When he sticks a tube down Will’s throat, he is violating his body; but previously he’s already violated his mind. (As Will tells him, “My inner voice sounds like you”.) Consider the verb: to violate. To violate means to trangress a boundary that should not be transgressed. (The French viol, from the same root, denotes rape.) Both violence and desire are violators of boundaries. As Anne Carson wrote in Eros the Bittersweet:
In Greek the act of love is a mingling (mignumi) and desire melts the limbs (lusimeles, cf. Sappho fr. 130). Boundaries of body, categories of thought, are confounded. The god who melts limbs proceeds to break the lover as would a foe on the epic battlefield.
“I see myself in Will” Hannibal says to Bedelia, both a sexual pun and continuation of this motif. Later, Hannibal will be literally inside him— he will carve a way in with a knife. And consider Will’s words to Hannibal in 3x06: “You and I have begun to blur”. The boundaries between them begin to dissolve, not only because of violence, but because of desire.
The line between acts of violence and acts of love are blurred in Hannibal from the very first episode. Garrett Jacob Hobbs kills the girls because he loves them. And the violence Hannibal inflicts on Will is more often than not almost tender, almost romantic. He strokes his cheek as if to bring him in for a kiss in Mizumono: and then he guts him. Even Will’s expressions are somewhat ambiguous. When the knife enters his belly, he moans (as someone once described on this website) almost pornographically. The sex scenes in Hannibal almost always focus on individual expressions and the erotic physicality of the body. But violence is shot exactly the same way. In ‘Dolce’, as Hannibal bandages his wounds, the camera focuses on Will’s expressions.
He’s like Saint Sebastian, patron saint of this ambiguity: is he in pain or is he in orgasmic ecstasy? (Ecstasy is something that means to bring beyond the place you are: ecstasy, like eroticism, dissolves boundaries). And consider the script:
Amid this violence, there is also intimacy. Later, Hannibal will feed Will him soup: he will blow out the heat, he will lift it gently to his lips. It’s a moment of unrestrained tenderness that is presupoosing violence.
NBC Hannibal is interested in deconstructing the concept of the psychopath: a psychopath is someone who is capable of great harm, and because they are capable, are incapable of love. But this isn’t necessarily true. Hannibal notes, that “the farmer who hand rears lambs loves them and sends them to slaughter.” People do horrible things for love— whether its love for a person, country, or myth. They hurt themselves. They hurt other people. Love is something that people will die for and that people will kill for. Garrett Jacob Hobbs kills the girls because he loves Abigail. Will is the most mutilated by Hannibal because Hannibal loves him. Love isn’t necessarily good or pure or something that makes someone whole.
Hannibal shoves the tube down his throat tenderly. He does it with great care; he strokes Will’s hair; he’s there to comfort him even when he throws up the ear. When Hannibal tells Will that “God’s terrific. [...] Typhoid and swans. It all comes from the same place” he could just as well be talking about himself, and his feelings for Will. After all, “love is a god”. And there is no such thing as a merciful god.
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