OMG pleaseeeeeee give us your theory about them NOT going off the cliff!! :D
I noticed that all the way through the Dragon fight we were being presented with two versions of reality – the truth, and the ‘story’ of what is happening, the grandiose violence that is somehow more real than what [we] know to be true.
What we see flickers from reality / to story / to reality.
The truth: Hannibal and Will kill Francis.
The story: Hannibal the Cannibal and Will Graham slay The Dragon.
And how is this switch between reality and story signalled?
Look. Will is seeing The Dragon, not Francis.
He sees the Story behind the reality.
Now, immediately before this fight ensues, Will and Hannibal talk about what is about to happen, while drinking wine.
Hannibal: Save yourself, kill them all.
Will: I don’t know if I can save myself. Maybe that’s just fine.
Hannibal: No greater love hath man, than to lay down his life for a friend.
[ they looks at eachother, and Hannibal nods ]
What does the drinking of wine usually signal, on this show?
How many times have we seen Hannibal smell the bouquet (as he smells the cork before pouring, here), make a pronouncement, and then take a sip?
It’s the victim-ritual, it signals that Hannibal has decided to kill someone; someone has just made the menu. Here the toast is made with Will, a toast to honour the death they have just decided to create.
Whose death do you think they’re talking about?
Do you think Will is really saying he intends to die?
If that were true, then why, when the Dragon shows up, does he fight back? Why does he warn Hannibal that the Dragon is watching them? If he really wants to die, or to let the Dragon kill Hannibal, all he has to do is stop saving them, right?
In the inception, it’s possible his plan might have been more open - let the Dragon kill Hannibal, then let the Dragon kill me. (We know he was planning to get Hannibal out, with or without the Dragon as leverage, because he’d already made the first moves of murder-husband courtship with the Chilton-burning, and then made Escape seem attractive to Hannibal with his brutal goodbye, when he thought the Dragon was dead.)
But during the course of this short exchange, his plan alters; Hannibal persuades him to switch one death, one sacrifice, for another.
Will’s actions make complete sense if the death he’s talking about – the sense in which he cannot ‘save’ himself – is symbolic.
He may as well be saying, ‘Will Graham is dead, long live Will Graham.’
So… he runs that possibility by Hannibal, (perhaps only then realising that it is a possibility), Hannibal takes it in, and then he talks about laying down one’s life for a friend.
Will has to make a plausible end for himself, just as Francis gave himself a plausible ending by seeming to Share with Reba and then kill himself out of remorse. He has to free the woman in his life by dying.
When Hannibal says ‘than to lay down his life for a friend,’ he’s telling Will what a plausible ending (for them both) would look like.
And, honestly, if you had to pick a likely cause of death for Hannibal, can you think of a better one than ‘because he was trying to save Will?’ It’s what has Hannibal already been banging on about (’you made a bargain for Will’s life, and then I spun your gold.’)
But if they want to convince the powers-that-be that they both died attempting to save each other from the Dragon then they have to let the Dragon come. They both have to bleed.
So they let him come, they let him attack them.
And what does Hannibal say while he’s there?
For Francis’s benefit, or for Will’s?
And all the while Francis is talking, Hannibal is looking at Will, signalling to Will.
Francis tells him he’s going to kill him; Hannibal’s eyes go blood-in-the-moonlight black, and he looks at Will like LET’S KILL HIM, and Will nods. Then Francis pulls out a knife, out of Will’s sightline – but Hannibal can see – and tells Will about it by feigning a kind of woozy look in his direction.
Fight over, they have their beautiful moment, the Dragon is Slain.
We’re about to slip back out of Reality and into Story-mode again.
Will is thinking ‘this is where we died.’
(And every moment after is borrowed.)
reality [they are finally united]
story [they commit ‘suicide’]
reality [they go and eat Bedelia].
All this season they’ve been putting the emphasis on emotional and character-driven rather than plot-driven story-telling. This is the universe in which Abigail went to Florence. In which Mischa’s spirit, embodied by fireflies, lead Will down to the cellar where Grutas was held. The universe in which the Dragon appeared and attacked Francis.
It’s the alchemy of lies and truth again.
So this is what happens in the Story:
But it is not, necessarily, what actually happened in reality.
Hannibal Lecter and Will Graham did ‘die’ on that cliff. That is what is emotionally true.
Other reasons to believe that they didn’t actually fall off the cliff:
- Bedelia isn’t stupid enough to hang around long enough for them to mysteriously not-die in the ocean, change their mind about wanting to die, get to a (Will’s?) boat, heal their wounds, sail back, break into her house, and then eat her.
- but Bedelia might not have moved fast enough (there is a precedent for that) to get away in time if they turned up at her house immediately after this. They could not do both; it’s either or. And since we know, for a fact, that Bedelia gets eaten, it has to be the latter.
- if they did go straight to Bedelia’s house after this, it would cue up a great parallel (which this show loves) between S04E01 and S03E01 where Hannibal shows up at her house to lick his wounds after Mizumono.
- Will’s carefully obvious telegraphing-in-advance that Hannibal was going to die. Hey everybody, pay attention, Hannibal is totally going to be dead soon okay, just so everyone is clear how dead he is going to be, the answer is: extremely. He is going to be shuffled off this mortal coil and joining the choir invisible, he will be pushing up the daisies, bereft of live, he will be resting in peace. He will be an EX. CANNIBAL. Got it?? That dude = totally not alive any more!!
- The Eroding Bluff. Do you not see the CHEKHOV’S PUNthere?
One reason to show the cliff-fall:
Y’know how in those old Hayes/censorship-era films where homosexuality was still the love that dared not speak its name and even heterosexual sex was frowned upon?
And they had to imply sex by, eg. showing rockets going off, trains slamming into tunnels? Basically being as Freudian as they possibly could?
The way they suggested Francis’ climax by showing the dropped martini glass?
Well look at Hannibal’s face when Will’s head hits his shoulder:
Look me in the eye and tell me that ^ isn’t orgasmic.
In this show, with these two, gut-stabbings are tantamount to flirtation, violence is romance, kill is kiss.
So what is killing together?
That fall off the cliff isn’t just about symbolic death, it’s a symbolic little death. It’s about physical release, these two men finally letting their bodies go, (and while they’re wrapped around each other no less). If you wanted to show this with two female characters, you’d have them appear to die in a mysterious explosion, to mimic the female orgasm.
With two men, you show them collapsing in relief, immediately after consummating their love…
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