OKAY OKAY OKAY I KNOW THERE ARE SO MANY FANDOMS STARTING NOW, LIKE THE SINK FANDOM AND THE TREEHOUSE FANDOM AND THE BLANKET FORT FANDOM, BUT YOU ARE ALL MISSING ONE.
SECRET
FREAKIN’
ROOMS
LIKE
PEOPLE
BUILD ROOMS
WITHIN ROOMS
BUT THEY AREN’T LIMITED TO INSIDE THE HOME
THAT’S RIGHT
THERE ARE SECRET ROOMS FOR CARS
HONESTLY THOUGH
YOU EITHER LIKE SECRET ROOMS
OR YOU’RE WRONG
I have always wanted a house with secret rooms.
My goal in life is to become an eccentric recluse with an entire manor filled with secret rooms young intrepid junior-detectives will want to explore to look for clues.
I will then proceed to spook them periodically while wearing a bedsheet with holes cut out, and stare at them creepily from behind paintings.
people seem to have trouble understanding why i’m an anti-capitalist, so i’m going to try and put it into simple, real-life terms.
i work at a restaurant. i make $12 an hour, plus tips. minimum wage where i live is relatively high for my country – the national minimum wage is $7.25/hr, and has not been raised since 2009. before taxes, working full time, my yearly income is about $22,000 a year. ($25,000 if you count tips)
at my job, we sell various dishes, with an average price of about $10-$15. we get printouts every week detailing how much money we made that week; in one week, our restaurant makes about $30,000. (one of our other locations actually makes this much on a daily basis!)
i’m not going to go into details, but after the costs of production
(payroll for employees, rent for the building, maintenance, and wholesale food purchasing) are accounted for, the restaurant makes an estimated profit of $20,000 per week.
this profit goes directly to the owner, who does not work at this location. the owner of my restaurant has actually been on vacation for a few months, but still profits from the restaurant, because they own it. i have met the owner exactly twice in my year of working here.
to put this into perspective, the owner of this restaurant earns in 2 days what they pay me in one year. and that’s just from this single location – the owner has several other restaurants, all of which make more money than the one i work at. this ends up resulting in the owner having an estimated net worth of tens of millions of dollars, even after accounting for the payroll for every single worker in their employ.
now, i have to ask you: does the owner of my restaurant deserve this income? did they earn it? did their labor result in this value being created?
the naive answer would be “yes”; the owner purchased the location and arranged for the raw ingredients to be delivered, did they not?
the actual answer is “no”. the owner may have used their initial capital to start the location, but the profit is a result of my labor, and the labor of my co-workers.
the owner purchases rice at a very low bulk price of about 25 cents a pound. i cook the rice, and within a few minutes, that pound of rice is suddenly worth about $30. the owner did not create this value, i did. the owner simply provided the initial capital investment required to start the process.
what needs to be understood here is that capitalists do not create value. they use the labor of their employees to create value, and then take the excess profit and keep it.
what needs to be understood is that capitalists accrue income by already HAVING money. the owner of my restaurant was only able to get this far because they started off, from the very beginning, with enough money to purchase a building, purchase food in bulk, and hire hundreds of employees.
that is to say: the rich get richer, and they do so by exploiting the labor of the poor.
the owner of my restaurant could afford to triple the income of every single person in their employee if they felt like it, but this would mean that they were generating less profit for themselves, so they do not.
the owner of my restaurant pays me the current minimum wage of my area, because to them, i am not a person. i am an investment. i am an asset. i am a means to create more money.
when you are paid minimum wage, the message your boss is sending you is this: “legally, if i could pay you less, i would.”
every capitalist on the planet exploits their workers for their own gain. every capitalist, even the small business owners, forces people to stay in poverty so that the capitalist can profit.
The reason why NBC’s Hannibal found such a huge female audience is because Fuller’s/Mads’ Lecter is not a male power fantasy: he’s a female power fantasy.
He’s not a broody snippy git whose appeal is assumed apriori and who in real life would drive away absolutely everyone he met (e.g. any sad manboy ever trotted out as a lead by Moffat).
He’s not an “aspirational” over-muscled hulk.
He’s not a fighter for ‘truth’ or ‘justice’ for whom bodies are just collateral on his path to heroic self-actualization
This Hannibal is the Head Bitch In Charge.
He is independent to the n-th degree. He lives to please himself and no one else. He is fabulous. He shamelessly geeks out over obscure and refined pastimes and shares them with friends. He is the Queen Bee of his social circle. He takes any excuse to treat himself, but he also has perfect self-discipline: gym is not optional. His time-management skills are superhuman. He can decorate and keep a house like Martha Stewart, hold down several jobs, and practice multiple hobbies daily.
(And what are his hobbies, aside from slaughter? Cooking, foreign languages, drawing, playing musical instruments and composing. And clearly clothes shopping. He is probably on first-name basis with the best tailors and cordwainers in town. Contrast with Will, whose hobbies are stereotypically masculine: fixing motor boats, fishing, playing outside with his dogs.)
Hannibal is not young, but he wears his age gracefully. He regrets nothing, like an embodiment of Piaf’s “Non, rien de rien”. His hair is perfect because he clearly spends time in front of the mirror styling it, not because the show’s producer wanted him to look effortlessly cool (*cough*Sherlock*cough*).
He never, ever loses his temper in public, as if he knows that the world/audience will not fawn over him for trying to assert himself through vulgarity, posturing, or volume – all the typical ways in which men like to hijack and dominate conversations.
He can dispatch a creepy stalker like Franklyn with a single neck twist, with no consequences. A sweet fantasy, indeed. If only real life stalkers were so easy to dispose of.
Hannibal’s victims – those who were not killed in self-defense or as ‘murder presents’ for Will – tend to fall into two categories: other killers who act like *they* are the baddest bitches in town (Gideon, Tobias, the mural guy) and people who disrespect him. Of those, there are surprisingly many. In fact, it seems like the very esteemed pillar of Baltimore society Dr. Lecter goes through life constantly being dissed. This is rather puzzling. Hannibal is a tall good-looking white gentleman who speaks like a professor, dresses like a count, and drives a Bentley that costs more than people’s houses. And yet something about him prompts many people, especially in the service industry, to be rude to him.
But he doesn’t confront these “pigs” (already a gender-loaded term, even though it gets applied to victims of both sexes) in a head-on, macho way. Instead, he bides his time and dispatches his prey through some kind of a sneak attack. His preferred philosophy of fighting is “feminine”: assume your opponent is physically stronger and don’t try to out-muscle them. (Even if his opponent is much smaller and weaker, like Chilton.) Subterfuge, ambush, sedatives – Hannibal wins his fights by fighting on his own terms. Nevertheless, if a man should come at him with a weapon, he defends himself with perfect adroitness: Tobias, Jack, Mason’s henchmen, etc.
Even some aspects of Hannibal’s relationship with Will would make more sense if he were female. In particular the issue of, well, issue. Hannibal is clearly Not Okay with Will having children with anyone but him. This is somewhat odd for a man, especially one who seems to have never wanted kids before this. But it makes sense for a woman just past menopause: fate finally delivered her dream partner, but it’s too late to have a family. And so Hannibal sets up the dominoes for Margot’s pregnancy to be terminated practically as soon as he learns of it. If he can’t have Will’s kids, then no one can. They may be adopted, but they have to be *theirs*.
It also makes sense that when Hannibal discovers Will’s treachery, he goes full Medea on him. Killing the man’s children is common to cultural narratives of wronged women all over the world. It’s often the only leverage they have over the men, the only way they can exact revenge. Hannibal can take much more than Abigail from Will, but she is the only thing he can take that truly matters.
Bonus exercise for the reader: imagine a version of the show where everything is the same, but Hannibal is played by Meryl Streep.
Or even just swap Mads Mikkelsen & Gillian Anderson places. Let her be Hannah Lecter; let him be Dr. Bennett Du Maurier, her wary shrink. Both the characterization and plot still work almost 100%.
I wrote this before season 3, and I just want to point out something that happened on the show afterwards. We saw Hannibal engage in more stereotypical male combat: protracted, hand to hand, with improvised weapons. Once against Jack and once against The Great Red Dragon.
Both times, Hannibal was smaller and physically weaker. In Mizumono, he only got to Jack through cleverness; physically, Jack could throw him around like a rag doll. When they met again in Italy, Jack kicked his ass so thoroughly Hannibal had to save himself by falling out the window and hobbling off. Same with the Red Dragon: had they gone head to head, Hannibal would have been thoroughly pwned.
Bryan Fuller described Hannibal and Will fighting to “two jackals trying to take down a rhinoceros”. He might as well have said “two women trying to take down a man”.
So are you saying that they are a gay couple who is in the same time a lesbian couple
yes.
I love this. It’s a woman’s show in so. many. ways.
For me (apropos of nothing), the scene in Antipasto when Prof. Sogliato humiliates Hannibal is EVERYTHING. In that moment, Sogliato is every dick who name checks a badge at an academic conference and dismisses you with a glance. Who doesn’t take you seriously because you’re ‘just’ a woman. And when he turns around and starts reciting Dante… in that moment, he is me and I am not prepared to get too worked up about Sogliato’s inevitable demise.
I honestly never thought of Hannibal in this way before and now I need to rewatch everything
I’m glad someone put my thoughts on the show into actual words.
Artisan Scribbles 