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This week we all plod forward, knowing that a new episode of Hannibal will never grace our TV screens again (they’re “looking into financing for a film,” says showrunner Bryan Fuller, but who knows how long that’ll take- if it takes at all). It’s a dreary day, for sure.
But as Mads Mikkelsen once said, Hannibal “finds life is most beautiful on the threshold to death.” So let’s make like the good Dr. Lecter and seek out the beauty in Hannibal as it plunges over that threshold and into the churning waters below (in the same interview that gave us that quote, Mikkelsen also compares Will and Hannibal to Sherlock Holmes and Moriarty. Kinda spooky, given where we last saw those two).
Now that Hannibal is a finished entity, let’s remember how it romanticized the stitching of corpse parts into to macabre, ingenious (also, smelly?) works of fine art. A definitive ranking of Hannibal’s top ten death tableaus.
(I can’t begin to describe just how NSFW and Spoiler Alert-y the following list is. Gore galore, plus a few slivers of nudity. Expect that any blue link you click might open up into even more pictures of grossness).
Image Courtesy of NBC
10. The Human Firefly
I wavered back and forth in picking a death for the number ten spot. Nine through one all came clearly, but there were maybe four or five also-rans that all had enough potential to make the list. Should I pick the mushroom deaths that, while certainly enough to make me give up on lunch mid-Hannibal, didn’t have the same cinematic flair as later kills? Maybe the various characters mounted on stag horns, even if that’s become passé since True Detective.
Ultimately I went with Will’s transformation of deranged cage dweller into human firefly ornament from the season three episode “Secondo.” There’s almost no explanation as to why Will does it- surely it must have taken hours, and Will doesn’t really have time to spare in his Hannibal-finding quest. Even Mikkelsen’s not quite sure: “It can be a little slight sign of him stepping into my shoes. Or it can also be trying to erase me.”
It is gorgeous, though. Really, truly gorgeous. Especially as it blends two of season three’s animal motifs in the fireflies that mingle and cast their light around the body and the snails that ooze over its torso. Who cares if it was kind of a question mark.
Courtesy of NBC
9. Doctor Sutcliffe’s Missing Cheeks
The death of Doctor Donald Sutcliffe earns maybe a 3/10 on creativity. Carving up someone’s face is certainly gross, but nothing on the level of turning someone into a tree or melding a human carcass with a prehistoric bear.
It’s the framing that does it for me, though. If you were to see that prosthetic head in perfectly average viewing conditions (maybe as part of a selfie or something) it’d be sickening, for sure. But you might hesitate to call it beautiful, or even particularly frightening. But in “Buffet Froid?” The angle is everything. It’s almost cartoonish, the way the tongue lolls out and how the mouth hangs open at such an impossible angle. You can almost imagine the top half of Sutcliffe’s skull gently swinging in the breeze, entirely independent of what the lower jaw is doing.
I get a tiny jump scare jolt every time I look at this thing, and I’ve clicked back to the above photo at least ten times in the process of writing these three paragraphs. I just did it again. Someone please stop me.
Courtesy of NBC
8. Cross-Sections of Beverly Katz
Fun fact: Beverly Katz was the Jesse Pinkman of Hannibal, scripted to die at the end of the first season (it was originally supposed to be her ear that Will coughs into the sink), but kept around a while longer. Unlike Jesse Pinkman, Beverly stumbles onto the wrong secret just four episodes into the second season, and ends up cross-sectioned into six head-to-toe slices.
The image above doesn’t really do it justice. For full effect, check out the reveal of Beverly’s death in glorious HD (“embedding disabled by request,” I’m afraid).
It feels weird to compliment, because I want to use words like “gorgeous” and “elegant” but it’s also a fan-favorite character chopped into little pieces and something twinges inside me when I call this graphic guts-cut a “thing of beauty.” Still, though. How we only see Beverly from the side (with Jack moving forward, reflected in the glass) and then the camera pans left and all those Beverly Katz microscope slides unfold like an accordion. It really is a work to be admired.
Courtesy of NBC
7. The Human Totem Pole
Casting Lance Henriksen as a guy who murdered 18 people over the course of 40 years and stitched them into a towering human totem pole was definitely an outside choice. Henriksen’s best known for getting messily dispatched by what goes bump in the night (an alien, a predator, a Terminator). As a serial killer? He’s very low key. At the end of “Trou Normand,” Will and Jack burst into Larry Wells’s (Henriksen) to find him kicking back in his Barcalounger, more than happy to chat about those dozen and a half murders.
It makes for a nice contrast, because that human totem pole is far and away the hugest undertaking of any arthouse kill in Hannibal’s debut season (and only the Body Mural can boast more corpses in a single installation). It’s everything you’d want in a death tableau: imposing, surreal and with a weirdly appealing sense of artistry. You just want to stare at it for hours (and when you do so for long enough, you’ll realize the uppermost victim’s head is resting gently on his own buttcheeks).
I can only hope that Bryan Fuller and NBC will hold onto all these tableaus for the indefinite future, and that they’ll put together a live exhibit some day (fingers crossed). I wonder if this’ll be the centerpiece.
Courtesy of NBC
6. The Human Tree
What’s so fascinating about the Human Tree is how inconsequential he is to the rest of “Futamono,” the hour where he meets his end. Hannibal’s feeling off his game, so he decides to throw a dinner party. Any worthwhile dinner party requires a few human organs… leading us to the vision above.
That’s it, really. The Human Tree nudges the story a bit forward (a few clues found in the body push Jack a bit closer to catching Hannibal), but it’s really just a death tableaux for death tableaux’s sake. Yet there’s just as much thought put into it (from both Hannibal and Fuller) as any tableaux that commanded a full episode’s attention. Hannibal’s victim is a dickish city councilman with a poor track record on environmental issues, so Hannibal extends his body outward with vines and branches, hollows out his chest cavity and replaces a full spread of missing organs with poisonous flowers. Amazing that a quick throwaway kill can be so captivating.
Courtesy of NBC
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