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Jessica Entwistle
Professor Greer
Eng 102
3/25/2015
Hannibal: Vicarious Desires
Hannibal Lecter. Saying the name brings people to the land of horror, serial killers, and
pop culture icons. He is the boogeyman, the faceless killer, the fear of a serial killer hiding in
plain sight put into one character. He is the dark side of the public, set free to roam and let out
unmentionable desires. He violates one of the biggest societal taboos of cannibalism and makes
it into a group act, bringing others into his twisted world. In the novels he corrupts a young FBI
agent, taking her from an innocent lamb to a lioness, at his side, willing to kill with and for him.
Now, he is reincarnated as a suave young man before his prison sentence, free to kill and
cannibalize. The TV show Hannibal brings society to the forefront of the mind of viewers by
showing how, through his physical beauty, alternate morality, complex plot lines and philosophy
and use of gratuitous violence Hannibal Lecter is a reflection of the unconscious desires of the
population.
In the show Hannibal, Hannibal Lecter is introduced as a respected psychiatrist and
known gourmet. He is assigned to work with investigator Will Graham to help in the hunt for a
cannibalistic serial killer known as the Minnesota Shrike. During the course of that investigation,
under the guise of “helping” Will to see the killer he commits a killing similar to that of the killer
they are looking for. In the end, he warns the killer, Garret Jacob Hobbs that the FBI is coming to
arrest him which causes him to attempt to kill his entire family. While Hobbs kills his wife, his
daughter barely survives thanks to Hannibal’s fast medical treatment. Through this, Hannibal
becomes Will’s psychiatrist and applies to be the guardian of Abigail Hobbs. As Hannibal

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continues to help Will solve crimes, there are more copycat murders that in the end, paint a clear
picture: either Will or Hannibal is the killer.
The entirety of the second season of the show is showing how Will was framed by
Hannibal and his struggle to prove that Hannibal is the actual killer, despite the massive amount
of forensic evidence pointing to Will Graham as the only suspect.
The image that is cultivated in the show for Hannibal Lecter is that of a gentleman, as he
first appears dressed in a suit and speaking with a slight foreign accent. He is both a medical
doctor and a psychiatrist and extremely skilled at everything he does. Hannibal seems like the
perfect man to help the FBI’s investigation in the serial killings that have been conducted, as he
comes recommended by another psychiatrist known to Jack Crawford, Alana Bloom. He seems
to be an upright citizen, with his credentials and his attractiveness compensating for the fact that
he is, in fact a serial killer. He could, in fact be compared to the game of Fallout 3 in the looks of
the world, “Fallout 3, finally looks beautiful….. Moved-by the care poured into the game’s
smallest atmospheric details” (Bissel 354). Hannibal Lecter is a beautiful person who has
cultivated a refined personality and surrounded himself with beautiful things as a way to
compensate for something that he knows is not there, his humanity and morality. The thin veneer
of humanity is revealed as false as Hannibal is entangled further in the investigation and the
copycat killings follow every case that he is involved in.
Hannibal as character brings the idea of a different morality to the forefront of the mind
of those viewing the show by showing the disregard he has for social mores and norms and his
creation of an alternative morality, where he decides upon who is “deserving” of being
cannibalized, “whenever it was ‘feasible,’ he preferred to eat the rude” (Harris 99). He knows
that if he keeps a moral code and uses it there is less of a chance of his doing something that

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would get him caught by the FBI. His code of eating those he considers rude, almost like his own
grocery store from the population serves to give him anonymity as those who become his victims
often only interact with him casually like a census taker (Harris Silence 27). The precise change
in character can be marked in the TV show, in a way that cannot be seen in the real world. The
audience watches as Hannibal Lecter uses what he gets from his victims to cook meals for
himself and others in the FBI. While the audience can see the monster the beauty, the normalcy
of looks hide the character underneath for those within his universe.
The intellectualism in Hannibal marks how television, as Steven Johnson argues, makes
people smarter. There are many reoccurring themes in the show such as Hannibal as an affably
evil person, the connections between Thomas Harris’ novels, the movies, and the show being
emphasized in different ways that require viewers to work as they watch the show. “Think of the
cognitive benefits conventionally ascribed to reading: attention, patience, retention, the parsing
of narrative threads. Over the last half-century, programming on TV has increased the demands it
places on precisely these mental faculties” (Johnson 280). While watching Hannibal it is obvious
to viewers that there must be attention paid constantly to what is going on on-screen as missing a
slice of dialogue can cause confusion upon watching the next episode.
As a show, there are many instances where small things come back around. For example
in the first episode, Aperitif, Will states he does not find Hannibal interesting yet in Su-zakana,
the eighth episode of season two, he states the opposite, saying he finds Dr. Lecter interesting.
Another way that the show uses intellectualism and challenges the minds of the viewers is in the
very naming of the episodes. The first season is entirely named after the courses of a meal, while
the second are named after a Japanese meal, and if the viewer is intellectual enough, the answers
to what will be happening can be viewed through the names of episodes.

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The violence in Hannibal is both gratuitous and entirely necessary for the both the show
and the character of Hannibal Lecter. He functions as a point to say that he is someone who has
gone too far in the violence and obsession with serial killing that has seemingly pervaded every
facet of American culture. While the show is not all jokes, the running gags about cannibalism
and killers hiding in plain sight says something about the public, to quote Antonia Peacocke,
“Jokes all have their origins, and the funniest ones are those that hit home the hardest; if we
listen to Freud, these are the ones that let our animalistic and aggressive impulses surface from
the unconscious” (Peacocke 308). The show Hannibal is an excellent example of how the theme
of cannibalism and serial killing fascinates the public and perhaps shows their unconscious
desires to explore what it would be like to kill someone, and not only kill someone but eat them
as a way to dispose of the evidence.
Watching in horror and confusion as you see Hannibal kill someone, yet smiling as he
does when he successfully gets his food passed to others. As an example in the novel Hannibal
as he is feeding Clarice Starling and she asks what is for dinner, he tells her to never ask as it
spoils the surprise (526-527), after which he proceeds to feed her the brain of a former co-
worker. In the TV show this is a main theme as well, as he often invites guests for dinner after a
killing, whereupon he feeds them and thus introduces them to the world of cannibalism as well.
While the show may show this as a normal act coming from a serial killer, one is left to wonder
why the concept of eating humans is a constant fascinating and repulsing act.
The violence in the show Hannibal is often out there, to shock viewers with its depravity
and how it came to be. Often, there is the scene of the crime, then Will Graham reconstructs the
crime in his mind, and there is the crime again, in full bloody detail including the splashing of
blood and removal of flesh. The way that the crime is showcased, is not in fact to glorify crime,

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but to show the violence in what producer Bryan Fuller calls: ““elegant horror.” And NBC was
very supportive. They realized they were ordering a show called Hannibal, and so they also
wanted to be respectful of the source material and of the fan base of the character. And not
deliver something that didn’t honor the genre.” (Aurthur). There was a knowledge going into the
TV show of the mythos of Hannibal Lecter and the horror that the character creates and the
amount of violence that would be necessary to convey the life of the killer.
Hannibal provides an outlet for those who wish to see violence and the public fascination
with serial killers, especially those like the Ted Bundy’s and Hannibal Lecter’s. The suave,
educated killer who hides his true self by the façade of intelligence and good looks. From the
first killing in the show Hannibal to the last episode of season two, which leaves many of the
main characters dead or dying at the hand of Hannibal Lecter the violence shows up as a moral
choice between being violent to get the flesh needed for that next gourmet recipe to being a
similar character and harnessing the power of understanding to solve the serial murders.
The intellectual exercise in viewing the show, from discussions about why Will Graham
has the ability to empathize with psychopaths to debating how wrong it is to be a Fannibal (the
title given to die-hard fans of the show) gives the public the opportunity to explore vicarious
desires through a suave, attractive serial killer.
Watching the show allows for living vicariously through the title character as people
watch him dupe other characters into believing that he is an upstanding member of society
because of his good looks, smooth talking, and standing in society. Hannibal is the culmination
in a series of programs for a nation obsessed with violence and serial killers because of their
tendency to look less like what is imagined and more like the average person you see every day.

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Works Cited
Aurthur, Kate. ""Hannibal" And The Consequences Of Violence." BuzzFeed. BuzzFeed, 14 May
2013. Web. 29 Mar. 2015.
Bissel, Tom. "Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter." "They Say/I Say": The Moves That Matter in
Academic Writing: With Readings. New York: W.W. Norton, 2012. 349-62. Print.
Harris, Thomas. Hannibal. New York, NY: Delacorte, 1999. Print.
Harris, Thomas. The Silence of the Lambs. New York: St. Martin's, 1988. Print.
Johnson, Steven. "Watching TV Makes You Smarter." "They Say/I Say": The Moves That Matter in
Academic Writing: With Readings. New York: W.W. Norton, 2012. 277-94. Print.
Peacocke, Antonia. "Family Guy and Freud: Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconcious." "They Say/I
Say": The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing: With Readings. New York: W.W. Norton,
2012. 299-311. Print.