beauty and the macabre onscreen
(WARNING: graphic images that may be disturbing below if you're not a horror lover.)
I am, as always, a little late to the game on this one, but we've been making our way nightly through the Hannibal series (my first time, J's second.) I am not as familiar with all the Hannibal lore, given I've only seen Silence of the Lambs and not read any of the books.) The twisty and intense plotlines and the cannibalism of the namesake character, while there, are not what is standing out at me in the brilliance of this series, but moreso the visuals. It sort of become a macabre art exhibit of death on display and the sort of dark poetry you rarely encounter in television (and when I do, its shows like Yellowjackets and AHS, but its guiding the show even more here.) In the last episode we watched, a killer took to making himself into an animal predator using the jaws of wolves and bears. In the last, a man sews a woman inside a horse after digging up her corpse in a field and puts a bird under her heart that flies out during the autopsy, and the man believes, holds her soul. It's all very nature bound--lots of antlers, insects, mushrooms, flowers. And that's on top of Hanniibal and his elaborate meals of, ya know... people.....
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I found a few pieces on the internet about the visual art of the show , including this great discussion of scenes and influences::
"A garden of diabetic patients making a mushroom garden grow. Viking blood angels. A man’s corpse stuffed with poisonous flowers. A cellist posed to play the cello that’s been slammed through his throat. A man with a honeycomb in his skull. A totem pole of torsos. A spiral of bodies in a color spectrum. A body with wounds resembling Wound Man. A woman with a Glasgow smile. A man with a Colombian necktie. A woman catching fire in an iron lung. A woman’s body, cut with a butcher’s saw into thin slices, preserved under glass, displayed vertically. A man with his face torn off by hogs. A man folded up into the shape of an anatomic heart. Two men removing prosthetics to reveal their wilted faces. A man on the end of a rope, then his disemboweled guts tumbling to earth. A pig pregnant with a human fetus. A naked man with a full tattoo of William Blake’s Great Red Dragon on his back as he exercises rigorously. A suburban house completely splattered with blood impacts. A family with mirrors inserted into their eyes and genital sockets. A man in a wheelchair set on fire. The same man alive with many layers of his dermis burned off. A three-way bloodbath as three men knife-fight it out on a seaside terrace.
If you don’t think you know what these images look like, you might be surprised. They take their inspiration from the Hellraiser series; from the art of H.R. Giger, Edvard Munch, William Blake, Henry Fuseli, Francis Bacon, and Pablo Picasso; from the famed Uffizi Gallery of artwork; from the photography of Man Ray; from the Elizabeth Short, or “Black Dahlia,” case file; from Weegee’s crime photos and other mafia-era photos; from 17th-century alchemical texts; from Gray’s Anatomy (the textbook) and da Vinci’s medical drawings; from Stan Brakhage’s film Autopsy; from ethnic art; from wartime photos of both World Wars and Vietnam; and from BDSM and industrial fetish art. "
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