by elisa penha
edited by jessica yi and alloe mak

the first words doctor hannibal lecter say to will graham on nbc’s hannibal are “do you have trouble with taste?” it’s clever. he’s a cannibal called hannibal and he’s asking will graham (currently distraught by the existence of a cannibal whom he is investigating) about taste. but taste hardly ever means taste on this show. or in any halfway decent writing for that matter. it’s almost impossible to talk vaguely about food without sounding like you’re making uninspired innuendos; authors of all kinds have been capitalizing on this parallel since the dawn of time. what else do you do with your hands and your mouth? you eat and you fuck. and though they were certainly not the first, nbc decided to ask: why not do both? 

the romanticism embedded in will graham and hannibal lecter’s bloody love affair is not only implicit but grossly religious. for the sake of transparency, i never really bought into the whole cannibalism as love thing. i see your metaphors for consumption and lust and i don’t feel much. the insides of pomegranates look like lungs. richard siken wrote “i say i want you inside me and you split me open with a knife.” we’re meat. i get it. but it doesn’t cut. it’s not nearly as intense or sensual a metaphor as it prides itself on being. i feel it’s an oversimplification of love: too primal to count and too inherent to be individual. stripping want down to bodily consumption is almost a copout. putting something inside of you. it’s sex and it’s food—but love? hardly. i am not too prideful to dissect my own criticism, especially not in the face of scrolling through the hannigram (hannibal lecter and will graham’s ship name) tag on tumblr, which, should you spend long enough on it, might leave you itchy to chew on somebody’s shoulder, put your teeth into them, and love them with more than promise. eating human flesh is most often the line drawn between human and monster. toeing this line for another is faustian in its romance, and forgiving the breaching of this line is endorsing and requiting in nature; i’ve seen what you’ve become—maybe what you’ve always been—and i’m going to love it anyway. 

tumblr took down a video clip of a scene from hannibal where hannibal begins to nurse will graham’s bullet wound for “explicit sexual content” though clothes aren’t abandoned and nothing touches skin except for blood. “you dropped your forgiveness, will,” says hannibal, as will groans in entirely sexless agony, “you forgive how god forgives.” and later, “does god gloat?” asks will, and hannibal answers, “often.” a knife falls from will’s limp hand to hannibal’s. it’s less than two minutes long and tumblr thought it was pornographic. was it will’s panting or the way hannibal held onto his hair? the blood from the inside all over his outside? or was it merely hannibal’s being a cannibal that would imply the sight of a bloody will graham be appealing to him the thing that makes it sex? but why sex and not gore? where does it stop being food and start being kink? a strange question, i know, but one surely posed by whichever mod made the decision to ban the video clip for “explicit sexual content” and not “body horror.” 

for lack of a better word, it’s weird—i feel weird writing that, but i suppose that’s the point. the conflation of food—wholesome and good and free of sin—and sex—taboo and dirty and full of sin—is meant to be uncomfortable. but why? sex—in the various forms it may take—shies not from biting and licking. it’s all supposed to get you and your partner as close as possible; to occupy negative space. but the eating, the chewing, it’s only different in that it does not end. maybe it’s weird because sex is eating minus one step. it’s strange (again, for lack of a better word), and, for many, it’s romantic. crossing moral lines and such. i have been inundated by poorly marketed instagram adverts for chocolates supposedly enthused with hormones that will make you and your partner desperate for sex (break. bite. bang. i’m sure you’ve seen it), and the comments are themselves inundated by people claiming the chocolate is nothing but placebo. you wanted sex. you just want to say the food made you do it. hannibal skips these steps and combines the two. i saw another instagram post about the christmas song silent night, joking that it’s strange to call baby jesus “tender and mild.” someone commented, “it’s pretty apt considering the religion built around him centers on a ceremony where you eat him.” to consume as an act of devotion, or, rather, to consume devotion itself, is perhaps rooted in sex as well. hannibal sure thinks so—what does it mean to drop your forgiveness anyway? you’re bleeding onto someone who might be turned on by that. you’re killing gluttony and lust with one stone, and god is watching. it’s all sex, it’s all food, it’s all god—maybe there shouldn’t be different words for any of that. just love. to be full of something. to not need. maybe blending them all cancels out the shame that comes with any of it, or, on the flip side, the good, erasing moral value from three of the most basic pillars of humankind. 

i’ve written myself into a corner—is that not the same primality that i hate about romantic cannibalism to begin with? maybe it is, and maybe the point of it all is to be contradictory and unabiding, but that feels too much of a scapegoat for my not being able to justify my distaste with this to begin with. i don’t like what i’ve written—but i believe in it. it’s what makes hannibal so deeply enthralling. the discomfort is skin-peeling, but the romance is palpable and those are things that should not be able to exist in conjunction. we’ve categorised food, sex, and religion in separate mental boxes and feel disoriented that they can be—that they are—so partial to one another. hand in lovable hand. will graham once asked: “is hannibal in love with me?” and bedelia du maurier answered, “could he daily feel a stab of hunger for you and find nourishment at the very sight of you? yes. but do you ache for him?” if you didn’t know this was about eating people, you might swoon. but you do know. does that change things? does your stomach churn? is it hunger or butterflies? do you want it any less? is it bittersweet? you dropped your forgiveness. pick it up and stop playing with your food.