There is one very live issue on which the pilot appears to have closed the book already: How much of a presence will Hannibal Lecter’s absence occupy in the show? Clarice’s legally mandated inability to mention him by name — in one of the episode’s funnier moments, Clarice’s shrink refers to him as her former therapist — did not necessarily mean he wouldn’t still be there, exerting unseen influence.
Consider, for example, the way Marlon Brando’s Vito Corleone became a sort of structuring absence in The Godfather Part II, a void around which the whole story implicitly orbited, with Al Pacino’s Michael Corleone attempting to live up to the old man’s legacy while the flashbacks to Robert De Niro’s young version of Vito depicted how he became the larger-than-life presence he was in the first film. A bit closer to home, Laura Palmer was just a prom photo and a few seconds of videotape footage for the bulk of Twin Peaks. However, creators David Lynch and Mark Frost never lost sight of how her absence, caused by her murder, continued to affect her family and friends, even after the circumstances of that murder were uncovered and solved. (Well, more or less — particularly by the show’s third season, it was clear that nothing in Twin Peaks was ever truly solved).
By contrast, Clarice devises a bold and, to my mind, successful work-around for the Hannibal issue: It prioritizes Clarice’s experience confronting and killing Buffalo Bill, the murderer whom Lecter helped her track down, rather than her experience with the good doctor himself. The decision actually makes good sense, from a character perspective. Sure, Clarice’s conversations with the Cannibal were harrowing; granting a psychopathic psychiatrist a deep dive into your childhood trauma is gonna leave a mark. But Clarice implicitly argues — with ample justification, as far as I’m concerned — that killing a man before he kills both you and the young woman he intended to be his seventh victim is a much bigger deal, leaving much deeper wounds. Clarice’s constant flashbacks (emphasis on flash; they pop up for split seconds) to Bill and his moth-infested house of horrors ground the show in that experience, not in Clarice’s comparatively tame quid-pro-quo relationship with Lecter.
(That Lecter is currently at large in the show’s time frame, having escaped during the course of the events of the film, does not appear to enter into its calculations at all; as Clarice herself said in the movie, she’s not worried about Lecter coming after her, because “he would consider that rude.” Case closed!)
I’m covering Clarice for Vulture, starting with my review of the series premiere.
Tags: clarice, hannibal, reviews, the silence of the lambs, TV, TV reviews, vulture