TIM JONES
Empathy is basically the ability to inhabit, fully and non-judgmentally, the frame of reference and point of view of another person. It’s all the rage these days—and not only for FBI profilers like Hannibal’s nemesis, Will Graham. Social theorist Jeremy Rifkin argues in The Empathic Civilization that, far from the cynical picture we usually get of people growing more insular and selfish as the years go by (like your grandparents would probably moan at you), there’s actually been a recent shift in the other direction. Thanks to the increasing number of stories about other people from all across the world that are now only a few clicks of the mouse or taps on the screen away, we’re rapidly approaching what Rifkin calls “global peak empathy.” Inhabiting the mindset of someone else and imagining what the world feels like from his or her own perspective has never been easier or come more naturally. Go us!
I say “Go us!” because empathy sounds awesome. The potential value of increased levels of empathic contact from person to person is made pretty clear by psychologist David Howe in his book, Empathy: What It Is and Why It Matters. Once we’ve established an empathic connection with someone else, this bond has the power to foster “cooperation” and “collaboration” in situations where there might otherwise only be competition or hostility. It also has the power to soothe and heal pain and distress. That pretty much every major approach in counseling and psychotherapy trains its practitioners in the use of empathy as one of its most basic foundations proves Howe’s point. No matter whether you’re a cognitive behavior therapist or more person-centered, one of the principal things you’d do with your clients as part of your efforts to help them through their distress is show an empathic understanding of their story and their problems.
So if we’re reaching a state of “global peak empathy,” this can only be a good thing, right? It’s pretty timely for Bryan Fuller’s reimagining of Thomas Harris’s characters in Hannibal to show up and give us an answer to this question. But we mightn’t like the fact that rather than singing empathy’s praises like Howe does in his book, Fuller’s show places at its front and center a whacking great big warning about empathy’s dangers. When we see the impact that being a brilliant empath has on Will once he’s met Hannibal, we might wish that empathy weren’t on the rise, but on the decline instead. This is a show that tells us to be as un-empathic as possible, for the sake of our very sanity and perhaps even for the safety of society itself. All that this “global peak empathy” might give us is a world of remorseless serial killers like Hannibal!
Empathy: What It Is and Why It’s Dangerous
If we take a longer look at what exactly empathy is, it should become more obvious why it’s so dangerous to form an empathic connection with a guy like Hannibal—a wonderfully suave, charming (even sexy?) culinary genius, with whom you’d love to share a bottle of wine and a night at the opera, but who, underneath this dazzling surface, is a cannibalistic killer. Then we’ll see why the show is sounding such a loud warning about a global trend that it’d seem more obvious to be pretty happy about.
What exactly are empaths doing when they form an empathic bond with the person in front of them? Empathy is defined by hugely influential psychotherapist Carl Rogers as the ability “to assume . . . the internal frame of reference of the client, to perceive the world as the client sees it, to perceive the client himself as he is seen by himself, [and] to lay aside all perceptions from the external frame of reference while doing so . . .” (Rogers, p. 29). To empathize with another person, then, is to cast your personal judgments on his or her philosophy and behavior aside, so that you can see these things exactly how he or she sees them him- or herself. And then you must successfully communicate this move to the client, so that he or she feels this willingness to achieve a total understanding of exactly where he or she is coming from, in terms not just of thoughts, but of feelings too, including those uncomfortable ones buried pretty far beneath the surface, which might never have seen the light of day outside the therapist’s room.
A therapist like Rogers would reach out like this several times each day, demonstrating to every one of his clients a willingness to enter their worlds and join with them in a moment of pure, human contact. Imagine yourself in the shoes of someone like Hannibal’s FBI profiler Jack Crawford, whose wife Phyllis is in the final stages of terminal lung cancer. He’d experience the power of someone showing him that they understand exactly how he’s feeling about the situation, that they see and appreciate all the thoughts and emotions spiraling through Jack’s head, whatever they might be—whether they include guilt about being unable to do anything to protect his wife from the disease; or fear of the impending bereavement and a life spent without her; or, perhaps, a sense of being trapped by a situation beyond his control and wishing for any release possible, even if the only way this release can happen is the illness getting on with it and running its course. Not a nice thing to be thinking, but what he may well be thinking nonetheless.
In the first cases, just knowing that another person is taking the time to acknowledge what a guy like Jack is going through can kick-start a healing process all by itself. When we feel we’re worth being encountered in this deeply meaningful way, all sorts of resources for coping that we didn’t know existed start coming to the surface. In the latter, darker instance, this isn’t exactly a feeling that someone like Jack would feel comfortable owning up to at all, or even safe to acknowledge fully to himself. He might have to keep it pretty deeply buried for the sake of his very sanity. But if the counselor can sense that this is what’s happening within Jack, and communicate this to Jack himself from a neutral, non-judgmental perspective, then Jack might feel safer owning up to these feelings and putting them out in the open. He can then explore them for himself with the therapist’s support and work through them in a healthy way, rather than bottling them up.
The crucial idea when empathizing with darker thoughts like the example given above is remaining non-judgmental. The empathizer steps out of any feelings he or she might hold about the client’s situation, and inhabits, in as pure a sense as possible, the client’s own outlook on the situation. The empathizer might be absolutely horrified that someone might secretly wish that a loved one’s terminal illness be over and done with. He or she might regard this as the height of betrayal. But while empathizing, this becomes irrelevant. What matters is reconstructing, living and communicating a sense of what the client is going through, completely unfiltered through the empathizer’s own judgments or moral position.
And this is where Hannibal sees the big fat danger signs. You might need to keep your own moral position intact if you don’t want some particularly unpleasant mindsets, like Hannibal’s, to completely erase your own.
Where There’s a Will
While empathy is probably most commonly used in therapeutic encounters like the above, in the case of FBI profilers like Will, it’s being put to a different purpose. A therapist would use empathic contact to help people right in front of him or her; Will uses it to help people from a distance by catching bad guys like Hannibal who’d seek to do them harm. If he can fully inhabit their frame of reference, and see the world exactly how they see it themselves, then he can second-guess their motivations, predict their next move, and stop them in their tracks.
The opening sequence of Hannibal’s pilot episode dramatizes pretty beautifully how this works. We first meet Will looking on at a house full of dead bodies, with blood splattered casually across the walls. He’s staring at the camera, looking slightly lost, and we’re left to think for a moment that this might be because he’s traumatized by what he’s seeing. But instead his vacant gaze is because his own perspective on the scene is literally slipping away from him. And then he seems to experience a moment of perfect calm as he gives himself up to this process and his own point-of-view disappears entirely. He’s then Will Graham no longer, and is literally inhabiting the viewpoint of the killer looking on at his handiwork. When Will says of the male homeowner, �
��He will die watching me take what is his away from him” (Hannibal, Season 1, “Apéritif”), he’s effectively stepped back in time to the moment of the act itself and reached a moment of perfect empathic contact with Garret Jacob Hobbs, the killer he’s hunting. Will’s living out the thought-processes and philosophy of Hobbs as Hobbs would experience them for himself, unmediated by any separate judgments that Will might make, were he to consider them from his own point of view.
Very useful to the FBI. But surely very scary for Will. At least he’s not stuck in this horrible mindset permanently. When we see him later in the episode, he’s Will again, speaking as Will speaks, and thinking how Will thinks. Like any empath should be, whether a counselor or a profiler, Will is able to leave the philosophy of the killer behind once the role is no longer necessary or appropriate. This ability to withdraw back to our own moral positions and emotions is an absolutely key ingredient to any empathic encounter.
There’s something about Hannibal himself, though, that derails this process and leaves Will’s own moral center slipping away beyond his reach. And this, the show suggests, is why empathy is pretty dangerous. You might be horrified at what empathizing with a cannibalistic serial killer like Hannibal makes you feel and accept as reasonable, only to retreat back towards your own frame of reference on Hannibal’s activities and find that it’s no longer there. Episode Three of Hannibal’s first season, “Potage,” sees Will ask if you can “catch somebody’s crazy.” It might not be an answer that we want to hear, particularly in a world approaching “global peak empathy” like Rifkin thinks, but the show basically answers “yes, you can!” And forming an empathic bond with someone as charmingly dangerous as Hannibal is the primary means of infection.
There’s Something about Hannibal
To empathize with Hannibal is to understand as an indisputable fact, just as he does, that weak or hypocritical people are ripe for hunting and ritualized degradation, and that human meat is no less deserving of being kept from our plates than the animal meat that many of us consume pretty regularly. And that following this philosophy and acting it out in the real world isn’t wrong at all, and not just right either, but beautiful.1
Fuller’s show works pretty hard to demonstrate to its viewers what Will’s going through when he struggles to retrieve his own perspective from this philosophy of Hannibal’s. We see for ourselves exactly how beautiful some pretty disgusting things can look, if only they’re framed the right way. If you think about it for a moment, there’s nothing at all pleasant about being buried alive in the woods and transformed into an incubation system for rare fungi, like the victims in the show’s second episode, “Amuse-Bouche.” But (and I hope this isn’t just my own reaction to the episode!) look at how director Michael Rymer manages to make this fate look almost poetically beautiful. In the same episode where Will is first being encouraged by Hannibal to see the wonderful side of his desire to kill Hobbs in the pilot, we’re placed directly alongside him by being shown how beautiful serial killing can look for ourselves.
What Hannibal is doing to Will, the show is doing to us. And if we’re a bit creeped out by this because we keep a healthy sense of the horror that remains so close to the beauty, then we can well imagine how Will feels whenever his own perspective on murder flickers back into life against the mindset Hannibal is leading him towards. We at least get a bit of a respite every time there’s an act break, or we can turn the show off once we’ve finished marathoning a few episodes, with the box sets or online. Unlike poor old Will.
The best illustration of exactly why Hannibal’s perspective is so hard to escape from is probably the closing sequence of Episode 7 of the first season, “Sorbet.” Again, note how beautiful it all looks: how proud Hannibal is of the meal he’s putting together in the kitchen and then placing before his guests; how much care he takes over pouring and checking the wine and cutting up the . . . whatever it is he’s cutting up; how sumptuously the long tracking shot over the dinner table showcases the final result of all this painstaking preparation. His world, and the steps he’s taken to bring it into being, looks truly . . . delicious. It’s quite the effort to remember what’s actually underlying all the luxury spread before us.
Watch, too, the knowing way in which Hannibal warns his guests that “nothing here is vegetarian.” They then laugh because the very notion of him needing to give such a warning to a room full of rapacious carnivores, who wouldn’t entertain the thought of giving up the luxury of meat-eating, not even for a moment, is indeed laughable. He takes on the slight hint of a smirk we see in the episode’s closing shot, not because his joke is funny on the same level that his guests recognize, but because of the hypocrisy beneath their laughter, which they’re unaware of. If they knew what they were really eating, all the trappings of high-society surrounding them would collapse into horror, and rather than laughing, they’d end up in quick need of the smelling salts. While to Hannibal, eating animal and eating human are basically the same thing.
And if we laugh ourselves, we’re presumably not laughing for the reasons his guests are laughing, but because we’re delighting in the hypocrisy that Hannibal is drawing out from beneath high-society’s fragile veneer of civility. We’re encouraged to appreciate the joke on Hannibal’s level, not theirs. And it’s a good one.2 He’s right to make the point. There’s something savage in the guests’ delight for meat, and if this savagery were put before them in a way that would make it recognizable for them, they’d be completely unable to stomach it. How pathetic of them! It’s enough to make you relish the thought of finding the nearest carnivore, tricking them into eating an acquaintance and then laughing at them when they say how much they’re enjoying the lovely meal you’ve prepared!
Oops. But look how easy it is to be drawn into Hannibal’s worldview. His closing look towards the camera and his raising of his glass, not just to his guests but to us as well, is practically an invitation to share this position of judgment with him and against his guests. For just a moment, we’re again in exactly the same place as Will. It’s lucky for us that this is right where the episode ends and we can snap back to reality.
But until this cut to black, we’ve been seduced by the acting, the direction, and the dialogue into taking on Hannibal’s point of view, just like an empath would do more willingly as part of his or her daily work. And the scene shows perfectly that Hannibal’s philosophy is so hard to disengage from because it’s just so damn clever, so suave, so delightful. The most horrible things are framed so effortlessly as the very height of sophistication. Who wouldn’t want to be as smooth as Hannibal is when he stands in triumph at the head of the dinner table, staring down at the stupid, uncomprehending guests whose utter ignorance means that they deserve everything that happens to them?
By the end of Season 2, Will appears to have pulled himself back from a permanent alignment with Hannibal, but this isn’t without a huge amount of personal trauma on the way. Perhaps it’s only possible because Will’s someone who’s recognized as a gifted empath and so has probably had lots of training on how to pull back from getting too close. Laypeople like us wouldn’t have a chance if our encounters with Hannibal weren’t confined to bite-sized forty-two minute tasters.
So Tell Me Hannibal, How Does That Make You Feel?
But like I said before, Will isn’t trying to use empathy in order to help Hannibal, like a counselor or psychotherapist traditionally would, but to catch serial killers, without even realizing at first that his new friend is one of their number. A way of redeeming empathy from the show’s scary portrayal of its dangers comes from imagining how it might work if a truly empathic encounter with Hannibal happened in a context more therapeutic than police-procedural, like in the example I gave using Jack earlier.
This isn’t necessarily any safer for the empath. After all, Hannibal’s psychotherapist, Dr. Du Maurier, is a bit crazy too. She might have had a screw loose to begin with, but it’s more likely that she’s just a little bit further along the
same path Will was going down before the Season 2 finale, with an empathic connection with Hannibal (in this case during a therapy session) leaving her unable to retrieve her own perspective from his perverse, yet seductively beautiful, way of seeing the world.
But empathy still deserves an attempt to show what it could really do for a person like Hannibal, if used by a particularly skilled counselor who could avoid the fates of Will or Dr. Du Maurier. At its height, or what therapists Dave Mearns and Brian Thorne call Level 3 Empathy, it has the ability to “show an understanding of the client beyond the level of the client’s present expression” (Mearns and Thorne, p. 59). This level of work between therapist and client can even reveal underlying feelings and emotions “quite opposite” to the thoughts and behaviors manifesting “on the surface.” And it’s at this deepest level that empathy could become most therapeutically useful for Hannibal.
Imagine, for a moment, one such possible therapeutic encounter:
Therapist [let’s call him Tim, just because]: You’ve been talking a lot about the contempt you feel towards people weaker than yourself . . . About how they deserve what you do to them . . . I’m not sure if you’re aware of this or not, Hannibal, but when you’re bringing up these things, I’m getting the sense that there’s something else there too . . . Like you’re fidgeting in the chair a lot. And you don’t seem to be able to make eye contact with me.
Hannibal: [Long awkward silence]
Tim: I wonder if you’ve ever felt weak or helpless, like the people you’ve been talking about?
Hannibal: [In a tone of spontaneous dramatic breakdown] Yes! I was only eleven! My family was killed by the Nazis! I watched helplessly as they abused my sister! I couldn’t do anything!
Tim: I’m hearing a real sense of powerlessness here. You saw all these horrible things happen and there was absolutely nothing you could do to stop them.
Hannibal Lecter and Philosophy (Popular Culture and Philosophy) Page 18