In “Bodies,” the season premiere of Law & Order‘s fourteenth season, cryptic markings on a dead woman’s body are matched to similar markings found on a victim in Brooklyn five years before—then to more—and, before we know it, Detectives Briscoe (Jerry Orbach) and Green (Jesse L. Martin) are on the hunt for a serial killer skulking and stalking the streets of New York City. The detectives don’t do anything fans of the show haven’t seen a thousand times before: they canvass, retrace victim’ steps, locate a cocktail waitress with (what luck!) a cocktail waitress’s keen eye for creepy patrons. These leads and a little gut instinct lead them to the seedy apartment of a creepy taxi driver. And that’s that.
It all happens quickly, even by Law & Order’s Solomonic standards. As a result, unlike many serial killer dramas, the central tension in “Bodies” is not the profiling or the race against time but the legal and ethical predicament that arises after the capture: the killer compromises his court-appointed attorney, an idealistic and inexperienced public defender, tricking him into discovering where he’s hidden the bodies of victims. ADA McCoy, intent on “closure,” wants to know where they are. And while the young attorney would like to help, he feels hamstrung by his duty of confidentiality, a pillar of our adversarial legal system. Unmoved, McCoy warns the young lawyer that if he doesn’t fess up, he’ll be charged as an accessory to the crimes.
***
When Dick Wolf debuted Law & Order in the fall of 1990, New York’s violent crime rate was peaking. In that year alone, the city saw approximately 2,000 homicides—for perspective, that’s about 1500 more murders than 2021 and 2022, when the usual suspects were monetizing soaring crime and rampant lawlessness. Law & Order‘s popularity was, I think, a natural side-effect of the public’s fear of social disintegration: by marrying severe formalism with centrist liberalism, it both played to our fears and helped rehabilitate our faith in traditional institutions. The focus on crime was in keeping with the times. The series debuted four years after Congress passed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, which created mandatory minimum sentences, and four years before Bill Clinton signed the Violent Crime and Law Enforcement Act (1994), which flooded the streets with policemen and extended the death penalty to forty new offenses.
By the late 1990s, however, the mood was shifting. Internet speculation had driven the stock market toward a Minsky moment; NYC was , in turn, transitioning from Tom Wolfe’s cautionary dumpster fire into a different kind of flame altogether. The crimes that captured the public imagination were changing as well. As street crime receded, previously unimaginable events like the Columbine High School shootings of 1999 and September 11th shifted the focus to singular bad actors and the evil within. Ever entrepreneurial, Wolf adapted to this changing landscape by tweaking his formula by shifting focus to tawdrier crimes (SVU) or more volatile detectives, (Criminal Intent).[1] For the flagship, however, the template largely remained the same.
“Bodies” was different, however. It marked a real departure from the show’s generic, almost comforting, procedural drumbeat. The killer is less an example of social blight—he doesn’t kill out of greed or revenge or jealousy—than a locus of chaos and nihilism. When he snares his public defender in the rules and ethics that make the system work, he turns the system on itself. He is, as we’d say in the late 1990s, a kind of deconstructive force. Although many early Law & Order plot-lines were “ripped from the headlines,” an exercise in pulp anthropology, “Bodies” is, I think, something different, reaching past tabloid headlines in a way that linked our millennial anxieties with those of the early nineteenth century.
I am by no means an expert. But the Creature in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is, to my mind, the ur-type of our modern-day “intelligent psychopath.” Of all the Creature’s crimes, the most tragic is death of the Frankenstein family’s adopted daughter Justine. Rather than killing her outright, he frames her for the murder of an infant family member. Confronted with the evidence of her guilt, Justine—an analog, perhaps, of de Sade’s Justine, whose innocence is rebuked by nature itself—is torn between confessing to a crime she didn’t commit and the threat of ex-communication. Choosing death today over condemnation for eternity, she confesses and is hanged. Her death is, of course, a parable of innocence lost, though it’s not just the senseless destruction of innocence that drives the Creature. Spurned by his creator and scorned by society, his revenge is a form rehabilitation: by turning the Frankenstein family and the justice system against themselves, he reveals the irreconcilable contradictions lurking beneath our secular and spiritual notions of “truth.”
***
When Law & Order premiered in the fall of 1990, it did so over the protests of a handful of NBC executives who thought it too intense for network television. Times change. Twenty-five years later, on that same netowrk, roughly 2.5 million Hannibal viewers watched a sadistic doctor graphically disemboweled a still-conscious victim. Dr. Abel Gideon is one of fourteen serial killers introduced in the first twenty-two episodes of the series. Although it was more explicit than most, Hannibal was, perhaps, the high-water mark in our evolving, decades-long fascination with fictional serial killers.[2]
A non-exhaustive list begins in 1996, with NBC’s Profiler and Fox’s Millenium. CSI, which premiered on CBS in 2000 (followed by CSI: Miami in 2002 and CSI: NY in 2004), while not focused on serial killers, nonetheless relied on them when it counted most—in its pilot, for instance, and later for multi-episode arcs during crucial sweeps periods. Criminal Minds, also on CBS, followed the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit (BAU) as they tracked a new serial killer each week. A few months before Hannibal’s version of the BAU debuted in April, 2013, Fox premiered The Following, a “literary” take on cultish serial killer fandom. In 2014 , viewers were introduced to the ritualistic bayou murders of HBO’s True Detective and suffered through the disappointing conclusion of Showtime’s Dexter.
What is with this fascination? You don’t need to be a pessimist about human nature to recognize there’s a built-in audience for sadistic, misogynistic violence. But misogyny does not completely explain the broad appeal; something else must be going on. In Infidel Poetics, the poet and literary critic Daniel Tiffany identifies something atavistic at work. He traces our attraction to the “riddling serial killers,” and specifically the “cryptographers of modernity” like the Zodiac Killer and Unabomber, to the mythical Sphinx that terrorized Thebes with a fatal riddle. Like the Sphynx, these killers draw us in by turning their existential threat into a puzzle that’s equal parts a “‘promise of revelation’ and ‘the threat of annihilation.’”[3]
As a liminal creature built from scattered parts—it is part human, part lion, and part eagle without being any of them—the Sphinx is a kind of genomic antecedent of Frankenstein’s Creature, whose assembled parts also fail to add up. Together, these figures presage the inscrutable psychopathic killer of contemporary television and film. The dead eyes of the killer in “Bodies” and the yellow, soulless eyes of Shelley’s Creature are like the pilot lights of the soul; something essential is missing. Our modern fictional serial killers are all the more beguiling because they internalize the outward the outward-facing grotesqueness and/or unnaturalness of the Creature and Sphynx—they hide among us and terrorizes us from within. If it seems a stretch to call the work of these killers poems, it’s fair to ask why we call their stylistic quirks a signature, as if they were authenticating a work of art.
How we revisit and revise these age-old narratives might also tell us something important about our cultural moment. If Frankenstein can be read as a searing critique of Romantic hubris—the folly of “playing God” through science we do not and cannot fully understand—then CSI (as just one example) might best be understood as an effort to flip Shelley’s script, rehabilitating science as a stabilizing source of social control. This rehabilitation is arguably CSI’s fundamental theme. It shifts our attention away from gun-toting cops in favor of forensic analysts who prefer to stay far away from the action: “I don’t chase criminals,” explains lead-scientist Gil Grissom early on, “I analyze evidence.”[4]
Intentionally or not, CSI’s scientists embodied the rise (and, eventually, fetishization) of the wonk: they were part team, part marketplace of ideas, and their dimly-lit laboratories were, in turn, a place of both collaboration and competition. The team represented a variety of archetypes: an ex-stripper, an All-American jock, a stoic who harbors his own dark secrets, a skeptical, old school cop, etc. Grissom, brilliant in his own right, was far from a solitary genius: he channeled the team’s competitiveness and need to please into crowdsourced solutions. Early CSI was explicit about Grissom’s empirical bias—spit-balling was disfavored and theorized-but-unsupported ideas were met with a quick rebuke. To its credit (I think), CSI didn’t fetishize its killers, it fetishized technocracy—an early example of competence porn. And it was hugely successful. Which is probably why, when Criminal Minds first aired five years later, it hued close to the CSI template, down to its “team” of diverse stereotypes. If crime and punishment are inherently conservative preoccupations, CSI and Criminal Minds proved relatively progressive in other ways—for instance, they were notable for the integral, authoritative roles given to women. The fact that the “marketplace” was an inclusive one helped off-set (or distract from) the weekly violence perpetrated against women. Although Criminal Minds abandoned CSI’s empiricism for the squishier realm of behavioral models, both treated serial killers as a problem to be solved—that can be solved—through collaborative intelligence and hard work.
Hannibal was a different animal. It adapted characters from, but pre-dated, Thomas Harris’s well-known Hannibal Lecter novels—which means we know the extent of the murder and mayhem to come. There are two figures at its center. Hannibal Lecter, of course, who, as the series begins, is already a killer but still a practicing psychiatrist. And Will Graham, a profiler with the FBI Behavioral Analysis Unit (“BAU”) and an instructor at Quantico. Unlike Grissom, with his ASD-adjacent quirks and chilly, impersonal objectivity, Graham is soulful and sensitive, described—in a bit of helpful exposition—as a “pure empath.” Through some mystical, inexplicable process, he experiences crimes from the criminal’s perspective. Given the uniqueness of his gift, it’s fair to question just what he has to teach—you can ask Ted Williams to be your hitting coach but he can’t teach 20/5 vision.
Slightly-built, with boyish curls, Graham’s eyes suggest someone who’s witnessed unspeakable things. Lecter, played with droll humor by Mads Mikkelsen, is, as always, sinister and oddly charming, a man of inimitable style—bespoke plaid suit, paisley ties cinched into hyperbolically-large knots, a Venn nexus of high-fashion, bored costumers, and obsessive-compulsion. A figure of Nietzschean superiority, Lecter is, in no particular order, an unparalleled chef, a visual artist (he studied drawing at Johns Hopkins on a fellowship), a musician and composer (harpsichord and Theremin, which, while I’m no behvioralist, sure seems like evidence of something), a former neurosurgeon, and, now, a shrink. Mikkelsen’s Hannibal is so refined, his composure so total, that I wanted—just once—for the show to sneak up on him as he watched The Bachelorette and ate Lucky Charms in sweatpants.
To the extent there’s anything radical about Hannibal, the TV show, it’s absence of any Law & Order-like drama. We know from the jump that Lecter is a psychopath, a killer, and a cannibal, of course, which means the show’s sole mystery is a kind of will-they or won’t-they romance. Lecter sees Graham as a kindred spirt and works methodically to transform him into a killer as well. For the most part, every other character simply orbits Graham and Lecter, gravitationally-attached to one or the other only to switch polarities for convenience (or contrivance) of plot. On a structural level, however, the fact that we know who Hannibal is but the characters do not, creates a subversive asymmetry: we’re not following brilliant detectives down a rabbit hole of human behavior, we’re watching and wondering if they’ll ever figure out what we already know.
If Hannibal has all the trappings of a modern criminal procedural—FBI agents, gunplay, suitably high-tech labs occupied by quirky squints—it mocks our faith in (or fetish for) science and institutions alike. The former is inert, ineffective, easily manipulated. These manipulations do not surprise us: we are, insetad, in on the joke as Lecter uses forensic evidence to toy with the police and pervert the truth. We even watch with morbid delight as Jack Crawford (Laurence Fishburne), the Director of the BAU, spends the first season getting chummy with Lecter over artful meals made out of Lecter’s victims.
It is, in a word, preposterous. But Hannibal got away with it—it was almost universally praised by critics—by being beautiful. Its compositions were—like Lecter himself—meticulous and extravagant; strikingly-compsed images drawn from a super-saturated palette. Indeed, no matter the killer, Hannibal‘s murders are marked by “tableaux” that embody a kind of high-gothic surrealism, that blurring the line between the beautiful and the grotesque. Indeed, there is no escaping this aestheticization: of the fourteen serial killers in S1, not one stoops to the banal depths of (for instance) strangling a prostitute in a dark alley. As elaborate and grotesque as the crime scenes may be, however, most of the actual murders occur off-screen. Thus we “meet” most victims for the first time when they are already dead, already posed. Only later, through Graham’s “experiencing” of the crimes (if then), does the audience witness the brutality behind the “art.” The upshot is that this endless litany of victims never exist as subjects, only as the objects of the killer’s art. For all but a few, the only hope of becoming beautiful or meaningful, Hannibal suggests, is by yielding to the sadistic impulses of our betters. [5]
Hannibal’s disinterest in its victims’ interior life parallels the disinterest of the killers themselves. So, too, its grandiosity. The show maps out a symbolic universe of mirrors and reflections, parlor rooms and libraries, sublime landscapes and dream imagery differentiate the almost alien-like richness of the killer’s interiority from the drab repetitions of everyday life. Throw in some rampant body horror, and it’s as if Eli Roth were leading a grad seminar on Lacan. That half of Hannibal’s main characters are psychologists or psychiatrists allows the show to lay it on extra-thick—for a show preoccupied with killing, it spends a great deal of time eavesdropping on conversations about “psychic borders” on velvet couches in book-lined libraries.
As the above suggests, the medical and psychology professions fare no better than law enforcement. Doctors are corrupt or corruptible. Any sympathy for the disemboweled psychiatrist mentioned above is preempted by the fact he is a blowhard and fraud, someone we have already grown to despise. Graham’s “empathy” is fetishized, basic is sympathy is nowhere to be found. Human bonds are flimsy, fleeting: it takes Lecter only a few episodes to manipulate both the FBI and Graham’s love interest—a fellow psychiatrist—into believing our soulful empath is a serial killer. Naturally, when Graham is arrested, it’s Lecter gets him released. Those who see Lecter for what he is (they don’t last long), describe him in familiar, Mephistophelean terms: he’s Satan, he’s smoke, he can’t be seen. More subtly, Lecter’s psychiatrist brushes up against Mary Shelley, confessing her horror at what she saw beneath the “stitching of the person suit that you wear.” That the “person suit” held up for so long is just more evidence of Lecter’s exquisite tailoring.
The show’s sympathies clearly reside with Hannibal. Our instinct to judge him is undermined in a variety of ways—he employs a superficially stringent code of etiquette and ethics, and, though breach of that code can have fatal consequences, it is nonetheless a code. The world, Hannibal tells us, is unavoidably hierarchal and stratified, our domination predetermined. Lecter, at least, has fantastic taste and a logically-defensible sadistic streak. It’s Lecter’s world we’re living in, though it favors all its killers, who somehow manage to finish their elaborate installations without anyone ever stumbling onto the scene. To its credit, the show is in on the joke: it hints at a universe in which psychopaths are not an exception but a cabal, making, enforcing, and amending cosmic rules. “Look at us,” says a journalist to Graham and Lecter as they hobnob at a crime scene, “a bunch of psychopaths helping one another out.”
***
Hannibal‘s subversion of the “hunt” is unusual but not necessarily unique. Showtime’s Dexter displayed a similar preoccupation, aligning its audience with its psychopathic anti-/superhero. But Hannibal lacks the central, quintessentially human paradox— the disorienting tension between our deep-seated need to identify and relate to a protagonist and Dexter’s psychopathy—that animated Dexter’s mostly-excellent first few seasons. As a matter of character and convenience, Dexter, the character, was construtively immortal; those around him were not. And, as a result, any relationship with Dexter posed a mortal risk. An audience, however, we could not help but root for Dexter’s happiness and, projecting our not-psychopathic values onto him, this meant the normal tokens of happiness: a family, a girlfriend, work friends. By desiring these things on his behalf, we were complicit in all that followed, including their inevitable deaths. (RIP, Rita.) Hannibal, by contrast, solicits our admiration but leaves our complicity largely unexamined. We’re left to passively admire these Titans and Olympians as they battle it out across the mountaintops. It’s a comic book universe as seen through the lens of the DSM.
Worse, having emptied science and law of value, Hannibal lacked a foundation from which it could offer comment or critique. That may have been the point. It dared us to ask whether its overwhelming technical accomplishment, its wealth of surface pleasures, were sufficient justification for its excesses. When Graham criticizes his fellow FBI agents for “mythologiz[ing] banal and cruel men who didn’t deserve to be thought of as supervillains,” the show becomes its titular character: clever and facile, worldly and stylish, vicious and hollow. As its audience, we were in on the joke but denied the riddle.
***
[1] An informal count tallied more than three times as many serial killers in the combined twenty-five years of SVU and Criminal Intent than in the twenty years of the original Law & Order.
[2] As far back as 1988, NBC broadcast the short-lived and before-its-time Unsub, starring Starsky & Hutch’s David Soul as the leader of a team of FBI forensic scientists tracking the same kinds of “unknown subjects” at issue in Criminal Minds.
[3] Tiffany, Infidel Poetics (2009), p. 72.
[4] In a fitting bit of cross-pollination, Grissom was played by William Petersen who played Will Graham in Michael Mann’s Manhunter (1986) the first screen adaptation from Thomas Harris’s Lecter novels. It was remade as Red Dragon in 2002.
[5] In this, it owes something to David Fincher’s Seven (1995). Twelve years later, Fincher would again direct a film about a serial killer – this time the Zodiac – but would focus less on the overtly apocalyptic and the graphically violent and focus instead on the destructive internal toll that the Zodiac’s “fatal riddle” imposed on those investigating him. He’d return to the subject in 2017 in his Netflix series Mindhunter.