Quote of the Day

.

There are tons of spoilers for both Hannibal and True Detective in this really wonderful piece on the feminist nature of Bryan Fuller's show versus the notsomuch side of the latter, so beware, only read it if you're watched everything both those shows have shown up until this very moment. I'm going to quote the main passage comparing the two shows after the jump so you don't accidentally read anything you don't want to, but I love what the writer's saying about not just fair gender representation but also the horror genre. I'm so tired of writers (male writers, specifically) acting as if the only way to show sexism is to have a sexist show, and I'm so tired of watching the blindered straight white male POV I could just collapse. McConaughey's one-two punch of Dallas Buyers Club (with its made-up tragic gays and sainted homophobe) plus True Detective really was a bridge too far. Anyway the quote I'm high on is after the jump (but I suggest you just read the whole piece)...

"It’s instructive, on this note, to compare Hannibal to the HBO hit True Detective. Much of True Detective’s appeal—the stylized visuals, the over-the-top lyricism of the dialogue, the cosmic-horror undertones, the hallucinations, the thematically significant conjunction of naked lady corpse and decapitated stag head—seems practically airlifted in from Hannibal. But True Detective is almost entirely reliant on the clichés that Hannibal studiously avoids. The plot turns out to be a standard buddy-cops-catch-the-killer mystery, complete with clichéd backwoods pervert in a tumble-down shack. Every single woman, up to and including Marty’s pre-teen daughter, is primarily relevant to the plot in terms of the sexual things she does or the sexual violence that’s forced upon her. It’s not enough to have a cult of serial killers worshiping Lovecraftian Elder Gods: They have to be a cult of Elder-God-worshiping serial-killers who also gang-rape children, or else it’s just not scary. And, whenever the plot stalls, we’re magically whisked away to a strip club or a harlot’s boudoir, so as to revive our interest in the show through naked breasts.

The standard defense for these tropes is that horror filmmakers need them to get decent scares. It’s true: Child rape is a very unpleasant thing to think about. (Although there are plenty of True Detective fans who seem to spend multiple hours per week speculating about it on Reddit). But Hannibal’s most profound accomplishment is the fact that it proves these moves are unnecessary. It never comes across as prim or neutered. It’s horrifying, both on a jump-out-of-your-seat level and a queasy psychological level. It turns out that being buried alive until your skin disintegrates, or having to rip half your own face off to save your life, or just finding out that your psychiatrist is actively trying to give you brain damage, is still pretty disturbing, even when there aren’t any gang-rapes included in the package."

.