This Thanksgiving season, I have decided to take a retrospective look at what exactly is going to be on my dinner plate. Turkey. Cranberry sauce cut from a can. Stuffing seeded in a box. Pumpkin pie from Wegmans. All mostly artificial. All of them are banally trivial.
I say this with obvious ism. Mainly because my palette has changed. “Why?” One may ask. Well, it’s because of the new show I just finished binging. It is seated in a catalog of critically acclaimed television shows, ones that have sadly been canceled and put back on the shelf only to be rediscovered a decade later. This show is called, “Hannibal” and it has just been my latest late-night obsession.
“Hannibal” tells the story of a FBI profiler named Will Graham, whose gifted mind permits him to understand and empathize psychopaths on a catastrophic but distinctive manner. When he and his team encounter a serial killer by the name of the “Chesseapeake Ripper,” they enlist the help of an astounding psychiatrist by the name of Hannibal Lector to solve case.
During the show though, most individuals do not realize Hannibal Lector is actually the serial killer they are looking for.
Hannibal is methodical and manipulative. He has the ability to feign empathy and constructive assertion. He went into a room and bent it to his will. This comes at the cost of Will’s sanity especially when Hannibal becomes his presiding psychiatrist. As the show continues, viewers start to realize Hannibal is only working for the betterment of himself and not anyone else, not even Will, even as he professes Will is his “friend.”
The funny thing about this show is not even that Hannibal is a manipulating psychopath, but it is the fact he is a cannibal. Hannibal the Cannibal.
His need for dominating other human beings, maiming them, comes from an obsession of power. Eating his victims is not just about consuming them, but placing them as trophies on the highest pillars of his shelf.
His palette is insatiable. It comes in all shapes and strange sizes. No human is safe from his knife or his blade.
Watching “Hannibal” during the Thanksgiving season has opened my mind to what exactly my diet and my palette has been looking like. Though I am not serving something exciting or enticing to eat, I feel as if my palette and most palettes have been black lately. And I mean that in regard to everything.
There is something missing on all our plates this year and what it is, I don’t know.
Something about these long days and shorter nights has provided nothing but an empty belly. There is no sustenance in school, or in work, or in everyday life. Our palette has all run dry, just like the season, just like the air.
And I wonder if we will be able to find our niche, at least like Hannibal did.