Instead, the holy man is just one example of what many others off-camera must be doing: looking in Will’s direction oddly because the man is talking aloud to himself. If they are not the same, then she is the one with the death wish, not him.įrom a more external perspective, the glance of the priest, we realize in retrospect, is not at Abigail. If he conflates himself and Abigail, he must acknowledge that he wants to go to Hannibal (and likely his own death) and does not need to be cajoled. Perhaps this explains the difference in the two death scenes as well-in the one we see, Abigail must be called on to go to her murderer in the one Will later seems to be reimagining, she simply takes his hand, more willing to embrace her own demise. In imagining the priest seeing Abigail as distinct from himself, he buys himself a bit of psychic space.
That part of him that he does not want to be. That part of him that still wonders if he should have gone with Hannibal. A part of Will willing to say the things that he cannot say aloud to himself. Instead, she is largely a sounding board. She isn’t there to punish him (or allow him to punish himself) for her death. Internally, he’s not being haunted by her in a conventional sense. I think there’s an internal reason and an external reason for this. Thus, despite the fact that Will seems to be oblivious to the glance, the only place we can be sure that glance exists is in Graham’s mind. She’s dead, and her shade is a product of Will’s imagination. But Abigail doesn’t have a point of view. The camera angles are done so the only time there’s a clear indication of precisely who he is looking at, it’s done from just over Abigail’s shoulder-that is, largely from her point of view. Will, nor anyone other than Abigail, sees the priest look at her. The thing that reassures us itself rests on shaky ground. And that is enough to dispel our doubts simply because that was what gave Bruce Willis away-no one else interacted directly with him.īut what makes it a great sleight-of-hand is precisely that Fuller knew our expectations and used them against us. The only indication that those of us educated by The Sixth Sense are given that Abigail is real is when a priest in the Chapel seems to glance at her. We don’t see the flight, or any of the moment-to-moment activities that those of us with corporeal existence endure. She never survived that attack, and instead, like her father before her, lives on only in the mind of Will Graham.
With Hannibal being a show that is all about the subtleties, I think it’s a mistake to overlook this difference.īut, as we soon see, none of this is a matter of what Abigail wants, simply because Abigail is not there.
In Primavera, this line is missing: he simply holds out his hand and she steps into his murderous arms. In the earlier version, Lecter turns to Abigail and says “Come to me, Abigail,” holding out his hand, which she takes. After Will lies on the floor, he–empathic man that he is–figures out what Hannibal is about to do and begins to beg for Abigail’s life. And in the hands of a less careful storyteller, I might think it was simply a matter of editing for time. There’s a very subtle difference between the scene we saw last year and the one replayed this year. The episode begins by showing the most heartbreaking part of that attack-the moment when Will, who had given Hannibal the option to run, is allowed to confront him, and Lecter exacts his revenge on the profiler by stabbing him and then, in an act of unbelievable cruelty, slits the throat of their pseudo-daughter just to, as Will later puts it, yank the football away again, a la Lucy and Charlie Brown.
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