I don't find you that interesting

And tonight rushthatspeaks and I looked at the objects in the kitchen and looked through the pages of Andrea Nguyen's Asian Tofu (2012) and decided to make soy paneer pakoras; we did not regret it. The recipe was both simpler and faster than several we've made out of that book, especially considering the most time-consuming stage was the de-stemming and chopping of parsley for the chimichurri, which was our own addition. (Green chutney was right out because of the chiles, so instead we flavored a basic parsley-garlic-olive-oil chimichurri in the right direction with ground savory, black pepper, and palm sugar. We did not have fresh ginger juice for the ketchup, but comparable amounts of powdered ginger and rice vinegar substituted fine. "The salt amplifies the ginger flavor," Nguyen warns the reader, but does not explain this is understatement for "The amount of ginger zap in this condiment will rock your head back." I sat around afterward eating both sauces out of the bowl, straight. The doctored ketchup has been pronounced gaudior-friendly cocktail sauce.) The tofu is drained and chopped like cubes of paneer and then wrapped in a thick batter of chickpea and rice flour along with diced shallots, minus again the green chiles; we swapped amchur for cayenne, ground coriander for the toasted seeds, and fried the resulting chunky spoonfuls in mostly the same oil we'd used for the sesame balls, since it seems cooking oil can be reused almost infinitely if you strain it each time and the flavors don't interfere. And then we ate two plates' worth of pakoras. They were delicious. A few bites in, we realized we had inadvertently discovered a very satisfactory start point for vegan fried clams: substitute nori, parsley, and lemon juice in the batter for sea-brine and brightness, a little cornmeal for grit and texture, and then learn to make vegan tartar sauce on the side. (We found what looks like a completely plausible recipe for vegan mayonnaise. Then we found the site was a ludicrous timesink.) We had also discovered a brilliant finger-food snack substantial enough to feed three people to the point where we didn't need to make cardamom cashew fudge after all without requiring us to wave our arteries off at the station.

And then Rush showed me the first episode of Hannibal (2013), which is actually as brilliant as everyone and their Tumblr has been telling me. To begin with, it's one of the most beautifully filmed pieces of television I've ever seen. The compositions are almost rigorously classical, drawing their visual geometries and coloring from Dutch paintings of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to the point of allusion; it is so good at establishing its tight first person in the head of Will Graham that there were two unrelated scenes where neither Rush nor I was sure whether we were seeing a symbol, a hallucination, or actual fact until the cinematography differentiated them for us. Scriptwise, it hits that almost impossible balance between an all-pervasive irony of which the characters cannot be aware (except for Hannibal, because he profits by it) and any sense that the show is cheapening their intelligence to achieve the effect; it handles nicely what Rush refers to as the "people who don't realize they're in Dracula problem." For each of their individual and understandable reasons, none of the main characters so far suspects Dr. Lecter of anything other than polymath brilliance and the slight remove that accompanies it. It is not the same remove at which Will operates, because he is explicitly identified on the autism spectrum and it is made equally, canonically clear that his wiring does not align him somehow with the "narcissists and sociopaths" he profiles. Pattern recognition is all well and good. The painful, involuntary empathy that skins him open to the perspective of anyone he turns his attention to long enough is something else again.

I know the canonical genderswap of handful_ofdust's Carra Devize is Roddy McDowall as Ben Fischer in The Legend of Hell House (1973), but I would now accept Hugh Dancy's Will Graham. (Are you really going to tell me you haven't noticed? How I have no skin, anymore.) I'd never seen the actor before; he impresses me. I believe his body language, his avoidance of eye contact and his physical distance, his social abruptness that does not mean he is inexpressive, inarticulate, or Sherlock-rude, and none of it is played for humor à la The Big Bang Theory or as if the audience is supposed to find him offputting. He has colleagues, coworkers, not many friends (but a great household of rescue dogs),* and no one hassles him to be more approachable, less staccato; they are fiercely protective of him as he is. And I am impressed by Mads Mikkelsen, because the cultured predator is an archetype that can so easily fall into preening villainy, and he is doing something very different from Brian Cox in Manhunter (1986), the only other Hannibal I have for comparison. His affect isn't off. He is sophisticated, understated; it is not a mask. Any way in which he causes the people around him to react to him emotionally is almost certainly calculated, but it is as much the requirements of survival as the expected self-amusement. What is wrong about him is his behavior. A trained physician confronted with a crime scene in progress should be sprinting to save lives, not watching with clinical interest as a girl convulses on her own blood on a kitchen floor; we do not know what decides him to save her, but we understand instantly that Will doesn't question it either way because his metrics for normal human behavior are not the same as those of almost anyone else who could have been present at the time. Under those circumstances, Hannibal might have chosen differently. He handles a scalpel so offhandedly as he waits to see which kind of professional interest Will's boss has taken in him, it takes us a moment to remember it's a weapon and Laurence Fishburne would have been dead in seconds if he'd said the wrong "yes."

* [edited for thinking of it in the shower] I really hope the dream-image of the stag (with raven's feathers) and the shots of Will with his dogs are not some kind of presentiment of Actaeon, Will transformed and brought down by his affectionate pack. That would be an amazing use of the classics as unspoken foreshadowing, but it would also really suck.

Which brings me around to the other thing I noticed about the show: it does not sexualize its violence against women. At all. It has some of the most aesthetically arranged, un-titillating corpse nudity I have ever seen in any medium. The deaths are not shot like orgasms. They're shot like deaths. They're shot like very beautiful deaths (a woman's body lifted on a rack of antlers, an offering to the crows and the heavy afternoon sky: and Will correctly interprets it as a negative gesture, the gift-wrapped reverse of the design he's been searching for), but the beauty is coming from another angle. This is to my knowledge almost nonexistent in American horror/crime or any genre that intersects with it. I imagine it's in line with the way Rush informs me at least one major character has been genderswapped from the books and two more cast with actors of color. If it's something the show can keep up, I'll be very happy.

So, yes, on the strength of an episode: very much worth watching. Visually striking, strong acting, script full of nuance and lacunae, a beautiful shifting of naturalistic and non-naturalistic registers. It reminds me very much of Millennium if its second season hadn't careered off into apocalyptic myth, which is why I'm already glad to see Lance Henriksen listed among the guest stars. You can read the script (and I am, because I always like seeing how writers interpret their characters before the actors do), but it will not give you the potency of the images, the hollows and shadows, the somber still-life clarity of its tableaux that made me think of Peter Greenaway before any other filmmaker; I would not have recognized the writer-director from Pushing Daisies except by the similarly essential and distinct visual aesthetic.

And the death-obsession, but a lot of people have that.

Oh, and it makes you feel very uncomfortable about food porn.

Another kind of pilgrim walks the way

Oh, thank God someone who is neither me nor poliphilo is writing intelligently about A Canterbury Tale (1944):

The film harks back to a time of glory, the old pilgrims on the ancient road, while simultaneously reminding us that there was no time of glory, or rather that every time is a time of glory, that we live in flux and that's OK. The only world is the one that's here, bashed about and bent out of shape, and the only heroes are the people around us, frail and fearful and coping as best they can. Powell and Pressburger's pilgrims have a hat-full of troubles and no idea where they're going. They strive and they falter and leave very little trace. But along the way, they receive blessings. They come stumbling through the ruins to find salvation inside abandoned caravans and hear the voices of angels in the train whistle's yelp.

Xan Brooks, "A pilgrim's progress: on the trail of A Canterbury Tale."