Endless Cycles of Adaptation

In the late 2000s, my mother was relearning how to speak after a brain haemorrhage. I had just moved back home to help with her care, and we spent a lot of time on speech therapy exercises. She used to love gardening and reading, both activities she was no longer able to do, but the one thing she still enjoyed, and that I also liked, was watching crime shows. I’ve since become more wary of them – or at least cautious about the way they frequently glorify police – but they still fascinate me for how they require a different kind of active viewing than other genres, how the viewer, especially in whodunnits, is there alongside whoever is investigating to solve the mystery. There is nothing quite as satisfying as figuring it out before the story tells you, the little kick of feeling a little smarter for putting the pieces together ahead of time (at least unless it is too easy – it has to feel earned), and I do recognise now that this process isn’t as much about solving a crime as it is a lesson in how screenwriting works. The viewer isn’t proving smarter than the investigator, but insightful about how a writer might approach seeding bits and pieces of information in a story, laying out the clues, constructing a story with them: I think it teaches more about writing than it does about genuine police work. My mother had to relearn how to speak and read, but she could still piece the clues together and make a solid guess at who the murderer was.
One of the shows we watched together back in the day was the Swedish television adaptation of Henning Mankell’s Wallander, which starred Krister Henriksson in the titular role. The show lasted three seasons altogether, with large time-gaps in-between seasons. Some of the episodes were based on Mankell’s books (he published thirteen books starring Kurt Wallander, but the television show starts with an adaptation of Before the Frost, which is about Kurt’s daughter, Linda), but most were written specifically for the show. The show came out in the midst in a glut of other adaptations of Mankell’s works: an earlier Swedish adaptation of nine of the books in film-length, starring Rolf Lassgård, and a later twelve-episode BBC version, with Kenneth Branagh taking on the mantle. I watched every version, and most of them with her, which of course leads to the question of what the appeal was: we’d read the solutions to the crimes, or at least knew them after seeing them for the first time. And yet, there was an inherent feeling of comfort in seeing the same story adapted with different actors, in slightly altered settings, through the eyes of new creators. Repeated adaptations allow for interpretations, even where the story still closely follows the original: Krister Henriksson, for example, always struck me as a slightly unfaithful version on Kurt Wallander, a version a little too well-groomed and narrow, removed from the rumpled, pre-diabetic and eternally tired man in the books, who seems to suffer physically from what he diagnoses as an increasing illness of the society in which he solves more and more violent crimes. Lassgård and Branagh come much closer to the description in the books, and prove that these stories are captivating because Wallander, with his doggedness and melancholy, is such a compelling protagonist. There are so many adaptations, in a relatively short period of time (Mankell released the first novel in 1991), because Wallander falls into a short list of crime-solvers who stand above the crimes they solve, who are interesting enough in-and-of themselves that it doesn’t matter if the viewer already knows the answers. 

I was reminded of Wallander because I finally watched all three seasons of the much-lauded television series Hannibal, which I had never seen in full since it debuted eleven years ago. It stars Mads Mikkelsen as Dr. Hannibal Lecter, pre-arrest, and Hugh Dancy as Will Graham, the struggling not-quite FBI agent tasked with using his radical empathy to solve heinous crimes committed by serial killers. Bryan Fuller, who had previously created niche but much beloved television shows Dead Like Me, Wonderfalls and Pushing Daisies, produced and wrote the series. The first season is original material, season two and three take from (with a lot of leeway) all of Thomas Harris’ Hannibal books except Silence of the Lambs. Red Dragon, the first of the books, came out in 1981. Since then, all of them have been adapted at least once, starting with Michael Mann’s Manhunter, a 1986 film that feels forgotten now or was maybe overshadowed by the massive success that The Silence of the Lambs enjoyed in 1991. Fuller’s Hannibal is far removed from all these other adaptations aesthetically and in terms of how it interprets the characters. It’s a sensory odyssey (in part directed by Hard Candy’s David Slade and Cube’s Vincenzo Natali, both renowned for their visual language) that makes extensive use of hallucinations and dreams. The set- and costume designs are gorgeous, and the sequences in which Hannibal prepares his meals are filmed like high-end food documentaries – the forbidden episode of Chef’s Table, perhaps, each meal prepared with lavish decorations, every detail considered. Fuller turns the conventional story of a regular FBI agent hunting a killer into a macabre, deeply erotic dance, in which the initial cooperation between Will and Hannibal (who perfectly passes as a well-respected psychiatrist, before anyone questions what he serves at his dinner parties) becomes a seduction. Mikkelsen’s Hannibal is so far removed from Anthony Hopkins’ take on the character in Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal and The Red Dragon that I found it difficult to go back to his interpretation: in watching these films again, I felt like Mikkelsen’s Hannibal would find Hopkins’ crude, occasionally rude, and might consider him dinner, rather than a reflection of himself. They share an unapologetic elitism – and the glorification of this old-European approach to privilege and culture is maybe one of the main reasons why the character never quite grabs me the way that he’s meant to, like he does Will – but Mikkelsen’s Hannibal wears his “human suit” perfectly, whereas Hopkins’ feels ill-fitting from the start. I’ve never read the books, so I can’t say which version of the character is truer to Harris’ intentions, but there is an ultimateness to Mikkelsen’s performance that makes me feel like maybe any future attempt of the character will be judged poorly against it, and is therefore pointless. It makes me wonder how Silence of the Lambs (a film now also difficult to watch for the inherent and much-discussed transphobia of the story itself) would look with a version of Hannibal closer to this (Hannibal, the 2001 film, is almost unwatchable, and feels much older than it actually is, like a relict of the distant past).
Hannibal in all its versions owes a lot to Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley, even if Harris’ original novels were likely much more inspired by historical serial killers. Hannibal captivates because he is constantly juxtaposed with other villains who fail his test of character (an aesthetic morality, in which rudeness – of manners, mainly, is the ultimate sin – but he’s happy to deviate when it assures his self-preservation). These villains are sometimes other killers, sometimes those who hunt them, but what they have in common is that they hurt Hannibal’s sense of how the world should look, and so he has created a moral imperative in which eating these irritations is justified – he does, after all, not consider himself human, and so his victims are more like livestock than fellow men. Ripley, Highsmith’s chameleon-like sociopath, works similarly: the reader barracks for him because he is the hero of the story. It’s a complete turning around of the usual crime story in which the catharsis comes through capturing the villain. The catharsis is Ripley once again getting away with it, and deservingly, because of his superiority to those chasing him. Interestingly enough, both also share that they are, on the edges, about being European vs. being American: Hannibal always reads as fundamentally European (he’s Lithuanian, but has remade himself into someone who fits most seamlessly in Florence), while interacting with Will Graham and Clarice Starling, both coded as deeply American (Will with his plaid shirts and fishing, Clarice with her Appalachian backstory, that accent that has travelled from Jodie Foster to Julianne Moore to Rebecca Breeds). Ripley assumes his identity as an upper-class European through murder, but the ultimate argument of the book is that he deserves those privileges more than the crude man he murders for them. 

Ripley’s story has, like Hannibal, been told again and again: since Alain Delon played Tom Ripley in 1960s Plein Soleil, there have been countless other adaptations (most recently, Andrew Scott played him in a black-and-white TV version). There is something deeply fascinating to a story that has been told so many times and yet still holds so much sway, a story that has been refracted through so many different perspectives, authors and directors, artistic ambitions, historical contexts: maybe they all connect back to Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes (from classic films to House, Enola Holmes and Elementary), or to Agatha Christie’s brilliance in creating both memorable protagonists and cases that are somehow still interesting in spite of having been solved over and over. Ripley and Hannibal just stand out for turning the tables on the investigators: they’re just as likely dinner as heroes. Maybe this is why I have a deep affection for the short-lived television show Clarice, which follows Clarice Starling (here played by Rebecca Breeds) a year after the events of Silence of the Lambs: Hannibal doesn’t really exist in those stories, only the deep mental damage of having interacted with him, and the series is interested in what Bryan Fuller always struggles with in Hannibal: the women in the story. Instead of glorifying the genius of a serial killer, the show focuses on the evil of a large corporation, protected by the institutions, a villain that almost gets away with it because everyone’s so obsessed with serial killers. The show also explicitly discusses the lasting damage of Buffalo Bill of the trans community, a debate that transcends the in-universe implications.

Some more thoughts on this:

• Apart from the indebtedness to Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie, I also find it fascinating to think about Greek myths, fairy tales and theatre plays – both in an eternal cycle of adaptation and re-contextualisation, stories that somehow become deeply woven into culture but also change with it.
• Nikita doesn’t really fit in directly with any of this, but this is another story that has exceeded by far what you would expect of a 1990 French film: since the Besson film starring Anne Parillaud, there’s been Point of No Return in 1993, an American adaptation starring Bridget Fonda, the Canadian television series La Femme Nikita, starring Peta Wilson (my favourite among them), and the American television series Nikita, starring Maggie Q, which continued the story into a new generation.
• I think there’s also something in reading Bright Young Women by Jessica Knoll, a novel about the ramifications of having interacted with a serial killer (who is deliberately never named), and a take-down of the idea that the serial killer in this case was charismatic (a quote taken from a judge, who talks about the potential of the man, is purely disgusting but sadly reverberates through time). Fuller’s Hannibal tends to only really care about what all of this does to Will, and sidelines other characters that they audience may identify with under different circumstances (justice for Beverly Katz). 
• I've been thinking about what the opposite of this phenomenon is, and the only thing that popped up for me was the impossibility of imagining anyone else playing Inspector Columbo: I know that both Poker Face and Elsbeth are gentle tributes to the show, but Peter Falk strikes me as the kind of ultimate performance that puts an end to even the idea of an adaptation cycle.