Abstract
The title character of the television show Hannibal, a psychiatrist and a cannibalistic serial killer, uses the bodies of his victims to create art installations, both as sculptures and as food. The show uses a sophisticated, high-society protagonist to juxtapose murder and art. It does so by playing with the audiences in front of which status is enacted: while crime is presented diegetically, the art is not, that is, the audience is witness to the art and the murder, while the other characters see only the murder; this happens within a frame in which, of course, the show itself as art is also (almost necessarily) a non-diegetic presentation, aimed only at us. Thus, the show manages to play with the status ascriptions around murder and art and thus shows how the front-stage talk about murder is contradicted continuously by the reception of the show: by emphasizing a putative opposition between status markers in the interplay between critical attention and production commentary, it shows a near-complete convergence of these status markers in its non-verbalized production imagery. This allows wider insights in how status is communicated in open and veiled manners.
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Notes
- 1.
This is, of course, the core of what Bourdieu terms “fine distinctions,” distinctive symbols only intelligible to members of the in-group that performs a specific kind of border maintenance that is not completely visible from the outside.
- 2.
This is a constant problem for status symbols in the hands of deprived populations, where the symbol may communicate status, but the membership in the deprived population counters this meaning; see the case where US police hospitalized an Africa-American woman in a closed mental ward for claiming that a BMW was her property. Here, the—openly racist—status ascription to the woman’s ethnicity overpowered the car, a classical status symbol.
- 3.
The paradigmatic format, here, is any police procedural in the tradition of the old western, where the rule of civilized morality is transported by the good of heart and intent, who wield deadly, but justified force in its name. A quality television format that played this trope to its logical end point is Dexter, while shows such as The Shield have shown us that audiences can be made to accept any powerful protagonist as a wielder of justified deadly force as long as the narrative follows them as a lead character.
- 4.
Earned media are generally distinguished from paid media (i.e., mostly advertising), and owned media, media attention on the distributor’s owned outlets (e.g., promotional trailers, reports in owned news magazines or variety shows).
- 5.
In Billions, a format depicting a self-made investment bank millionaire who is an icon to the people, one way to tarnish his reputation is to coax him into buying a multi-million dollar beach mansion: “People hate guys that buy things like that.”
- 6.
Another such example is Batman: Were he merely Bruce Wayne, he would easily be classified by audiences as an unlikeable rich man.
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Dellwing, M. (2019). “It’s Only Cannibalism if we’re Equals”: Consuming the Lesser in Hannibal. In: Dürrschmidt, J., Kautt, Y. (eds) Globalized Eating Cultures. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93656-7_14
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