How Dr. Lecter and Dr. House Quarreled

In New York, in the Wall Street area, there is a sculpture that in the dark can easily be mistaken for a person. Because this monument to human despair rises above nothing. A steel man sits drooping on a bench, put a battered briefcase next to him … Wall Street brokers, massively fired after the collapse of the New York Stock Exchange, are immortalized in this way. But at the same time, it is also a monument to the depression itself – both the Great and personal, and especially male, which is so often caused by the inability of a man to continue to be the master of our world and bear full responsibility for it. The steel man demonstrates to what extent men of recent history are not made of steel …

But then, men of steel still met – heroes who descended from the assembly line of the “dream factory” and the pages of comics. They acted in an intelligible system of coordinates, when evil was insidious and greedy, and good was generous and with fists. And it never occurred to this collective Batman to doubt himself.

Batman in the person of F. D. Roosevelt defeated the Great Depression, triumphed over the Hydra of Nazism, Spiderman in the person of Reagan won the Cold War. The Berlin Wall has fallen. But after it, the twin towers fell, the world became more complicated, evil, let’s say terrorism, turned out to be not alien to religious spirituality, and good – powerless to distinguish shades between black and white …

The television series was the first to respond to this drama – the current forge of heroic shots. And a new hero appeared – an ambiguous man who is not easy to admire, but who is easy to sympathize with. Dr. House (Hugh Laurie), a drug addict and a slacker, a toxic genius who saved the lives of patients without feeling for them, small people – you can’t see under a microscope – as a rule, not the slightest sympathy. And Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland) from 24, who selflessly fought against a terrorist plot, but lost the trust of his colleagues and, worse, trust in himself …

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But the economic crisis hit again. Markets, stock exchanges and the dollar collapsed. And here he could not stand it anymore, our hero. And in the latest series plunged into a deep depression. He has relentless nightmares – like FBI agent Ryan Hardy (Kevin Bacon) from The Followers, who has signed his own impotence to change the world. He suffers acutely and seemingly for no reason – like the forensic psychologist Will Graham (Hugh Dancy) from “Hannibal”, tormented by the all-consuming responsibility for the nature of the human race. He is an asocial personality, seeking to move away from the world. He is in a state of permanent hysteria, and hysteria is the fuel on which this unit works to save the world from maniacs.

Hysteria also permeates the fabric of the narratives of Hannibal and The Followers. They are no longer just blood flowing like a river, they savagely consider how exactly it is let in, how some people cook for dinner – and exquisite – other people, how the human body becomes an ideal breeding ground for a mushroom plantation …

There is no place for any erotic-sexual identification of the characters. Dr. House, remember, at least had a difficult relationship with Dr. Kadi, the hero of the “Followers” is traumatized in all respects – there is no time for relationships, he would have to deal with himself. And the characters of “Hannibal” are completely devoid of personal life and its erotic line – both the traumatized psychologist-psychopath Graham, and the psychiatrist-cannibal Lecter (Mads Mikkelsen). This is all because naturalism and romance are incompatible. From the moment at the very beginning of Hannibal, when the authors strung a young female body on deer antlers, a man – a conqueror of hearts – became impossible here.

Corroding every romantic flair, physiology penetrated even the epic-heroic fantasy – “Game of Thrones”. The authors dragged into the fantastic reality of the other world everything that corresponds to modern ideas about the Middle Ages – lack of hygiene, rudeness of morals, tyrant tyranny, a rack and an “iron maiden” almost with instructions for use.

The current reality turned out to be such that it requires realism even from fantasy. And of course, hints to the male hero that you should not take on too much. Our destinies no longer depend on his will.