#but we as readers cannot know the truth—she’s become unknowable to us and perhaps to herself

[dragonseeds]

maybe like four blogs ago i wrote the most insane book-focused meta about will as john the baptist and starling as a sacrificial christ figure who becomes one with god in a way john cannot and is absorbed in the process of her apotheosis—but the point is the story is about her and will’s only the forerunner, the prologue. like, i love hannibal the show and will graham is my favorite unhinged wet dog, but i’m still a little bitter starling’s story was dissected and given predominately to a male character instead of fuller just coming up with something unique for will and hannibal.

what’s most interesting to me about them has always been will’s fundamental inability to handle the work that he was asked to do and that everyone knew this but they kept asking because he’s so Special—whereas starling could handle it, being clever and hard-working and exceptional at compartmentalization, but was never allowed to do so because she wouldn’t compromise herself to get ahead. it’s stings because gender is precisely why they ended up where they did; the horror and violence of gender is so thematically significant and inextricable to the series for me. will caught hannibal almost by accident in the books. hannibal caught starling not by devising a trap for her or gaslighting her (that came later) but simply because the systemic misogyny she faced pushed her out of her career and her life, and her contempt for the corruption of system grew and grew and crystallized inside her until she was forced to make a choice—shoot the dirty cop or let hannibal be eaten by the pigs—and in making it she revealed the truth of herself: that she believed she was above the law, above the broken system, above the men who uphold it. that choice drove her straight to hannibal. he didn’t have to do anything at all to isolate her. she came for him; he just had to wait.

[littlestloaf]

maybe around a month ago, i’d had to watch christopher nolan’s memento for my film studies module, and i’ve had a piece titled “memento: remembering to forget or forgetting to remember or simply doing whatever the fuck you want because reality isn’t real” sitting in my drafts folder since then. i’d really wanted to review it, because it’s the first time i had Thoughts after watching a nolan film. (in all fairness i’ve only ever seen one other nolan film which is inception but it was too much mindfuckery and i Did Not Like It.) i know never to procrastinate my writing because once i lose inspiration it’s Gone For Life (i have no reason to be capitalising random words but it is adding an Effect i cannot explain.) anyways. memento review not done, and it’s probably the only film i enjoyed in this module so far. go figure. 

last night, because of eye redness and pain that should be diagnosed as chronic at this point, i found myself throwing an ice pack we used as kids to break fevers into a green hello kitty handkerchief we also used as kids and slapping it onto my eyes to relieve the itchiness and scary red veins. while praying that this better not be linked to my diabetes or turn me blind, i decided to pick back up on my recent public transport hobby - listening to podcasts. the title was “why did two parents murder their adopted child?”, from the guardian audio long read. (highly recommended by the way, especially if reading long articles turns you off.)

and i thought, yes, why?!?!?!? i wanted answers. i wanted to know if they were monsters, who made them monsters, or if this was just an elaborate media conspiracy. 

this could be a spoiler if you plan to listen to the podcast, but also not very much so if you are an avid reader of keigo higashino’s books. which is that you pretty much do not get the why. there are speculations of course; the calm british male voice narrating the podcast points out that investigators thought the couple were selfish, narcissistic individuals, adopting the girl in a bid to elevate their already elevated upper middle-class nice friendly neighbourhood couple status. psychologists state that the mother was slightly mentally impaired by her depression and anxiety. the overarching theory was that, whatever reason they adopted the child for, they’d gotten tired of the effort required to raise her, the mental energy necessary to lavish on a pre-adolescent girl whom they’d already spent so much money and time on through ballet, violin, french, chinese, piano lessons. she was an intelligent, precocious young girl. months and weeks prior to her death she’d complained of giddiness, of feeling like someone was trying to kill her. it is unknown whether she was aware that, if the investigators’ theories were right, her parents had been trying to poison her with lorazepam for months, so much so that traces of it were found on the first 3 centimetres of a strand of her hair. 

if you’d watched memento you’d know that the basic premise of it is about this man who suffers from extreme short-term memory after a blow to his head from the murderer-rapist of his wife who is, by the way, yet to be caught. so he takes the investigation and revenge into his own hands. but the catch is, he can never remember anything for more than a few hours at a time. so he uses badass homemade tattoos on his body, polaroids, and little notes to self written on those polaroids to give him a narrative to return to whenever he forgets. except nothing is at all as it seems and you should really watch the film if you haven’t because it’s probably nolan’s best movie even if other people won’t tell you that. 

the similarity between memento and this podcast is that both tell the story backwards - nolan quite literally, and this author in retrospect through tracing the lives of those involved. and because they are backwards, you are sitting at the end of an event with all the evidence laid out right before you. yet, there is a strange unknowability to all of it. it disturbs me that you can never really get down to the root of anything, no matter how much you investigate it. maybe you’ve convicted a murderer, and they said they killed their victim out of jealousy. all evidence could point to that fact, they get convicted, etc. but did they really kill out of jealousy? did they even kill the person? what if all the evidence is only circumstantial and happens to point towards them in a very bizarre coincidence? honestly, that’s between them and god. between them and nobody if there is no god. 

i’ll always want to know why. i’ll always want honesty in a world where there is no objective reality whatsoever. maybe it has to do with wanting comfort. if i knew why they did it i could prevent anyone else from ever doing it again. maybe it’s just plain, simple curiosity. but it just sucks, for the lack of a better word, that i’ll probably never get any closer to the big, capital T truth. 

people who knew the couple expressed shock upon knowing they had become convicted child murderers, while members of the public accused them of devious heartlessness. i thought investigators were supposed to be neutral. calling someone selfish and neurotic isn’t neutral. my main point is that everything is so mediated, so filtered through something else, that perhaps by the time it gets through to you it may be unrecognisable. a large scale game of telephone. 

kurosawa plays with this premise in rashomon, coining what we know now as the rashomon effect, which occurs whenever two or more witnesses give competing interpretations of the same event, thereby preventing listeners from determining the objective truth. other forms of media which deep delve into the idea of public enemies, like miller’s enemy of the people and the untamed, similarly point out how perspectives are circulated, warped and destroyed. how power frames things one way and then another. 

even if my dreams of living in a world where everything can be simply Known will never be fulfilled, it’s nice to have these things that shine a mirror right into your face. our culpability can never be underestimated; we are all a node in a great big game of telephone. no message can hope to survive to the end, and can only die trying.

i guess this should be salient given the era of fake news and whatever but i am mostly thinking about how all of us are these tiny little beings in a large world, forever, strangers to the workings of it, to ourselves and to one another. we just...never know, you know. ha. (apparently my sister and i use “you know” so much at the end of sentences that L has started to imitate us. how do i let him know that nobody will ever know.)