On Bedelia
I’ve been noticing a fair number of “???? what even is a Bedelia” sort of posts floating around lately, and sure, I have du Maurier thoughts. And actually, they are pretty different from a few of the ones I’m seeing? So I’ve decided now is the time for me to spool out some of my own feelings, for what they’re worth! (As always, views are simply mine not The Only Right Ones, this show is subjective and ambiguous as hell, you all are great.)
Ok, so, disclaimer: I love Bedelia. I also love Hannibal, and Will. All of them are strange and sneaky and hilarious. They’re great tv, the lot of ‘em. But Bedelia, it seems, is often put into a difficult place between Hannibal & Will. Difficult for fandom, I mean — it’s difficult in-world as well but Bedelia du Maurier can handle it (part of why I Loooove Heeeerr). I feel like there’s a VERY strong urge to set her up against Will, and a mild-to-moderate one to set her against Hannibal as well. This has always felt a little off to me though, because I actually saw Bedelia as oddly helpful, to both of them. I also feel like the ways she engages with them are more similar than they are different, which might actually be part of what leads to her final & only downfall, but we’ll get to that.
I sometimes joke that I am Bedelia, though I never explain what I mean by that – basically, through all my teens and my twenties I was The Psychologist Friend. I am not a psychologist or a psychiatrist and have no training in talk therapy whatsoever, but that’s like saying The Mom Friend is not actually her friends’ adoptive mom. I’m a writer, I like not only to observe but to model human nature, so I am a good listener when I’m learning something new, I don’t judge hastily, and as has recently been observed by Anon, I default to sounding reasonable. That seemed to be all it took, in many quarters. What it looked like from the outside – if anyone had bothered to look – might have been a morbid attraction to drama, as long as the mud didn’t touch my pant cuffs. I didn’t subjectively experience it as an attraction to drama (I’m not sure if Bedelia does), but it is a form of problem-solving that the implicated actors themselves cannot engage in, by definition. And problem solving is a savage pleasure.
(I have, among others, the specific life experience of having counselled people through the fallout of a betrayed friendship – awful, life-ruining stuff. And of coming to the realization, fairly early on, that this disaster had happened because one of the parties had been in love with the other, and said other had no idea. I didn’t tell them that: they wouldn’t have believed me and it wouldn’t have done any good. I talked them through to the point where they figured it out for themselves. Just like Bedelia did.)
I love this a lot. For meta bona fides and also I think because it gets to something about this show that I really treasure, but I don’t think I’ve talked much about: for something as grand/Grand Guignol as Hannibal is, we still see ourselves in some of these characters. Not that we’re all of us therapists or killers or heirs to a meat fortune, but that we recognize something in these heightened haute couture versions of our own struggles played out on a fantasy stage. AUs of our lives. Myths of our lives. They’re unreal, these human creatures on our screen, “not flesh, but light and air and color” etc, but they’re there by us, and for us. “Between the wolf in the tall grass and the wolf in the tall story there is a shimmering go-between,” as Nabokov once put it, a “prism.” Hannibal is one.
Anyway. Bedelia taking a savage pleasure in problem solving is just, sterling. Thank you for all this @genufa, you always have such a knack for letting beams of light come glancing through this shimmer show.
Aw, you’re welcome!
I’m quite cautious in meta-ing about Bedelia, actually, because I feel like I understand her too well – that has to be adjusted for, because it’s projection. But were I to form a working model of Bedelia I would say that her basic motivator, above even #2 self-preservation, is the desire to understand herself, because without self-understanding, self-control is an illusion. (This is the fundamental thing that Bedelia knows and Hannibal doesn’t. Even Will knows this better than Hannibal does, because his subjective sense is that both are constantly eluding his grasp.)
Bedelia probably thought she understood herself, before Hannibal Lecter and Neal Frank; and when we meet her she’s running away from the new knowledge, doing her best to avoid dealing with it (in her own words). She ran until she couldn’t anymore, then she came back to see it through: to understand what her potential was, what Hannibal saw in her, what made him tick, what their potential might be together. Much the same questions Will needed answers for. By Secondo Bedelia had her answers, somewhat anti-climatically – she doesn’t really love murdering, Hannibal is a self-destructive hot mess who ate his sister and is pathetically in love with another, and playing hostess at his dinner parties had rapidly become an eye-rolling exercise. After that, she extricated herself. I do think she was somewhat jealous of Will, because it would have been very clear to her that Will had something she didn’t: Hannibal’s not her soulmate, but if he had turned out to be, Bedelia would’ve put a ring on it and not looked back. What I don’t think is that she would have let those feelings transpire if Will had had any chill. XD;; I mean, lbr, he left her no choice from a social interaction perspective but to snap his neck in a z formation.
I don’t think anyone disliked Bedelia in S1-2, because she seemed to see Hannibal clearly and spoke truth to him and even helped Will; and the revelation of her amorality doesn’t change that very much in retrospect. Or even in S3, to a degree. The one aspect that she and Will might have talked about, if she had managed to guide his thinking that far, is that past a certain point, even crushing the baby bird leaves a mess on your Louboutins. Like… I was watching deer videos, the other day, because what else do we do in this fandom, and there were these two bucks that had gotten their antlers so inextricably entangled that one of them had died. And not only had died but had been HALF EATEN BY COYOTES. So this other stag was dragging around HALF A DEAD STAG on his antlers and couldn’t get loose.
These were hunters shooting this video, and after a few minutes of this (the coyotes were ~50 metres away, just… chilling and waiting to get peckish again), they were like: we should probably do something. Yeah, let’s. And they went out in the field and by dint of extensive physical effort freed the stag, which ran away. Like, these people had literally gone outside for the purpose of SHOOTING DEER WITH GUNS, but not under those circumstances. It would have been sad and unsporting.
I think that must’ve been how Bedelia saw Hannibal and Will, by the end: locked together by the antlers and in imminent danger of being eaten by coyotes.
GODDAMNIT. I had almost finished a response to this *gorgeous* meta by wellntruly and then I read your equally gorgeous response and then her response to your response and yours to that and GODDAMNIT HOW IS EVERYONE IN THIS FANDOM SO INTELLIGENT AND SO FIENDISHLY ELOQUENT.
I swear. I just want to talk to all of you forever.
Before I say anything else though, I have to stutter over how enormously flattered I am that I got a mention!! *blushes forever and makes hand fluttery swooning gestures in wellntruly’s general direction*
As a lot of you know, I also love Bedelia immensely, and reading an entire post of wellntruly’s brilliant thoughts on her left me inarticulate with excitement. And… I’m still kind of that way, but *shrugs* Apparently there is no point in trying to wait for my inarticulate-ness to die down because others will continue to say still more brilliant things and recovery is a losing game.
So.
I have been slightly dissatisfied with my own take on Bedelia for, well, almost every moment since meeting her. This has nothing to do with any fault on Bedelia’s part *she rushes to clarify* but rather has to do entirely with my utter and repeated failure to figure out just exactly what is going on with her. It seemed like Bedelia always knew exactly what she was doing and (unlike nearly every other character in this show) never really grew or changed over the course of the series (which gets back to @wellntruly’s other wonderful post about how Bedelia is much closer than Hannibal to the Ice Cold Conniver Hannibal thinks he is before he actually spends some time with Bedelia and sees just how far from that cool composure Hot Mess Will Graham has dragged him).
I still like the idea of Bedelia as an Observer of Lions, as wellntruly noted, which comes from when I worked at a wildlife preserve and noticed the people that worked with the big cats behaved in similarly strange ways. Each and every one of them started because they identified with the cats to some extent, and each and every one would go through hell and highwater for a chance to continue their observation. But slowly they would all begin to kind of mimic certain traits, in part out of a conscious effort to bond with their charges that just carried over into everyday life, but also as a defense mechanism that comes from being around something that will only refrain from killing you if you follow a very specific set of behavioral rules. Now, this would be fairly limited at first, when people were new and followed protocol and made sure the cages were always totally sealed and everything was always totally safe. But no one sticks to that for their whole career (at least not anyone I’ve met at the places I’ve worked and visited), and you kind of relax a bit with specific animals that you get to know, relaxation in which mimicry takes the place of a fence. And you kind of believe that you are rather like the lion you’re observing, because it acts like you are like it. This jumped out at me in Tome-wan, when Bedelia says, “Some psychiatrists are so hungry for insight, that they may try to manufacture it. How deadly that can be for the patient who believes them.” (It’s worth noting that the original line in the script is, “Some psychiatrists can be so curious for insight…” and also that the only other time they use the term “manufacture” is later that episode when Will says “There is no mercy. We manufacture it in parts that have overgrown our basic reptile brain.” But if I start to get into all that this will be an even longer post, so I’ll just leave it be.) Now, obviously this has all kinds of double and triple meanings (because this is Hannibal and, what’s more, this is Bedelia), but my favorite meaning is all about what @genufa is saying regarding Bedelia’s uncertainty with herself, and just what Hannibal sees in her, and why she’s drawn to him. I think she runs away with him for the same reason any lion keeper would do the same: there’s this great, deadly beast, who you’ve worked closely with it before, only the fence of professionalism separating you, and now that fence is gone… and it doesn’t immediately savage you. Which you know, intellectually, makes sense—lions don’t kill without purpose, and that doesn’t mean you’re really safe—but it is still a near-divine thrill. When it offers to take you with it, to live beside it for a time, and you think, well, it likes me, it prefers me to the others, see how it hasn’t killed me yet, maybe if I can maintain my behavior, whatever quirk it sees that makes me closer to it that to those it preys upon, I can be relatively safe, and god I can live with a lion.
And maybe I can find out why it seems to think I’m a lion too.
I think the crystalizing moment of all this comes in Primavera when Hannibal catches her trying to run. She’s figured out by now that whatever image he’s had of her is shifting and she had better get the hell out of dodge before he realizes how entirely human she is, how much not the predator, which must make her prey (albeit amusing, intelligent, powerful prey). And he shows up, and promptly brains poor Willacino with the bust of Aristotle, and demands that she chose which party she belongs to, the one crawling towards the door or the one that’s already set the bust aside because he is a weapon and needs no aid to kill.
She stammers out that she was “curious,” but it is posturing and they both know it. Bedelia using his words (which she notably refrained from using before with Will in the interrogation room) to show him that she is willing to posture, to try to play the role he’s set for her, but is unable to actually do as the lion does (and who could? The big cat keepers I know, including myself, all eat our meat incredibly rare, but we don’t eat it raw).
The point that always dissatisfied me was that I was never fully sure if Bedelia was unsure about herself at any point. Because she would have to be, at least minutely, to be curious enough to go with Hannibal. Sidenote: This is the other reason I set Will against Bedelia in my head sometimes: it’s not that I think they’re rivals (because HAHAHAHA NOPE NOT EVEN A LITTLE, Will may worry but Bedelia has no interest in being him even if she resents that from where she’s sitting Will tricked Hannibal into unreservedly believing that he is a lion instantly and on accident I mean fucking Hell that’s NOT EVEN FAIR), but because they are such opposites in so many regards. Will hardly ever has any idea what he’s doing or why; whereas it seemed to me that Bedelia always knew exactly what was going on in her own head (also one of my favorite moments of Jack Crawford Getting Everything Wrong Forever: “A guy like Will Graham knows exactly what is going on inside his head” — oh just slay me, I swear).
But @genufa kind of cleared that up for me, so thank you.
Somehow I still didn’t fit in about half of what I could say on this topic, but this post is already way too long so I’ll stop myself here. If any of you have any further thoughts on this, as wellntruly said, you know where to reach me!
me, on the floor, looking up at ALL THIS
Trying to talk about Bedelia has just brought on A TORRENTIAL RAIN OF MARVELS from other quarters, and I am soaked and refusing to come inside and dry off.
I especially love the many and variably upsetting animal metaphors we have going on here.
