(You guys are safe from spoilers or grossness with this one.)

professorfangirl:

vollha:

isn’t the way this has been shot interesting? meta anyone?

(the difference in colouring isn’t just how I coloured it – there was barely any colour on that close up with Hannibal. I didn’t even have to use any tricks to get this under the limit)

That desaturation/supersaturation pattern is one of my favorite aspects of the cinematography. The desaturated palette, like the bottom, seems to happen at psychologically ambiguous moments, when questions are posed that are difficult to answer. The supersaturated colors seem to accompany different kinds of psychological intensity (though I’m not confident about that generalization). I notice it most strongly when Will goes into the hyperreal dissociation of his empathetic deductions; that briliant knifing pendulum light seems to leave almost scary vibrancy behind. Seems easiest to say that the desaturation indicates mundane reality and the supersaturation represents emotional revelation. Have to think on that more.

I think you’re perfectly right, Prof!  But also that you might be overanalyzing in this case. ^_^  It’s a pretty straightforward and well-established technique for art and film.  We know that humans have strong emotional reactions to color, so amping up the vibrancy:

1: supports the emotional impact of the scene (we can guess, both for us the viewers and us as Will, as he throws himself into the emotional swirl of a life and death situation)

2: implies boldly defined reality

3: can create a sense of surreality, as colors reach a point of intensity that doesn’t occur in nature (clever, this one; it’s an established technique, but one that often gets overlooked)

Meanwhile, as consumers of visual entertainment, we’re well-indoctrinated into the meanings of monochrome:

1: Monochrome palette and cool bluish tones create a sense of coldness and lack of emotion (particularly used for Hannibal’s coldest, most calculating moments—note how the saturation cranks even further down for him sometimes)

2: Chiaroscuro, heavily used in the series, establishes a sense of the hidden and dangerous

3: The stark contrast of tones reflects the conflict/contrast of what we’re seeing—lies, two-facedness, our own inability to trust the scene or the players in it

4: Another kind of unreality—that of fiction, as opposed to intense over-emotional engagement

5: The other thing monochrome often represents is death—so we’ve got a deathly palette for the scenes of everyday life, and a searingly bright, vivid palette for the scenes in which, usually, somebody is dying 

In short, this is the classic desaturated, high-contrast look of film noir, the genre of lies, gaslighting, backstabbing, and terrible people doing terrible things, thrown up against the surround-sound real-life-on-a-sunny-day color of Will’s imagination. Because what his imagination delivers to him at those crime scenes is more intense and more honest than the physical reality he’s walking through; and because the things our minds do to us can feel so much more real than the external world; and because this is indeed what life feels like—so often monotone, and seldom more vivid than in the moments of risk; and because this is a series of uncomfortable extremes, where we’re thrown between the vivid and the cold like a pendulum (see what I did there?—or what Fuller did, maybe) with very little solid, reliable, normal-colored ground to find our footing on in between.

…Did I say something about overthinking earlier?  Um, don’t mind me.