Will Graham and the death kink of it all.

To die is to be released is to surrender.

Will Graham often hid behind his gun, proposing empty threats or nervous impulses, removing his instincts and true self from the bullet comminating to shoot.

With my hands, he said. Intimate. To kill is to make love. It’s to dominate and feel surrender between your fingers.

Will’s emotional entangling of sex, love and violence is depicted in the undertone of scenes where he points his gun, the symbolic phallus, in moments where he wants to disconnect himself from the person on the other end.

When he wants to assert dominance without truly earning it. When he feels vulnerable and submissive against his will.

When he opens himself up to his true self by indulging in fantasies he once feared, he begins to explore the intersection of violence and intimacy.

He kills Randall with his bare hands as he imagines Hannibal, I’ve never felt more alive, he says, making the emotional connection between pleasure and death.

When he points the gun to Clark Ingram, he had been correlating the case with his and Hannibal’s dynamic, but from a subdued, deluded perspective, that didn’t take into account his true self.

The gun to Will is the fallacious attempt at dominance. His hands are the truthful, genuine earning of that dominance, where he isn’t running from himself, but rather accepting his self, making love to his darkness, allowing it to enjoy the act of violence, thus truly and effectively asserting dominance.