I'm about mid-Season 2 in my slow rewatch, and one thing I've noticed is that part of what makes the series' meta-aesthetics so thematically coherent is that murder, cooking, art on biological media (taxidermia, flower arrangements, etc), as well as psychiatry (in any combination of ethical/unethical and clinical/interpersonal), are all versions of the same activity of re-arranging a living being, be it is flesh or its mind, in the way *you* find it more agreeable; this can be done consensually and with the best of intentions, or very much not, but it's still doing something *to* the living, and even the human, in a way we associate with how we deal with inanimate matter.
Those activities are all violent, and the meta-aesthetical points of Hannibal's unique mixture of interests is that it makes that violence utterly explicit, by blurring the lines between all of them.
