NBC’s Hannibal is just as fascinating to me now as it was when I first began watching it in 2014. The cinematography alone is enough to draw viewers in — gratuitous use of slow motion and close-ups, ornate food displays, and fantastic imagery characteristic of the typical Bryan Fuller show — but in the end, the characters capture more attention than the pretty shots.
The show first aired when I was in middle school, and 13-year-old me had a strong admiration for Freddie Lounds. Even now, it’s not difficult to see why — Lounds tended to maintain an air of coolness about her even when it seemed that her life and livelihood were at risk, the kind of cool that I yearned for. She was a chameleon, both in the figurative and literal sense, blending into situations as her own ambitions deemed it necessary. In the episode in which she is introduced, she wears a monochrome red outfit that almost seems to vanish against the red backdrop of Hannibal Lecter’s office — she’s trying to blend in, mask her intentions, an attempt which is quickly thwarted by Lecter. At the same time, Lounds was flashy when she needed to be. Most notably, in season two, she wears a wide-brimmed black hat with ribbon, one with dramatic flair that seems more suited for a socialite than someone on a witness stand — and yet, it was fitting as she played up the details of Abigail Hobbs’ death.
Most importantly, Lounds was a writer, a journalist. The one element that drew me towards her as a young teen is also one of her most damning.
Lounds is not meant to be a good journalist. She, like her counterpart in the Thomas Harris novels, is explicitly described as unethical and sleazy by those around her. Lecter comments on her “exploitative brand of journalism”, Crawford and other members of the FBI express disdain for her, and her most common adversary is none other than Will Graham, who is understandably upset about being a constant subject of her work.
“My Freddie is ambitious,” actress Lara Jean Chorostecki said of the character she played. “But, I think she’s learning along the way that she has to temper herself to get what she wants.”
Lounds’ ambition drives her to act in ways that are questionable at best — she poses as the mother of a young boy who stumbled across a crime scene, records someone else’s therapy session, contaminates a crime scene, and is implied to have gotten multiple people fired, and that’s all in one episode. Her “learning to temper herself” comes from learning how to work with the FBI, rather than any visible character development.
Female journalists do not have the best reputation in television and film, and this has come to light again recently with the release of Richard Jewell, in which real-life reporter Kathy Scruggs is depicted as someone who relies on sex to get stories. The same trope appears in House of Cards, in which both Janine Skorsky and Zoe Barnes have sex with potential sources and behave in other inappropriate ways. As Alyssa Rosenberg writes for Slate, the problem is not the intrigue of sketchy characters or that journalists can be competitive — it’s that there is not much insight offered beyond the surface level. Even Rory Gilmore, a poster child for her ambition and drive next to Hermione Granger and similarly studious characters, is reduced to the stereotypes.
When we compare Lounds’ character to that of other female journalists, it may seem like she’s one of the progressive few. She doesn’t sleep with anyone on the show for her own personal gain (while this may seem out of place in a show like Hannibal, remember that Margot Verger did sleep with Graham for personal gain). She’s not any more catty than anyone else on the show. Yet, this isn’t enough.
While Lounds may not be as salacious as other female journalists in television (perhaps because she was formerly a male character), her portrayal is still reflective of the negative ideal that journalists are inherently unethical and value stories over the people they’re centered on. While the narrative repeatedly calls attention to the fact that Lounds’ approach is abnormal, it doesn’t actually mean much, since she is the only journalist we actually see on the show. Newscasters are pushed into the background of crime scenes. We hear the questions being asked, see the cameras flashing, but we don’t see the coverage. Marissa Schuur tells Abigail Hobbs that everyone in the neighborhood and at school was on the news, but we don’t hear what they said. The rumor mill reaches us first, and in comes Lounds.
In one episode, Jack Crawford remarks that Lounds’ failings were due to her “inability to keep herself out of her own stories”. In spite of this, we don’t really get a sense of who Lounds is at all outside of her work. At the end of season two, Lounds remarks that before TattleCrime, she wrote for a cancer supermarket tabloid. This information is likely meant to imply that she was always “sleazy” in some way, but it just raises more questions. Who was she before the tabloids? Where did her ambition leap from?
Not every supporting character in a series is bound to receive a full backstory, but compared to the likes of the Vergers, the Hobbs family, Gideon, and Miriam Lass, Freddie Lounds is an enigma.
We don’t hear her story either.
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Rumors have their role in journalism, even if they can’t be verified at first. “Journalism is a profession of facts,” Larissa Pham writes in the Columbia Journalism Review, “But stories don’t frequently start with the facts.”
Therefore, it makes sense that Lounds plays such a big part in both dispelling and contributing to rumor in Hannibal. She presents herself to Abigail as the sole person who can help her share her truth and consistently posts “exclusives” that would establish her credibility with her intended audience even as the FBI keeps her at arms-length. She also graced television in the years before American trust in the mass media hit an all-time low in 2016, which reflects how the public often turns to other, sometimes unverified sources for information when they feel that mainstream outlets are lacking. While the idea of tabloid crime may feel somewhat anachronistic in this day and age (Red Dragon was published in 1981, after all), TattleCrime actually fits right in with current trends. Early on, the main cast speculates about whether the Minnesota Shrike “copycat” was inspired by TattleCrime posts, which parallels the crimes committed by those radicalized online. Lounds is rightfully criticized for her use of insinuation in her articles, because it is implied that the most tangible impact TattleCrime has is caused by what its readers believe to be true.
This is where the FBI comes in. In the source material, Freddy Lounds is asked to cooperate with the FBI’s investigation of the Tooth Fairy after he is caught attempting to sneak onto a crime scene. Hannibal’s version of Lounds has a similar introduction; after interfering with the Eldon Stammetz case, she agrees to cooperate with the FBI to avoid arrest. However, she avoids the demise that her male counterpart faced in the books and works with the FBI more often. Her continued presence has certain implications in the show, which Chorostecki commented on during an interview with IGN.
“That’s one thing about Freddie as a character,” Chorostecki said, “she’s treated at all times somewhat as an equal, or certainly as someone that people can’t just readily get rid of.”
“Equal” is a bit of a questionable term, given that Lounds is not given much respect by other characters. Lounds isn’t always pleasant herself, telling Graham during an interview that she is glad he is imprisoned, but other characters return this vitriol with fervor. In spite of these adversarial relations, the FBI continues to return to Lounds for assistance with its own goals, a decision that is apparently not unique to them. During the Eldon Stammetz case, Brian Zeller comments that someone from the Baltimore police department must have sold a photo of the crime scene to TattleCrime. This implies that there is some level of trust between local authorities and the site, or at least an awareness of the increased level of control over the narrative that gets published if one contributes to it themselves.
The FBI definitely knows they can control the narrative by using Lounds; in one episode, Crawford explicitly states that he wants to work with someone who is “less concerned about the whole truth than the best story”. They take advantage of what they claim to dislike about Lounds as it suits them, the most egregious example being the claims published about Francis Dolarhyde. In the sole instance where Lounds objects to what she is asked to do, saying that “no straight newspaper would ever credit” the statements being made by the FBI, Graham responds that TattleCrime is not a straight newspaper. Where she was once a threat, she became an asset.
Law enforcement bodies have been under increased scrutiny in recent years because of greater awareness of corruption and brutality in the field. As such, their methods of communication are under scrutiny as well — Columbia Journalism Review recently reported on the new “true crime” podcast created by the NYPD, which is described as “impossible [to view] as anything but a public relations exercise, and one designed to elicit maximum sympathy from the police”. This forms a clear parallel to how the main cast uses TattleCrime; the FBI is not directly centered in any of Lounds’ articles, but they are still behind what gets published, and even the official narratives in-universe are regarded with skepticism. When Lounds publishes an article on Abel Gideon being the Chesapeake Ripper, he later tells her that the piece did not seem genuine, to which she confesses that Crawford made her write it. If credible narratives are so transparent, imagine the response to blatantly false information that was published just to “lure out a killer”.
Is Lounds a credible journalist? Perhaps not. But is it truly justified to single out Lounds when everyone else around her is so unethical? (The protagonist is a murderer, after all.) In the end, the issue is not whether Lounds follows the typical journalism ethics, or whether she is a sexual being, but rather that she is rendered an intermediary to an entity that does not actually care for her. Chorostecki says that her character has developed a facade to survive in an isolating and lonely business, and that facade is clear. Lounds is shown to be bold, ambitious, occasionally sympathetic, but she is still unknown.
Freddie Lounds, in this case, is representative of how society may view journalists as a whole; she is simultaneously reviled and relied upon, seen as callous and at times detached from humanity, but still expected to tell the stories we want to hear while remaining nearly anonymous save for a byline.