Will Graham

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This article is about the character from Red Dragon. For the evangelist, see William Franklin Graham IV.

Edward Norton as Will Graham in the 2002 interpretation.

Will Graham is the protagonist of the novel Red Dragon. He is an FBI profiler who has the ability to empathize with psychopaths. In the book, as well as the two film versions of it, Graham is portrayed as being disturbed, even disgusted, by his ability. Graham is seen as one of the few people to be Lecter's intellectual equal, something Lecter himself acknowledges.

[edit] Profile

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

This history is based on the novel by Thomas Harris, not any of the screenplays in which Will Graham appears:

Will Graham was originally a homicide detective in New Orleans who had grown up poor in Southern Louisiana. He left to attend graduate school in forensic science at George Washington University. After attaining his degree, Graham went to work for the FBI's crime lab. Following exceptional work both in the crime lab and in the field, Graham was given a post as teacher at the FBI Academy. During both his field work while at the crime lab and the Academy, Graham was given the title of "Special Investigator" while he was in the field.

In one of Graham's field cases during the 1970s, he was tracking a serial killer, who had been stabbing young women, many of them college coeds, for eight months. He eventually caught the killer, Garrett Jacob Hobbs, known as the Minnesota Shrike, and killed him. When Graham found Hobbs at Hobbs' home, Hobbs was repeatedly slashing his own daughter's throat. When Graham appeared, Hobbs' wife was on the apartment landing, bleeding from multiple stab wounds, and clutched at Graham before he kicked in the door. He then shot Hobbs to death (Hobbs' daughter survived and eventually returned to normal life following intensive psychotherapy.) Graham was profoundly disturbed by the incident, and was referred to the psychiatric ward of an unnamed major hospital. He eventually returned to the FBI.

In 1975, he began to track down another serial killer, known as the "Chesapeake Ripper", who was removing organs from the victims. He turned to world famous psychiatrist Dr. Hannibal Lecter for help. After looking around Lecter's office during a consultation, he saw the antique medical diagram Wound Man, whose wounds matched exactly those of one of the Ripper's victims, and realized that Lecter was the killer he sought. Graham went to Lecter's outer office and made a phone call to the FBI's Baltimore Field Office. Lecter sneaked up on Graham and stabbed him in the abdomen, nearly disemboweling him. Lecter was arrested and Graham spent months recovering in a hospital. A tabloid reporter, Freddy Lounds, sneaked into the hospital where Graham was recuperating, photographed Graham's wounds and humiliated him in the National Tattler. Graham retired after his recovery, and held a grudge against Lounds.

William Petersen as Will Graham from Manhunter.

Three years later, Graham, now living with his wife Molly and her son Willy in Marathon, Florida, is persuaded by his former boss, Jack Crawford, to come out of retirement and help the FBI again in the "Tooth Fairy" case. The Tooth Fairy, actually a man named Francis Dolarhyde, had killed two families on a lunar cycle, the first in Birmingham and the second in Atlanta. After studying the crime scenes, Graham consults Lecter on the case, but Lecter gives him only vague brainteasers as clues, and sends Dolarhyde Graham's address in code, threatening the safety of his wife and stepson. The family are moved first to a cottage owned by Crawford's brother, but Molly later decides to take Willy to stay with her late husband's parents in Oregon. Graham resumes tracking Dolarhyde, and uses Lounds in an attempt to break the coded communication between Lecter and Dolarhyde by giving Lounds false information and also attributing fake insults against Dolarhyde to Lecter, which ultimately results in Dolarhyde kidnapping and brutally murdering Lounds. After linking him to a video production company. When Graham, Crawford and FBI, agents arrive at Dolarhyde's home to arrest him, only to find that the killer had set it on fire while his blind girlfriend, Reba McClane, was inside, and then apparently committed suicide. Graham rescues and consoles McClane, and returns home, believing Dolarhyde's reign of terror is over.

However, Dolarhyde's apparent suicide is revealed to have been a ruse. Dolarhyde attacks Graham and his family at their Florida home, stabbing Graham in the face before being killed by Graham's wife. Graham and his family survive, but he is left disfigured. A brief reference in The Silence of the Lambs, the sequel to Red Dragon, implies that his wife had left him soon after that, and he is now "a drunk with a face that's hard to look at" and that his "face looks like goddamn Picasso drew it."

[edit] Comparison between the book and the films

In Michael Mann's film version of the book, Manhunter, Graham is played by William Petersen. In Brett Ratner's 2002 edition, Red Dragon, he is played by Edward Norton.
Neither film adaptation has Graham as seriously injured by Dolarhyde as the book's climax suggests.
In the novel, Graham's wife, Molly, has a son from a previous marriage. In both films, the boy is presumed to be Graham's biological child. In the novel, Molly's son is named Willy; in Manhunter, he is called Kevin; in the film Red Dragon, he is called Josh. The reasons for these name changes have never been explained, though it seems plausible that casual viewers may get confused by referring to both Graham and his son with similar first names (Will and Willy, respectively).
In the film Manhunter, Graham's "gift" is never explained (an extra scene in the Director's Cut shows a conversation between Graham and Dr. Chilton, in which Chilton inquires Graham about his abilities). In both the novel and the film Red Dragon, Graham's gift is classified as making him an 'eideteker', a person with eidetic memory.
In the novel, Graham carries a heavily modified Charter Arms .44 Bulldog revolver.
Manhunter presents us with a Graham who is incredibly conflicted and vaguely psychologically unsound. This definitely reflects the novel quite faithfully. However, in the the 2002 adaptation, Red Dragon, he is portrayed as far more stoic and in control, which is in fundamental opposition to Harris' vision of Graham.