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Rating: “What follows stems from my insatiable need to talk about a schizophrenic murderer, which I begin now after digesting the large, excessive amount of Pandoro and accompanying mascarpone cream I consumed on Christmas Day. I only digested it yesterday. I will therefore not feel implicated should any phenomena such as fainting, vomiting, or random homicidal attacks arise in those of you about to read what follows”
Personally, Jack the Ripper, or at least the image of this serial killer, has always intrigued me greatly. And it’s not his uncontrollable urge to dismember and sever female organs (specifically of women whose profession is famously the oldest) that ignites interest and astonishment in me, but rather the aura of mystery (not of Mystery) that formed after the rapid succession of gruesome and enigmatic murders that occurred in the autumn of 1888. Not even the legend that he lured his victims with laudanum and grapes to more easily torture them later on stimulates my perverse mind. No. It's not his dubious, underhanded behavior that draws me to a depraved murderer. The simple and essential reason why I've always been infatuated with this faceless, nameless shady character is one: they never caught him.
Different times, different places, different ways of thinking, acting, and solving. It's difficult, if we try to put ourselves in his place, to think about what might have moved beneath “the skin of history, where the veins of London were pulsing (then)”, what might have been at stake those years (besides Queen Victoria's golden jubilee), in those political and social spaces.
“I’m eager to delve into the matter, just as old Jack would have”.
And so, one day last week, aided by the post-Christmas fever chills, probably caused by the unusual warmth and affection received during those (apparently/unwanted) holidays, I went to read EVERYTHING (well, not quite everything but quite a lot!) about this… “Murderer!!!”
Yes, it seems they heard them screaming, more than once, and always the same phrase, or in this case, word: “Murderer!!!” (“Assassino!!!”). But they didn’t have the courage to look out the window, to observe the deliberate procedure of removal that Jack was so careful to execute once the victim’s throat was slashed (so widely it almost decapitated). Idiots.
Had I been in the place of those impressionable Londoners (and the fascinating fact is that all this took place in the heart of the Anglo-Saxon capital, suggesting that locals were well accustomed to nocturnal murders), I would have peeked, eavesdropped, gone down to the street, been the first to raise the alarm, to bear witness to such a diabolical work. Because what else is the story of Jack the Ripper if not a work? Beethoven wrote works, some shocking, some extravagant, others overwhelming. And Jack’s work, just like a work by Beethoven, Wagner, or whoever, stirs in me a sense of impotence, sublime and power itself, making me feel painfully human. Different works, in substance and form, same result: the same. Here I am, eating my heart out because, damn it, I would have wanted to be inside their head. (far be it from me to equate two worlds that are, in any case, far apart, allow me the joke)
In short, I would have liked to be there, in those years. I would have wanted to discover the corpses of the poor exsanguinated, photograph their mutilated and slashed bodies, their glassy eyes reflected in the light of the cold English mornings along the dirty, gray street. The smell of putrefaction rising above the roofs of White Chapel at the slow rise of the blood-red sun appearing over the bloodied late-century London. A Bloody London as the stage for one of the most distinguished leading actors ever to have graced the stage of those years.
One might say to me, “If you like corpses so much, they will neither today nor ever be missing”, but I would hysterically respond, “But it's not the same!!”. And you can bet, idiots, that it’s not the same. Today, I can go on the web, retrace the crime scene thanks to cameras, which, as a recently deceased poet said, have taken the place of God. I can watch, thanks to TV, the bloodstains on the asphalt where the murder took place. I can listen to the words of the killer, interviewed by national entities, which think it wise to play a piano in the background, thinking that I, I, can move my spirit towards that of the killer who, at least in the TV's impression, has a heartfelt motive for what he did. I can even read a book written by the murderer, so as to get a complete picture of the context within which he operated. Or I can read the book in which he seeks to excuse himself (for example, the Franzoni)... but my friends, tell me, are these murderers?
As Walter, the friend of the Dude in “The Big Lebowski,” would say: “These are fucking amateurs!!”
Which is why I deliberately forget that I have ears when news stories are broadcast on regional or national or international TV (well, maybe not always always): because today’s news is crap! Cocaine-crazed lunatics killing children at school… what’s the thrill?
And it’s therefore much more interesting to read about Jack the Ripper, scrutinize the biographies of the victims (all, and I say all, divorced prostitutes, mothers of disowned or abandoned children, addicted to alcohol and double-deal relationships), retrace the degradation of Hanbury Street or Mitre Square and think: “Only the walls of those alleys truly know how it went down”. But more than knowing how it went down, because how it went down we all know in broad lines, those walls mainly knew who, they knew the author of the crimes.
And who was Jack the Ripper? If this review contained the absolute answer, it would be redeemed by a fundamental sense that it is not meant to have. I don’t have the answer, and as a result, my writing loses purpose, shock value, sense.
But I would have loved to live through those years of innovation and at the same time of grim disorientation, in a world, in a city that was cruel and icy. Would I have wanted to be Jack the Ripper?
Let’s not say nonsense, as much as my words reveal my wallowing in blood and decay, I could never have been a professional ripper, but I would have liked to frequent one opium den after another like the protagonist of the film I blatantly used to speak of a small nerve (Jack, precisely) rediscovered during these winter holidays. But I did rewatch the 2001 film, and quite gladly.
I thought, “well, since I spent a day dedicated to this great serial killer, why not rewatch the film?” The last time I saw it I was thirteen. I rewatched it on the cusp of turning twenty-one, and I was struck again by the dark and grim atmospheres of Victorian London, created with clever effectiveness, along with the frequent appearances of the sick, filthy, and at heart mean-spirited and lacking in pietas masses. The camera that opens the film moves through wet streets and the first-person view catapults me into this world not as distant as we might think.
I revisited the incredible Joseph Merrick alias Elephant Man, as physically hideous as he is spiritually rich. Despite his brief appearance, his person received other high cinematic accolades, like David Lynch’s jewel where his spirit full of poetry and humanity is elevated and gratified.
Johnny Depp plays his part, meaning he plays Johnny Depp in a nineteenth-century version, but I must say his presence in this film does not harm the screenplay, and in the end, despite his excessive self-reference (especially in recent years), as an actor, not always but almost, I quite like him. I like the prostitutes in the film, ad hoc to interpret their role: victims with no way out. Their execution is premeditated and not at all random: their death is systematic and inevitable, their departure techniques brutal even if not as meticulous as a perverse person like me would expect. At thirteen, I confess, they were enough as they were.
A superb Ian Holm…
SPOILER
Anyway, the thesis that the prostitute killer was a trusted man of the British government isn’t as foolish as one might think, quite the opposite. Setting aside the timeline in which the plot takes place (in reality, twenty-two days passed between the first two victims and the third, while in the film it seems to happen over a few days), the idea that the royal marriage needed to be concealed by eliminating the friends who were witnesses is intriguing even if it holds little weight: in the marriage scene, it’s easy to see that there were other people present besides the five unfortunate ones, so Jack would have had to kill them too. Maybe they were paid, along with the priest, to keep them silent… who knows!
END OF SPOILER
But turning away from the film, which I still recommend watching, I’m left with an exposed nerve: why would Jack the Ripper have killed prostitutes? Why in some times distant from each other? Why in a socially degraded area like White Chapel? Could it be that Queen Victoria, on the verge of her fifty-year reign, wanted to start the removal of social depravity by putting street girls out of commission? It seems unlikely, an unnecessary waste of time and money. And if you, like me, went to take a look at the lives of these claxon girls (of course, claxons didn’t exist back then...), you'd notice the insignificance of their existence up until the moment of their passing, thus their death remains a mystery; not to mention that Jack was never caught, and even today we wonder who the individual with the cloak and top hat wandering around rummaging through female organs with accurate meticulousness (not to say professional ability) was. I still think he couldn't have been an ordinary fool, and perhaps in reality as in the film, he had to operate undercover, or it doesn’t explain the timing of the victims’ discoveries closely aligned with their execution (and removing kidneys, vaginas, and stomachs is not exactly like pruning plants in the garden).
Not to mention the puzzle of the sinister mocking letters sent to the lost and powerless London police against the overwhelming force of the ripper: they didn’t even have a semblance of guilt so, as usual, the Jews were blamed, who, once again got beaten.
In short, now this is a murderer! He slashes. He severs. He disappears. He mocks the cops. A 360° job. All that's missing is that with the money earned from his executions (and there remains this little quirk, if his murders were the shadow of someone’s will, most likely under payment) he retired to a remote island, and we’d be looking at the coolest of serial killers ever to exist.
The film is a vehicle for savoring the macabre and funereal climate of those years, the ever-present ominous tolling of the bells accompany our journey into the late nineteenth century in England, among low-cut and foul-mouthed prostitutes and filthy, shivering hobos, between an opium puff, a sip of absinthe, and a nod of understanding with that rogue Joseph Merrick; yet the film and its settings do not fully satisfy this desire of mine to relive the story step by step: I would need a time machine, I would need a machine, I would need time: but where do I find all these things today?
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