Jack the Ripper takes on new life through cinema


No other serial killer has infected our collective unconscious quite like Jack the Ripper. He is history’s resident boogeyman, a nameless, faceless ghoul who stalked the street corners around London’s Whitechapel District from 1888 until roughly 1891, murdering and mutilating at least five women, most of them prostitutes, before receding into the fog of myth. The strange and terrible nature of his crimes, coupled with the fact that he never answered for them, caused the Ripper’s legend to endure, spawning a century’s worth of books, films and a seemingly inexhaustible supply of conspiracy theories ranging from Masonic blood sacrifices to the direct involvement of the royal family.

You Don’t Know Jack · Russell Edwards, who claims to have uncovered the identity of the real Jack the Ripper, says From Hell, a 2001 film starring Johnny Depp, inspired him to reopen the investigation.  - Photo courtesy of 20th Century Fox

You Don’t Know Jack · Russell Edwards, who claims to have uncovered the identity of the real Jack the Ripper, says From Hell, a 2001 film starring Johnny Depp, inspired him to reopen the investigation. – Photo courtesy of 20th Century Fox

 

Last weekend, however, there was an apparent break in the 126-year-old case, and an article published by The Daily Mail suggested the notorious killer had been identified as Aaron Kosminski, a Polish-Jewish immigrant who was working as a barber in Whitechapel at the time of the murders, thanks to mitochondrial DNA evidence found on a blood and semen-stained shawl allegedly belonging to Catherine Eddowes, one of the Ripper’s later victims, who also lost her left kidney to the fiend. The shawl, reportedly stolen from the crime scene by a Victorian policeman as a gross-out gift for his wife, is currently in the possession of businessman and self-described “armchair detective” Russell Edwards, whose book, Naming Jack the Ripper, conveniently hit shelves earlier this week.

Edwards’s announcement, based on the findings of Liverpool John Moores University molecular biologist Dr. Jari Louhelainen, quickly raised the hackles of skeptics and “Ripperologists,” who have plenty of reasons to be suspicious of this supposed breakthrough. In 2002, there was a similar uproar over Patricia Cornwell’s book Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper — Case Closed, which used DNA found on the postage stamp of one of the Ripper’s alleged letters to the police as evidence that British painter Walter Sickert was in fact the murderer. Then there’s the shawl itself, which could easily be tainted with other people’s DNA — and that’s if it’s the genuine article to begin with. Besides, even if Kosminski was one of Eddowe’s clients, that doesn’t necessarily mean he was her killer.

To be frank, the truth of Kosminski’s guilt counts for very little now. It doesn’t matter who the Ripper really was. What matters is the power the character continues to exert on the public imagination through the realm of fiction, particularly literature and cinema. Edwards’s interest in the case, for instance, was piqued by the 2001 movie From Hell, starring Johnny Depp and Heather Graham, which was an extremely loose adaptation of Alan Moore’s celebrated 1989 graphic novel of the same name, which itself was inspired by Steven Knight’s 1976 book Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution.

The Ripper has been with us for the better part of 12 decades now, but he seems most at home in film, where the joys, fears and neuroses of our culture are offered up in flickering microcosm, a shadow play of ancient truths, prescient wonders and terrors older than time.

Along with Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog, one of the earliest and best-known portrayals of the Whitechapel killer can be found in G.W. Pabst’s 1929 silent melodrama Pandora’s Box, the Austrian director’s first collaboration with Louise Brooks, a cat-eyed Kansas waif whose wild girl facade belied hidden reservoirs of acting talent. The film features Brooks as Lulu, a career temptress whose reckless sexual escapades drive her to murder in Germany, fugitivism in Egypt and prostitution in London, ultimately leading to a fatal third-act encounter with the Ripper (Gustav Diessl). Lulu’s final scene, cast in a veil of shadow and fed on the horror of the implicit, is an unqualified triumph of expressionist cinematography, the kind engineered to produce nightmares.

The character has also proven himself surprisingly malleable, appearing in everything from the crackerjack sci-fi comedy Time After Time, where the Ripper (David Warner) hijacks H.G. Wells’ time machine and runs amok in modern-day San Francisco while the author himself (Malcolm McDowell) gives chase, to no less than two separate Sherlock Holmes adventures.

The first of these, 1965’s slapdash but spirited A Study in Terror, pits the Great Detective (John Neville) and Dr. Watson (Donald Houston) against the insane Duke of Shires (Barry Jones), who triggers the Ripper killings after his son falls in love with a beautiful prostitute. Bob Clark’s far-superior Murder by Decree, starring Christopher Plummer as Holmes and James Mason as Watson, expands on the theories put forth in Knight’s book and embraces a far-reaching Masonic conspiracy surrounding royal physician and real-life Ripper suspect Sir William Gull. The latter film is buoyed by Clark’s sharp directorial instincts, which he would soon put to even better use in A Christmas Story, and the chummy banter between Plummer and Mason.

So what is it about the Ripper that still intrigues us? Why does he continually bleed into our art? Why does his shadow loom so large over the last century? Morbid curiosity simply isn’t enough to explain the public’s ongoing fascination with the Whitechapel murders. Some point to the character as the embodiment of the social ills — for Victorian England, it was crushing poverty and neglect — that plague every time period in one form or another. Others see him as a perversely romantic figure who could only love through violence. Even if we close our eyes and refuse to see him at all, he’ll still be out there, the invisible monster, the chaos peddler, the black hole in our cultural firmament.

Aaron Kosminski, who suffered from auditory hallucinations commonly associated with paranoid schizophrenia, died in a mental asylum in 1919. He only weighed 96 pounds at the time of his death. His victims, assuming they really were his, have all been cried over and buried. But there’s something in human nature that abhors a neatly solved mystery, especially one that ends with such a plausible, garden-variety culprit. It’s the same reason many viewers were left unsatisfied when Cthulhu didn’t show up in the True Detective finale. Maybe part of us would prefer a monster. When it’s just a man, the world feels like a far more sinister place.

 

Landon McDonald is a graduate student studying public relations. His column, “Screen Break,” runs Wednesdays.