I have begun writing my essay! I have so much to say that I am starting early, because it's going to take some serious refinement to give it some depth and not get lost in the broadness of my enthusiasm. How to cut down? I don't know: give me dissertation time please!
So, I apologise in advance, because from now onwards my one-track mind is going to get even more focused, and I know you're sick of this already
I've a strange thought of using a time machine to go back and findout who Mr Jack really was, only to discover that it really was the very "gentleman with a cape and a top hat" that I am attempting to disprove in my essay. Perhaps finding out that it was Prince Edward, or William Gull, or one of the lunatic ideas of suspects that I sneer at. I mean, I wouldn't because the very attempt to do so would land me in an ethical dilemma that no one should have to face. But it's still a funny thought that maybe, unlikely as it seems, that Hollywood is right.
On the same theme, I had a dream while househunting. I dreamt that my gang were all Victorian gentlemen, and our hunt for a new lodger was actually a cover-story to disguise the fact we were hunting Jack the Ripper. That's the problem with the whole damn affair, the lack of solution. That's the reason why people can't let it rest (I use the word "people" because, obviously, it has no reference at all to myself...). It's like, one minute you've got three children sleeping quietly in a hotel room, then you come back from dinner and you've only got two. She's just gone. That situation is vile beyond human comprehension, but there's a level at which it's not morbid speculation, or fear, or sympathy that keeps us interested - it's frustrated curiosity at the process of turning from a person of three dimensions into a fuzzy police photo which sums up your entire existance. Life's little cliffhangers. As if JJ Abrams and Carlton Cuse were the world's Watchmaker. The absence of closure is a big hole punched through lives, in big ways or little, and it doesn't really go away: Madeline won't be a popular girls' name for a good four decades now. Fiction has ill-prepared us for existance without answers or endings.
Its why Picnic at Hanging Rock is such an enduringly creepy film. 20 girls go on a picnic to Hanging Rock. Nothing much happens, only then three of them don't come back. Nothing much happens. We are given clues about what happened, but never enough to form into a complete picture, and the more we learn the more intangible it gets.
Having studied them all, I want to make a Ripper movie. I keep thinking about how I would do it differently. It would be the background to another narrative - no detectives, no suspects, no promise of a solution. It would be about fear. I might focus on one murder, or maybe two, and instead of showing murders, my characters would spend their final scene in the midst of their daily life. And when, say, she left her last recorded conversation the camera would linger on her back as she walked away for as long as I could handle, with the rest of life going on oblivious in the foreground. And just vanish. In fact, exactly like Picnic at Hanging Rock; I just feel I should add a film to this field which isn't obsessed with fog and slippery cobbles. I am increasingly convinced that there has never been a good Jack the Ripper film. Either as cinema, or as a fair representation of what happened.
In a way, I do regret choosing such an emotive subject to write about - I've always liked the idea of academia and art as essentially cold and amoral, even while I have never believed it. But I didn't know it would ultimately have this effect on me when I began looking into it as an offshoot of my Doctor Who reading last year. I suppose I should have guessed, though, that in setting out to write an essay about how strangely distorted and fictionalised a period of history is, that there be historical realities underneath. I mean, last year London was my oyster*; and then last autumn, you couldn't have dragged me to Whitechapel for anything; and now - can you believe this? - I think it is important for me to actually go and pay visits and be Respectful, because after all this studying fake versions, I want something to make it real to me again. Short of looking at the post-mortem photography.
Who are you, and what have you done with my Emily?! This doesn't even sound like me.
*have I just inadvertantly worked out why Oyster cards are named after shellfish?
So, I apologise in advance, because from now onwards my one-track mind is going to get even more focused, and I know you're sick of this already
I've a strange thought of using a time machine to go back and findout who Mr Jack really was, only to discover that it really was the very "gentleman with a cape and a top hat" that I am attempting to disprove in my essay. Perhaps finding out that it was Prince Edward, or William Gull, or one of the lunatic ideas of suspects that I sneer at. I mean, I wouldn't because the very attempt to do so would land me in an ethical dilemma that no one should have to face. But it's still a funny thought that maybe, unlikely as it seems, that Hollywood is right.
On the same theme, I had a dream while househunting. I dreamt that my gang were all Victorian gentlemen, and our hunt for a new lodger was actually a cover-story to disguise the fact we were hunting Jack the Ripper. That's the problem with the whole damn affair, the lack of solution. That's the reason why people can't let it rest (I use the word "people" because, obviously, it has no reference at all to myself...). It's like, one minute you've got three children sleeping quietly in a hotel room, then you come back from dinner and you've only got two. She's just gone. That situation is vile beyond human comprehension, but there's a level at which it's not morbid speculation, or fear, or sympathy that keeps us interested - it's frustrated curiosity at the process of turning from a person of three dimensions into a fuzzy police photo which sums up your entire existance. Life's little cliffhangers. As if JJ Abrams and Carlton Cuse were the world's Watchmaker. The absence of closure is a big hole punched through lives, in big ways or little, and it doesn't really go away: Madeline won't be a popular girls' name for a good four decades now. Fiction has ill-prepared us for existance without answers or endings.
Its why Picnic at Hanging Rock is such an enduringly creepy film. 20 girls go on a picnic to Hanging Rock. Nothing much happens, only then three of them don't come back. Nothing much happens. We are given clues about what happened, but never enough to form into a complete picture, and the more we learn the more intangible it gets.
Having studied them all, I want to make a Ripper movie. I keep thinking about how I would do it differently. It would be the background to another narrative - no detectives, no suspects, no promise of a solution. It would be about fear. I might focus on one murder, or maybe two, and instead of showing murders, my characters would spend their final scene in the midst of their daily life. And when, say, she left her last recorded conversation the camera would linger on her back as she walked away for as long as I could handle, with the rest of life going on oblivious in the foreground. And just vanish. In fact, exactly like Picnic at Hanging Rock; I just feel I should add a film to this field which isn't obsessed with fog and slippery cobbles. I am increasingly convinced that there has never been a good Jack the Ripper film. Either as cinema, or as a fair representation of what happened.
In a way, I do regret choosing such an emotive subject to write about - I've always liked the idea of academia and art as essentially cold and amoral, even while I have never believed it. But I didn't know it would ultimately have this effect on me when I began looking into it as an offshoot of my Doctor Who reading last year. I suppose I should have guessed, though, that in setting out to write an essay about how strangely distorted and fictionalised a period of history is, that there be historical realities underneath. I mean, last year London was my oyster*; and then last autumn, you couldn't have dragged me to Whitechapel for anything; and now - can you believe this? - I think it is important for me to actually go and pay visits and be Respectful, because after all this studying fake versions, I want something to make it real to me again. Short of looking at the post-mortem photography.
Who are you, and what have you done with my Emily?! This doesn't even sound like me.
*have I just inadvertantly worked out why Oyster cards are named after shellfish?
Comments (1)
cinema (and books) create a myth of closure. In most film/books everything falls together, whereas real life is a messy tangle that never really resolves itself. Big things seldom go away, they are just edged into the background by new Big Things. Loose ends quite often stay loose. Today there was a headline blaming poor training and equipment for someone being killed in Iraq. We can't accept it was just bad luck (or skillful work by the guys who made and planted the bomb). Stuff happens. I like the idea of a Ripper film that escapes the cliche of ripper films - there is always an expectation hurdle to climb when people "know" the story, viz the reactions to Tim Burton's Alice...