I’m a writer. And several years ago, I was doing some research for a book chapter on Psycho. Anyway, some college students had asked me a question about the similarities between a Faulkner story and Psycho. There was no question that the similarities were there, and there was also no question that both Faulkner and Hitchcock had worked in Hollywood in the 1940s. So I got curious and decided to explore that angle.
Well, there wasn’t any connection. The similarities were coincidental—sort of a convergence between cultural trends and the necessities of storytelling. However, in the course of my investigations, I did some reading from a book about the psychology of murder, published in 1959—shortly before Hitchcock made his movie. I wanted to know what that book had to say about Ed Gein, since Bloch loosely based Norman Bates upon Gein.
The book had an entire chapter on Gein. But I didn’t stop there. I read about nearly every infamous murderer catalogued in that book. Along the way, of course, I came upon Jack the Ripper. When I read about the injuries he inflicted on his victims, I wondered: “Why didn’t I know about this? Why did I only know that he cut their throats but never knew that he also disembowelled them?”
The answer was obvious: nearly my entire source of information about the Ripper was from television and movies (most of which I’d seen on television). Pop culture, for the most part, had sanitized and softened the Ripper. So I became curious about how the culture interprets Jack the Ripper–not just now, but ever since the Autumn of 1888.
Maybe I’ll blog about various trends in the coming days. But for now, I’ll just settle on the victims. Okay, I’m assuming that anybody reading this has some kind of interest in Jack the Ripper and/or Ripper movies. So tell me: what do you know about the victims? You probably know their occupation, right? I think nearly everybody knows that. Do you know the average age of the victims or their names? Unless you’re a hardcore Ripperologist (or serious fan of the Johnny Depp From Hell movie), probably not.
I gave a questionnaire to a film club a few years ago, and most people thought that the victims were young and beautiful. So did I before I began to study the case. I do have a theory on why many people think that. Many of us have gotten our impressions of the case from pop culture. And, of course, pop culture knows that beautiful young women sell product a whole lot better than decrepit middle-aged alcoholic prostitutes do. Hence, the first “distorted” presentation of the victims in cinema.
Now, I’m not complaining about the distortion. I just find it interesting… just as I find it interesting that the Ripper can be used in supernatural horror movies, science fiction, and virtually anything else that writers can dream up. Every character inspired by Ed Gein–whether it’s Norman Bates, Leatherface, or Buffalo Bill–is a character planted at least marginally in the real world. Okay, Texas Chainsaw is kind of a surreal world, but there’s nothing supernatural about it.
Why does the Ripper get to be immortal (or whatever) and Gein-based characters do not? Well, I have a theory about that too.
I think I’ll save it, though, for tomorrow.
jack the ripper or adolph hitler?
Since the first part of the Hitler movie ran last night on ABC, I got into a conversation on the nature of evil today. What’s odd is that I’m not the one who raised the obvious question: Was Hitler more evil than Jack the Ripper? Or did Hitler just have more power to wreak havoc?
Here are excerpts from the blog I wrote on that movie elsewhere last night:
staring into the eyes of a monster
I was expecting it to be just sort of another one of those historical movies. But it wasn’t. It looked deep into the eyes of the monster. And what it showed there was absolutely terrifying. It still has me shaken.
My husband and I watch a lot of scary movies–from the silent era to the present. We’ve seen the Universal horrors, the Hammer horrors, the cheapies, the high budgets, Night of the Living Dead, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, a variety of slashers, Italian giallo films, even Cannibal Holocaust. And a whole lot of Jack the Ripper films. The really intense ones can give you some immediate and visceral chills. But most of them are cathartic. Most of the time, you identify with a potential victim in a battle against a monster/killer. And once the film is over (and the potential victim usually has won), you go home and feel just fine.
This wasn’t cathartic. Yes, they do give you a character to identify with, but you suspect that he will ultimately be crushed under the wheels of Hitler’s rise.
The main character in this movie is Hitler. Viewers are usually led to identify with the main character–no matter how vile that character is–by placing us close to the main character’s point of view. Though this film does place us close to Hitler’s POV, it never tries to get us to identify with him. When he is holding a pistol to his head after the disastrous putsch, you just wish he’d pull the trigger. When soldiers start firing on Hitler’s armed mob, you wish they’d land a shot to Hitler’s head. When Hitler’s on trial for treason and starts speechifying, you are more horrified at his rhetoric than caught up in the excitement of the main character turning disaster into triumph. You watch all the lost opportunities to stop the Nazi horror, and just feel helpless that the juggernaut continues to roll on.
This dynamic is very unusual in filmmaking, and very hard to pull off because of the audience’s natural identification with main characters. I think the filmmakers pull it partly because we know the future that these events will lead to. We know about the war, the death camps, the genocide. But most of the credit belongs to the the brilliant performance by actor Robert Carlyle, who plays Hitler in this film. Without him, the filmmakers probably could not have pulled it off.
Carlyle plays Hitler as a man of intense anger and hatred. You suspect that he is psychotic. You know that he’s evil. And Carlyle’s portrayal is terrifying. Hitler becomes the bogey-man. The darkest depths of the human soul. The monster. And all this without ever going beyond what we’ve seen of Hitler on old newsreels. If you didn’t know it were true, you’d think it was over-the-top. But you stare into the eyes of the monster and know that they’ve got it right.
In Hitler’s early years, the “bad” things that happen to him are no worse than the normal trials involved in growing up. He doesn’t get along with his father. He doesn’t get into art school. Sure, his mother dies. But by that time, he is in his late teens, not early childhood. The film shows no trauma that could ever explain what Hitler became. He’s more a product of nature than nurture–the demon child, the bad seed, the boy born bad. If he had not grown up to be a genocidal dictator, he would most likely have become a serial killer (his childhood behvarior fits nicely into the serial killer profile). And if not a serial killer, some other type of menace to society, or (if we had been so lucky) an inmate of a mental hospital.
All I have to say is that if you like scary movies, this one is really scary. And even scarier… it’s true.
(First blogged: Monday, May 19, 2003)
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