Fantastic Metropolis

From Hell (2001)
Directors: Albert and Allen Hughes.
Cast: Johnny Depp, Heather Graham, Ian Holm, Ian Richardson.

‘This is a ghetto story’, threatens Albert Hughes, co-director (with brother Allen) of the film version of Alan Moore’s celebrated graphic novel, From Hell (a Jack the Ripper ‘melodrama in 16 parts’). You shouldn’t hold Tinseltown mercenaries responsible for customised quotes fed into the publicity machine. It’s much easier to buy a property that comes ready packaged, dressed like a storyboard. Moore’s complex original, serially published like a novel by Dickens, had to be reduced to a single workable strand. ‘This is a ghetto story. It concerns poverty, violence and corruption, which are themes we deal with in our movies.’

From Hell, shot in Prague, where a facsimile of gothic Whitechapel was lovingly assembled by designer Martin Childs and his team, is a ghetto story. But that ghetto is Hollywood, not Victorian Spitalfields. History is there to be captured and colonised by a commando unit of highly trained and skilled professionals, using the most advanced technology known to the western world. The corporate military/industrial state sees film as an efficient way of burning (laundering, re-investing, alchemising) money. Great Britain, that drifting, off-Europe aircraft carrier is tolerated as a generator of exploitable myths: Dracula, Frankenstein, Jekyll and Hyde, Sherlock Holmes, Harry Potter and the runic menagerie of J. R. R. Tolkien. After Tony Blair’s sterling support for America’s Afghan adventure, Brits can expect to be upgraded from sneering villains and movie spooks to Byronic anti-heroes (like the Celtic Hannibal Lecter).

The Hughes brothers’ fantasy ghetto, populated by the usual hyperactive extras, returns the traditional immigrant quarter of London to one of its points of origin. Jewish writers, such as Emanuel Litvinoff, always considered Whitechapel to be more closely allied with the cities and settlements of Poland and Russia than with the rest of London. Whitechapel faced east. And now, thanks to the dedication of the film crew, the lost ghettos of Israel Zangwill and Arthur Morrison have been given a massive transfusion. Streets and alleys are drenched with the wet stuff (like an explosion in a blood bank). It is more real than the real. Alan Moore, when he saw the production stills, was staggered. The spell cast by dark magus Aleister Crowley (who believed that the position of the Ripper’s victims made up an ‘averse pentagram’) could finally be activated: it was possible to step into the past, to achieve invisibility

Photographs fade. Colour saturations bleed. The visceral impact of the Hughes’ grand guignol, with its Steadicam swoops and dynamically articulated tracking shots, loosens its grip. Memory won’t hold us in this other place, however cunningly the never-was is resurrected. Xerox truth is no truth at all. Actual cobblestones (‘centuries-old’) were ‘borrowed’ from Polish breweries and civic institutions to dress the set. Stones become blind, accusing eyes. ‘We were very lucky that Prague was undergoing a major restoration,’ said Martin Childs. The German conceptual artists, Jochen Gerz, has another take entirely on cobblestones. Memory is a wound. The pain of history has always to be appeased. Art is an exorcism. He had his students dig out cobblestones at night, so that the names of vanished and deleted synagogues could be inscribed on the undersides-before the stones were returned to their original positions.

The makers of From Hell take one of Moore’s lines as their statement of intent: mad doctor Jack ‘gives birth to the twentieth-century’. The Whitechapel Murders of 1888 are a paradigm for the cult of serial killers, the font of all conspiracy theories. Jack the Ripper is the ‘first tabloid star’. Moore’s epic deconstruction, with summaries and echoes of all previous Ripper scholarship, is a monstrous edifice; loud with shrieks and whispers, broken quotes, ghosts and doppelgangers. It looks over the revised geography of Spitalfields, the retro-Georgian conversions, the icy cliffs of Bishopsgate, like one of Jack London’s dark tenements. Like the ‘Monster Doss House’ of Fieldgate Street, photographed for the first edition of The People of the Abyss in 1903.

What Moore proposes, and what the film necessarily refutes, is the belief that the past is unknowable. ‘In all our efforts to describe the past, to list the simple facts of history,’ he wrote in his introduction to the From Hell scripts, ‘we are involved in fiction.’ There can be no anachronisms when time is a plural concept. Nobody knows, or will ever know, or should know, who Jack the Ripper was. Jack is. Sustained and incubated by tour guides, crocodiles of sombre or giggling pilgrims processing around the locations where the bodies were found, the Ripper lives on. An invisible earner. A waxwork vampire. A golem of the interzone.

According to the Prague legends of Rabbi Loew, the golem—a creature made from river mud—would protect the Jewish ghetto. In Moore’s version (and in the Hughes brothers’ film), that myth is turned on its head: Jack the Ripper is a golem conjured by royalty and the Freemasons, and sent into the ghetto to enact a series of bloody ritual sacrifices. The pitch is republican—with Queen Victoria, stripped of her Dench-heritage charm, as a marble puppet issuing death threats that must be carried out by a cabal of aristocrats, civil servants and surgeons.

The underclass exist only as victims. The film is more sentimental than Moore’s graphic novel, which is darkly realist; fiercely drawn, crosshatched, by Eddie Campbell. The Hughes’ cinematographer, Peter Deming, recreates several of Campbell’s frames—but the colour, the opera of movement and costume design, the wrap-around orchestration, subverts the bleak nightscape of the original strip. Because of the nature of a page divided into variable combinations of frame, Moore’s novel keeps its distance from the hot narrative. There is always the sense of looking, at one time, through a dozen windows. Narrative is fragmented. The graphic novel is always silent: Hitchcock’s 1926 Ripper film, The Lodger, and not his London return of the Sixties, Frenzy.

The Ripper is a blank-faced monster, revised from generation to generation, but the victims don’t change. We know who they are, the nature of their wounds, the cemeteries in which they are buried. Moore dedicates his From Hell scripts to the dead prostitutes—with a characteristic echo of Eliot. ‘Goodnight, ladies.’ The Hughes brothers’ film takes the hint and builds dramatic tension through the conflict between the sisterhood of the streets and the vengeful hierarchies of the state. Everything hinges on a single challenge: confront the karma, appease the pain, take the taint from surviving geography of Whitechapel.

What does survive? The Prague model of Hawksmoor’s Christ Church, Spitalfields, is more available than the cleaned and scoured, Portland stone dagger on the edge of the City of London. The true church is an island protected by steel-grey railings—as if obeying Hawksmoor’s instruction ‘to keep off filth Nastiness & Brutes’. BE-AWARE / THE AREA IN FRONT OF THESE / RAILINGS IS / PRIVATE PROPERTY. No nonsense about access for all, serving a community.

The Gents lavatory, the last gasp of Victorian charity, a benevolent reconstruction that followed in the wake of the Ripper murders, is now a subterranean wine bar. The male and female entrances to Jack London’s night shelter for down-and-outs have been blocked off by a yellow fence: MANHATTAN LOFT CORPORATION. Georgian façades are retained, like cosmetic masks, to dress the latest land-grab piracy. The arch from Aldgate priory, close to where the body of Kate Eddowes was found in Mitre Square, is preserved—as a conversation piece, inside the offices of the Swiss Reinsurance Co. The arch belonged to one of the 10 side-chapels where masses were sung for the dead. Memories of the Augustinian priory, of a gateway built from the ruins of property demolished when the Jews were expelled from England, are prompted by summaries on boards. Royal genealogies alongside yellow press graphic strips, precursors of Eddie Campbell, with Ripper cartoons and caricatures of Jewish slaughtermen.

The Ten Bells pub, where the movie prostitutes meet and drink, offers ‘Hot Toddies’ and leaflets for Ripper tours. Bloody Marys all round. Pinned to the door, a couple of months back, was an advance flyer for From Hell, starring Johnny Depp. The names and dates of the victims, once engraved in the glass of the pub window, have long since disappeared.

Depp is in the wrong film. He has nothing to do with the historic Inspector Abberline, and demonstrates few traces of Moore’s dour West Countryman. He essays a kind of low-key Mockney, tranquillised by Jamie Oliver. ‘Dorsett (sic) sounds too bizarre to use,’ said the dialogue coach. (So much for the Thomas Hardy franchise.) Depp is a fin-de-siècle dandy, out of Oscar Wilde or Stevenson; a melancholy Dorian Gray. An opium-smoking, absinthe-tippling Shoreditch dude who dreams the crimes. Dreams London. From Hell is Depp’s posthumous reverie. Which explains the unreal geography, the bloodshot panoramic skies (last seen in Carol Reed’s unicorn-in-Petticoat Lane fantasy, A Kid for Two Farthings.)

So a film which is delivered with considerable panache, with painstaking reconstructions, with moments of psychotic chill from Ian Holm as Sir William Gull, fails in the only way that matters: it robs the worst of the murders—the slaughter of Mary Kelly in Miller’s Court—of its place in time. Sentiment (box office) demands that Kelly escapes, goes free, lives on in a white-washed John Ford cottage in the West of Ireland. History is trashed. Hurt is demeaned. The small set, hung with a woman’s entrails, is no more than a literal cutting room, film for flesh. Where Alan Moore can float Kelly’s escape as a wistful potentiality, Hollywood needs a clear finish. An up-beat resolution. From Hell returns to source, as a penny-dreadful, a shocker; a distortion of place and time. An industrial product crafted to stand alongside the wave of predatory development that maligns history and treats the past as the final colony in the American world empire.