Summary
The first episode of Ripper Street is a self-contained piece of epic artistic genius. By the end of the episode, I was crying. It is ultimately a test of the audience’s character.
On the surface, for those who cannot truly perceive melodrama or multiple levels of themed content, the first episode of Ripper Street is a self-contained piece of epic artistic genius that takes the audience through a flawlessly crafted story wrapped in a beautifully and painstakingly recreated period drama. For the minority of us, who sleep, eat, and breathe the melody of multi-tiered emotional complexity, who have ascended and freed ourselves from our own weaknesses, and who have evolved far beyond the deluded thinking of frightened animals who cannot bare their own reflections, Ripper Street is something else entirely.
By the end of the episode, I was crying.
I was not merely weeping or shedding tears, but crying which implies a deep pain; a wailing or a shrieking from deep in the soul. I came apart but not in the way madness takes hold when you come to a realization that you cannot accept, but in the way you feel when you have suddenly experienced something of so much clarity and beauty that you feel one with it, graciously exposed by it, and you cry through that blinding radiance. One of three things will happen at the end of such an experience : You are inevitably transformed into something more / different than what you were previously, the jewel of your current character is further solidified in it’s original setting, or said jewel is violently unseated by the truth of your failures as a person.
For the Greeks, “character” (kharakter) was an “engraved mark” extending to “symbol or imprint on the soul” and I strongly hold to that original definition of what it meant to be solid in who you were. I still teach my students that character is your personal philosophies personified and that tests of character present themselves often in life to ensure that who you are is built upon a solid and unwavering foundation. It is then precisely because clarity can be painful and truth often drives people mad, that episode one of Ripper Street is something every person needs to be exposed to in order to determine who they are or are failing to be at their core.
Ripper Street episode one is – simply stated – a test of character.
The camera is a fascinating device; a terrible and beautiful creation that is unmatched in its violence except maybe by a firearm which also – just by the mere mention – has the ability to tear people apart and separate them by character. The camera can rip down our walls, shred our souls, grab us by the throat and strangle us. The camera can rape, exploit, and demean all without any kind of physical contact. Photography, if we allow it – moving or still – opens us, violates us, and force feeds us someone else’s experiences, someone else’s soul, or simply puts us intimately in touch with our own.
Photography acts on the body as much as on the mind and it has the ability to wound the spectator. That is the power of punctum. It is punctum that makes film the singular most invasive form of art. It is punctum that shatters the weak foundations of mundanes and causes them to flee, rage, and even go mad in the exact moment of being exposed to it.
I wrote an essay once about the man who went beautifully mad during a screening of Lucky McKee’s film “The Woman”. Awakened abruptly from his dream of the world when he found himself in a darkened theater surrounded by men and women alike cheering and applauding at scenes of rape and mutilation, he had to be escorted out by security for causing a ruckus when he expressed his outrage during the rolling of the end credits. I deeply respected that he sat through the entire film and held back the sounds of his wounded soul until the end. That told me a lot about his character. I marveled at the video of him trying to seek a reasonable, logical, rational explanation for why such a film would be made from security personnel who could have cared less and were so disconnected from the violence and brutality that they only saw him as a disruption of everyone else’s … enjoyment. “Imagine, a little thing like that come between us and our enrichment.” – Sgt Donald Artherton.
No one channels Lucky McKee except Lucky McKee and Ripper Street is nowhere near the intense, brutal, bleeding rawness of The Woman which refuses to uplift us and instead drags us kicking and screaming into some terrible dark hole where we have to face the monster within us. Tom Shankland’s directorial hand is gentle, beautiful, artistic, and full of light as to allow us to ascend to a realm of understanding and enlightenment. He turns us towards the darkness of what we fear in ourselves with a gentle but forceful push. He is unapologetic but not uncaring. He is forceful but not disrespectful. Shankland is telling us something without preaching it and instead allowing the punctum of each character’s expressions and scripted actions to reach us on our own terms be they healthy or twisted ones. I felt strongly at several moments, in the way he chose to shoot both inanimate cameras and actives ones, that there was a strong love he wished to portray; an emotion buried within the filming of film itself, that would ideally make or break our perception of the final message of the episode. There was a scene that could have been pulled directly from Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom, a film that also shook the core of so many when it was released. It ruined Powell’s career but now is considered a masterpiece. Surely Shankland was channeling Powell in his handling of the very same subject matter – that which exposes us to ourselves – for which Powell was ultimately unfairly vilified.
Mundanes – those chained to the most basic level of human existence – judge in others what they cannot abide in themselves. Their lifeless shells bubble over with so much self-loathing, shame, and denial that they cannot help projecting it onto everyone they see and into everything they experience. They look. They feel. They hate themselves for looking. They hate the feelings they experience. They judge those who made such things for them to look at. They blame those who made such things that cause them to feel. They cannot see the world clearly because they view everything through a warped and tainted lens created from their desperate need to cover up their own inadequacies. Melodrama then becomes, to such people, something to despise, to ridicule, to misjudge, to corrupt with negativity the expression of other people’s emotional wellsprings. These are hateful, foul, lost creatures, roaming awake in darkness, blind to the daylight of reality and the bigger picture beyond their pathetic, fear laden existences. They are so easily broken, the foundation of their character so violently shaken, and their wasted and tortured souls so deeply … wounded.
Film is magical is it not? It can make us believe something is real when it’s pure fantasy, it can alter our perception of actual reality, it can mesmerize, brainwash, and transform us. It’s the ultimate trick. While many people say that the magic happens in a well-constructed trick during the turn, I believe it’s actually during the pledge that the true magic and success of the trick is solidified. During the pledge is where we, the spectator – the victim, if you will – swears a silent oath to ourselves and the magician to volunteer ourselves to be deceived. We make a promise to be open, wide open to the possibility of magic even though our minds know it’s just an illusion. Without that willingness, there is no magic that would ever happen before our eyes and therefore “magic” is merely our ability to allow ourselves to be prepped, stroked, guided, and willingly manipulated.To fully and completely walk Ripper Street is to pledge yourself to the medium of melodrama and leave all that would block the magic of the genre behind. In doing so – in stripping yourself naked – you are set to receive whatever message the artists wish to convey upon the canvas of who you are. The message – the turn – can proceed forward through its extraordinary execution and you can be changed by the experience.
I could spend another 10 pages writing about the following themes that clearly arose out of episode one of Ripper Street. These are subjects I have taught and lectured on for years …
- The Misuse Of Technology : From Cameras to Computers to Guns
- Horrible Beauty, Pleasurable Pain, and Other Oxymorons
- Art vs Obscenity : The Age Old Argument Waged by Simian Cowards
- Sexual Evolution and The Industrial Revolution : A Marriage
- Technophobia and the Rise of Spiritualism in Modern Society
- Documentary Duty vs Accountability : The Suicide Of Kevin Carter
… but I’m not going to. I’m not that kind of teacher anymore and don’t want to be – not for mundanes. Not for those that need such things laid out for them with bullet points and puerile language. Not for those that have spent time attacking Ripper Street or any other multi-leveled pieces of media because they are incapable of accepting something that challenges their deluded perceptions of the world and of themselves. Such people do not want to be changed or touched by deeper lessons within the magic of melodrama.
Did You Pass The Test?
I started out by saying that episode one of Ripper Street was ultimately a test of the audience’s character. The success or failure of this test can be determined really simply in the understanding – or lack there of – of one line; one definitive line of dialog at the pinnacle of the episode that separates the ascended from the mundane. If you are truly evolved or capable of evolution then you do not merely understand or accept this line, but you actually feel it, agree with it, and know that nothing else matters.
Detective Inspector Edmund Reid has a solid character and a vision of the world that extends far beyond just himself. He refuses to be bound by the past, by fear, or by ignorance. He seeks truth and evidence and logical realities surrounding the most horrible and inconceivable acts. He looks into darkness but does not fear it because he carries with him his own light. But where Reid is superior to 99% of the population is in his focused attention on the LARGER picture despite how many other secondary details emerge to distract him.
Can most people say that about themselves? I highly doubt it.
This episode of Ripper Street exists to facilitate a deeper understanding of others, of history, and of the pain, passion, and madness associated with creation. It does not exist, and was not labored over with love and dedication, to incite you to condemn the content, or post-judge the past (fictional or factual), through projections of your pathetic limitations in the present.
