Literary Repudiation in The Hughes Brothers’ From Hell (2000)

I recently rewatched the Hughes Brothers’ production of Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s From Hell. I have a greater understanding of why Alan Moore doesn’t trust movie directors. The movie completely eviscerates the central obsessions of the comic: Gull’s psychogeographic lecture about the hidden histories of London, the encounters with William Blake, the game the comic plays with literary and political history, the intricate way it enters into the occult world of the Freemasons. Each of these elements are either completely deleted in the movie, or so degraded that they mock the care Moore takes in placing them in his graphic novel. The literary elements are almost erased entirely, and replaced with halfhearted references to Shakespeare. When Aberdine (played not by a frumpy old 40 year old as he was portrayed in the comics but by sexy Johnny Depp) overdoses on laudanum and absinthe at the end of the film (!!), his partner plays says sweetly “Good night, sweet prince. And flights of angels see thee to thy rest.”

So, why replace Blake with Shakespeare? I argue that Shakespeare’s appearance in the Hughes film and Blake’s disappearance stages a battle between academic literary culture and the mass culture of the spectacle that is definitely part of Moore’s comic but that becomes–perhaps unintentionally–the defining feature of the film. In the comic, Moore depicts Blake as a radical druidic iconoclast literally weighed down by the masculine rationality (and ready literary respectability) of Daniel Defoe. Defoe’s grave is depicted in the book with an obelisk which casts a shadow over Blake’s grave everyday at dusk. Sir William Gull, who in both the movie and the film is the alter ego of Jack the Ripper, laughs with glee “The obelisk is phallic, for the Sun’s a symbol of the male principle; of man’s ascendancy. It also symbolizes man’s left brain, our rational Apollonian side and yet, each sunset casts its unforgiving shadow ‘cross the grave of England’s greatest Holy Fool” (4;12). The fool, in this case is Blake. During Gull’s life, Blake was only beginning to be recognized by the literary community. The Pre-Raphaelites, Algernon Swinburne, and W.B. Yeats all expressed interest in Blake, but each of them had to fight hard against an establishment that thought him mad. Blake’s literary place in the comic is to act as a foil to Gull’s aristocratic evil, to suggest that there are forms of poetry which–while not completely accepted by the literary community–still maintained a certain form of literary value.

Shakespeare, in the Hughes film, provides a literary counterpoint to the depictions of the mass media. Each death is a media spectacle. In one scene, police officers impotently attempt to mask one of the bodies from a crowd of onlookers by holding up a linen sheet. In another scene, Aberdine and his partner appear disgusted as newspaper cameras take shots of the dead bodies. The attitude of the newspapers toward the Ripper murders foreshadow the media culture of the twentieth century with its obsession over serial killers, dead celebrities and murder.

Shakespeare is better known to American audiences than William Blake as a signifier of the literary. When Aberdine’s partner mouths off lines of Shakespeare and allusions to his plays, he is enacting a popular repudiation of mass culture using a popular conception of what signifies literature. Literature is no longer a secret struggle between mystical and occultic forces as it is in Moore’s graphic novel, but rather a way for the film’s popular audience to reject the media culture that many of them, nevertheless, might indulge in every night.

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~ by tharmas on March 10, 2008.