I have always been (somewhat guiltily)
interested in the stories and psychology behind serial killers and, if the
overstuffed-to-the-point-of-bursting world of true crime entertainment is any
indication, I am far from alone in this fascination. I am not, however, what
you would call an afficionado by any means; I know the names of the monsters
that everyone knows... Dahmer, Bundy, Gacy, Jack. When I saw that Netflix had a
new miniseries titled The Ripper I, naturally, thought it was about the
last of these. What I found instead was the dark tale of the Yorkshire Ripper,
a name I had, for one reason or another, never heard of. I always love learning
about new tales of the nefarious and was therefore intrigued by The Ripper
and its tightly focused narrative.
One
of the things I appreciated the most about the series was how it jumped right
in. There is not much exposition beforehand, and when the backstory of the town
and the grisly events that transpired there are eventually explored, it is
explored briefly and concisely. The pacing is, in other words, quite good. It
is always important to get some background to events such as these, but plenty
of other true crime documentaries tend to overdo it a bit to pad out
excessively long run times. I did not have this problem with The Ripper,
as the societal ills and political climate are essential to the story of the
police and their attempt to hunt down Peter Sutcliffe, not to mention the fact
that the series is only four episodes long.
This
leads me to another aspect that I appreciated: that the story is primarily
concerned with the police, the victims of the Ripper, and (to a lesser extent)
the lamentably sexist society that allowed such a man to thrive in the first
place. Sutcliffe himself is not given much attention when he is eventually
caught, which I also realize might be a big turn-off for people interested in
the macabre details of what it takes to make a monster such as he. Some also
might find issue with the undeniable feminist overtones that the narrative has,
calling the series too political or biased. I did not feel this way about
either hypothetical complaint, as the murders are still the primary focus and
there is an undeniable gender theme to the story of a man who only killed women
and a police force that bungled their response partly because of sexist
assumptions (like assuming that all of the Ripper’s early victims were
prostitutes simply because they were single and impoverished women). As one of
the interviewees says, the goal is to “push him back into the shadows and bring
the women out.” It’s not a bad idea, but I also realize that it’s not what some
people want to see.
All
that being said, the series is not preachy, nor is it an in-depth societal
treatise. This is all just window dressing for a true tale of murder, mayhem,
and missed opportunities. The Ripper is a slightly-better-than average
documentary that, to me, was slightly elevated beyond that because of the fact
that it was conveying information that was new to me. So give it a shot.
The Ripper is now available on Netflix.
This review was first published in The Keizertimes on February 26th, 2021. Visit at http://keizertimes.com/
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