The Misanthrope's Corner.(comments on the film 'Riding in Cars with Boys,' and on Jack the Ripper)(Review)

We have an emergency. I compiled a sheaf of notes and file-named them Terror3.NR, but faced with the prospect of turning them into a column, I suddenly found that I couldn't go on. Writing three columns in a row about Sept. 11 is like listening to the Three Tenors. It's two tenors too many, or as George Eliot put it: "much of a muchness."

So, you're going to have to take potluck because I invented a new approach to the essay: I decided to open the newspaper at random and write about the first thing I saw that wasn't about terrorism.

I admit I cheated a little, immediately discarding the Business and Sports sections, but when I picked up Style I squeezed my eyes shut, stuck my finger indiscriminately into the pages, and yanked them apart. When I opened my eyes, the first thing I saw were two movie reviews.

Riding in Cars with Boys stars Drew Barrymore, the acting profession's collateral damage, and is based on Beverly Donofrio's coming-of-age memoir of the same name. It just so happens that I reviewed the book, but if you think that's going to get this show on the road, guess again. I've reviewed countless other books just like it, and I never could tell one from the other. Comprising the Funky Feminism school of growth-through-humping, their standard theme is How the '60s Liberated My Personhood, and their titles all sound alike (e.g., Rosemary Daniell's Sleeping with Soldiers). I pretty much panned the whole genre, which is why editors kept assigning them to me. I would get a phone call and the editor would say, "Here's one you can have some fun with," which is lit-crit code for "I know you're going to hate it."

The movie reviewer said that Riding in Cars with Boys lacks "the honesty and grit" of the book, but I don't remember any honesty and grit. In fact, I don't remember anything about it at all except that I panned it. I read the movie review with great care but nothing in it rang a bell; my mind is a total blank, so chalk up one shaggy-dog story for my new approach to the essay.

The other movie review was From Hell, about Jack the Ripper. Now we're cooking. . . . I could fill a whole issue with commentary on this subject.

It's doubtful if the crimes would have become so legendary without the catchy moniker. Nicknaming is an Anglo-Saxon art form born of our need to erect jaunty barriers against emotion, a case in point being the number of WASP men who call their wives "Dutch." The Ripper's nickname invariably gets lost in translation. When the French dramatized the story they called him "Jacques L' Eventreur," which simply doesn't do it. It sounds very fey and very French, a murderer out of a puppet show. I don't know what the Germans call him, but I can imagine. They probably throw together one of their verb-trailing compounds that translates as "Jack who the throats of women who their bodies to men sell cuts." If, as is generally thought, the murderer invented the name ...