lj rename + thoughts on Sherlock Holmes
lj rename tiems! I've been wanting to rename to fanbeatsman for ages, but have only now got enough cash lying around that I don't feel bad coughing up ~£10 to do so. There's nothing particularly deep behind the name - it's a quote from one of my favourite bits of one of my favourite Futurama episodes; it sounds quite neat as a handle; and it works rather appropriately on another level :D
I wanted to post about Sherlock Holmes, too, although not really one of my usual tl;dr reviews - if only because, well, I just enjoyed it, in a relatively uncomplicated way. I saw it as part of a fun afternoon out with very dear friends, in Liverpool ONE's swish and comfy new(ish) Odeon, full of meatball sub yet still with pick'n'mix on one arm of the chair and popcorn on the other, and generally had a most pleasant Big Winter Film Experience. That's not to say that it wasn't daft as a brush at times, flimsy as anything in many respects, and generally nothing extraordinary, but it was satisfying. The acting was always solid and often great; the script was better than you usually get in films like that and gave RDJ et al a lot of good character work to work with; I liked, of course, the Epic Bromance, and I liked the aesthetic of it - I liked seeing a grimy, industrialised fin-de-siecle with ships and coal and steel, the clutter of Holmes's packrat rooms and the grubbiness of the detective work and the forensics, as a change from the gaslight-and-frockcoat elegance of something like Dorian Grey. It entertained me for two-and-a-bit hours, and I'd be happy enough to watch it again for the exact same purpose.
What I found thought-provoking about it, then, isn't so much how it operates as a text, but more the fact of its existence, I suppose. As an adaptation, I find it veeery interesting, because although I can't speak with any authority (or knowledge at all, really) on Conan Doyle's novels, it seems to me that the film works (and, more importantly, is marked - look at the title, that plain "Sherlock Holmes") less as an adaptation of those texts and more by tapping an understanding of Sherlock Holmes as a character and the basic trappings of Holmes&Watson narratives that circulates within the collective cultural consciousness. Which is interesting to me from two perspectives - firstly, given that a major chunk of my thesis is discussing how contemporary transmedia fiction is structured by and relies upon creating cult figures that circulate in this way, it's interesting to examine an embryonic new franchise (which you can't tell me Sherlock Holmes isn't hoping to be) working with characters and narrative patterns or tropes that are already major cultural reference points. Secondly, I'm fascinated by the generic transformation - that Sherlock Holmes is very much an action film, rather than a detective film. I'm still working through what I want to make of both those things, but it's food for thought, at least.
As is, for me, the bromance. What gets me about it isn't just that it was homoromantic as all get out, it's that it very clearly knew it was - it's set up to explicitly and deliberately pit the closeness of Holmes and Watson's relationship against the closeness of Watson and Mary's relationship! And the fact that the latter is positioned as conflicting with and taking away from the former suggests similarity and common ground between them - something that I think Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law put a lot into their interactions to suggest that Holmes and Watson were conscious of, however uncomfortably, on some level. Which, idk, I think is pretty fucking huge. To see a filmmaker like Guy Ritchie, in a blockbuster action film like Sherlock Holmes, recognise even slightly what queer theorists and slash fandom has been saying for so long now - that there's a very very fine line between queerness and the kind of intense male homosociality you get in so much mainstream media - I think that's fascinating. But you have to wonder, well, what happens now? Will anything? Sherlock Holmes is one sex scene short of a slash fic (except that Sherlock Holmes has one thing that many slash fics and the source texts they're slashing lack): both male leads have unavoidable, believable chemistry with comparatively awesome female characters; are we going to see any mainstream films that do the work of slash writers for them and actually push that kind of relationship a step further? Or what might be the result of just more fully recognising the potential for romance and intimacy and intensity in fictional male friendships (or rivalries! or was I the only one who got Holmes/Rookwood vibes?), even while keeping them ultimately platonic? Are we going to see shifts in the fictional parameters of masculinity? Idk. But it would be kind of awesome if we did.
Argh, that turned out a bit rambly and possibly lacking in sense. Today is one of those days when I can't get my brain to sort my thoughts out and turn them into words. These are frustrating and upsetting days, and make trying to put in a decent day of work very difficult. I'm not feeling too guilty, though, as I was megaproductive yesterday and Monday (I now has a baby theory! a conceptual and analytical framework that I built all by myself; I am very proud), so hopefully I can just pick myself back up tomorrow.
The weather atm is making a liar out of me when I said we don't really get proper snow where I live; it's died off now, but yesterday afternoon it looked like somebody was bursting the world's supply of feather pillows in the clouds. Thick blizzards of big fat floaty swirly snowflakes! Which Hazel and I went out for a walk in yesterday, which was all fun and games and magical winter wonderland silence for as long as we had our backs to the wind. Then it was snow in eyes and impending frostbite and the encrusting of our coats and hats and scarves and gloves with snow to the point that we looked like yetis. Meanwhile, everywhere was even more magical today in the sunshine, as long as you stayed off any kind of road or commonly used pavement, where thanks to the local council's failure to provide ANY GRIT AT ALL the snow has become lethal impacted ice. I'm remembering that I really sort of hate snow, in a lot of ways.
OTOH, see how pretty!
I wanted to post about Sherlock Holmes, too, although not really one of my usual tl;dr reviews - if only because, well, I just enjoyed it, in a relatively uncomplicated way. I saw it as part of a fun afternoon out with very dear friends, in Liverpool ONE's swish and comfy new(ish) Odeon, full of meatball sub yet still with pick'n'mix on one arm of the chair and popcorn on the other, and generally had a most pleasant Big Winter Film Experience. That's not to say that it wasn't daft as a brush at times, flimsy as anything in many respects, and generally nothing extraordinary, but it was satisfying. The acting was always solid and often great; the script was better than you usually get in films like that and gave RDJ et al a lot of good character work to work with; I liked, of course, the Epic Bromance, and I liked the aesthetic of it - I liked seeing a grimy, industrialised fin-de-siecle with ships and coal and steel, the clutter of Holmes's packrat rooms and the grubbiness of the detective work and the forensics, as a change from the gaslight-and-frockcoat elegance of something like Dorian Grey. It entertained me for two-and-a-bit hours, and I'd be happy enough to watch it again for the exact same purpose.
What I found thought-provoking about it, then, isn't so much how it operates as a text, but more the fact of its existence, I suppose. As an adaptation, I find it veeery interesting, because although I can't speak with any authority (or knowledge at all, really) on Conan Doyle's novels, it seems to me that the film works (and, more importantly, is marked - look at the title, that plain "Sherlock Holmes") less as an adaptation of those texts and more by tapping an understanding of Sherlock Holmes as a character and the basic trappings of Holmes&Watson narratives that circulates within the collective cultural consciousness. Which is interesting to me from two perspectives - firstly, given that a major chunk of my thesis is discussing how contemporary transmedia fiction is structured by and relies upon creating cult figures that circulate in this way, it's interesting to examine an embryonic new franchise (which you can't tell me Sherlock Holmes isn't hoping to be) working with characters and narrative patterns or tropes that are already major cultural reference points. Secondly, I'm fascinated by the generic transformation - that Sherlock Holmes is very much an action film, rather than a detective film. I'm still working through what I want to make of both those things, but it's food for thought, at least.
As is, for me, the bromance. What gets me about it isn't just that it was homoromantic as all get out, it's that it very clearly knew it was - it's set up to explicitly and deliberately pit the closeness of Holmes and Watson's relationship against the closeness of Watson and Mary's relationship! And the fact that the latter is positioned as conflicting with and taking away from the former suggests similarity and common ground between them - something that I think Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law put a lot into their interactions to suggest that Holmes and Watson were conscious of, however uncomfortably, on some level. Which, idk, I think is pretty fucking huge. To see a filmmaker like Guy Ritchie, in a blockbuster action film like Sherlock Holmes, recognise even slightly what queer theorists and slash fandom has been saying for so long now - that there's a very very fine line between queerness and the kind of intense male homosociality you get in so much mainstream media - I think that's fascinating. But you have to wonder, well, what happens now? Will anything? Sherlock Holmes is one sex scene short of a slash fic (except that Sherlock Holmes has one thing that many slash fics and the source texts they're slashing lack): both male leads have unavoidable, believable chemistry with comparatively awesome female characters; are we going to see any mainstream films that do the work of slash writers for them and actually push that kind of relationship a step further? Or what might be the result of just more fully recognising the potential for romance and intimacy and intensity in fictional male friendships (or rivalries! or was I the only one who got Holmes/Rookwood vibes?), even while keeping them ultimately platonic? Are we going to see shifts in the fictional parameters of masculinity? Idk. But it would be kind of awesome if we did.
Argh, that turned out a bit rambly and possibly lacking in sense. Today is one of those days when I can't get my brain to sort my thoughts out and turn them into words. These are frustrating and upsetting days, and make trying to put in a decent day of work very difficult. I'm not feeling too guilty, though, as I was megaproductive yesterday and Monday (I now has a baby theory! a conceptual and analytical framework that I built all by myself; I am very proud), so hopefully I can just pick myself back up tomorrow.
The weather atm is making a liar out of me when I said we don't really get proper snow where I live; it's died off now, but yesterday afternoon it looked like somebody was bursting the world's supply of feather pillows in the clouds. Thick blizzards of big fat floaty swirly snowflakes! Which Hazel and I went out for a walk in yesterday, which was all fun and games and magical winter wonderland silence for as long as we had our backs to the wind. Then it was snow in eyes and impending frostbite and the encrusting of our coats and hats and scarves and gloves with snow to the point that we looked like yetis. Meanwhile, everywhere was even more magical today in the sunshine, as long as you stayed off any kind of road or commonly used pavement, where thanks to the local council's failure to provide ANY GRIT AT ALL the snow has become lethal impacted ice. I'm remembering that I really sort of hate snow, in a lot of ways.
OTOH, see how pretty!