"Dr. Toffee" breaks in to say a few words about actors and directors who can't keep their bloody mouths shut!

Just got back from a high-speed trip to Walmart to get the DVD. I raced back home, made a cup of tea, and popped the disc in the machine, starting the making-of featurette, “Reinventing Sherlock Holmes.” It has to be said: Guy Ritchie, Robert Downey Jr., and Jude Law are a bunch of WRETCHED GITS!!! Here I’ve been going along nicely, having my fictional student work on an argument of their film’s validity as an adaptation, AND THEY DECIDE THAT THEY HAVE TO MOUNT A DEFENSE THEMSELVES! Just who the hell do they think they are?



I’m sorry to tell you this, gentlemen, but when you create a work of art and send it out into the world, it IS your statement of its validity. Moreover, it’s a big hit, so why do you care that it’s being criticized for the very thing that’s making it fresh and exciting? You have probably sent a number of filmgoers running off to bookstores and libraries to read the original stories, for which I applaud you (not to mention your READ poster for the American Library Association), and they will all discover, as Rhonda has, that you are not “reinventing” the characters so much as you are giving them their full context to a depth that has not previously been imagined. And having done that so successfully, why did you feel the need to make trouble for Rhonda (and me)? Now I have to advise her on her revision, and I’m especially glad that she is not a real student, because I’ve had any number of them who, when advised that they needed to do a global revision thanks to a piece of material that was unavailable to them during their research, had hysterics and/or dropped the class only a few weeks before the end of term. You wretched, wretched men.

Back to Rhonda.

Why I'm Losing My Mind

Well, it's not because I don't have enough material to draft my paper, or because I waited too long to start, or because I haven't given it enough thought.  I'm pretty sure that I feel like I'm going crazy because I've never written a paper like this one before.  The peer review is Friday (today's Sunday), and this entry is supposed to be about problems I'm having.  The way it's going so far is that I keep thinking of stuff I needed to put in my outline but didn't, so every time I finish one task (for lack of a better word), I have to go back and put something else ahead of what I just wrote.  In other words, this thing is growing in every possible direction, and it may be totally out of control.

The one "task" that's given me the most trouble is defining a term:  action hero.  I guess that if I knew more about action/adventure stories in the 1800s, I'd be able to come up with a more scholarly definition that would take that into account.  As it is, I'm basing the definition on a couple of sources (the Tasker article and the one about Gladiator), and I think/hope I've finally got it to work.

The argument itself is shaping up okay, thanks to that Slate.com article.  I'm refuting it point by point.  My conclusion sucks.  That's the next big problem.

Speaking of peer reviews, my feed just popped up a batch of articles about a group of academics "corrupting" the process of academic publishing.  Take a look:

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A Plan of Action

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I'm getting a jump on next week; I just checked the course site, and Toffee has posted the journal prompt for week 9 of the semester.  She wants us to talk about how we "want to compose" our essays.  This is kind of an interesting idea.  I've never written about what I plan to write, unless you count outlining, which she says not to do for this entry.

I think I actually started doing this in the last couple of entries.  I selected Nathan Heller's review/article about the film because it's representative of all the reviews that complained about Sherlock Holmes being too action-oriented to be faithful to the Conan Doyle stories.  I'm thinking now that the point I brought up last time about Watson might just explain the difference; I talked to my father about it, and he agrees (gave me a few good ideas, too).  In all but a couple of the stories, Watson is the narrator, and we see everything from his point of view.  For a former army officer, Watson is also pretty stuffy and judgmental -- a real Victorian, according to my dad -- and it's clear in the stories I've read so far that he doesn't tell us everything he knows that we would like to know, too.  That bit I quoted from "The Musgrave Ritual" is a good example, and I think I'll use that story as my main comparison with the film.  He also brushes over a lot of action, especially travel.  SH really gets around, according to Watson, but the doctor just says that they went from point A to point B (and sometimes the whole rest of the alphabet) without giving any of the details of the trips or describing the places they travel through.  The film, however, does NOT use Watson's point of view, and now that I think of it, I guess I've never seen a SH film that does (and thanks to my dad, I've seen plenty).   I read something in one of my sources, which I guess I'll have to find now, about Watson being an "unreliable narrator."  That seems to sum up the problem I see.  He has his own personality quirks that lead him to criticize Holmes for various things and to praise Holmes for things that he (Watson, that is) approves of.  Watson isn't ever going to talk about things he thinks should not be talked about in public, and he's not going to tell us stuff that he thinks we should already know, like what Mayfair looks like as opposed to Stepney (which he does describe, in "The Six Napoleons"). 

So, it appears that my thesis is being revised already!  I'm not sure how to word it, but it's something like how everything Heller is noting as a deviation from the stories is only a deviation if you believe that Watson's point of view is the only point of view that matters.  Well, this is going to take more thought than I thought it would.

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The Big Deal: Creating New Knowledge

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Yeah, I know I already posted one today, but spring break is almost over (no, I didn't go anywhere.  I'm broke!) and I've got the day off, so I'm catching up with the prompt I skipped last week, which was to analyze the assignment for the research paper.  I keep thinking about what we were told on the first day of class:  the purpose of academic research writing is to create new knowledge.  I'm not really sure how my project is going to do that, although Dr. Toffee says that it is. 

On the assignment sheet, the project is actually called "The Documented Argument Essay," a pretty intimidating name, I think.  Anyway, here's the way I see it.  This is a fairly long essay (minimum 2500 words) for most people, but I'm really gonna have to edit this time;  you may have noticed that I tend to write a lot once I get going.  The essay has to have a few things, I guess to show that we know how to do them, like a bunch of sources and a "survey" of the articles and books on the "issue."  Maybe it's me, but that last word seems kind of important.  The issue isn't the topic, really.  The topic is only part of the deal.  There's also the academic approach.  So, I have to think about my issue, which I think is whether Sherlock Holmes -- which is pretty clearly an action flick -- is a distortion of the character Conan Doyle wrote about.  I've got sources on Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and action films, and it looks to me like I have to go over all of that.  The stuff on action films goes to my academic approach, which is "genre criticism," according to Toffee, who says that it's a kind of approach that scholars in film studies use all the time.  My thesis is sort of geared toward talking as much about what makes an action film an action film as it does about Sherlock Holmes.  In fact, I think I'm going to have to open the paper with a definition of action films; some of my film sources should fit in there. 
And what about the argument?  The sheet says the paper has to have "a well-developed argument that appeals to logic rather than emotion (or anything else!), considers counterarguments, and contains no serious logical fallacies."  I feel some pretty serious confidence about this requirement, mainly because I have a target to argue against in that Slate.com review I talked about in my last post.  Once I've got my definition of an action film set down I need to do some brainstorming about the points I need to make about the stories and about the film.  I think I mentioned before that some of the stuff in the film comes right out of the stories (for one example, there's a scene early in the film where SH is shooting at the wall in his room, and it's drawn from one of the stories, "The Musgrave Ritual."  Watson is complaining about what a slob SH is, and he says,
        " . . . pistol practice should distinctly be an open-air pastime; and when Holmes in one of his queer humours would sit in an armchair, with his hair-trigger and a hundred Boxer cartridges, and proceed to adorn the opposite wall with a patriotic V.R. [for Victoria Regina] done in bulletpocks, I felt strongly that neither the atmosphere nor the appearance of our room was improved by it.").

The main difference I see between the stories and the movie is that Watson, as written by Conan Doyle, tends to describe things rather than action, as above.  He doesn't tell us what he does while Holmes is "adorning" the wall, but based on his earlier complaints, it seems that we are supposed to know that Watson was probably trying to get Holmes to stop.  And, it looks like I've stopped analyzing the assignment, doesn't it?  Now that I think about it, I guess I'm trying to think of counterarguments.

The one logical fallacy that I'm worried about is overgeneralizing.  It can be hard to tell when you are doing it; at least it is for me, but since I know I do this sometimes, I'll be extra careful.  What burns me right now is that I'm pretty sure Lisa already has her draft done.


  

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One item checked off the to-do list!

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I can't believe it myself, but my annotated bibliography is finished.  Fifteen entries, and as far as I can tell, all correctly MLA in format.  I'm not really happy with my working thesis, but hey, it's just a working thesis, right?  It's not supposed to be perfect yet.  I went with "Although much has been made of the action in Sherlock Holmes, the film actually adheres to the characterization of Holmes and the level of action found in the original stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle."  Kinda wordy, isn't it?  It's not a breathtakingly argumentative thesis either.  Maybe Dr. Toffee will have some idea how I can spice it up. 

My plan for the next stage -- the draft of the "documented argument essay" (i.e., the research paper) -- is to argue against the article below, from Slate.com.  We'll see how that goes over.


 

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The Man Who Created Sherlock Holmes

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Believe it or not, I just read an enormous biography of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and I really didn't have to!  I was just looking it over -- checking out the introduction, the table of contents, and the index, just like Dr. Toffee said to do -- and I thought I would read a few pages, and then suddenly it was an hour later and I'd gone through a few chapters.  I was hooked.

The book is The Man Who Created Sherlock Holmes:  The Life and Times of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, by Andrew Lycett, who has also written biographies of Rudyard Kipling, Ian Fleming, and Dylan Thomas.  Dr. Toffee pointed out to me that Lycett is an historian, which she seems to think is unfortunate, although she liked the book, too (turns out she's into 19th century Brit-Lit).  The problem, as she explained it to me, is that when a non-lit person writes a biography of an author, there is less about the individual works of the author, and I'd have to say that's true about this book.  He mentions most of them, but he doesn't do any literary criticism, beyond a kind of review.  I mean, he says whether a story or novel is good work or not, but he doesn't do any real analysis.  On the other hand, I learned a lot about life in Conan Doyle's era, especially about "spiritualism," which was an obsession with him from early adulthood (this fascinated my dad, who has borrowed the book to read himself.  He thought that the spiritualism was something Conan Doyle got into in his old age).  

I discovered something that disappointed me, though.  You remember that I'm a big movie buff?  Well, when I was a kid, my dad rented a movie and made me watch it with him.  It was Fairy Tale: A True Story, about the incident of the Cottingley fairies (two girls who lived in the country took photographs of "fairies," or so it seemed); in the movie, ACD (played by Peter O'Toole.  A great actor -- he should have played Dumbledore) and Harry Houdini (played by Harvey Keitel!) meet them and try to get at the truth, which in the film is that there really are fairies.  Thanks to Lycett, I now know the "true story," which is that neither man met the girls (one of whom was 16-- in the movie, they're both around age 10 or so), and they faked the pictures with cutouts from a book.  When you see the pictures, you can't believe anybody bought them as being real.  

   

See what I mean?  Anyway, I loved that movie (hey, I wasn't even 10 years old myself, I don't think).  The sad reality is that ACD believed the photos were real BEFORE HE EVER SAW THEM! 
Another sad reality is that most of what I just spent a couple of days reading is not going to find its way into my research paper, but I'm not sorry I read it.

Body Talk

I've been working my way through the Tasker book (Tasker, Yvonne, Ed. Action and Adventure Cinema. London: Routledge, 2004.), and it's really interesting.  I can already see that there are ideas I can apply to my project, even though -- of course -- they are writing about different movies.  One of those ideas has to do with bodies.  Apparently Tasker previously wrote a book about what she calls "muscular cinema" (she's a Brit), talking about the action films of the 1980s, when Stallone and Schwarzenegger were the big stars.  It's easy to see where she's coming from; just think of Rambo, and you can see a picture of Stallone where he's all sweaty and bulging with muscles.  Things changed when Die Hard was released, since Bruce Willis is obviously not of the same physical type.  
About half the authors of the articles in this book refer to the body issue.  One of the articles I like so far is by Steve Neale, titled "Maximus Melodramaticus:  Masculinity, Masochism and White Male Paranoia in Contemporary Hollywood Cinema."
Unfortunately, Neale writes in a pretty dense style, from my point of view, at least.  Here's an example:
"This distinctly fetishistic adulation surrounding Maximus/Crowe's quasi-bestial masculine persona belies a return of the repressed:  a nostalgic longing for a mythic masculine essence, a phallic presence  rather than a bricolage of 'decorative' and commodified signifiers.  Of course, this is exacerbated by the generic throwback to the 1950s epic and the national masculine certitude it worked to represent" (Neale 244).
See what I mean?  Quasi-bestial?   Bricolage?
Anyway, I'm trying to figure out where Robert Downey Jr. fits in the grand scheme of things in the action hero timeline.  My problem has to do with a movie of his that I saw a long time ago, Restoration.  There's a scene in that film where RD is naked -- with feathers -- and at one point he is walking away from the camera.  Far from being a hard body (even as hard as Willis), he's pretty flabby.  Not fat, but completely untoned, if you know what I mean.  And every time I see him in a film nowadays, I have that mental picture.  I wish I'd never seen it.