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.

A QHQ?

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I got a little behind this week (from what I heard in class yesterday, I'm not the only one, and our first checkpoint is next Friday!), so I'm doing two entries in one day.  This one is supposed to be a Question-Hypothesis-Question, and (according to the assignment page) "the first question should be whatever initial research question you've formulated. The hypothesis is what you think the answer is and why you think that. Once you have your hypothesis, you should be able to tell what the next question you have about the topic is."  I'm not sure how this will work out.
My first question was "is the Ritchie/Downey Sherlock Holmes the Arthur Conan Doyle Sherlock Holmes, or is it a serious distortion?"  Now, my hypothesis.  From what I've read so far, the R/D SH actually fits ACD's SH in a lot of ways.  The big difference I'm seeing has to do with the presentation of SH as a man of action, and a really quirky one at that.  Is that a distortion?  Maybe, maybe not.  I've been reading "The Six Napoleons," and in it Holmes and Watson are constantly on the move, going all over London (from the best to the worst and back again) to ask questions.  So, there's a lot of that kind of action.  I'm also thinking that SH -- or Conan Doyle -- is always secretive about his background.  We never find out much about how he came to be a detective or where he grew up.  His brother Mycroft doesn't turn up in the early stories (I think, but I'll have to check that), and when he does, he's kind of mysterious, too.  In the stories, the focus is always on the mystery at hand, and description of SH is doled out in small details here and there as they occur to Watson (who is usually the narrator).  The film can't help but provide lots of information, since the audience is seeing everything (well, almost everything) of Holmes, and all the visuals suggest many things about SH.  For example, the way he dresses is obvious in a film, but in the stories, his clothing is described most often when he is in disguise.  I also think that the Holmes of the stories is of a higher class than in the film, but I'll think more about that later.  So, I guess that the film is not a serious distortion, but it does have a point of view that is different from a very conservative reading of the stories.

And that leads me to the last question:  Is Sherlock Holmes an action hero?  I ask this because that is the thrust of the film and it appears that the stories support that idea.  Now I suppose I need to begin thinking about what an action hero really is.  

A Fifteen-Minute Free Write

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According to the assignment, this week I’m supposed to do a 15-minute free write to get “everything I know or think I know” about my topic down on paper. I’m not wild about free writing; I always feel like an idiot when I look at it afterwards. Here goes.



Sherlock Holmes relies on logic and deduction. He knows a lot of strange things about different subjects that come in handy. I remember that in one of the stories I read, he talks about knowing where a bit of cigar ash came from because he wrote a monograph about tobacco (what’s a monograph, anyway?). He wears a deerstalker cap. He sometimes uses a bloodhound named Toby to track a criminal. He lives with Dr. Watson (before the doctor gets married) at 221B Baker Street. Their landlady is Mrs. Hudson. He plays the violin when he is thinking, and he smokes a pipe. He also uses cocaine in a 7 percent solution (what that means, in terms of strength, I have no idea, but I guess that the people reading it when Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was writing the stories would have understood). Watson is an educated man, has served in the military, and sometimes carries a handgun. Holmes does not carry a gun.
Think, Rhonda, think!
“Elementary, my dear Watson”—I seem to remember my dad telling me that this isn’t in the stories. I’ve seen the old black-and-white movies with Basil Rathbone; Dr. Watson is a goofy old man in those and usually kind of bumbling. He mostly gets in the way, and he’s the comic relief, I guess. My dad likes the BBC tv series, I think it’s from the 1980s, with Jeremy Brett. I think he’s kind of creepy, but he makes that work for the character. His Sherlock Holmes is very enigmatic. He keeps everything as secretly as possible. I guess my favorite movie Holmes is the one from The Hound of the Baskervilles, the British one, could be the 1960s, with Peter Cushing. Actually, he reminds me of Rathbone and Brett. They all have similar faces. And now that I think of it, the kid in Young Sherlock Holmes has that kind of face, too. A narrow, hard face with a prominent nose, they all look like their skin is kind of close to their skulls, if you know what I mean. Weird. Robert Downey Jr, on the other hand, has a much softer looking face, and he is built differently. I bet that he has to work hard to keep his weight down. So, there’s one difference.
The Dr. Watson in the new film is different in one interesting way—he actually gets mad at SH. The others sometimes became exasperated, but they seemed to regard Holmes as if he were a superior life form or something, like they don’t have a right to get angry at him. The new Watson seems to be angry at Holmes repeatedly. I need to see the film again!



Can’t think of anything else. Can’t think of anything else. Waiting for an idea. The dog that didn’t bark, and that was the strange thing. Which story is that from?


15 minutes are up. Yay!