Of Baudelaire and Holmes: Ennui in
Contemporary Culture
What caught my attention was the TV commercial: Robert Downey, Jr.,
hair out of place, naked to the waist, fists clenched. I stopped what I was doing
and watched the ad unfold. I didn’t need to see the entire movie to realize, on the
basis of a fragment from one of the scenes, what director Guy Ritchie had done
with Sherlock Holmes. He had made a movie, titled Sherlock Holmes, that
represented one more small but inevitable step in what Harold Bloom referred to
years ago as “the closing of the American mind.” Yes, I did see the movie in
which the usually sedentary Holmes becomes an action figure whose ferocity
and fighting ability make him a match for Spartacus and Beowulf. Of course,
Ritchie is simply following a formula: take out the cerebral stuff and go with the
action. What is it, I wondered, that accounts for this phenomenon: turning
literary figures into action heroes in movies that sacrifice plot for spectacle? The
answer would have to go beyond the audience’s desire to be entertained and
touch upon certain underlying factors—social, psychological, spiritual—that
might help explain America’s addiction to everything from reality TV shows, in
which participants are often required to do and eat disgusting things, to online
gambling and pornography, to films like the recent Sherlock Holmes. Is there, I
wondered, some kind of sickness at work here?
In Ritchie’s film, the plot involves a conflict between Sherlock Holmes and
Lord Underwood, a satanic figure working in the employ of the infamous
Professor Moriarty, whom we never really see in the film. In the opinions of
Guy Ritchie and actors Robert Downey, Jr., and Jude Law, the film returns us to
the real Holmes that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle intended. Of course, the film does
no such thing. What Ritchie does give us, in place of a story in which the
world’s greatest detective has figured out the crime even before his client leaves
the room, is a film so packed with thrills that, at times, the underlying structure
seems ready to crack. In place of the real Holmes, Ritchie has given us a
protagonist who is as good with his fists as he is with his mind. Consider the
expertly choreographed pit-fighting scene into which Ritchie has incorporated
elements that, to the viewer, allude to images in his or her own mental
landscape. Naked from the waist up, Holmes is in a pit facing a larger opponent.
After seeing Irene Adler among the spectators, Holmes announces that he quits,
and it is just as he turns his back to leave the pit that his opponent, not satisfied
with this easy victory, strikes Holmes from behind. Something in Holmes’ brain
suddenly kicks in, and Holmes quickly determines, in specific step-by-step
detail, how he is going to destroy his opponent. After this calculation, England’s
greatest detective totally incapacitates his adversary, exactly as planned.
The equivalent of this scene in our own world is cage fighting—two males,
with little to protect their fists, engage in an almost no-holds-barred fight; this