It's a Kind of Magic: Situating Nostalgia for Technological Progress and The

IT’S A KIND OF MAGIC IT’S A KIND OF MAGIC: SITUATING NOSTALGIA FOR TECHNOLOGICAL PROGRESS AND THE OCCULT IN GUY RITCHIE’S SHERLOCK HOLMES MARKUS REISENLEITNER | YORK UNIVERSITY Guy Ritchie’s recent blockbuster success Le succès récent du blockbuster de Guy with a revisionist Sherlock Holmes is Ritchie revisitant la figure de Sherlock the latest in a series of popular films and Holmes s’inscrit dans une lignée récente fiction to have reinvigorated a nostalgic de films et de récits populaires qui ont imaginary of London’s past that places revivifié un imaginaire nostalgique du the former capital of the Empire at the passé londonien dans lequel le centre de crossroads of a persistent Manichean l’ancien empire britannique se trouve au battle between empiricist-driven croisement d’un conflit manichéen entre technological progress and traditions of un progrès scientifico-technologique occult knowledge supposedly submerged et les traditions d’un savoir occulte in the 17th century yet continuing to supposément enfouis dans les siècles trickle into the heart of the Empire précédents mais qui continue à s’insinuer from its colonies. By tracing some au cœur de l’empire à partir de ses of these historical layers sedimented colonies. En retraçant certaines de ces into 21st-century popular imaginaries couches historiques dans les recréations of London’s past, this paper explores contemporaines du Londres impérial, the mechanisms of popular culture’s cet article explore les mécanismes de production of nostalgia that mediate production de la nostalgie dans la culture public memories and histories and suture populaire en tant qu’ils font le pont them to the imaginary urban geographies entre la mémoire publique et la mémoire that constitute the space of the global historique en rattachant celles-ci à un city through its metonymic sites and its imaginaire de la géographie urbaine qui materialized histories. pour sa part pointe vers la ville globale d’aujourd’hui. IMAGINATIONS • 5 - 1 • 2014 • 122 REISENLEITNER In the 21st-century competition between imaginary of London as a global city. I global cities to establish themselves as argue that this imaginary has become central, London has emerged as a clear the basis of a nostalgia for the British front-runner. London has been cementing Empire, one that mediates public its position, asserted since the opening memories and histories and sutures them up of its stock market in 1986, not only to the imaginary urban geographies by economic and political decisions but that constitute the space of the global also through a slew of representational city through its metonymic sites and practices, most recently through the its materialized histories. I will explore global media spectacle of the opening of how cinematic techniques, specifically the 2012 Olympic games (Reisenleitner the possibilities of computer-generated 2014). The very contemporary imaginary images, negotiate the visual memories of London’s centrality to a global system of of London as a centre of empire in Guy urban nodes has routinely been buttressed Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes (2009). Placing by a particular vision of empire, an the movie in its genre context and almost desperate attempt to create (or re- exploring the layered histories that inform create) the collections and constellations the film’s take on the urban detective of collective memories that would can reveal the constitutive elements that otherwise be rapidly obliterated in the challenge and inform the imaginary of constant need to assert global-city status London’s centrality in contemporary through “nowness,” creative destruction Hollywood-mediated popular culture. and innovation. Mediated memory of empire has been mobilized to provide Policing the Imperial Centre an imagined historical context for the The emergence of popular culture single-minded “branding” campaigns of produced for a mass audience coincides ad agencies, global media spectacles and with the emergence of the modern similar vehicles powered by the engine city during the nineteenth century. of global market fundamentalism, a European and North American hegemonic practice that imposes stability popular culture developed in constant and homogeneity on a space (the urban) dialogue with the profoundly unsettling that, as Steve Pile reminds us, “… cannot experiences of modernity, imperialism, be thought of as having one geography and globalization. The upheavals that and one history” (Pile, Brook, and accompanied urbanization resulted Mooney vii). in new ways of seeing the city as In this article, I explore some of the opaque and potentially dangerous; an historical layers sedimented into 21st- alleged illegibility of the city and the century popular imaginaries of London’s urban masses translated into popular past. I am specifically interested in a fiction as crime and threat associated persistent dichotomy of technology with the city streets and translated vs. occult knowledge that seems to be into the architectural forms of gated intimately connected to the persisting communities, ubiquitous surveillance, 123 • 5 - 1 • 2014 • IMAGINATIONS IT’S A KIND OF MAGIC defensible architecture, and all the other Sue’s histories in the Mysteries of Paris are accoutrements of a city of fear that Mike as responsible for Baron Haussmann’s Davis so masterfully conjures up in City reimagining (and redrawing) of Paris of Quartz (Davis 1990). “Modern” ways as John Fante (Ask the Dust; Dreams of seeing the city, and acting upon the from Bunker Hill) was for Los Angeles’s city, arose with the nineteenth-century “Bunker Hill Renewal Project”—even Los city of industrialism and its immiserated Angeles was, in Orson Welles’s words, working class and resulted in the city “[i]n the beginning […] simply a ‘bright, being seen as a “problem” (similar to guilty place’ without a murderous shadow the emergence of the “environment” or mean street in sight” (Davis 2001, 33). as a problem in the later twentieth Anthony Vidler draws our attention to the century). The necessity of rendering this historical roots of sensitivities that have problematic city—the site of crime and become commonplaces in contemporary illness (often expressed through body popular culture: metaphors)—administrable is predicated The contemporary sensibility that sees on the visibility of the city as an object. the uncanny erupt in empty parking lots While urban planners and reformers were around abandoned or run-down shopping busy re-imagining the city as a cleansed, malls, in the screened trompe d’oeil of controlled and sanitized machine for simulated space, in, that is, the wasted living (Corbusier), working, traffic flow, margins and surface appearances of post- and commerce, the fear of the irruption industrial culture, this sensibility has its of the uncanny into city spaces that defy roots and draws its commonplaces from a planning and description has continued long but essentially modern tradition. Its to speak to the presence of an elusive apparently benign and utterly ordinary other—often a colonial other—in the loci, its domestic and slightly tawdry Western metropolis. Popular genres settings, its ready exploitation of an like detective fiction and film noir already jaded public, all mark it out have created topographies of modern clearly as the heir to a feeling of unease urbanity in which monstrous spaces, first identified in the late eighteenth characterized equally by the danger and century. (Vidler 3) lure they pose for the metropolis, threaten an assumed movement towards a well- This feeling of unease and threat ordered urban rationality, establishing that accompanied the emergence of (at least Western) urbanity as a structure the modern city, and its symbolic metaphorically and literally built on resolution through the re-establishment the (post-)imperialist paranoia about and imposition of a rational order, is the presence/return of the alien and epitomized by the emergence of the figure asserting a desire to establish control over of the urban detective, arguably the most fundamentally unstable spaces—precisely important figure in the history of urban the kind of control that also resulted perception. Like the flâneur—detached, in the disciplining narratives of urban interested, fascinated, trying to make surveillance, statistics and reform. Eugène sense of the city but with what Simmel IMAGINATIONS • 5 - 1 • 2014 • 124 REISENLEITNER described as a blasé attitude (14)—, Detective fiction as “representational the detective has become a privileged forms of solutions to the problems of site of Western urban perception, the social control in a dynamic capitalist solitary (often staunchly middle-class) urban milieu” (Frisby 58) draws attention male figure entitled to move through the to the fact that the meaning of a city is metropolitan maze of illegible, violent and produced as a site of social negotiations dangerous crowds to decipher what needs (which are not private but collective, deciphering in order to tame, appropriate situated practices), “an imaginary space and control. Tony Bennett, drawing created and animated as much by the on Benjamin, reminds us that “the urban representations to be found in development of a position of imaginative novels, films and images as by any actual spectatorial dominance afforded by urban places” (Donald x). detective fiction was accompanied by, and corresponded to, the development of Sherlock Holmes, together with Edgar new mechanisms of surveillance which— Allan Poe’s Dupin, is the archetypal precisely through their bureaucratic detective of the Western metropolis, reduction of individuality to a set of on mission after mission to uphold the knowable traces—rendered the city legible city’s rational order, moving through the to the gaze of power” (215). The urban metropolitan maze of illegible, violent, detective’s way of acting on the city is dangerous and exotic crowds, rationally informed by the superior insight afforded deciphering what is illegible in order by the rationality that distinguishes to establish a “rational” form of order him from the urban crowd while also and control, often violently and through legitimating his exerting violence on the superior physical prowess.

Load more