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.

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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. Holmes has city and its less desirable elements. The recently been resurrected in a variety urban detective has come to stand for the of fiction, film and TV adaptations urban planner and the bulldozer conflated that highlight London’s presence on into one, ultimately containing the unruly the global media stage. Guy Ritchie’s cityscape (and the unruly crowd moving 2009 and 2011 blockbuster successes through it) by exerting some form of (Sherlock Holmes and Sherlock Holmes: visual/semiotic control. Detective fiction A Game of Shadows) with a revisionist has come to function as a Sherlock Holmes as a down & dirty Iron Man-like action hero in what set out fantasy of a spectatorial subjectivity to become, according to producer Joel capable of establishing epistemological Silver, “an 1891 Bond film” (a sentiment and aesthetic control over an environment that highlights the connection of the commonly perceived to be threatening two major popular culture heroes to and opaque. By reducing the city to a the violence of empire), are major legible model or emblem of itself, and contributions to a series of popular by demonstrating his control over its movies and fiction to have reinvigorated a production, such a subjectivity assumes a nostalgic imaginary of London’s past. paternalistic or heroic role in relation to an urban literary audience. (214)

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The plot of Sherlock Holmes (2009) disguising himself on chases. However, revolves around the eponymous detective, the lineage is very clear. Packaged into played by a somewhat seedy but super- Downey’s character are not only Doyle’s fit Robert DowneyJr, and his stalwart and Sax Rohmer’s detectives but also Poe’s sidekick Watson, played by Jude Law, “Man of the Crowd” and Baudelaire’s who prevent the megalomaniac sorcerer flâneur—he is a dandy, a ragpicker, and and magician Lord Blackwood (Mark a sloppy Bohemian. Ritchie’s protagonist Strong) from blowing up Parliament and knows his city—the London of 1891— reclaiming and recolonizing America for so well that there is literally no pulling the British Empire. They are joined by the wool over his eyes: when taken the feisty Irene Adler (Rachel McAdams), blindfolded to the Temple of the Four remembered by Holmes fans from Orders, an occult-dabbling secret society Arthur Conan Doyle’s first short story, headed by a prominent Lord, he “was the 1891 “A Scandal in Bohemia,” as the admittedly lost for a moment between only woman able to outsmart Holmes. Charing Cross and Holborn, but was Together they pursue the evil mastermind saved by the breadshop on Saffron Hill, in a ride that involves numerous action the only baker to use a certain French and fight scenes in paradigmatic London glaze on their loaves, a Brittany sage. After locations such as Baker Street, the that carriage fork left and right…” Embankment, the shipyards of the East End’s docklands, the sewers, and, in the Local knowledge and easy movement climactic finale, on a Tower Bridge under through every social layer of the city— construction—a half-finished symbol of including its underground, the sewers— the Empire’s technological prowess that make it possible for him to keep at bay connects the proletarian outskirts of the the forces that threaten the metropole’s river›s southern bank to the metropolitan rational social order. Following generic centre but also literally controls the flow conventions, the material city is presented of ship traffic (by raising the bridge) from as a semiotic reservoir to be deciphered. and to its colonies around the world. Clues are spread throughout the urban landscape, and solving this puzzle through Guy Ritchie’s knowing update of the powers of intellect is the detective’s forte, Baker Street sleuth inserts itself into the but he is also in perfect command of generic conventions of more than one all the other institutions of modernity, and a half centuries of detective stories. particularly those of movement: Robert Downey’s character might be more physical than previous versions The deep anxiety of an expanding society: (enjoying, not unlike the film’s director the fear that development might liberate and lead, the occasional drunken brawl centrifugal energies and thus make in an Irish pub)—something Ritchie has effective social control impossible. This justified including in his film by pointing problem emerges fully in the metropolis, to the original stories, in which Holmes where anonymity—that is, impunity— is often depicted boxing, sprinting, and potentially reigns and which is rapidly becoming a tangled and inaccessible

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hiding place. We have seen detective centre, but this would disregard his being fiction’s answer to the first problem: positioned very clearly within an English the guilty party can never hide in the tradition of occultism. The figure of Lord crowd. His tracks betray him as an Blackwood is recognizably modeled after individual, and therefore a vulnerable, the influential and controversial English being. But detective fiction also offers occultist and magician Aleister Crowley reassurance on the second point. All (1875–1947), Holmes’s investigations are accompanied and supported by the new and perfect mechanisms of transportation and communication. Carriages, trains, letters, telegrams, in Conan Doyle’s world, are all crucial and always live up to expectations. They are the tacit and indispensable support of the arrest. Society expands and becomes more complicated: but it also creates a framework of control, a network of relationships, that holds it more firmly together than ever before. (Frisby 58) In the detective genre, command and control of modern technology are equated with mastery of the urban. This is how crimes are solved, and order re- established. Hermetic Historicities

The resolution of threats to the urban Fig. 1 Aleister Crowley more often than not involves exorcizing (violently and physically) the threat of a colonial “other.” However, while a Chinese villain does make an appearance in a fight scene—a clear reference to Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu—, the threat posed by evil mastermind Lord Blackwood and his esoteric cult do not fit neatly into the pattern of threats to the colonial centre described above. With his vaguely foreign looks and sounds and references to old Egyptian and Cabalistic teachings, Blackwood might be read as an orientalized representative of a Fig. 2 Lord Blackwell colonial outside threatening the imperial 127 • 5 - 1 • 2014 • IMAGINATIONS IT’S A KIND OF MAGIC who was involved in a number of early Vinci Code’s symbologist professor- twentieth-century hermetic and esoteric detective Robert Langdon deciphers groups not too dissimilar from Ritchie’s historical symbols to reveal ancient fictional “Temple of the Four Orders” mysteries passed on through medieval (see Pasi). While some of this occult and Renaissance channels of conspiracies practice is presented as being of oriental and physically preserved in the cities’ origin, it is all really a quite silly mixture material environments, breathlessly of elements from the Christian, Jewish connecting dots on the maps of Paris, and Egyptian traditions, in other words: a Rome and London in order to uncover merry gumbo of “Western Civilization”’s Gnostic traditions preserved in secret past that has, mysteriously, left its obscure societies. For Dan Brown, the historical traces in the material shape of the city. city also provides the crucial clue for Holmes manages to make sense of this unraveling the ancient mystery. Much past, and prevent catastrophe, by mapping like Sherlock Holmes’s deductions or this “ancient” knowledge—manifested in Dupin’s ratiocinations, the instruments London’s urban morphology. of the professor’s intellectual toolbox reveal “correct” interpretations of those Uncovering some past secret is, of course, clues that ultimately lead to modernist nothing unusual for detective fiction. rational closure—in Brown’s case, a deep What is, however, surprising in these 21st- structure of an alternative narrative century recuperations of the historical is of Christianity, and thus European that in addition to predictably hearkening civilization, that does away with the back to the modernist strands of the contingency and multifacetedness of late nineteenth- and early-twentieth history’s relics and assigns, literally, the century that gave rise to a genre linking right “place” to historical manifestations. technological rationality and empire, Dan Brown’s story similarly follows the current manifestations of the historical in well-established generic metaphor of popular culture seem to throw into relief the city as a historically layered enigma what is perceived as an almost Manichean whose underlying deep structure—the struggle between empiricist-driven historical narrative that manifests itself in technological progress and traditions of highly visible material symbol carriers— occult knowledge supposedly submerged needs to be deciphered by the expert. The in the seventeenth century. plot of The Da Vinci Code is structured What obviously springs to mind in this as a treasure hunt, with clues hidden in otherwise mind-boggling denouement of well-known art works and tourist sites. an ancient conspiracy manifesting itself in The structure hidden behind all the the heart of empire is Dan Brown’s mega- superficially confusing manifestations of hyped Da Vinci Code and the previously history is conveniently provided by the written (2000), although only recently heavy hand of the Catholic Church—the filmed (2008) Angels and Demons. Like most persistent, organized and powerful Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes, the Da Euro-global institution in the history of the West and arguably the originary

IMAGINATIONS • 5 - 1 • 2014 • 128 REISENLEITNER motor for the establishment of global origin: the tomb of Mary Magdalene domination and empire, represented in beneath the Louvre. Brown’s narrative Brown’s novel by its more recent hardliner thus operates much like a tourist map: manifestation, the Opus Dei (established once properly unfolded (and only a select in 1928), and its equally monolithic few have access to this particular gift), “other,” the secret society that preserved everything falls into place. The detective the hidden knowledge of the “sacred unfolds the bizarre traces of history in the feminine.” material urban environment into a linear (albeit implausible and preposterous) The metonymic London locations that narrative. Dan Brown chooses for resolving the contradictions between science and Sherlock Holmes in Guy Ritchie’s religion, such as Westminster Abbey, interpretation is very much part of the provide closure in ways vaguely similar same tradition, but takes as its focus to Dame Francis Yates’ historical the struggle against and submersion trajectory of Elizabethan and seventeenth- of ancient occult knowledge during century London’s role as a funnel for the Industrial Revolution. The occult articulations of empiricism and occult knowledge that threatens the metropole knowledge culminating in both open and here is presented as already having been submerged agendas of the Royal Society part of the Rule Britannia lineage, and (Yates 1964, 1972, 1979). According consequently the evil master plan is to Yates, the Renaissance marriage of not an overthrow of the British Empire magic and science, which was based through some foreign (previously often on Cabalistic and Hermetic teachings vaguely oriental) enemy (as would have imported from Italy, epitomized by the been mandated by generic tradition), but magician Prospero in Shakespeare’s The rather the recreation of an authoritarian- Tempest, and which thrived during the imperial tradition that includes the formation of the British imperialist United States, precisely by mobilizing the tradition during Queen Elizabeth I’s submerged occult. “It looks like he was reign, was submerged by the institutions attempting to combine occult practice of modern science, yet continued to with scientific formula,” states Holmes inform knowledge production in the when he finally figures out Blackwood’s imperial centre. Condensing this tradition intentions, but “there was never any into the role of Isaac Newton, Brown magic, only conjuring tricks.” Ultimately, efficiently mobilizes the reverberations it is technological rationality that has of new-age inspired historical narratives the last say. The occult only consists of that pick up on hypotheses of occult, recycling earlier scientific knowledge, supposedly ancient knowledge’s lineages such as an “ancient Egyptian recipe” for having been preserved by secret societies. untraceable poisons. In the final climactic The persistence of history ultimately fight sequence, Blackwood is not killed guarantees meaning and reveals its by Holmes but by the half-finished Tower overdetermined and wildly psychoanalytic Bridge itself: technological symbol of

129 • 5 - 1 • 2014 • IMAGINATIONS IT’S A KIND OF MAGIC the city’s connection to the global traffic illustrations of Conan Doyle’s stories rationalization of empire. for the Strand magazine. Ritchie is therefore bypassing a long tradition of What Guy Ritchie is picking up on here cinematic versions of Sherlock Holmes is the well-known Victorian penchant that have created very different, cross- for the occult and the paranormal—after referenced imaginaries of turn-of-the- all, Arthur Conan Doyle was a well- century London. The Sherlock Holmes known spiritualist. In an exclusively film coming closest to Guy Ritchie’s Blu-ray special feature Guy Ritchie takes urban imaginary is a Steven Spielberg us through the movie like a budding production of 1985, Young Sherlock film professor, explaining that “the Holmes, which also features an esoteric intersection of this particular time of underground cult supposedly originating science and superstition… is what this in Egypt, and notable mostly for its era is about.” While this commentary computer-generated effects, including the seems to be stating the obvious, the filmic first fully computer-generated character: a recuperation of this history also involves knight in a stained glass window, created reclaiming the East End and other places by Lucasfilm’s John Lasseter, of Toy in London through representations of Story (1995) fame. the occult, a way to layer and deepen the histories of many sites in London. Digital technologies in filmmaking have Indeed, Ritichie’s attention to sites is clearly come a long way since 1985, meticulous, with a heavy emphasis on giving filmmakers the means to generate the “authenticity” of the recreation of images and sounds of the past that are 1891 London. This creation of historical infinitely malleable and able to eschew authenticity necessitated shooting at the archival and material traces of the non-London sites such as the docklands moment of filmmaking, while at the of Manchester, not yet gentrified into a same time making it possible to create Canary Wharf-like corporate Yuppie- pasts remembered through a lineage Town, and numerous digital effects—in of images. Films such as Sky Captain other words, a cinematographic toolkit and the World of Tomorrow (2004, dir. better suited to (re-)create urban history Kerry Conran) and King Kong (2005, than the irrevocably altered material city. dir. Peter Jackson) were shot entirely It is the role of the digital in filmmaking against blue/green screen on sound stages that reclaims certain histories that I would in an attempt to visually recreate pasts like to turn my attention to next. through their mediations by cinematic images (see Reisenleitner 2012). Guy Role of the Visual-Digital Ritchie’s film, however, while obviously The visual design of Sherlock Holmes is using compositing techniques and digital meant to painstakingly recreate the special effects technology liberally for his London of 1891, clearly along visual streetscapes, fight scenes, explosions, etc., lines of representation that take their very deliberately includes “real places,” cues from Sidney Edward Paget’s location shots which were digitally

IMAGINATIONS • 5 - 1 • 2014 • 130 REISENLEITNER enhanced but still meant to produce a weather maps and other CG-generated form of “authenticity” supposedly denied special effects through which movies to the purely digital. While the recreation like The Day After Tomorrow (2004, dir. of the Docklands was actually filmed Roland Emmerich) have envisioned in Manchester and Liverpool, Ritchie the weather, a system as unimaginably seems eager precisely not to eschew the complex as the past, and with similar material traces of the urban histories effects on material environments, digitally of the imperial centre into which his modified images re-constitute historicities narrative inserts itself. The material that have, precisely because they have remnants, the ruins of an empire driven become disconnected from materiality, by mechanization and an industrialist transcended experiential thresholds. rationality, make their way into shots Digital simulation, because it is infinitely of a huge shipyard and a mechanized malleable, visualizes an approach to the slaughterhouse in the Docklands; the past in which “chronological topographies centre of British rule—Parliament—is replace constructed geographical space, metonymically presented by Manchester where immaterial electronic broadcast Town Hall; and the occultist heritage missions decompose and eradicate a sense is present in a shot of Covent Garden’s of place” and allow us to come to terms Freemason’s Hall. The scenes most reliant with the disconcerting consequences of on CGI are the panoramic views from what Abbas (personal communication) Tower Bridge under construction during describes as the “urban double-take,” the final showdown, when the visual the sensation that when you look again, referents shift from recreating historically the complexity of the system has already accurate contexts of still existing changed your perception, so the only places through CGI to a visuality more thing you can see is the pre-conceived reminiscent of Gustave Doré’s and Paget’s cliché—nostalgia—as the only, albeit illustrations. alternate, chronology possible. Digital cinematography seems to manage to Conclusion capture the oneiric quality necessary to Andrew Ross reminds us that it is not only imagine (urban) pasts in their global space but also time that has become fluid connectivity and multi-layered temporal in techno-simulation (132). It seems to me synchronicity, the mise-en-scène of past that the centrality of digital production possibilities for the future. methods in Ritchie’s film is predicated The Tower Bridge sequence captures the precisely on this aspect of the fluidity of oneiric quality of the Empire through time, its nexus to the materiality of the what was one of its most prominent physical, specifically urban environment, structures. It becomes Ritchie’s symbol of and a desire to render the memory a London at the heart of a British-ruled images of the potentialities of the past, world of technological progress from whose material traces have been erased which the esoteric is (repeatedly) purged. by natural and man-made disasters. But it is also a fragile, half-finished Like the computer-generated fractal

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Markus Reisenleitner is Associate Professor and Director of the Graduate Program in Humanities at York University, Toronto. His research and publications focus on urban imaginaries, fashion and digital cultures. Markus Reisenleitner est professeur associé et directeur du programme gradué au Department of Humanities de l’Université York à Toronto. Ses recherches et publications portent sur les imaginaires urbains, la mode, et les cultures digitales.

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons 3.0 License although certain works referenced herein may be separately licensed, or the author has exercised their right to fair dealing under the Canadian Copyright Act.

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