5-1 | Table of Contents<\/a>\u00a0| http:\/\/dx.doi.org\/10.17742\/IMAGE.periph.5-1.9 | Reisenleitner PDF<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n Markus Reisenleitner | York University<\/p>\n In the 21st<\/sup>-century competition between global cities to establish themselves as central, London has emerged as a clear front-runner. London has been cementing its position, asserted since the opening up of its stock market in 1986, not only by economic and political decisions but also through a slew of representational practices, most recently through the global media spectacle of the opening of the 2012 Olympic games (Reisenleitner 2014). The very contemporary imaginary of London’s centrality to a global system of urban nodes has routinely been buttressed by a particular vision of empire, an almost desperate attempt to create (or re-create) the collections and constellations of collective memories that would otherwise be rapidly obliterated in the constant need to assert global-city status through \u201cnowness,\u201d creative destruction and innovation. Mediated memory of empire has been mobilized to provide an imagined historical context for the single-minded \u201cbranding\u201d campaigns of ad agencies, global media spectacles and similar vehicles powered by the engine of global market fundamentalism, a hegemonic practice that imposes stability and homogeneity on a space (the urban) that, as Steve Pile reminds us, \u201c\u2026 cannot be thought of as having one geography and one history\u201d (Pile, Brook, and Mooney vii).<\/p>\n In this article, I explore some of the historical layers sedimented into 21st-century popular imaginaries of London\u2019s past. I am specifically interested in a persistent dichotomy of technology vs. occult knowledge that seems to be intimately connected to the persisting imaginary of London as a global city. I argue that this imaginary has become the basis of a nostalgia for the British Empire, one that mediates public memories and histories and sutures them to the imaginary urban geographies that constitute the space of the global city through its metonymic sites and its materialized histories. I will explore how cinematic techniques, specifically the possibilities of computer-generated images, negotiate the visual memories of London as a centre of empire in Guy Ritchie\u2019s Sherlock Holmes<\/em> (2009). Placing the movie in its genre context and exploring the layered histories that inform the film\u2019s take on the urban detective can reveal the constitutive elements that challenge and inform the imaginary of London\u2019s centrality in contemporary Hollywood-mediated popular culture.<\/p>\n The emergence of popular culture produced for a mass audience coincides with the emergence of the modern city during the nineteenth century. European and North American popular culture developed in constant dialogue with the profoundly unsettling experiences of modernity, imperialism, and globalization. The upheavals that accompanied urbanization resulted in new ways of seeing the city as opaque and potentially dangerous; an alleged illegibility of the city and the urban masses translated into popular fiction as crime and threat associated with the city streets and translated into the architectural forms of gated communities, ubiquitous surveillance, defensible architecture, and all the other accoutrements of a city of fear that Mike Davis so masterfully conjures up in City of Quartz<\/em> (Davis 1990). \u201cModern\u201d ways of seeing the city, and acting upon the city, arose with the nineteenth-century city of industrialism and its immiserated working class and resulted in the city being seen as a \u201cproblem\u201d (similar to the emergence of the \u201cenvironment\u201d as a problem in the later twentieth century). The necessity of rendering this problematic city\u2014the site of crime and illness (often expressed through body metaphors)\u2014administrable is predicated on the visibility of the city as an object. While urban planners and reformers were busy re-imagining the city as a cleansed, controlled and sanitized machine for living (Corbusier), working, traffic flow, and commerce, the fear of the irruption of the uncanny into city spaces that defy planning and description has continued to speak to the presence of an elusive other\u2014often a colonial other\u2014in the Western metropolis. Popular genres like detective fiction and film noir have created topographies of modern urbanity in which monstrous spaces, characterized equally by the danger and lure they pose for the metropolis, threaten an assumed movement towards a well-ordered urban rationality, establishing (at least Western) urbanity as a structure metaphorically and literally built on the (post-)imperialist paranoia about the presence\/return of the alien and asserting a desire to establish control over fundamentally unstable spaces\u2014precisely the kind of control that also resulted in the disciplining narratives of urban surveillance, statistics and reform. Eug\u00e8ne Sue\u2019s histories in the Mysteries of Paris <\/em>are as responsible for Baron Haussmann\u2019s reimagining (and redrawing) of Paris as John Fante (Ask the Dust<\/em>; Dreams from Bunker Hill<\/em>) was for Los Angeles\u2019s \u201cBunker Hill Renewal Project\u201d\u2014even Los Angeles was, in Orson Welles\u2019s words, \u201c[1]n the beginning [\u2026] simply a \u2018bright, guilty place\u2019 without a murderous shadow or mean street in sight\u201d (Davis 2001, 33). Anthony Vidler draws our attention to the historical roots of sensitivities that have become commonplaces in contemporary popular culture:<\/p>\n The contemporary sensibility that sees the uncanny erupt in empty parking lots around abandoned or run-down shopping malls, in the screened trompe d\u2019oeil of simulated space, in, that is, the wasted margins and surface appearances of post-industrial culture, this sensibility has its roots and draws its commonplaces from a long but essentially modern tradition. Its apparently benign and utterly ordinary loci, its domestic and slightly tawdry settings, its ready exploitation of an already jaded public, all mark it out clearly as the heir to a feeling of unease first identified in the late eighteenth century. (Vidler 3)<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n This feeling of unease and threat that accompanied the emergence of the modern city, and its symbolic resolution through the re-establishment and imposition of a rational order, is epitomized by the emergence of the figure of the urban detective, arguably the most important figure in the history of urban perception. Like the fl\u00e2neur\u2014detached, interested, fascinated, trying to make sense of the city but with what Simmel described as a blas\u00e9 attitude (14)\u2014the detective has become a privileged site of Western urban perception, the solitary (often staunchly middle-class) male figure entitled to move through the metropolitan maze of illegible, violent and dangerous crowds to decipher what needs deciphering in order to tame, appropriate and control. Tony Bennett, drawing on Benjamin, reminds us that \u201cthe development of a position of imaginative spectatorial dominance afforded by detective fiction was accompanied by, and corresponded to, the development of new mechanisms of surveillance which\u2014precisely through their bureaucratic reduction of individuality to a set of knowable traces\u2014rendered the city legible to the gaze of power\u201d (215). The urban detective\u2019s way of acting on the city is informed by the superior insight afforded by the rationality that distinguishes him from the urban crowd while also legitimating his exerting violence on the city and its less desirable elements. The urban detective has come to stand for the urban planner and the bulldozer conflated into one, ultimately containing the unruly cityscape (and the unruly crowd moving through it) by exerting some form of visual\/semiotic control. Detective fiction has come to function as a<\/p>\n fantasy of a spectatorial subjectivity capable of establishing epistemological and aesthetic control over an environment commonly perceived to be threatening and opaque. By reducing the city to a legible model or emblem of itself, and by demonstrating his control over its production, such a subjectivity assumes a paternalistic or heroic role in relation to an urban literary audience. (214)<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Detective fiction as \u201crepresentational forms of solutions to the problems of social control in a dynamic capitalist urban milieu\u201d (Frisby 58) draws attention to the fact that the meaning of a city is produced as a site of social negotiations (which are not private but collective, situated practices), \u201can imaginary space created and animated as much by the urban representations to be found in novels, films and images as by any actual urban places\u201d (Donald x).<\/p>\n Sherlock Holmes, together with Edgar Allan Poe\u2019s Dupin, is the archetypal detective of the Western metropolis, on mission after mission to uphold the city\u2019s rational order, moving through the metropolitan maze of illegible, violent, dangerous and exotic crowds, rationally deciphering what is illegible in order to establish a \u201crational\u201d form of order and control, often violently and through superior physical prowess. Holmes has recently been resurrected in a variety of fiction, film and TV adaptations that highlight London\u2019s presence on the global media stage. Guy Ritchie\u2019s 2009 and 2011 blockbuster successes (Sherlock Holmes<\/em> and Sherlock Holmes, a Game of Shadows<\/em>) with a revisionist Sherlock Holmes as a down & dirty Iron Man-like action hero in what set out to become, according to producer Joel Silver, \u201can 1891 Bond film\u201d (a sentiment that highlights the connection of the two major popular culture heroes to the violence of empire), are major contributions to a series of popular movies and fiction to have reinvigorated a nostalgic imaginary of London\u2019s past.<\/p>\n The plot of Sherlock Holmes<\/em> (2009) revolves around the eponymous detective, played by a somewhat seedy but super-fit Robert Downey Jr, and his stalwart sidekick Watson, played by Jude Law, who prevent the megalomaniac sorcerer and magician Lord Blackwood (Mark Strong) from blowing up Parliament and reclaiming and recolonizing America for the British Empire. They are joined by the feisty Irene Adler (Rachel McAdams), remembered by Holmes fans from Arthur Conan Doyle\u2019s first short story, the 1891 \u201cA Scandal in Bohemia,\u201d as the only woman able to outsmart Holmes. Together they pursue the evil mastermind in a ride that involves numerous action- and fight scenes in paradigmatic London locations such as Baker Street, the Embankment, the shipyards of the East End\u2019s docklands, the sewers, and, in the climactic finale, on a Tower Bridge under construction\u2014a half-finished symbol of the Empire\u2019s technological prowess that connects the proletarian outskirts of the river’s southern bank to the metropolitan centre but also literally controls the flow of ship traffic (by raising the bridge) from and to its colonies around the world.<\/p>\n Guy Ritchie\u2019s knowing update of the Baker Street sleuth inserts itself into the generic conventions of more than one and a half centuries of detective stories. Robert Downey\u2019s character might be more physical than previous versions (enjoying, not unlike the film\u2019s director and lead, the occasional drunken brawl in an Irish pub)\u2014something Ritchie has justified including in his film by pointing to the original stories, in which Holmes is often depicted boxing, sprinting, and disguising himself on chases. However, the lineage is very clear. Packaged into Downey\u2019s character are not only Doyle\u2019s and Sax Rohmer\u2019s detectives but also Poe\u2019s \u201cMan of the Crowd\u201d and Baudelaire\u2019s fl\u00e2neur\u2014he is a dandy, a ragpicker, and a sloppy Bohemian. Ritchie\u2019s protagonist knows his city\u2014the London of 1891\u2014so well that there is literally no pulling the wool over his eyes: when taken blindfolded to the Temple of the Four Orders, an occult-dabbling secret society headed by a prominent Lord, he \u201cwas admittedly lost for a moment between Charing Cross and Holborn, but was saved by the breadshop on Saffron Hill, the only baker to use a certain French glaze on their loaves, a Brittany sage. After that carriage fork left and right \u2026\u201d<\/p>\n
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\nIt\u2019s a Kind of Magic:
\nSituating Nostalgia for Technological Progress and the Occult in Guy Ritchie\u2019s Sherlock Holmes<\/em><\/h4>\nPolicing the Imperial Centre<\/h4>\n
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