Sherlock Holmes Syndrome

I’m sick of Sherlock Holmes.

Let me clarify.

I fell in love with this character several years ago when I began reading the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle canon. Do you ever have those moments when you discover a character or a book and you think: this was created for me? I had that with Sherlock Holmes.

I loved him even with all his flaws, sexism, and drug addiction. I loved the world he inhabited, I loved Watson, and I was madly in love with Irene Adler. Even the stories where Conan Doyle was clearly phoning it in, I enjoyed. And for a while, I loved the fact that pop culture had rediscovered this character and seemed to create new renditions of him every year.

I am now sick of what I call Sherlock Holmes Syndrome. I am sick of eccentric, often neurotic, always brilliant white men who see things that we mere mortals cannot see. I’m sick of the mass media’s apparent belief that mental issues, depression, anxiety, psychopathy and neurodevelopmental disorders are magic. I’m also sick of the blanket use of autism, often incorrectly, as a signifier for Otherness and as a vague superpower.

Loki and the Language of Sexual Violence

[Trigger warning: discussion of sexual violence, consent issues, and rape. NSFW language]

All this talk of Marvel’s Thor: The Dark World (2013) inspired me to break out my Blu-ray edition of Marvel’s Thor (2011) last night. By all accounts, it’s my favorite film of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) since it taught me to love Thor and Marvel, which then inspired me to apply for an internship there and the rest is geeky history. So I love this movie. I love Thor. And like most in the Marvel fandom, I love Loki.

But there’s a moment in Thor that I always found troubling and I often try to forget it happens. When it does occur, I find myself incredibly uncomfortable, especially for a movie that I thoroughly enjoy as both a feminist and a geek.

Frigga, Loki, and Magic in Marvel’s Thor: The Dark World

I recently wrote an essay exploring Loki and Frigga’s relationship and the use of magic and the feminine in Marvel’s Thor: The Dark World. Please check it out here at The Discriminating Fangirl! Beware, SPOILERS.  

 

The Erasure of Officer Anne Lewis and Women in Action

Officer Anne Lewis (Nancy Allen)

The new trailer for the RoboCop remake was released yesterday, bringing us a vaguely closer look at the origins of OmniCorp’s program to bring robots to the American home front.

Whatever.

As a massive fan of the original 1987 RoboCop, I have yet to see anything in the trailers for the remake that is as fresh and clever as the entire original film. I’m also still angry over the apparent lack of Officer Anne Lewis: a dynamic and engaging secondary character in 1987’s RoboCop and one of my favorite examples of a woman in an action film.

According to the cast list of the 2014 version, there is no Officer Anne Lewis, simply an Officer Jack Lewis, played by the awesome Michael K. Williams. Great, he’s an amazing actor. But the removal of Anne Lewis is highly troubling to me.