I have often thought that Robert Downey Jr. was a bit too cool, a bit of a dick, who, though ever charming and witty, lacked a certain maturity or social awareness. But, I loved him in Sherlock Holmes. I gave in to his charm in the first five minutes of the film.
I didn't really want to see this film, since I thought it would be just the usual period piece fetishism, and because they had marred Jude Law's beauty with a mustache.
But, as soon as the movie started, I realized this was about debunking mystical bullshit. Sherlock Holmes has to deal with an entire society taken in by mystical, religious, nonsense, and him and Holmes have to kick ass and show how it's all based on the bastardization of science and technology.
I was shocked. This is exactly the movie that we need at this point, when we are distracted from our real living conditions by the false debate over healthcare reform, (which has, unsurprisingly, turned out to be a pay out to the rich,) distracted the false debate over gay marriage, which is theologically and culturally irrrelevant, and all the other fictional dramas presented to us as crucial to the fate of our nation.
What we need to be doing is getting past the popular illusions and seeing the real mechanisms and interests behind them.
This is what Holmes does. As London and greater England are beset by the prospect of an evil, magical villain rising from the dead and taking over the country's most powerful secret society, and then the country itself, Sherlock Holmes and Watson figure out how each miracle was faked, and how the real danger was of a power hungry murderer taking advantage of the credulity of both the masses and the nations ruling class.
In these times, the message of Holmes, aside from drug use (at least in the books), is: Get to the bottom of it. Find out the real causes and through them address the danger.
This is why Holmes should have been hanging out in The Lovely Bones. This piece of crap film has a different message for a country in the midst of all kinds of fear and danger: Fuck it, we're all going to heaven.
Got no money? Don't sit around working out what you're going to do about it. Fuck it, you're going to paradise when you die.
Did your beautiful blue eyed daughter get murdered and cut up by your neighbor? Open your eyes to the bigger picture!!! Enjoy your remaining family time. Getting trapped, murdered, and butchered like a pig was merely a minor issue in your daughter's life, after which she spends eternity in a beautiful, wheat field Heaven! Hallelujah, amen!
Suppose on the other hand, if you're an unenlightened, sad little skeptic deluding yourself into thinking that this life is all we got. Then you might start seeing the murder of fourteen year old girls, by a serial killer, as the main problem presented in this film.
If you're so thick headed as to imagine that these seventy years or so are all you're going to get, so you better cherish it, and cherish the lives of your friends and pets, suck every last bit of experience you can out of life, because that's all we got-if you're this negative about things, you might start thinking that serial killers are a real big deal, and we should be spending time figuring out how to neutralize these monsters, instead of reconciling ourselves to our impotence in this world.
But that's the sweet beauty of The Lovely Bones: even the butchered bones of a fourteen year old girl are something you just have to let go of, and cherish the remaining connections you have. And if another of them gets killed, you still have a couple more left, so give them a hug. And if some other innocent is dragged from her car, strangled, raped and slashed across the face with a razor, than don't sweat it, because there's karma to take care of everything.
And by Karma I mean the westernized idea marketed to and parroted among the lower classes and dissociated types, that imagines there's some special justice that gives good shit to good people and bad shit to bad people.
In The Lovely Bones, this comes at the end of the movie. After the serial killer gets away, probably killing again, and after we are left with no answers about what to do about serial killers, only then does Jesus-Karma mete out cosmic justice by having the aged serial killer slip off a hill and die.
Sherlock Holmes would have figured out who the killer was. And, since he doesn't exist, and serial killers often go unpunished, dying with all their cherished memories of slaughter intact, than perhaps I might offer the following responses to serial murder.
Off the top of my head: Psychological Profiling and Analysis. Sociological Factors found to be relevant in cases of serial murder. Biological Factors. Ways to teach your children to avoid and/or fight dangerous adults. Ways to organize your neighborhood to avoid the anonymity and secrecy that serial killers avoid.
God forbid I should ever have a child who is murdered, and, in the midst of my unending agony, give in to some kind of religious bullshit. I could then just stay in my fantasy and pray to someone and ask them to say hello to my child, all while more murders are planned and carried out. And when I ran into parents whose children had been murdered by the same person that killed my child, I could wisely shake my head, dismissing evidence, prevention, and joint action, and say: Golly, jeez, the good Lord sure does work in mysterious ways, butchering kids and stuff. But, you know, think about, it, now that they're up in Heaven, they're happier and smarter than us, so, really it all worked out, and it was really a good opportunity for those kids to get all cut up and buried in a corn field.
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