INSTALLMENT 17:
In Which We Unflinchingly Look A Gift Horse In The Choppers

One of my pet hates is Christmas cards. No need to go into the convoluted thinking behind my hatred of the damned things; I'm a month or so shy of age fifty-two, and I'm permitted a few eccentricities. Suffice to say that every year, despite many and widely-disseminated appeals to save their money and send what they'd spend on a card to some noble charity, readers and even long-time friends who should know better, fill my already spavined mailbox with gold lame, embossed, outsized, Oriental silk-screened wishes for a joyous Christmas, Channukah, New Year, Twelfth-night, Hsin Nien, Festival of Tet, Druidmass and End of Days (the last accompanied by a pair of ducats on the 50-yard line for the battle between Gog and Magog).

Most of these are returned to the sender on the same day they are received, with the message I HATE XMAS CARDS AND CATS printed with a large, thick-line green marker, right there on the envelope. I've been doing this for years. But as we know, there are always those who Don't Get The Message. So every year I curse and fume and send back hundreds of Yuletide missives.

You cannot know the enmity this act generates.

Even those faithful who stick with me during my most indefensible, unconscionable periods of social vileness and irrational gaucherie, sprout fangs and fire back letters (in ordinary envelopes, not those square Xmas card wrappings) in which such umbrage, such animosity, such a tone of affront is manifested, that one might think I had used the family budgie for genetic experiments. The thrust of their anger is that I have committed a felony. Let me opine that Heinlein's latest novel isn't up to his best, or that Reagan is so locked into Cold War thinking that he would sacrifice us all to his paranoia, or that Peanuts is a dumb comic strip, and they'll all smile protectively and make excuses for me . . . he's such a sweet man, perhaps he was just having a rotten day.

But let them receive the card they sent, all in good faith and sincerity and camaraderie, scrawled upon in green marker, and they howl for a return of the ducking stool. Defenestration is too good for me, they shriek! Scaphism is too kind a fate, they bellow!

How dare I not only turn away this kindly-intended, innocent gesture of goodwill, but let them know I never asked for it in the first place? This is an act of antisocial intercourse guaranteed to sour even the sweetest friendship.

And in what obscure fashion does any of this have to do with Young Sherlock Holmes (Paramount)?

Well, let me put it this way:

It had to've been late in 1942. I was eight years old. I was laid up with the flu. We're talking Painesville, Ohio. And my mother was going downtown to do some shopping, and I was miserably bundled in my bed with more books than I could've read if I'd been down with something serious like rinderpest or beriberi or Dutch Elm blight, and my radio so I could listen to Jack Armstrong and Superman and Terry and the Pirates, and of course my comic books; but I still lacked the one thing short of chicken soup with farfel that could save me from death. And that, simply put, was issue #18 of Captain Marvel Adventures, a 10¢ panacea issued every four weeks by the world-famous faith healers, Fawcett Comics.

With great care I explained to my mother that issue #18 had been among the publications received just that very day at the magazine-and-smoke-shop right next to the Utopia Theater (at which venue, I hoped she would notice, I was not enjoying the Saturday ritual of seeing Wild Bill Elliott as Red Ryder or Sunset Carson as Sunset Carson mopping up bad guys, to the accompaniment of the crunching of popcorn and the smell of gunsmoke, which personal tragedy surely entitled me to some consideration) (if not the Croix de Guerre). I described in detail how the magazines came in all bundled together with wire that had to be snipped by the nice man with the smelly panatella who ran the shop, and that if she had any faint shadow of affection for one soon to pass through the veil, she would make sure that the copy of issue #18 of Captain Marvel Adventures she selected from the racks was not one that had been scored by the dreaded bundle wire.

I went over the instructions several times. You know how parents can be. And I made absolutely certain she knew it was issue #18, the brand-new one available today for just a few minutes before other children (lesser children who were not on their deathbeds) savaged the supply. Eighteen, I said again. One eight. I have all the issues up to number eighteen, I said, to her retreating form. Eighteen, I shouted from my bedroom window as she got into the car. Eighteen, I gasped, falling back amid the sodden sheets.

Don't you know I waited all damned day for that comic!

Now this part is painful. Not just because of what comes next in the story, but because of my behavior. I have never forgotten what comes next, and if I'd had the courage to say it to her before she died about ten years ago, I'd have told my mother that I spent the next thirty-odd years of my life being ashamed of my behavior. But I was so ashamed that even at age forty-something, I couldn't dredge up that awful moment and ask for absolution.

Because what happened was that my mother came home all laden down with groceries, having spent a difficult day helping my dad in the store and having rushed back to make dinner, and when she answered my endless screams from upstairs, demanding my Captain Marvel Adventures, and she handed me the paper bag with the comic in it, the comic she had gone out of her way to buy for me, and I pulled it out of the bag and saw that it was issue number seventeen (#17 for crine out loud, not #18 which I had waited for all day with my tongue hanging out, only the thought of that comic keeping the Man With the Scythe from my person, but sevenbloodyteen!!!), the one with Captain Marvel battling Jap Zeros on the cover, I screamed at my mother and threw the damned comic across the room.

I'm certain that when I really do lie on my deathbed, the look on my mother's face at that moment will sneak back to strangle my spirit. The real crimes we commit cannot, somehow, ever be expunged. We pay and pay, right up to the last moment. There simply isn't enough in the exchequer to settle the debt.

And the terrible part of all this is that I know if the same circumstance were set up today, and my mother, or my best friend, or Susan, or Mother Teresa, or God his/her/its self brought me the wrong issue of Captain Marvel Adventures, I'd act exactly the same, indefensible, selfish way.

Which brings me to Young Sherlock Holmes.

Consider: how many times have good Samaritans "done you a favor" you didn't ask for? How many times have you wished they had kept their kindness to themselves, not put you in a position where you had to smile grimly and say, "That was very thoughtful of you," when what you wanted to do was knock them silly for putting you in a position where you had to clean up the mess engendered by "the thoughtful act of selflessness"?

People are forever doing things for your own good. They are forever giving you gifts they want you to have which you don't, frequently, want any part of. They merely want to serve. They want to share. They want you to have a nice, expensive Christmas card with the word Hallmark on the back so you'll know they cared enough to send the very best.

My wretched nature and guilt aside, I suggest this is self-serving on the part of the giver, with no damned concern for the attitude of the recipient.

Everyone gets a fix from "good deeds." I applaud that. I far more trust those who will cop to the truth that they feel terrific when they perform a noble act, than those who try to get us to believe they were solely motivated by a desire to serve the Commonweal. Good Samaritans and philanthropists and those who roll bandages at the local hospital are not much different, at core, it seems to me, than those who attempt to legislate morality, to save us from the devil, or to convince us that we need to believe as they do to preserve the Union. It is a philosophical and ethical membrane that separates us from them.

But I suppose it's part of human nature to give the gift that not coincidentally pushes the giver's viewpoint. Whether as bread-and-butter house gift or as guilt-assuaging invitation to dinner as reciprocation for all the dinners they've given you, the seemingly selfless act is, I submit, rooted as deeply in the need of the giver to get his or her fix, as it is to reward the recipient.

The thorn in the paw when one accepts the gift, however, is that seldom are we asked if we want this attention.

When it comes to filmic hommage—one of those gifts never sought and usually damaged in transit—the custom of primacy of interest by the creator is more honor'd in the breach than the observance.

Did the Salkinds check with Siegel or Shuster as to their enthusiasm for having their creation Superman transmogrified into a clown at the hands of David and Leslie Newman? If we listen closely can we hear Edgar Rice Burroughs thrashing in his grave at what befell Tarzan under the tender ministrations of Bo and John Derek, Hugh Hudson, or the blissfully-forgotten hacks who churned out half a dozen Me-Retard-You-Maureen-O'Sullivan idiocies? Was any attempt made by concerned parties, to hire a spiritualist who might pierce the veil and get Val Lewton's reaction to writer-director Paul Schrader's quote in the May-June 1982 issue of Cinefantastique, just prior to release of Schrader's remake of the 1942 Lewton-produced Cat People, that "Val Lewton's Cat People isn't that brilliant. It's a very good B-movie with one or two brilliant sequences. I mean, we're not talking about a real classic"? With how much good grace do you think Ian Fleming would take the jaded, imbecile shenanigans of the James Bond we see in Octopussy or A View to a Kill?

Even on suicide missions, at least lip service is paid to volunteerism. But Captain Nemo, Sheena, King Kong, Conan and Norman Bates keep getting sent out there to suck up them bullets—a kinder fate than having to suffer the critics' wrath—without any of the "gift-givers" bothering to ask if they mind having their literary personas savaged.

Hommage is usually less a sincere form of flattery than an expensive Xmas card that blows up in your face. In the case of Brian De Palma, of course, hommage is merely a license to steal from Hitchcock.

As the unsought gift is tendered, one has the urge to snarl, "Who asked for it, creep?" Nowhere do we find evidence that the recipient has been granted the option of saying, "Thanks but no thanks."

Which brings us, yet again, to Young Sherlock Holmes, 109 minutes of just simply awful, lamebrained and inept crapola from the team that brought you Gremlins. One hundred and nine minutes of unsolicited hommage that utterly corrupts the nobility and artistic value of the original creation; proffered with disingenuous and actively embarrassed apologia front-and-back by young scrivener Chris Columbus and his mentor, an ever-more-millstonelike Steven Spielberg, who managed—one presumes with dangled carrots of fame and pelf and posterity—to suck in yet another excellent filmmaker, director Barry Levinson, whom we heretofore revered for Diner and the cinema adaptation of Bernard Malamud's The Natural.

(An aside. No one is more aware of the seemingly incessant flow of aristarchian eloquence I've expended on Spielberg-influenced films, beginning with Gremlins, than I. From that first Chris Columbus-scripted abomination, through Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, to Goonies, Explorers, and Back to the Future, there has been no peace for Spielberg and those who have realized his personal view of movies by the warping of their own vision, from this corner of the critical universe. It has become such a threnody that even I grow weary of the dirge. Yet what is one to do? All I have to work with is what I see on the big screen. And Spielbergian product has so dominated the industry since E.T. in 1982—an industry that imitates what it takes to be success to the exclusion of alternate styles of filmmaking—that almost every other trend is as a trickling crick to the Mississippi. As verification of that assertion, if common sense and simple observation fail to convince, consider: taken as a whole, the five films nominated as best of the year for the Oscars earned $220 million in box-office revenues; Back to the Future, which was not among those five, earned $200 million. In the face of such success at a strictly commercial level, the level at which the drones and hacks of the industry place value worth emulating, a level of success that is awesome not only because of its height above the mass of financially-remunerative films, but because of the dismaying lack of quality and paucity of content they champion for those whose aspirations are already operating on a subterranean level, how can an observer trying to make sense of it all not dwell to almost pathological degree on what Spielberg hath wrought? It is the Spielberg sensibility that informs the writing of scenarists whose work prior to their association with him seems, in my view, stronger and truer and less marred by cutesy trivialism. It is the Spielberg sensibility that poisons the directorial attack of Robert Zemeckis and Kevin Reynolds and Joe Dante and now Barry Levinson. It is the juggernaut that flattens studio considerations of development of projects outside the narrow path of what Spielberg has shown will appeal to the adolescent—or at best sophomoric—demographic wedge that buys tickets. So what is one to do? Either to pretend that Out of Africa or Kiss of the Spider Woman are more than noble exceptions to a rule of picayune endeavor, or to continue dealing with that which dominates the industry in hopes that someone, somewhere, will take note and break loose from the Accepted Wisdom that the only surefire way to make a buck in movies is to ape the three or four styles of motion pictures that have been raking in the gelt: knife-kill flicks, Rambo/Rocky manipulations, high school epics of tits and food fights, or Spielbergian reductions of life and adventure to the importance of cartoons. I share your exhaustion at these fulminations . . . but what is one to do?)

It is painful to attack a writer as young in years and in time spent working at his craft as Chris Columbus, yet what are we to make of someone whose credits to date include Reckless, Gremlins, Goonies and the quisquilian subject under examination here?

Another Spielberg "discovery," Columbus seems sincere, dedicated, and hardworking. I spoke to him via telecon once, soon after Gremlins. My natural instinct was to give him the benefit of the doubt on that one; to assume (erroneously, it turns out) that the vileness of Gremlins emerged as corruptions of his original intent by Spielberg and/or director Joe Dante.

Turns out that both Dante and Columbus were swayed to the Spielberg view of filmmaking by the amentia of Amblin Entertainment; and we now have a quartet of Columbus screenplays to evaluate; and much as we might like to believe that Columbus is the new Lawrence Kasdan, even his staunchest supporters now admit in private what they will not say in public: Chris Columbus just ain't very good at this thing called screenwriting.

And that wearying aspect of Spielberg-influenced films that masquerades under the encomium hommage, that endless truckling to injokes and references to best-forgotten minor films of a generation's childhood, takes center stage with Young Sherlock Holmes. Sorrowful headshaking ensues.

There is nothing in this film fresh or innovative or even particularly well-executed beyond the delicious conceit of showing us what Holmes and Watson were like as students. A mind-tickler that has intrigued Sherlockians who can never get enough of the adventures of the World's First Consulting Detective contained in the sixty (or, as some savants insist, seventy-two) elements of the canon. Doyle forever possesses our admiration and affection not only because of what he let us know about Sherlock Holmes through the recountings of his escapades via Dr. John H. Watson, but because of what he didn't let us know. The tantalizing hints of cases not recorded—yes, lord, let us one day find hidden under a false bottom in that travel-worn and battered tin dispatch box kept safe in the vaults of the bank of Cox and Company, at Charing Cross, the full story of the horrible Giant Rat of Sumatra—and the clues to Holmes's background. We can surmise with some certainty that he was born in Surrey, and we know (because Holmes said it was so) that he was the descendant of country squires, but was Mycroft his only sibling? And why, exactly, had Holmes such suspicion of women?

The gaps in our knowledge are almost as engaging as the vast amount we know, the adventures we read over and over from our first thrilling exposure to the canon till that final rereading of "The Adventure of the Retired Colourman" moments before we go to meet Sir Arthur in person on the other side.

So the pull of what were Holmes and Watson like as prep school lads? is a kind of what-if I think no dealer in imagination could resist. I cannot find it in my heart to fault Columbus or Spielberg or Levinson for giving in to the temptation to fiddle with the conceit. It is the shallow and tawdry manner of their dealing with this material that hardens my heart. The word "entertainment" as it has come to be debased—as per Amblin "Entertainment"—falls far short of entertainment as we know it in its highest form, that is, as literature. Which is what the Doyle Sherlockian oeuvre has demonstrated itself to be.

Columbus, et al., have treated Holmes as entertainment in this debased context, denying the material's value not only as Literature but, worse, more offensively, as Entertainment in the greater sense. But then, one suspects these people can do no better. Which, if true, is sad enough; yet one might wish that this batch of mediocre ribbon clerks could get past its awesome arrogance, its insular belief in the myth of its own omniscience, to display an uncharacteristic reticence when it comes to laying ham hands on the work of its betters. If the best they can conjure are the screenplay equivalents of fast foods and tv dinners, then swell. In the words of Thomas Carlyle, "Produce! Produce! Were it but the pitifullest infinitesimal fraction of a Product, produce it, in God's name! 'Tis the utmost thou hast in thee: out with it, then. Up, up! Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy whole might." But let them, also in God's name, even if the name be Doyle (but not if the name be Spielberg), have the humility to know that their best is, at best, ephemeral fluff, examples of planned obsolescence, junk that insults the honorable term junk, creativity at the level of dispensability where one finds Kleenex and Saran-Wrap. Let them have the common sense to pull back from the posturing foolishness of a Schrader downgrading a Lewton in order to seem less a thief of art. Let them cease trying to fool us that their misappropriations are sincerely motivated hommage.

I have more to say on this. It may be that some primal force other than my mere anger has been inflamed through the act of codifying reactions to what is, after all, only a dopey film. It may be that whistle-blowing time has arrived for this gang of pilferers of the literary treasurehouse. Michelangelo said, "Where I steal an idea, I leave my knife." Perhaps we have all been witnesses at the scene of the crime where we have failed to realize how important it was for us to identify the owner of the knife. As Socrates received the unsought gift of hemlock, so Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, he who created Sherlock Holmes and Watson and Moriarty and Colonel Sebastian Moran, receives the unsought gift of hommage from Spielberg and Columbus and Company; and in leaping to the defense of one whose work probably needs no defense against the nibbling of minnows, perhaps we defend ourselves.

I'll be back next time to complete the thought.

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction/July 1986