Has anyone else been a little confused about reaction to the trailer for Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes in the last few weeks?

Robert Downey Jr. as a brilliant, weirdo drug addict. Type-casting.

It’s not that I don’t understand the concerns of the hardcore Holmes nuts when they see the trailer:

Holmes is…flipping around!  Jumping out of windows! FIGHTING people! With his fists! And weapons! It looks like…an action movie! What the hell?

I was ambivalent about the whole thing myself there for a moment. But then I realized it’s not me that’s attached to Holmes as a dark, eccentric armchair detective who solves cases with his brilliant, twisted mind and has no use for physical confrontations. It’s me at 12 years old.

True story: I was once had the shit kicked out of me for reading Sherlock Holmes…

I was in middle school, our gym teacher had taken a sick day and we were given the period to do whatever we wanted. They brought out a bunch of soccer balls, basketballs, footballs — and, predictably, I was interested in none of it. Instead I dug into my book bag for a library copy of  The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.

Holmes was the perfect hero for a skinny, mouthy, awkward little kid growing up on Southern military bases and in trailer parks. I could IDENTIFY with him.

We were both pale, over-read and underdeveloped.

We both had no real use for women (well, I had no use for them yet. And it would still be a few years before they’d have any use for me).

And, maybe most importantly, we both grew rather odd where we were planted.

But whereas all this was still a huge problem for me, Holmes thought it was hilarious.

Sherlock Holmes, lounging about his apartment in his robe in the middle of the day, laughing at the world's problems until he can find one that intrigues him.

Weird, brilliant and completely convinced of his own superiority, Holmes smiled wryly as the rich, powerful and well respected begged him to solve their problems WITH HIS MIND. His brilliance brought him fame, (eventual) fortune and the privilege of being rude to everyone from his best friend to the police, making a mockery of polite society and generally being so socially awkward that had he not been the world’s greatest detective he would have been lucky to get a job walking up and down the London streets wearing a sandwich board.

Here’s where Holmes had it all over me: he would have been smarter than to be reading Victorian-era detective fiction while surrounded by modern redneck kids in gym class.

These kids already knew I was the kind of miserable, stuck up little shit who actually did all the REQUIRED reading for class, blowing the curve. Now I was reading for PLEASURE?

Well, looky what we got us here…

It wasn’t the worst after school ass-kicking I ever got…but I did spend about twenty minutes looking for a shoe in a muddy ditch. And as I shook the ooze out of that shoe I hated anyone, anywhere who had ever enjoyed a gym class. Anyone who enjoyed sports. There were two kinds of people, as far as I was concerned: people who loved literature, art and music and apes who loved throwing and catching things, running, jumping and tackling.

Years later, looking back on my 12-year-old self, I realized that I didn’t really resent sports or athletic people. I didn’t even resent the physical violence. I resented the fact that I wasn’t good at any of it and they were. The truth is that no matter how fast, crazy or vicious I was, I could never have won a physical fight with any one of those kids – nevermind three of them. They were bigger, stronger, more practiced at physical competition. If I could have won a fight, I wouldn’t have considered it beneath me. I was not, as I told myself, better than that.

How, exactly, does a 12-year-old decide that he’s philosophically against being able to defend himself? He doesn’t. He gets his ass handed to him and works backward from there, deciding that because he lost he doesn’t want to win, doesn’t want to compete at all, even if it means having to fish his left shoe out of a ditch at the end of the day.

Sniveling and squishing my way home I told myself that I, like Sherlock, would distinguish myself not with my fists but with my mind. Then they’d see…

Which is the wrong lesson entirely.

Holmes would have won that fight – and not just because he’d have been squaring off against a bunch of  five-foot kids who had yet to begin shaving.

There were all sorts of things about which Holmes was willfully ignorant — but he never considered himself too smart to throw a punch when it was needed.

In the very first Sherlock Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet, Holmes is described by an appraising Dr. Watson as “an expert singlestick player, boxer, and swordsman.”

Not an amateur, not a hobbyist, but an expert. How in the world I devoured that story but managed to overlook (repress?) that part, I couldn’t tell you. Maybe it was just too horrible to contemplate. Holmes was a boxer! A swordsman (at a time and in a place where it wasn’t a cultivated eccentricity to be shown off in historical reenactments)! A singlestick fighter! He was a greater jock than any junior redneck who ever beat me up after school.

Maybe it was easy to ignore, because Arthur Conan Doyle usually arranged to have a lot of the physical action off-stage. Holmes’ knowledge of martial arts famously saves his life in deadly combat with Professor Moriarty atop the Reichenbach Falls, but we only hear about it later. He gets into an honest-to-goodness barfight in The Adventure of the Solitary Cyclist , but we only hear about it after the fact, when he brags to Watson.

Without much action on the page, it was easy to convince myself that Holmes was all brain. There were also little hints that Holmes was with me on gym class — it was said he “seldom took exercise for exercise’s sake.”

That “all brain” impression was also fostered by Basil Rathbone (whose Holmes radio show was terrific but whose movies are very spotty) and Jeremy Brett (my favorite Holmes, by far). They each perfectly captured an essential aspect of Holmes (Rathbone his playful arrogance, Brett his creepy detachment and inherent kinkiness). But neither of them were particularly convincing as someone who you’d be afraid to face down in a fight.

Guy Ritchie’s movie may yet be awful. I have my own reservations about the trailer. But I think Robert Downey Jr., a genuine weirdo genius drug addict, has a good shot at giving us a Holmes whose brilliance and physicality can finally co-exist.

If he pulls it off we might look forward to Philip Seymour Hoffman as Nero Wolfe.