by Clarke, Neil
The trailers already hint that this version of Holmes will be up on his canefighting, and also a worthy pugilist and kickboxer. It’s no surprise — director Guy Ritchie is a judo black belt and a longtime karateka. Then there’s Robert Downey Jr., who studies the Chinese boxing system of wing chun. Once celebrated as the style of Bruce Lee, wing chun is perhaps today more famous for being the style of choice of any number of YouTube warriors who end up being kicked in the head by Muay Thai artists, taken down by Brazilian jiu-jitsu practitioners, and pounded by boxers. Heck, I do tai chi and I laugh at wing chun people. When the Sherlock Holmes trailer was first released, martial arts bulletin boards lit up with supposition — were Downey’s stiff-armed boxing stance and front kicks the real nineteenth century pugilistic deal or were they — gulp! — ”the Chun”? Wolf allays the fears of a dozen or so Internet martial arts geeks, while crushing the hopes of many a chunner. “Richard Ryan [the fight choreographer for Sherlock Holmes] is an old colleague of mine and the Bartitsu Society contributed copies of the Bartitsu Compendium to the production.” Downey himself gave bartitsu a kinda-sorta shout-out in an interview with Premiere Magazine last year, saying, “If you look baritsu up, they can’t even really tell you what it is, so it gives us a lot of leeway.”
Of course we can tell what bartitsu is, but there is a final question: does the system actually work? To find out, I attended a bartitsu class held by Botta Secreta Productions, a historical swordplay group. David Charles, a fencer and wrestler who got into historical recreations through rapier play and the Golden Gate Renaissance Park Faire, taught a small class of five — three men, a woman, and me — the basics of canefighting. He warned us right up front that if we were “looking for a secret weapon to make it in the Octagon [the cage in which the Ultimate Fighting Championship's MMA matches are held], we’re not your guys.”
We went through the basic strikes and parries with our canes, and then paired off for a bit of play. I was teamed up with a man who wore suspenders and a shirt that wouldn’t look out of place on Barton-Wright (He had a nice hat too, but took it off for the cane drills.) During the “choice reaction” drill, when we could do as we liked with our canes, I managed to poke him in the belly once, using the cane like a bayonet. Beginner’s luck!
More complex moves were harder to pull off. In one the opponent’s cane is blocked, an arm grabbed, then a foot swept. In another, a swinging cane is blocked, but then looped around to the opponent’s ankle for a nice yank. Then we practiced the cane to hook the neck in order counter a right punch and feed the ruffian a knee to the face. But our punches kept “hitting”, knuckles lightly brushing against chins, before the cane hook could work. And that’s a major part of bartitsu — figuring out what moves work and how to make them work from fragmentary evidence. Still photos and sometimes tedious descriptions of physical moves are not enough. By the end of the class, we figured that perhaps there was an extra step off to the right involved — this would keep the punch off the chin and give the cane-wielder more space to yank with the cane. Plus, actually slamming a cane on the side of someone’s neck full-force probably would have made the move work a bit better!
We still know only a little about bartitsu. Despite Cherpillod’s presence at the school and reports of public demonstrations, for example, we have no idea what the wrestling curriculum of bartitsu consisted of. John Sullins, a Botta Secreta member, says: “Any study group working on the canonical system at a certain point is forced to ad lib and create its own Neo-Bartitsu style. There is nothing wrong with that, it is all part of the fun of studying this odd little martial art.” David Charles quoted the informal slogan of the neo-bartitsu movement — ”The recreation of bartitsu is its re-creation,” several times during the class.
The martial arts historians are having their fun, and now the steampunks have some period exercise to try, but sadly the Sherlockians who play “the game” of pretending that Holmes was a real historical figure have an issue — Holmes supposedly learned bartitsu before 1893, but Barton-Wright didn’t found his art until 1898. And Holmes certainly didn’t study “baritsu,” which doesn’t exist. There’s only one solution: Sherlock Holmes went to Japan, learned jujutsu, and a decade later in a clever disguise, founded bartitsu! And when whatever case the great detective was working on was solved, the club and the entire system were mothballed.
Until now.
(1) This spelling reflects the most common Portuguese transliteration of the Japanese word jujutsu.
About the Author
Nick Mamatas is the author of two novels, Under My Roof and Move Under Ground, and over fifty short stories, many of which were recently collected in You Might Sleep… A native New Yorker, Nick now lives in the California Bay Area.
