Sherlock, Season 2

1. There will be spoilers.

2. The most amusing part of Sherlock season 2, for me, was after J and I finished watching it. We were getting ready for bed and I was walking around, letting the dogs out and back in, turning off the lights, starting the dishwasher, and explaining with some vehemence that the original stories of “The Final Problem” and “The Adventure of the Empty House” are a retcon worthy of DC Comics.

I mean, Doyle wrote a straight-up no-takebacks death. He wrote a Grant-Morrison-killing-Magneto-and-Jean-Grey death, a “see what you’ll do with THAT, hahahahh!” scene. He wanted out, he wanted to be done with Holmes, and he killed him, fair and square.

Nine years later, he brought Holmes back.

I recently watched the Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes series. I simply find “The Adventure of the Empty House” to be asinine, to be ludicrous. I find nothing in it to be believable or to be fair to the reader. The whole things strikes me as similar to the Veronica Mars episode “Donut Run,” in which Veronica lies to the viewer and breaks the rules of the show. It wasn’t fair when Veronica did it, it wasn’t fair when Doyle did it, and I fully expect it to be gratuitously unfair when Sherlock will do it next season.

But at this point it’s traditional.

I watched “Reichenbach Fall” with a sort of malign glee. I know it’s going to be a take-back. And I know the take-back will be ridiculously awful and convoluted and heavy-handed and unfair to the viewer. That’s CANON. So I am actually totally looking forward to it. I feel that I am in on it, you understand. That we all know this is how it goes.

I’m glad that my long-canon-form-fannishness is cross-fandom. Comics, Sherlock Holmes, Jane Austen — things that have been around a while and have accumulated interpretations — all need a bit of understanding from a fan.

2. Speaking of interpretations!

Irene Adler.

Here’s the thing; Irene Adler is a canonical cipher. You can either write her as unknown and unknowable, and interesting only because of how Holmes reacts to her, or … or you can make her up.

Adler has one canonical short story. And she’s barely in it. All her cleverness is revealed in hindsight. We really get almost nothing.

But there are, frankly, three female characters in the Holmes canon. Mrs. Hudson, Watson’s wife, and Irene Adler. It’s no wonder to me that people trying to make the Holmes stories less … male … hang a lot of weight on Adler. Modern interpretations and adaptations, particularly, try to make her something more than the canon presents.

I like all the adaptations I’ve seen. I like the Adler Rachel McAdams plays in the recent films. I like the Adler in Laurie King’s Mary Russel books. I like the Adler I saw here, in “A Scandal in Belgravia.”

I like them because they are all attempts to demonstrate two things. First, what sort of woman would rattle Sherlock Holmes? Second, what does that woman’s personhood and agency look like?

People make all sorts of speculations and theories about Holmes and his sexuality, misogyny, asexuality, homosexuality, relationship to his mother, relationship to prostitutes — it’s endless. It’s endless in no small part because there is so little substantive canon. Does Holmes’ admiration for Adler have a sexual component? Maybe. If it does, why her and no other woman? What makes her so special?

You can see how this leads to all sorts of wide-ranging character types.

3. I read an essay, somewhere — and if you know whereof I speak, please tell me — discussing that Holmes and Watson look to us today as if they are in a homosexual relationship because of invisible prostitutes. Namely, because no-one writing in Victorian England put prostitutes in their fiction, yet all readers at the time knew, without being told, that unmarried men regularly visited such businesswomen. Two unmarried men living together as best friends would never be presumed to be anything resembling homosexuals, not because homosexuality was unknown, but because EVERYONE went to bordellos. One merely didn’t talk about it.

I find some of the “people will think we’re gay” in Sherlock to be funny, some to be tiresome, and some to be so trolling of slash fandom that I believe — based on no data — that it is deliberate.

4. I like this show. I’m looking forward to season 3.

Things I Like: Sherlock Holmes

My love for Sherlock Holmes falls slightly outside my usual run of interests. (My usual run of interests, for those of you new to the blog, being more along the lines of attractive desperate women and stories about consequences.) Yet Holmes is a character I almost always adore.

1. In the currently-running BBC series Sherlock (the second season of which I have not seen yet, no spoilers please!) a police officer calls Holmes a psychopath. Holmes whirls and snaps at the man, the anger precise between his teeth, “I’m not a psychopath, Anderson, I’m a high-functioning sociopath, do your research.” This is a Holmes I love. I love the man completely adrift in humanity who makes a decision to use his powers for good and not evil.

He had to make the choice, you know. You know that at some point he sat down, possibly for days, and weighed his options. Good or evil. We have no way to know what went into the calculation, and goodness knows I pine to hear his thinking, the pros and the cons. But he had to decide.

This decision on Holmes’ part, this is very akin to the decision the X-Men make — to protect a world that hates and fears them. On a much smaller scale this is the choice that kids who are outsiders, or victims, or shunned, or neurologically atypical, or geeks must all make. When the world doesn’t seem to care much for you, when the world shoves, what do you do in return? Do you make the world a better or worse place? Do you grow up to become an abuser or a social justice advocate or a writer or an elementary school teacher or an administrative martinet? Do you use your powers, whatever they may be, for good or for evil?

Holmes’ decision is one we all have to make at some point. I love this version of Holmes because that choice fascinates me. I want to know how it is made.

2. I also love the Robert Downey Jr. Holmes of the recent movies. This Holmes is less sociopath and more unable to live inside his own head for more than a few moments. He casually insults people, but he also knows how to charm and sees the use of it.

RDJ’s Holmes is manipulative and codependent, and I like this about him. He is more comprehensibly human, afraid of experiencing personal loss, afraid of failure. There are people in the world, people I know, who move through life as though shot from a canon. They achieve, and succeed, and they always have a plan. And you can see just behind them the shadow of what they are leaving behind, even if you can’t identify it. RDJ’s Holmes is one of those people, walking briskly away from something that is totally irrelevant to the story at hand, save that it drives him on.

3. I also love the Holmes of Arthur Conan Doyle’s short stories. There is less character to love here, and more sheer brilliance. This is the Holmes I pine to be, the brilliant detective who doesn’t need anything but scientific truth. This Holmes appeals to my sense of order. Science, logic, rational thought, this is how I want the world to be. I want people to be deduceable, as well. In the Holmes stories, they are.

4. Laurie King is the author of a series of books, beginning with The Beekeeper’s Apprentice, about Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes. I fell madly in love with Mary Russell upon first reading the books — brilliant, self-contained, damaged, arrogant Marry Russell — but I quickly fell for both her relationship to Holmes and Holmes himself.

This Holmes is a man, very human. He is brilliant but he is also older. He’s had time to move past some of the insecurity and arrogance of youth. He is also an incredibly dedicated student, constantly working to maintain and improve his skills. He is a man who used to be chasing a need to be right; now he is chased by visions of how things can go wrong. This is Holmes with not only intelligence, but wisdom.

In the best possible universe, when I am sixty years old I will get to be some combination of King’s Sherlock Holmes and Bujold’s Cordelia Naismith Vorkosigan. (And don’t you now want to eavesdrop on those two people sitting down to tea? Don’t you want to know what they would say to each other? Fanfic writers, give me that, mmkay?)

***

I was thinking about this due to an essay, A Scandal in Fandom: Stephen Moffat, Irene Adler, and the Fannish Gaze. It’s an excellent essay, and I don’t think I have more to say on it at this time. But it made me ponder what I personally get out of Holmes, and the variety of canon and fanon works pertaining thereunto. I think my take is that I essentially approve of all the Holmes interpretations that don’t make Sherlock distant and unengaged.

For me, personally, the core of Sherlock Holmes is a close-bodied grappling with the worst of humanity. Whether the contest is intellectual and clean, or visceral and bloody, Holmes is a character who is only alive when he is engaged with a problem. A Holmes who moves from cool and bored to cool and superior is not a Holmes I want to spend time with. I think both Moffat and King address this, in their very different ways. Laurie King’s Holmes is a man called out of retirement by life and youth and, yes, crime. The text explicitly acknowledges that he was stagnating, possibly dying, as a direct result of having no useful work. Moffat’s Holmes thrives on the conflict, the puzzle, the need to show his superiority. But it’s also clear that he stays engaged with other people, particularly Watson, to stay in touch with his own humanity. Two very different approaches with similar results.

Some days, I wish I could be Sherlock Holmes. Other days, I hope fervently that I am not. Whichever sort of day it is, though, I can’t let his character go.

Intergalactic bounty hunters

1. I truly do not understand the disapproval and ire I saw on Twitter and blogs about the Superbowl performance of the Black Eyed Peas. I mean, clearly their monitors weren’t working right and they could not hear themselves or each other. And whoever was mixing them was doing an incredibly bad job. But neither of those things are really their fault. And, I mean, let’s be frank, here — no one listens to the BEP for the melodic and lyrical quality of their work. They are a pop-dance-R&B-influenced house band. You listen to them when you want a thumping beat and a good hook and something to dance to.

So let’s talk about what the DID bring to the show. Insane costumes. Which I loved. I mean, in case y’all haven’t noticed, the Black Eyed Peas are complete dorks. They sing about Cybertron. They love giant battling robots. They are fans of comics and superheroes and science fiction. They clearly want to be intergalactic bounty hunters when they grow up, and they are not afraid to let everyone know it. So, good on you, Black Eyed Peas, for letting your freak flag fly. If I had the money to wear a flashing space armor suit to CONvergence, I might well do it.

Well, not me, personally. But I would dress my kids in it in a HEARTBEAT.

2. There’s a trope – story type – thingy I’ve been trying to articulate, and name. It’s the following:

Child (I prefer the story version with a girl, but I know this trope exists for boys, too) has horrible childhood. Child/adolescent is offered a way out by a suspect organization or individual. The “way out” appears to be empowering, but the protagonist is trained to kill and is used as an assassin/killer/terrorist/thief. Protagonist eventually decides to make a life for herself, and breaks free from the organization or takes a stand and changes the organization from within.

La Femme Nikita (all versions)
the girl Matilda from the movie The Professional
Parker from Leverage
Laura Kinney
Cass Cain
River from Firefly
all the girls in Gunslinger Girl
half the cast of My-HiME
some Mercedes Lackey characters
some of the characters on Dollhouse
There are echoes of this in the Bionic Woman remake, sort of
Hit-Girl, *sort of*
Nadia from the tv show Alias, *sort of*

I don’t know that there’s a *name* for this trope. And I’m sure there are more examples out there.

I am such a sucker for this thingy. I tried to find it on TV Tropes, but it appears to not be there. I’m half-tempted to join TVT and put this in. I think there’s enough examples of it to make it a trope. But I’m not sure how much time/effort it would take to do so. Hmm. Perhaps I shall investigate.

Also, now I kinda want to see a crossover RPF fic in which the characters from Kieron Gillen’s S.W.O.R.D. comic discover that the Black Eyed Peas really are intergalactic bounty hunters, and have to arrest them, and Beast ends up having tea with Fergie. I can totally see that.

3. I was pondering the character of Sherlock Holmes this weekend, and how perilously close I identify with him. This is … not the best thing in the world, since he is an ass. But, better to know oneself than be blindsided by oneself, right? But I am just a sucker for the person who can see the truth about other people. Witness my liking of Lightman from Lie to Me. And Nate Ford on Leverage.

4. The weather finally warmed up a bit. Like, to around thirty degrees Fahrenheit all weekend. It was gorgeous.

Thursday’s post needs a title

1. I finished Irrepressible yesterday. For those of you keeping score at home, that’s the biography of Jessica Mitford. Let me just say, it is decidedly odd to be reading a biography of a person who lived in history — you know, all those years before I was born — and then their bio starts talking about events I remember! Can’t they have the decency to die before 1980? (I kid, I kid!) This is a thing I’ve noticed with teaching my kids — the Regan era is history. So is the first Gulf war. So is 9/11. Idek, y’all.

But, in Mitford news, while in her 70′s, Decca Mitford became lead singer in a band that cut a few tracks professionally. Despite being no longer able to sing on pitch or carry a tune. Her friends were often embarrassed on her behalf, but her family supported her. And Decca herself? Completely irrepressible.

2. N brought back a CASE of Bundaberg Ginger Beer for me from a vendor in Madison. This is awesome. Bundaberg Australian Ginger Beer is the best ginger beer I know of, and there are no vendors of it in Minnesota.

3. J and I got an estimate for steaming the roof. It’s fairly expensive. We’re waffling now, trying to decide if we need to get it done or if we can just fight the ice dams ourselves for the next eight weeks. Home ownership kinda sucks sometimes.

4. I watched a BBC movie last night, Dr. Bell and Mr. Doyle, about Arthur Conan Doyle and his medical school mentor, Dr. Bell. Bell was an acknowledged inspiration for Sherlock Holmes. The plot was interesting — the story is set at a moment of profound misogyny, as women have been accepted into the medical school for the first time. The film wasn’t bad, with solid acting and a good script. If this is the sort of topic that interests you, I recommend it.

5. I also finished the audiobook The Rise and Fall of Alexandria, Birthplace of the Modern Mind. I did, in fact, cry in my car while driving at all the points where the library and museum were burned or sacked, or the points where incredible scholars were killed. The death of Hypatia essentially marked the end of Western, Christian scholarship for 600 freaking years. (The Muslim world continued on thinking and exploring and learning just fine, thank you very much. As did Europe’s Jews. But both peoples were frequently executed by Western Christians if they displayed any of their fine erudition in Europe. Christianity, you have a LOT to answer for. (Yet, it was the monks who saved what they could, through the Dark Ages, the bishops who tried to educate the gentry, the monks who tried, against all odds, to preserve what little knowledge they had. Every monastery sacked was tantamount to another fall of Alexandria. I find this fundamental internal conflict in the early medieval Christian church to be as frustrating as anything.))

When Hypatia was murdered — the first prominent female scholar, scientist, and philosopher in the Western world — it was not because she was a woman, but because she was not a Christian. And, moreover, because she taught the Alexandrian elite that they should examine Christian doctrine as critically as they would examine anything else. But Christianity was not a movement based on reason, it was a movement based on faith. Any reason that contradicted faith was not merely wrong, but evil. And treasonous.

I don’t say it often, but I think that faith-based cultural movements are some of the most damaging things humans have ever created. I’m not sure their contributions to progress — see the aforementioned monks-saving-books — outweigh the harm.

High-functioning sociopath

I watched the first episode, “A Study in Pink,” of the new Sherlock Holmes series Sherlock on the PBS website yesterday. The show is well-made, I like the technical quirks of updating it, I like the actors, and the cinematography is good. I look forward to seeing half-recognized actors from other British shows appearing in upcoming episodes.

I do love a good Holmes.

I was thinking about this, pondering it. Why on earth do I like this guy? I think the biggest part of it is that I really, truly met Holmes via Laurie King’s series of Holmes-Russell books. The first, Beekeeper’s Apprentice, introduces us to a retired Holmes in the early 1900s, and to the original and entirely captivating (to me) character of Mary Russell. The two form a partnership in detecting, and their adventures and relationship are the subject of the rest of the series.

In the Beekeeper series, Holmes is a cantakerous man, set in his ways, a genius who lacks a personal touch. Yet we see him through the eyes of an equally brilliant, equally awkward, equally damaged person, Mary. The books present Holmes as complex and flawed, with value beyond that of his intellect. Certainly, he is an ass, but he recognizes this and makes amends over time.

I think that this rendition of Holmes is always in the back of my mind when I read or see other versions. I think that I, as a viewer or reader, insert that humanity into him regardless of the presentation. So, there’s that. In my head he’s an ass, but he’s an ass with lots of hidden good qualities.

Yet Holmes is not the only ass I like in fiction. I also, for instance, Like Dr. Leitman on Lie To Me. And I think it’s for the same reasons. Both characters are right.

I don’t mean they are good, though they mostly work for law and order and justice. I mean they are Factually Correct. It is a geek social fallacy that social value can be purchased or gained by intellectual superiority. While I try to avoid this sort of thinking, there was a time in my youth when I pined for this to be true. (This was before I met people loads smarter than me.) Yet, though I recognize that Leitman and Holmes are jackasses I never want to meet, I still find them awesome as characters. I sorta wish I could be like them, only better at wielding the power I would have.

Because their gifts really are shown as superpowers, frankly. Leitman’s ability to read micro-expressions is based on a real ability, but the show treats it as telepathy. Ditto Holmes’s ability to detect physical evidence and deduce its meaning. Real skills, made magic. It all amounts to really really REALLY good cold reading. And I have always wished I was better at cold reading.

When I was a kid, a teenager, and a young adult, I was fairly poor at understanding social cues. I pined for someone to just explain to me what the hell was going on, and what I was supposed to do. Just TELL me, I would shriek in my head, instead of playing these stupid GAMES. As an adult, I recognize that the things I thought were games were, in fact, the purpose of the social exchange — assessing status, determining whether further intimacy was desired in the relationship, deciding whether this new person was wanted or unwanted in the social sphere. But I didn’t get that, and when I did get it I wasn’t very good at it.

When I saw people who were good at social interactions, it looked like magic. Normal social skills looked to then-me the way cold reading looks to me now. And I craved for those abilities.

Watching Holmes on Sherlock rekindles that desire on my part to be really really REALLY good at reading people. Except I would use the information better than Holmes, I tell myself in my head. There’s a moment on the show when a character calls Holmes a psychopath. Holmes snaps at the man, “High-functioning sociopath!” and returns to his existing conversation / ranting. I am not certain that high-functioning is a term that rightly applies to sociopathy. (Perhaps it does, I haven’t done research on this.) But if there is such a thing, I would believe that it looks like Holmes. A brilliant man who doesn’t see human emotions and relationships as real. And I wonder, watching the show, whether it is possible to possess the skills Holmes does (or Leitman) and not be an ass. Or a high-functioning sociopath.

Still, I watch the show and my geeky heart is with Holmes. He is right. He knows everything. He is incredibly confident, with an arrogance that is justified. (And how I would love for my own arrogance to be justified.) He can do things that no-one else can. He is special. (And how young-me ached to be Special, in that purple-eyed red-haired magic horse mutant powers Mary Sue way.) And I know (from the Beekeeper books) that Holmes has human thoughts and feelings hidden away, which he will show when the time is right, with the person he trusts, who will be Watson. (And on some level so many of us geeks yearn for the One Person Who Sees Our Value Despite Our Socially Inappropriate Manner and Can Be Trusted With Our Heart.) Sherlock Holmes really is, on some level, my personal geeky-teen wish fulfillment fantasy. No wonder I like it.

I’m looking forward to watching the rest of Sherlock. I think I’ll go order the dvds now.