This is not an entry about the Harry Potter movie, which was fun.  It’s an entry about the trailer for the new Robert Downey Jr. Sherlock Holmes movie beforehand.

To clarify: I’m a die-hard Holmes fan. I’ve read Holmes stories since I was a tiny kid; every time I pass a collection of Holmes in the bookstore I am overcome by deep, profound yearning.  I can recite many of the stories, turn-for-turn, from memory.  My first exposure to Japanese animation was Miyazaki’s Sherlock Hound, and one of the two episodes of The Real Ghostbusters I remember is the one where Sherlock Holmes and Watson get made real by the sheer force of belief.

Our culture embraces Holmes as the Victorian Batman.  Practically infallible (except for the Irene Adler affair), best at everything.  For which they’re hardly to be blamed; Doyle himself slowly drifted away from the first chapter of The Sign of the Four, in which he lays out very clearly the limits of Holmes’ knowledge.  It’s gotten to the point where Alan Moore, in his League of Extraordinary Gentlemen books, makes a decided point of distancing the “Great Detective” from the action — he becomes a superhuman figure, and tacitly in the midst of every battle we can hear the beset members of the League thinking: this wouldn’t be a problem if only the Great Detective were still around.

So, set that against the Robert Downey Jr. version, which plays Holmes as, to judge from the trailer, a drug-addled, brilliant action detective pressing the bounds of Victorian society while prim, mannered Watson trundles grumpily alongside.

I love it.

The movie might be crap, but they’ve performed a brilliant trick by seizing one of the most subtle aspects of the books: we see everything through Watson’s perspective.  Watson clearly is a prim, proper Victorian army doctor; through him we see Holmes as a brilliant, mannered outsider.  But what do we *know* about Holmes?

He’s a workaholic, a cocaine addict, a  master of boxing, the singlestick (beating people up with a stick) and Bartitsu (a form of jujitsu taught in Victorian London), an occasional cross-dresser and sometime opium smoker, a man with a set of talents that verge on the criminal and a host of shady contacts throughout London, who is equally at home in an opium den as in the Belgian ambassador’s residence.  He’s possessed of immense physical strength (capable of bending a poker back into shape, which is a LOT harder than bending it out of shape in the first place) and speed (outrunning a bevy of younger men with apparent ease in Hound of the Baskervilles).  He plays something that can best be described as jazz fiddle, which Watson regards as incoherent noise.

Imagine, for a moment, that Watson, not Holmes, is the consummately prim one (as is, in fact, also supported by the stories – Watson wouldn’t be caught dead masquerading as a beggar or what have you).  He’s faced with a man who flies in the face of Victorian morals with alarming ferocity, yet whom he deeply respects for his brilliance.  What is poor James Watson do, then, when he tries to record his friend’s adventures?  He writes them faithfully, and skirts the truth in presenting Holmes as a Victorian paragon who just happens to possess a host of questionable skills.

Come to think of it, this also explains why Holmes is so derisive of Watson’s reporting of his accomplishments.

Anyway, I’m not saying that this is the truth of Holmes. It is, however, an interesting reading of Holmes, and a refreshing shift from classic portrayals of the infallible, unflappable Detective. I might need to play with this idea some more in the future.

In the meantime, go hunt down a copy of Young Sherlock Holmes and watch it. You’ve almost certainly earned it for something you’ve done today.