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Posts Tagged ‘Holmes’

Sherlock

For the last week or so Steph and I have been watching the Stephen Moffat / Marc Gatiss / Sue Vertue miniseries Sherlock, and this is what I was talking about months ago when I said that most people forget how weird Sherlock Holmes actually is when they read the stories.   Sherlock here is a manic scarecrow, absolutely confident and yet slightly uncertain in his own abilities, an ex-druggie and current Nicotine patch abuser, given to firing bullets into his own wall from boredom.  Unlike the (still fun) Robert Downey Jr version, though, Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock comes off as a very strange man who is an inseparable part of our world, rather than the inhabitant of a Victorian adventure-drama pastiche (not that there’s anything wrong with such pastiche – there’s just a limit to what you can do there).

In three 90-minute episodes, this series does the practically impossible of nailing the Sherlock Holmes feel in a thoroughly modern setting.  The actors (Martin Freeman of Life on Mars as John Watson and the brilliantly-named Benedict Cumberbatch as Sherlock Holmes) are inspired, Cumberbatch as a Holmes always one step away from committing some heinous crime just to keep himself from boredom, and Freeman as a Watson drawn to Holmes’ adventuring lifestyle.  The cinematography is brilliant without going out of its way to seem so, the music serves as an excellent accent, and of course there’s the script.  Between them, Moffat and Gatiss craft stories that are hilarious at one step, and deadly serious (even terrifying) the next, much as Holmes stories always were.  The villains are truly chilling creations, and Sherlock in his way is their mirror, even as he struggles to deal with the most elementary of human interactions.

The show isn’t entirely even – the second episode veers a little close to Yellow Peril/inscrutable Oriental territory for my comfort, and also in that episode Holmes verges on being an incarnation of the Doctor – but it’s always fun, witty, and mysterious.  There’s so much to praise here, from the plots that spin off old-school Holmes adventures to the amazing chemistry between the two leads to the cinematography, but this should be enough to convince you that you need to watch:

The series starts when Doctor John Watson, recently invalided home from the war in Afghanistan with shrapnel in his leg, meets an old school friend of his who tries to convince him to share a flat with the eccentric consulting detective Sherlock Holmes.

The same opening works as well for Gatiss, Moffat, and Vertue today as it did for Doyle more than a century ago.  Kind of sad, now that I think about it, but at least they make the most of it.

Edit: Mistakenly listed the name of the actor playing Sherlock Holmes as “Bernard Cumberbatch.”  In fact, his real name is Benedict Timothy Carlton Cumberbatch, which is even better.

The New Holmes

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.