Sherlock Is My Holmesboy; Or, What I Love About Holmes and Watson

(I promise that title is the worst and only pun in this blog entry.)

Sherlock Holmes is one of the world’s most popular and iconic characters. He is re-imagined for every generation and niche. He’s a child; he’s an old man; he’s a she. Sherlock Holmes is a delusional drug addict; a functional alcoholic; a sociopath; an affection-starved mama’s boy; a misogynist; a social progressive; a permanently friend-zoned geek; an asexual adult; an android; a clone from the distant future.

It’s fair to say that Sherlock Holmes is a trope as well as a character, and that different things about that trope appeal to different audiences.

For me, at its most affecting, Sherlock Holmes is about love and the terrifying vulnerability of feelings.

Back up the train. So often in contemporary Western society, “love” is a euphemism for sex, and that’s not what I’m talking about. True, in some of the Holmes re-workings or adaptations that appeal to me, sex does feature, but I consider it an occasional symptom of rather than cause for the germ of the idea I seek.

Instead, I’m drawn to versions of the Holmes-Watson trope that bring out the dynamic between a Holmes character who feels love — most often friendship, but also romantic, sexual, whatever, I really don’t care as long as it runs deep — for the people who surround him but is unable to express it because he has such an inwardly low opinion of himself as an actual human being whom other human beings might like. In his inner self, he’s terrified that any expression of caring or attachment will earn him a laugh in his face or, worse, disgust, rejection, and distance.

I don’t need this idea to be the focus of the story as a whole. If I wanted to read about angst with no plot, I would go find fanfiction, which is a genre where that structure is more accepted. It’s not enough that the Holmes character feels these feelings. She also has to be an otherwise awesome character who has thrilling adventures and solves baffling cases. I don’t want to sympathize with someone whose self-loathing is totally justified.

See, what appeals to me most about that version of Holmes is I can see myself in her. I’m not good at expressing my feelings, and that does stem from my own insecurities. I find it cathartic and comforting to see my own emotional experience dialed up to eleven in a safe, fictional environment. It’s reassuring to watch characters as cool and competent as the Holmes figures always are still feel that they’re not good enough for those they love.

It’s particularly reassuring when any idiot can see from the outside that Holmes is enough for the people who love him just the way he is. They sometimes show their love by calling him out when he’s wrong or challenging his views, but none of them ever leaves him by choice (well, not unless the performers who play them quit the series, but that’s different).

Which brings me to Watson.

There are lots of reasons why the Watson half of the trope is important to me. I think contemporary series are right to put the focus on developing Watson as a unique and gripping character; if you’ve read the play or novels I’ve been working on lately, you’ll probably have guessed that I think Watson is an important ideological counterbalance to Holmes’s hyper-pseudo-Enlightenment-rationalism, and that he or she deserves to win status more often.

I’ve worked through and with and around those thoughts in a variety of different media; I won’t re-dwell on them here. However, I will explain the main reason why Watson is the key to the Holmes-Watson trope for me, whether the finished product winds up matching my ideology or not.

The Watson character is the reassurance of a happy ending for the story. Other character come and go; they’re guest stars or series regulars with sub-billing. Watson is always there for Holmes, because at the end of the day, he (or she) loves Holmes unconditionally. He might have his own priorities; he might love other people, too. He might get married to Mary Morstan or gang up on House with Cuddy or shoot Sherlock a dirty look while comforting Mrs. Hudson yet again. But there’s never any doubt that he’ll always return to that second cozy armchair at 221B.

Watson’s journey complements Holmes’s and externalizes the emotionally satisfying plotline. Instead of watching Holmes come to love herself, we watch Watson learn to love Holmes and Holmes learn to accept and trust that love. Sometimes, this plot culminates in Holmes being able to express her love to Watson. In other adaptations, the two are stuck in a paradoxically progressive stasis: Holmes grows as she learns to feel confident in their relationship, but she is perpetually unable to reach the stage where she can reciprocate in words.

Of course, Watson also has other, interesting journeys. We can watch her struggle with what it means to care about someone with these kinds of emotional walls, both in terms of how it affects her relationships with other characters and the toll it takes on her own psyche. We can see her fight to be comfortable with her new colleague and then fight even harder to keep her independence at the same time.

Depending on the tone of the particular adaptation, her struggles can be lighthearted and comic or they can delve realistically into the pain of dealing with a loved one with intense emotional and substance abuse problems. Either way, the outcome is usually the improvement of Watson’s self-knowledge and expansion of her worldview. Although a daily relationship with Holmes isn’t always sustainable, especially in those darker adaptations, Holmes invariably changes Watson’s life for the better.

For me, this emotional interaction is the soul of the trope. No, it’s not what Sherlock Holmes is about — not when there are baritsu fights on the brink of Reichenback Falls and pistol shots and dogs that do not bark in the night-time. But it’s what makes it interesting to me, and it’s why, despite the hundreds of other detectives out there and thousands of brilliantly plotted mysteries,  I come back to Baker St. again and again.

Thanks, Amanda and Liz, for the conversations that sparked this blog entry!

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