There’s No Place Like Holmes

Or, “You Can’t Go Holmes Again”? Let’s face it, between Sherlock and his more modern incarnations like Dr. House, there’s a lot of scope for puns when discussing the Master.

Anyhow, so I saw Sherlock Holmes over the holidays. Did I like it? Yeah, overall, it was great.

But wait, Sarah, I pretend to hear you say in order that I might segue into the next part of the blog! Aren’t you a diehard Holmes fan? In some ways, the filmmakers took the original Sherlock Holmes stories, ripped them apart, and jammed all the pieces back together like a broken jigsaw puzzle. How could you stand that Irene Adler was basically a female American-insert character like Tom Sawyer in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen? Or that they strongly hinted not only that Holmes loved her (sacrilege in some parts) but that she loved him back? Etc.

Well, a lot of their changes did make me laugh. But I have a secret: I’ve never been as interested in Holmes as I am in what it’s possible to do with characters like him.

OK, I guess it’s not a secret so much as “something I write about on my blog all the time”. Sherlock Holmes had heart, action, and intrigue, but what fascinated me most about the movie were precisely those changes that are probably making Baker Street Irregulars cry tears of blood. How does one modernize a character like Sherlock Holmes, who’s so timeless and yet so tied to his time and location? What does it mean to preserve his essentials while updating him for contemporary audiences? And how and why do different modernizations of Holmes, like this movie and (come on, you totally knew this was coming) House, M. D. differ?

Because of the whole Irene-Adler-is-now-a-super-sneak-thief* change in Sherlock Holmes, the first thing I noticed was the way adaptations have to deal with The Woman Problem. In the 60 canonical Sherlock Holmes stories, women play hardly any role in the proceedings. It’s telling that Adler, to whom Holmes refers as “The Woman” and who is arguably the most significant canonical female character, appears in a single story (“A Scandal in Bohemia”) and has barely any “screen time”. Holmes and Watson talk about her, but our viewpoint character, Watson, only observes her from a distance. We get Holmes’s  account of his interaction with her through Watson’s account of his own interaction with Holmes, and she sends Holmes a letter at the end. That’s it.

The function of pretty much every other woman in the series is to be background dressing (Mrs. Hudson), to be a damsel in distress and conveniently leave all the plot to the men (Mary Morstan, Violet Hunter, et al.), and/or to make it clear that Watson is either not gay or not out of the closet (Mary Morstan again, Watson’s other spouse(s)).

But this isn’t acceptable for modern audiences, at least not in this type of story. No token woman equals no token sexual tension and/or uncomfortable sexism and/or unintended homoeroticism**.

Sherlock Holmes copes with this by putting Irene Adler in a position of prominence, making Holmes and Watson less a duo than a trio while still emphasizing that the boys’ friendship is the most important part of the story. This conveniently lets the writers form the typical protagonist team: hero, male best friend, and female possible love interest. They also body-snatched Mary Morstan (Watson’s fiancee) and Mrs. Hudson, replacing their canonical maudlin admiration for Holmes with more twenty-first-century “Excuse me?” reactions to his antics.

Interestingly, House, M. D. takes some of the same tacks, using not one but two (later three!) guy-guy-girl teams (although, to be fair, only the most prominent, House-Wilson-Cuddy, really follows the movie’s Holmes-Watson-Adler pattern. [Warning: do not click on link if you ever want to get productive work done again. I mean it!] The other two are different in that all three characters are of equal importance and play relatively interchangeable roles.) And the women who surround House don’t exactly fall into mindless admiration every time he solves a case.

What’s interesting, though, is that while the writers of Sherlock Holmes solved their Missing Women problem by taking the canonical female character closest to Holmes’s love interest and making her prominent, the House writers seem to have pulled their most prominent token woman from a different source. See, House and Wilson are pretty clear analogues for Holmes and Watson, in terms of story structure, but Cuddy isn’t Irene Adler***. That role seems to have been played by Stacey in season 2 – “the Woman” that House/Holmes just can’t leave in the past. Instead, Cuddy seems to be a more direct analogue of Lestrade**** – Holmes’s (male) Scotland Yard colleague. Lestrade brings Holmes cases, respects his ability but tries to keep his douchebaggery in line, and is supposedly one of the best of the non-genius detectives even though he can’t measure up to Holmes. He often also winds up falling into the low-status position or acting uncharacteristically stupidly so Holmes can gain the audience’s admiration.

Which raises some interesting questions. How does souping up an existing female character differ from putting a new female character in a previously male role? Which (if either) is more canonically faithful? (For instance, Stacey’s a far more Holmesian Irene Adler than the one in the movie: she’s happily married to someone else and she isn’t a permanent character. Cuddy’s sometimes a lot more like canon!Lestrade than is movie!Lestrade : she’s competent and doesn’t spend all her screen time having House/Holmes make a fool of her. And sometimes not: canon!Lestrade never had personal plotlines like love interests and baby-seeking.)

But since the word “douchebaggery” is too good not to type again, and also since I’m reaching the limits of how long a blog entry can be before everyone shuts their laptops, I’m going to move on to the second major problem of adapting Holmes to the new millenium: exactly how much of a misogynist jerk is he, and how can you show it on the screen?

Part of the problem is not knowing exactly how to read the Victorian social cues in the Holmes stories. An easy example: Holmes’s dislike of women, preference for male company, and laconic, violin-playing dandy-ness scream GAY GAY GAY! to contemporary readers. Would they have done the same in the 1880s and 1890s? Did Sir Arthur Conan Doyle give Holmes those traits knowing that his audience would pick up homoerotic suggestions, or do we simply have different interpretations of male-male relationships in the twenty-first century?

Likewise, how does a contemporary filmmaker, actor, or writer translate Holmes’s idiosyncracies? If Holmes canonically injects himself with cocaine, is it more authentic to have his modern incarnation mimic the twenty-first-century social connotations of cocaine (i.e. he’s a drug addict – he can’t stop taking Vicodin) or what it may have meant in Doyle’s time (e.g. he uses a frowned-upon but acceptable drug in what appears to be a controlled manner to lighten his mood – he sometimes smokes pot to loosen up)?

And how much of a total knob is Holmes? Depending on how you read the Victorian social conventions, he can range from being eccentric and rude but overall a decent guy (the movie’s approach*****) or a total and utter b&$!^&d guided only by his own strict logical code (House‘s approach). Doyle confuses things even more by noting that Holmes can be perfectly charming when he wants to be, so modernizers can justify a nicer Holmes by putting him in a situation where he might decide not to be an a$%hole.

Intriguingly, both House and Sherlock Holmes make explicit one element of Holmes’s personality that’s at best only ever mentioned in passing in the canonical stories (Holmes cares deeply about Watson and relies on him emotionally******) and another that blatantly contradicts some of canon (Holmes is a sexual being who can and does fall in love).

I say “intruigingly” because, regardless of the extent of his total knobbery, these are the two traits that help an audience sympathize with Holmes. At this point, if you’re a House fan, you might object that House’s very misanthropism shows that these traits aren’t what interests an audience in a Holmes/House character, and I’d agree with you, up to a point. It’s true that part of House’s appeal is that he’s both a puzzle of a character (why does he do the things he does?) and a bit of a wish-fulfilment (man, I wish I could be a genius who says hilariously mean things to people), but House’s anti-empathy is really only in comparison to that of characters on other TV shows. In comparison to canonical Holmes, he wears his heart on his sleeve. We see him being emotionally vulnerable relatively often.

And I think that’s the one major difference for Holmes-like characters in the twenty-first century. To put it in a sweeping, generalized, and totally unverified way, we live in a cynical times. And we expect our stories to be equally cynical. In an age of computers and nuclear weapons, we no longer believe in the possibility of a supremely rational, emotionless and superior, machine-like human being – and if there was one, we’d expect him or her to annoyingly crash when faced with the slightest real-world ambiguity. Reason is fallible. We happily follow Holmeses and Houses through bewildering mysteries and enjoy the riddle, but to care about them as characters – to believe they are people and not plot devices – we need them to feel as well as think.

* AKA, the “Did they just rip all this from Batman and Catwoman?” plotline.

** Not that both the Holmes updates I’ve mentioned don’t suffer from the latter two anyway, but think how much more pronounced it would be if it they were total sausage fests.

*** Okay, not until recently, anyway, when it sometimes seems like the backstory is being changed so that she and House are star-crossed Twu Wuvs. But I guess that’s being unfair to the House writers – they haven’t finished their story, and they’re not yet directly contradicting any previous timeline.

**** Or Gregson. Poor guy always gets shafted in adaptations. Guess Lestrade and his sallow rat-face are just more memorable.

***** Fascinatingly reinforced by the fact that movie!Holmes loses all the time. When he’s a turdbag, everyone else is a turdbag right back, and they’re usually better at it. Mary Morstan throws a glass of water at him, Watson purposely doesn’t post bail when he’s stuck in jail, Irene Adler strands him handcuffed naked to a bed, and we get the best exchange ever:
HOLMES: (obnoxiously) You have the grand gift of silence, Watson. It makes you quite invaluable as a companion.
WATSON: *punches him in the face*

****** I’m not gonna argue with those of you who think this is way more explicit in the stories, but here’s my basic point: when you look at the the two characters with twenty-first-century eyes, Holmes is pretty cold toward Watson. He occasionally has moments where he says something nice, like that he’s lost without his Boswell, or that he’d kill the guy who shot Watson, or that he missed Watson when he was busy callously faking his own death, but none of it is anywhere near the explicitness and depth of the bromance we see on House and in Sherlock Holmes.