Point of View, My Dear Watson!

Disclaimer: any time a familiar story chooses to do an installment from the point of view of a character not the protagonist, I immediately and involuntarily compare it to the Pinky’s POV episode of Pinky and the Brain. You’ve been warned.

*sigh* It’s about House again.

Sort of.

One of the major ways both the new Sherlock Holmes movie and House differ structurally from the original Sherlock Holmes stories is in their choice of point of view. Obviously, part of this has to do with the difference in medium: first-person just isn’t as exciting an option on the screen as it is in print. POV shots as though the camera is set in an individual character’s head feel gimmicky and annoying. But the change is bigger than that; arguably, while Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories are almost all* written from Watson’s perspective, theatrical and filmic adaptations tend to be presented from Holmes’s.

In the Sherlock Holmes books, we see only what Watson sees, despite the fact that Holmes is the main character. This is useful to Conan Doyle: Watson can draw our attention to important details without understanding – and hence, without giving away – their importance, while Holmes is allowed to operate at an arm’s length from the reader and is therefore able to surprise us without it feeling like a cheat.

However, in most Sherlock Holmes or Sherlock-Holmes-inspired movies, TV shows, video games, and other adaptations, we get the scoop directly from the source. We see what Holmes (or the Holmes-genius-type character) sees: we know everything he knows about the case, and although we are occasionally made privy to information of which he isn’t aware (for instance, we see a scene in which the villains discuss their evil plan; the “teaser” moment in which the guest-star-of-the-week gets murdered or falls down in convulsions; or random goings-on with the characters involved in the B- or C-plots), we are generally invited to identify with him intellectually and emotionally, sometimes even when he’s not on the screen or stage**.

In House, this POV is pretty marked: sure, we always see the patient before he or she succumbs to This Monday’s Illness; we are sometimes privy to information House doesn’t know, like what Cuddy and Wilson say about him when he’s not there or what the team is doing when they’re not with him; and occasionally, the writers hide things from us that we would know if we were really in House’s head, like when he plays a prank and the audience doesn’t find out his complex plans until the payoff has sprung. But all in all, it’s pretty clear that this is his story. Aside from his name being the title of the show, we always see what we need to see to make his narrative make sense, every episode. We get inside scoops on his personality that none of the other characters could possibly know – as when we see him come close to making an emotional revelation but chickening out at the last minute, or when we get to watch his hallucinations or dreams the way they appear to him.

Visual media can afford to do this because its point-of-view characters can still hide things from the audience without it feeling like a cheat. If Conan Doyle had Holmes write, “Aha! I know who the murderer is. But before I think about it, I will get Watson and everyone together in the same room so I can make a dramatic reveal!”, he would just come off as a giant douche who hates the people reading his story. It’s difficult to believe that he would realize who the murderer is and not think about it, so the reader is left to conclude that he’s purposely leaving the identity of the villain out of his narrative until the right moment. Which would be fine, if he had good motivation to do so, but if his only motivation is “Because this is a story, duh!”, it feels cheap.

On the other hand, we don’t expect characters on the screen to tell us everything they’re thinking. In fact, if they do, it feels fake. It’s perfectly OK for House or Holmes to fall silent suddenly, make the epiphany-face, and run off to organize the climactic reveal. The audience does get antsy if there’s too much filler between “aha!” and “and now I shall explain my solution to the rest of you…”, but we don’t consider it unfair that the explanation is needed in the first place.

So far, so good, right? But what interests me most about this set-up is how the distinction between protagonist and viewpoint character gets blurred in visual media.

Two recent episodes of House, “Wilson” and “5 to 9”, advertised themselves as allowing the audience to see Princeton-Plainsboro through the eyes of someone who wasn’t House – Wilson and Cuddy, respectively. Both episodes could have gone two routes: they either could have shown us a story about House through another character’s eyes, or they could have done what they actually did, shown us a story about the characters whose viewpoint it is that includes House by virtue of the fact that he’s both their friend and a major source of conflict.

(If  House’s story being told through somebody else’s eyes is tough to imagine, remember “Locked In”, that episode last season with Mos Def? That one did have many first-person camera shots from the patient’s point of view, but so many of those scenes were actually about other characters, when they’d come to examine him or talk to him about the various plots surrounding themselves. The episode also had scenes there was no way the patient could have observed to underscore the importance of the regular characters’ stories. But imagine a whole plot constructed like those first type of scenes – not necessarily using the first-person shot but with the viewpoint character having the same role in the story: sounding board and plot catalyst, but not active participant.)

Now, how far the artists succeeded in presenting a world where Wilson’s and Cuddy’s daily lives “exist” on the same level House’s does is open to interpretation***. But the fact that they chose to take this approach to what being a viewpoint character means says a little about TV as a medium.

It’s true that most people think and act as though they’re the heroes of their own stories. Watson’s focus on Holmes – or Nick Carraway’s on Jay Gatsby, Lockwood’s on Heathcliff and Cathy, or Marlow’s on Kurtz, for that matter – draws attention to itself as a literary device and feels somewhat dated for precisely this reason.  In essence, a move like this makes the narrator a surrogate audience member instead of a character in the story, and often the price paid is that his or her own personality gets muted out****.

This is doubly a problem in visual media, where instead of just having a voice in words telling you about someone else, you have a body right there on the screen who’s essentially hanging around doing nothing but watching. We’re pretty good at watching what’s on TV all by ourselves, thank you very much. If action defines a character as a person with interesting attributes, inaction essentially reduces him or her to a piece of talking furniture.

So, in that respect, the House writers’ strategy makes sense: if the point of changing perspectives is to give the audience a new understanding of a major character, using him or her to tell someone else’s story undermines that goal. Unless Wilson and Cuddy actually do stuff, we’re not learning anything about them. Because we, the viewers, are physically positioned in the world of a TV show in a way we’re not positioned in the world of a book. We are standing or sitting at a certain angle from the action, and we don’t need an actual body on the screen to be a stand-in for us – the camera is our stand-in. Instead of pronouns like “I” or “he” or “you”, it’s the content, the story, the scenes that the writers choose to include and what they chose to be in them, that tell us who’s the protagonist.

* There are a couple written in Holmes’s voice, and another written in third-person. But they are deservedly forgotten – if you don’t believe me, see for yourself.

** For example, when we get to watch Watson and Mrs. Hudson freak out over what Holmes is doing now, we’re encouraged to feel not the way they feel (angry, scared, and frustrated) but the way Holmes feels (amused and mischievous) even though he’s not physically present in the scene.

*** I’m not sure I quite buy that they’re people with interesting lives outside of House in the same way I buy Deb’s life from Dexter. It seemed both like we were getting to follow them on extraordinary days in their lives and like their stories actually reinforced the fact that their lives revolve around House: both their episodes followed the basic plan of “X has a moral dilemma. X gets help from other people, but it’s not enough. X eventually turns to House, who tells X he/she is wrong and an idiot, multiple times, but X does what he/she wants anyways. However, at the emotional climax of the episode, House is the one who comes through and does or says what X needs to pull through.” So the episodes still centre on House, in a way that I’m willing to suggest, say, a “Deb” episode from Dexter would not.

**** Unless he or she is clearly an unreliable narrator, but I can’t think of any examples of this off the top of my head that follow the Holmes-and-Watson point-of-view pattern.