A Man of the Times

I don’t know why I’m beginning this new entry now (Monday morning), when I’m not really sure where I’m going to take it, when House, M. D. starts up again tonight* and will probably inspire me to a variety of rants and/or analyses. Then again, I’m winging this one with a take-off shove from the varieties of Sherlock Holmeses I’ve encountered lately. And here’s the topic I’m wondering about: when talking about incarnations of a classic-but-often-redone character like Holmes, is it useful to distinguish between the century of the setting and the century of the protagonist’s personality?

I’ll clarify that in just a sec, but obviously, this idea is also applicable to other characters who often get remade across broad spans of time: from Colin Firth’s two Mr. Darcy’s (the one in Pride and Prejudice and Mark Darcy in Bridget Jones’s Diary), to the various Shakespearean staples like Juliet and Othello.

Right, so that clarification: this idea occurred to me when I was thinking about comparing the four Sherlock Holmes updates or re-imaginings or partial inspirations that I like best at the moment, the TV series starring Jeremy Brett; the new movie(s) with Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law; the BBC’s new series with Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman; and of course, House, M. D., although for once I wasn’t actually thinking of that one except when I needed it to complete the pattern I’m about to tell you.

What popped into my head was the idea that one could arrange these four shows in a sort of Pascal’s wager/Prisoners’ dilemma payoff matrix square thing, with one axis having the labels “19th-century setting” and “21st-century setting” and the other “19th-century Holmes” and “21st-century Holmes”. It seemed to me that what you get is this. Or, well, maybe not “what you get”, but “something that’s arguable and is an interesting way to talk about fun ideas”:

You may be asking what exactly it is I mean by this. That’s a very good question: part of what interests me about thinking about these adaptations in this way is what precisely it means to say a character is a “19th-century” personality placed in a “21st-century” milieu. Does it mean anything at all? Is it just shorthand for talking about something else?

For example, I think that although we can talk like this about characters written in the same century in which their stories are set (for instance, the Harry Potter series is roughly contemporary** to our times, in which J. K. Rowling wrote it; the original Sherlock Holmes stories were both set and written in the late 19th century), usually we don’t. It might be possible to look at Harry Potter from 2010 and argue that, say, Dumbledore is really a Victorian gentleman stuck in modern times, or at the original Sherlock Holmes with 21st-century hindsight to suggest that the Master is actually a modern CSI-type-detective ahead of his time.

On the flip side of the coin, sometimes it’s easy to spot when a movie or book changes the “century” of a character for the worse. Take, for instance, Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland. Alice and the rest of the sympathetic real-life characters scream “I have the political stance and morals of the 21st century!” They’re feminist in a way that really makes sense to be only if you happen to live in the current sociopolitical climate of the Western world.

Otherwise good films with a historical setting often call attention to themselves in this manner, transplanting ideas that make sense only within a certain time and place in order to give more conventional signs for “good guy”, “bad guy”, “progressive”, etc.*** instead of doing the long, painful work of researching the past and slowly allowing a contemporary audience to abandon its assumptions about what the world is like and what sorts of ideas are available.

In that respect, characters will always reflect the time in which they’re made or re-made: we can’t abandon all our assumptions about what the world is like, no matter how hard we try, and a bit of the present will always creep into anything we do.

So, although I characterized Jeremy Brett’s and Benedict Cumberbatch’s Holmeses as nineteenth-century, I’d never claim that there’s nothing of our own times in them. Of course there is. What I guess I might mean is, it seems to me that with both of them, care has been taken to follow the hints of personality in the original Holmes stories, regardless of whether that’s the type of protagonist that’s more accepted in our own time. Neither is plagued with the perpetual angst and self-doubt of the postmodern protagonist; neither is set up as an anti-hero; and neither fits the set of archetypes we often see in present-day characters. (For instance, Robert Downey Jr.’s Holmes is the archetypal 21st-century action hero****)

What interests me about thinking about characters in this way is how it can shed light on general questions about the past: can we characterize someone as belonging to a certain time? In everyday life, when we encounter people of different generations, it often seems so, but would a Victorian middle-class lady’s perspective on the world hold things completely unthinkable to a contemporary middle-class yuppie? It seems to me that fictional characters provide an important counterpoint to non-fictional recordings like diaries, articles, books, etc., if only because fictional characters live on in a way real-life figures don’t. Sherlock Holmes has never died****; Charles Darwin, William Ewart Gladstone, and Oscar Wilde all, unfortunately, have. So although we can delve into the psyches of real-life historical figures only second-hand, at a distance, if we’re lucky, we can step right into the shoes of a fictional character from a different time.

… You know, I’ve written this whole entry all the way through, and I’m still not sure whether there’s something interesting to be said about the idea of characters being of a certain time, or whether I’m just doing my usual blind-alley ramble. Guess I’ll just have to think about it more and see.

* Yeah, it’s now Wednesday morning, and, having seen it… let’s just say I made a wise choice in beginning this entry about something completely different. Otherwise, I’d have to post nothing but a link back to the entry I made after last season’s finale. Oh dear.

** Harry is about 5-10 years behind the rest of us. According to the timeline, he’s four and a half years older than I am,  but I’ve never read a new Harry Potter book in which he was less than three years younger than the age I was at the time I bought it.

*** Brief historian’s tangent: it’s easy to forget that people in the past weren’t just stupider or meaner than we are now, blatantly failing or refusing to see what we feel are the most obvious ideas in the whole world. Their ideas made sense to them in the context of the world they lived in, and we, too, are blinded by the limitations built into our society.

**** Not to say that this is unsupported by the original stories: Canon!Holmes is a boxer and a swordstick expert and can unbend a steel poker with his bare hands. But Canon!Holmes is also more of a 19th-century action hero, more Allan Quatermain than Jason Bourne.

***** At least, not since Conan Doyle ret-conned Reichenbach.