The latest Sherlock: an anti-costume drama costume drama which yet provides refuge

‘You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive’ (I:18)

‘What the deuce is it to me?’ he interrupted impatiently, ‘you say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not a make a pennyworth of difference to me or my work’ (I:21)

I had begun to think my companion was as friendless a man as I was myself (I:22) A Study in Scarlet

‘John you’re a soldier. Now it’s going to take time to recover. And writing a blog about everything that happens to you will help, honestly [the psychologist]

‘Nothing happens to me’ — John A Study in Pink

Jeremy Brett as Sherlock Holmes in disguise, and yet perhaps seen less opaquely as a groom in Scandal in Bohemia, 1984 (scripted by Alexander Baron)

Portrait shot of Benedict Cumberbatch, Sherlock, 2011-12 (creator Mark Gatis, also Mycroft Holmes and Steven Moffat)

Dear friends and readers,

How does the first episode of the new Sherlock series open? We are in a war zone of noise, terror, killing. It is very sunny, hot, but near a modern airport:

First shot

Second

Then (reminding me of Patrick O’Connor film adaptation of J. L. Carr’s A Month in the Country) we realize this is a bad dream of an vet come home:

He’s near tears

Then it’s morning in an anonymous flat where he sits across the way from his cane:

Cane on other side of room

We watch him go over to a table, take an apple, and mug of coffee, the mug has an insignia on it. It is the Royal Army, but it could be any large institution’s cup he got for free. Then his visits to the psychologist. All with soft tender music.

Then hard music and we see the modern city where the action is to take place, a ferris wheel prominent:

It will be quite a while before he (Martin Freeman as John Watson) meets Benedict Cumberbatch as Sherlock Holmes and is taken to that quiet upper-middle alcove of a block that is now Baker Street complete with a comfortable wry Mrs Hudson (Una Stubbs)

Breakfast no longer a lonely affair

Did you know that there were 80 (that’s right, 80) silent film adaptations of texts by Arthur Conan Doyle, 75 of them chronicling the adventures of Sherlock Holmes” (TLeitch, “Reframing the Victorians”, from Bloom & Pollock). Downton Abbey is not the only Edwardian hit of the last two seasons; the BBC and Masterpiece theater have also brought us what some might think a genuinely new Sherlock, so transformed does the analogous or free adaptation mode feel: set in London in 2011, using every new filmic technique one can think of in the last 10 years: continual sequences of images rather than a stage, brief epitomizing pictorial scenes rather than coherent narrative, any one-on-one developed interchanges continually on the move from the camera’s restlessness, computer enhancement. Plus everyone is re-dressed, re-type cast (there is some casting against type as in choosing Andrew Scott for Moriarity), high violence (as in an action-adventure film), working class accents galore (you’d think we were in Red Riding).

And yet you would be wrong if you thought so. It is true this seems to be the first re-set analogous adaptation (all others rooted in the 1890s), but Cumberbatch has studied Brett’s controlled hysteria with careful alert attentiveness to small details. As with the 2007 ITV Persuasion, which was a development out of the boldness of neurotic aspects of the 1995 BBC Persuasion (found in Austen), so this is a development out of the buried subversions (though glimpsed continually) of the long-running 1984-1994 Brett and Burke pair (produced by June Wyndham-Davies who we have so many to thank for I won’t begin).

David Burke as Warton (Hounds of Baskerville, 1988)

Martin Freeman as Watson with expression very like that of Hardwicke

But Freeman-Watson does need his cane (stumbles, lurches along when he walks)

I watched the first episode of the first season of the new Sherlock, “A Study in Pink”, two nights ago (this one directed by Paul McGuigan). My three epigraphs turn up in this “Study in Pink” which is not as surprising as on might think because the new Sherlock actually followed the plot-design outline of the original story. I went over the plot-design of the movie story and compared it to the plot-design of Conan Doyle’s first story. And, more of the memorable epitomizing lines were transposed into new speak than one would have thought possible. All the dialogue is understated, spoken low, witty lines continually thrown away, no showing off — which I like — what I noticed in this first episode and then again last night’s “The Hounds of the Baskerville” (the plural has been transposed: the original: “The Hound of the Baskervilles”), which I did not manage to finish.

Jim has asked what I like about this new series, why was I fascinated by it. Well, Benedict Cumberbatch whose abject flatness, blankness of face becomes mobile and intensely animated at key moments: think dear reader of Dickens’s famous outpourings of utterances (the one in Pickwick Papers which ends “Sagacious Dog. Very”), or Jane Austen in the (unhappily unknown) Sanditon. What was back story in Conan Doyle became front-story in the Jeremy Brett films. We had these narratives turned into powerful erotic gothic cinema. Now they are re-condensed into thrown-off speeches uttered at top speed by Cumberbatch as expressionistic ways he can project his own despair. Cumberbatch plays Sherlock as messenger from the old Greek classical plays.

I am also interested in these free or analogous adaptations as a breed. The specific changes if you can account for them do tell us about the hidden and overt realities of our lives that movies mirror and enact in front of us.

Jim’s statement shows that he was not charmed. So let me bring out the flaws and troubling aspects of this new generation (using the word in its literal sense). Violence, high violence continually indulged in. “The Study in Pink” opens with Martin Freeman as John Watson on the battle field, bombs exploding, you’d think you were in a stunt man movie (think Batman) and then he is discharged and then living in bad quarters in London. The new Hound opens with a young boy chased down by a ferocious monster. Both original stories start quietly. Quentin Tarantino matter. Now we have male violence glorified in military outfits, men in woods (Come to think of it this is how the Indian free adaptation of Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, I Have Found It starts.)

Women are erased. They are victims, however eroticized in Conan Doyle, and fully developed as victim and highly sexualized presences in the Jeremy Bretts. Last night’s Hounds of the Baskerville substituted a small young boy for the nubile servant girl locked up in a room to be raped by a bunch of later 17th century male aristocrats who fled to the grounds and found herself torn to bits by a supernatural hound (Conan Doyle’s “Hound” is, like Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde, a werewolf story).

Two typical heroines of yesteryear:

Gayle Hunnicutt as Irene Adler:

Through a window, framed (Scandal in Bohemia).

For all the abused victim heroines, here’s Anne Louise Lambert, as the abused wife of a high aristocrat in Abbey Grange (see my “The violent labyrinth”):

Abbey Grange — no divorce, no reprieve possible until Sherlock turns up

It’s not that I object to the rapid pace per see or necessarily, but the insistence in the film on coolness. Maybe that’s the worst thing as it’s an encouragmennt of inhumaneness. Since when is sadism fun? But Cumberbatch as Holmes says it is, sort of. The way cruelty is treated, the acceptance of phsycial pain, emotional torture, carelessness and lack of bonds between the characters who pass to and fro is troubling.

This is made up for in part by the developing friendship between Sherlock and Watson. The purpose of The Study in Pink is to build slowly that good feeling of camaraderie between Sherlock and Watson, that kindness, tenderness even, I recognize as essential; the difference now being the world outside them has darkened considerably. The 1984-1994 series kept the framework individual and protecting aristocratic spirits; now we have a setting whose application is global and about indifference. We are all going it alone in the new Sherlock.

I don’t know that this is an objection, rather simply a reality, a fact on the ground: the creators have noticed how thin and flimsy are many of the Holmes’s stories so they can bent and refold them at will; this one had hardly any of the central or front/back story – we first got to it towards the end and then it made little sense. The back-story of A Study in Pink was silly and there were no politics, no substance really but then this was just introduction. In A Study in Pink an evil man who loathes everyone is murdering people as a serial killer, doing it so they look like suicides. Phil Davies (ever the evil man, Smallweed in Bleak House) is the evil cabbie.

This is adaptation as police procedural (see Five Days, Prime Suspect). I am hoping that as they went on, the film-makers did treat some stories seriously, with the half-gravitas intended, but I cannot know.

I turn to neutral differences: things are made explicit in this new series that did not used to be: both Watson and Holmes have no friends; that’s why they can get together; they are loners, unusual. Are they gay? The film-makers for British TV and masterpiece theater are not yet ready to go homoerotic. So, if so, the series was as silent about this as our originating material and all the Sherlocks ever since. Really this is male-clubby literature; Chekhov did a satire-parody of the form and he emphasized this. The drug taking in 2012 is treated as a dread secret because of our present (in the US at least) draconian laws. Taking drugs is not a medical problem (as it was in 1890), but a criminal one. Holmes is no amateur but a consultant; indeed sometimes the writers have to go back to 1890 to retrieve parts of the original — when I went back I discovered that was Conan Doyle’s name for his profession.

The absence of such women types, with women showing up as small time and rough cops is significant. Are we in the territory of male bonding without women about in this new series? Is this really Master and Commander (a film adaptation of a Patrick O’Brien novel where there was not one woman to be seen) in disguise.

The 2012 heroine looks like this: super-thin (so frail even if steely), clinging to her gadget, cool looking:

Lara Pulver who reminds me of the actress who played Mrs Simpson in Edward VIII as Irene Adler (in the new Scandal in Belgravia): these gadgets are everywhere in the new series, everyone texting everyone else, but the story sticks close to the original Scandal in Bohemia)

I liked the intertexuality. The woman’s body laying there as central to A Study in Pink was an allusion (made specific) to Helen Mirren’s Prime Suspect. I just know Cumberbatch has the 1960s Avengers in mind (remember Patrick Macnee with his bowler hat?). Filmically it’s a modern movie, and I hope anyone involved who can speak of this makes clear how wholly contemporary it also is. No stage to be seen. Shots done in this super-sophisticated way, narrative patterns give way to moods and shots that are pictorial (like when we see Watson through a corridor watching Sherlock and the cabbie at the table). I grant they may have overdone it but we have to switch our aesthetic pattern understandings so to speak.

We get so few of these new-style adaptations made by the BBC in the US on PBS: PBS fears its older audience won’t like them too strongly and object. This one was using all the new high speed cinematic techniques — let me suggest we need to start thinking about and responding to film differently. It may be the recent Dickens adaptations are actually “against” (disliking) Dickens, but this adaptation rather like Conan Doyle’s stories.

Once upon a time some viewers (influential as well as powerless in this one most exits) and people would complain that (at least some of) the central values of the books were reversed. That’s now old hat. What troubles me about the new film adaptations is the aesthetics give up what was enjoyable and meaningful in the 1990s and early 2000 mini-series. Even when they were a one-shot deal they’d have the slow pace, good dialogue, time for acting and interaction between developed characters. I had occasion to watch a few films on PBS (which plays the British ones) and they had stick figures in slick action-adventure films dressed up as if this were the costume drama form. I had rather those who detested this form (probably partly because it got smaller audiences except when a big hit, partly its identification with women, partly sheerly the cultural value in it) tried to get rid of them altogether rather than silently re-vamp them. My students and I this term watched parts of two mini-series (Poldark, Small Island: see The Art of story-telling in a mini-series). The new anti-costume drama group decided if you can’t beat them, join them and in the process change them radically.

But I know in the wide popular audience it’s not done openly to admit you are freely adapting. And certainly not to admit to the audience for costume drama that you are centrally pulverizing its central qualities (which account for much of the love for Downton Abbey).

My last point (from Thomas Leitch’s (“Jekyll, Hyde, Hekyll, Hyde, Jekyll, Hyde, Jekyll, Hyde, ed Bloom and Pollock): there are stories, characters, matter as turned into literature that become so ubiquitous to remain alive they need not have full-blown literal treatments. It is enough to allude and quote. We can tell we are in the presence of one when such free adaptations emerge.

Such originating mythic texts are said to speak to continuing cultural and psycholoogical anxieties. But to work out what that is one must turn back to the stories, and I suggest watch the transpositions (earlier faithful films) or commentaries (less faithful, critiquing, improving, the Brett, see my Violent Labyrinth) According to Brian Rose, we must study “tracer texts” (these would include Dickens’s most famous books, Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice, Sense & Sensibility and Emma) in the various permutations to understand why the original text is mythic and what is done with it in each generation.

I’m not sure this new cool, self-reflexive supposed free analogy adaptation would yield its meaning by returning to the tracer texts even if follows the plot-design; my intuition tells me it has other core centers stemming form popular culture (in the case of this Hound variation, the horror film). The new stories are about the buried violence turned into psychological disquiet in Holmes who then both tries to control and stop as well show and accept a barbaric world which corresponds to the cinema which projects it.

And how we seek refuge. About 10 minutes into the first hour John is welcomed into Sherlock’s comfortable lair, complete with a wall of good books, a comfy pair of chairs and of course Mrs Hudson:

First Shot of John walking down Baker Street — jaunty happy music accompanies this

Suddenly an old-fashioned hansom cab brings in Sherlock

Welcome says Mrs Hudson: it seems Sherlock did not save her husband from execution, but ensured it

The Hard Climb Up

John looks about him

Two chairs: says John: “Oh this could be very nice …”

Remember as you watch the new Sherlock, the narrative does not matter so much, but rather the shots, the pictures, the music and the epitomizing utterances

Ellen