Eccentric Flower:201001/Sherlock Holmes

OK, so, I saw the Sherlock Holmes movie and it was good and I knew people were expecting me to go all batshit over it (I don't mean in a good way), so I knew I was going to have to write something about it.

But then I saw what lizbee wrote (contains one spoiler), and I said, "Well, that's the gist of what I would say, minus the supporting evidence," and I didn't write it. And then I was thinking maybe I had still had something to say after all, and just then, along came cleolinda with pretty much exactly what I'd write (contains a couple of minor spoilers), with supporting evidence, so why bother? I don't compete with Cleolinda, because she is a brilliant comic writer and I would lose.

However, I know some of you will not go read those two links, or even if you do, you'd also like to have my perspective on it. So I'm going to go out on a tangent, a little. This is somewhat about the movie, but the movie parts all distill to "go see it, it gets my seal of approval." The rest of this is about Holmes fandom, and why my seal of approval may be somewhat significant, and why some people expected me to bust an artery over this film.

I have been a Sherlock Holmes fan since I was seven years old, which is about when I first got an edition of Holmes stories plus the first two novels. I remember that it cut out chapters 8-12 of A Study In Scarlet, and later when I read an edition with those chapters left in (they are Jefferson Hope's recounting of the events in America which led him to seek revenge in London, and are fairly tedious), I no longer was so unhappy with my original edition for making the cut. I haven't had that book in some years, and I don't remember whether they cut the drug use at the beginning of The Sign of Four. (Many editions intended for youngsters do.)

I have been an unabated fan ever since. Cleolinda notes with pride her possession of the annotated edition, but she doesn't say which one; I will top her by saying that I have both the original Baring-Gould annotations and the three volumes of the more recent Leslie Klinger annotations. (This is not just completism. The annotations don't overlap, and besides, all Holmes annotations contradict one another; this is part of the fun. Also, Baring-Gould controversially arranged the manuscripts in the order that they would have occurred for Holmes and Watson, not in the order they were published, whereas Klinger arranges the stories by publication in two volumes and all four novels in the third.)

One thing about being a lifelong Holmes fan is that you run out of original material very quickly. Fifty-six short stories and four very short novels do not last long, even if you can read them over and over and over until you've half memorized them. Fortunately for the Holmes fan who has the stomach for it, there is a vast, unbelievably vast amount of, well, let's call it ancillary material.

Stories of the Holmes and Watson adventures that Watson didn't write down, some of them bizarre indeed. Stories - indeed, whole series of novels - told from the point of view of a minor character in the canon; or stories told from characters not in the original universe at all about their adventures/interactions with Holmes or Watson or both.

I don't often buy anthologies of Holmesian short fiction, because quality in them varies so widely, but I probably own five or six. The actual number is vast. It's not just unknowns; major writers have tried their hand from time to time. Stephen King wrote one of my favorite non-canon Holmes stories ever, and Caleb Carr of The Alienist fame not so long ago had an actual hit with The Italian Secretary, which is unabashedly a Holmes novel - it says so right on the cover! Then we have whole series done in the Holmesian universe, e.g. M.J. Trow's Lestrade novels; Carole Douglas' Irene Adler novels; Laurie King's Mary Russell novels (where Holmes is an extremely important character indeed).

Let's be blunt: This stuff is fanfic. Some of it's very good, professional-grade fanfic. But it is fanfic nonetheless. Not all of it is entirely serious. While Trow's books are legitimate procedurals, Douglas' are fair cheese (in her other life she writes historical romances, mysteries with a cat as a protagonist, and the sort of fantasy elf-bodice-rippers you don't have to buy because you can tell everything you need to know about them from their titles). Mileage on King's books vary with the readers; I tend to be on the side that thinks they are genuine quality, especially in their depiction of relationships, but others can't swallow the occasional leap of disbelief King asks you to make.

Some Holmes stories are out-and-out pastiche or satire. Some are played for pure comedy. Some are science fiction. Some are hallucinatory. The entire gamut has been run, and will continue to be run, over and over.

This is not a new game, after all. The Baker Street Irregulars, the organization of enthusiasts named after Holmes' informal army of ragamuffins in the stories, has been around since 1934. Since full formal membership traditionally required writing an original work of Holmesian "scholarship" (read: fanfic), these people have demonstrably been writing Holmesian fic for seventy-five years. Long before most of you existed. Slightly before the Golden Age of SF fandom. Way, way before Kirk/Spock.

(Real Holmes fandom actually began much earlier, back when the stories were still published. The fans grew so upset when Holmes was killed that Doyle had to bring him back. He got threatening letters.)

What will interest some of you is that even though I know all this, and have read all this, and can quote you chapter and verse on Holmes until I bore you to tears (as indeed I may already have done), I have never written anything in the Holmes universe, never intend to, and I don't usually tell anybody about my Holmes fandom. The fact that I am such a Holmes fan will come as a surprise to many of you who never knew this part of my personality at all. In fact, only those who have been living with or near me for long periods of time - the in-person friends, as it were (plus Mel, to whom I speak nearly every day and at some length) - will have suspected this.

This is because of my basic attitudes toward fandom, which range from secrecy and occasional embarrassment to outright contempt. I have never really embraced the idea that it is okay to air one's fandoms except when one is in a safe space, and my definition of a safe space for a particular fandom is an especially narrow one. I hold, in short, that being overt about a fandom is like smoking a cigar indoors; either everyone in the room should be doing it or no one should.

And yet, then, why do I not attend more places where even my narrow safe spaces exist? Why not occasionally go to a room full of Holmes fans and geek out? Because gatherings of fans strike me not as displays of mutual pleasure in their fandom but of one-upmanship. Every fan in those safe rooms is convinced he/she is the One True Fan and wants to demonstrate that to everyone else whenever possible. This is the most true about Star Trek fans, who never met a piece of minutiae they weren't willing to correct someone else pointedly over, but as far as I can tell from what I've seen - and I have attended SF conventions most of my life, as often as I can stand it - it infects most other fandoms as well.

In particular, it seems that the idea of, "People, it's just entertainment and sometimes it's not very well-written entertainment; it's cheese, sit back and enjoy it," is a hard sell in some fandoms. And that bothers me. I don't think there are many fandoms that need or deserve to be taken as seriously as its fans tend to do, on average.

I mention all this not just to talk about my biases; there's a reason this comes back to the film this is supposed to be about: If you are one of these hardliner Holmes fans, it is entirely possible that the film will annoy you, perhaps to the point where you can't enjoy the film. It's telling that some people, upon learning I am such a Holmes fan, assumed automatically I'd be that kind of hardliner. I think that proves my point about fans above.

If, on the other hand, you're the sort of Holmes fan I actually am, who has seen it all and can laugh at it and in general takes a laid-back attitude, you'll like this film very much, and you will even find that it respects canon to a remarkable degree.

(My major worry about the film was that it was going to be played as spoof/farce all the way through; not that I don't appreciate farce, but Hollywood has forgotten how to do it properly and therefore I've stopped attending their attempts at it. However, it is not, and the trailer - which, strangely, was cut in such a way as to imply this film was coarse comedy - is not representative of the actual tone of the film, which is a smart, well-scripted, occasionally funny, occasionally tense, action picture.)

I will now address a few specific points I've heard from fans and non-fans.

1. They're too young.

The longer one stays a Holmes fan the longer one realizes that the canon makes absolutely no chronological sense. Baring-Gould tried, but for every place he put a story in his arrangement, he cited three footnotes of Irregulars or other Holmesian scholars who disagreed fervently with where he put it. No one is sure how many times Watson married; the evidence contradicts itself. Watson himself (perhaps deliberately) says things in his manuscripts that cannot possibly be reconciled with his other statements in other places. A great deal of BSI "scholarly works," in fact, have been articles coming up with some farfetched explanation of one apparent contradiction or another.

However, fortunately, other than two stories told of Holmes' pre-Watson years, everyone agrees that A Study In Scarlet is both the first in the Holmes/Watson chronology and the first in real-world publication. Although first published serially in 1887, it is pretty unanimously accepted to take place in 1881, and it begins with Holmes and Watson meeting for the first time. Watson is fairly generally thought to have been born in 1852. Holmes' dates are less certain but two of the most popular ones are 1854 or 1852. This means that at the time of their meeting, both men were in their early thirties at most.

Now, the movie has Watson preparing to marry Mary Morstan. If we assume this really is the Mary of The Sign of Four (except that's been removed from the movie's mythology), the general consensus is that novel happened around 1888, with Watson marrying Mary soon after. Some say 1887. So Holmes and Watson have been kicking around together for six years or so and they're not yet forty.

Jude Law is thirty-seven. Robert Downey Jr. is forty-four and can pass for five to seven years younger than that (sort of surprising, given his substance abuses).

2. They're too slashy.

It's true that most Holmesian fic has not really embraced the unsung love between Holmes and Watson, and Doyle, an English gentleman very much of his time, would never have countenanced the thought. And yet he went as far as he respectably could to imply that there was an extremely deep, extremely comfortable friendship between Holmes and Watson. Cleolinda quotes one example above; there are many more. Canon implies that the emotionally-remote Holmes had only one true friend in the world, and that was Watson; Holmes himself, though non-demonstrative, comes close to saying so.

I'm sure there are some trufans who are having hives right now at the thought of tons of badly-written Holmes/Watson fic, but my thought is, first off, anything which keeps fresh blood in the over-a-century-old Holmes fandom is okay by me, and second, the film certainly does invite it. And, I might add, does so very well.

My point here is that while the film may take liberties in that direction, those liberties are hardly non-canonical, and if Doyle had been a slightly different person or had been writing as little as thirty years later, they might be fully canonical and we'd not be having this chat. One simply did not say that two bachelors were getting it on in 1890, any more than one told the truth about James Buchanan's husband.

3. Holmes is too buff.

As early as A Study in Scarlet, Watson, attempting to "get the limits" of his strange new roommate, makes a list of his abilities and knowledge that includes the entry "Is an expert singlestick player, boxer, and swordsman."

In The Sign of Four we have this exchange with McMurdo, a porter at Pondicherry Lodge:

Incidentally, the film pays tribute to this in the name of the character Holmes decimates in a bare-knuckles boxing match.

Holmes is also revealed to be expert in "baritsu," which is thought to be Doyle's corruption of bartitsu, a sort of early mixed martial art combining all Holmes' known strengths which was popular in Britain circa 1900.

And, finally, there is a sequence in "The Adventure of the Speckled Band" where Holmes is threatened by the menacing Dr. Roylott and is unfazed:

In short, Holmes was no physical slouch, at least not in the early part of his career.

4. Too much woo-woo stuff.

It's true that this was the one thing that bothered me as I watched the movie. There's a whole lot of the apparent supernatural, with dark magic cults, a man rising from the dead, and a theoretically-good order which bears more than a passing resemblance to the Order of the Golden Dawn (which, by the by, would be chronologically correct).

Now, if they had left it at that, I might have had problems. Holmes is supposed to be about the rational, about the triumph of reason over just about anything (except possibly emotion; even Holmes has some troubles with that occasionally). But in fact (minor spoiler) everything is revealed to have a real-world explanation at the end; it's all just a trick, and that's how it should be.

But what about the complaint that all this mystical silliness doesn't belong in a Holmes story at all, even if it's revealed to be a fraud?

Well, I refer you to the many times in canon when Holmes proves something to not have a supernatural explanation, starting with the aforementioned "Speckled Band," and moving briskly along to The Hound of the Baskervilles, and including prominently among later cases "The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire" and "The Adventure of the Devil's Foot," which even Holmes calls "the strangest case I have handled."

5. OMG they messed with Irene.

It's true this is the one big liberty of the film (other than messing with Mary Morstan's backstory). Irene Adler turns up in exactly one canonical Holmes story, "A Scandal In Bohemia," where she does indeed outsmart him, and where there is indeed evidence that she is the only woman Holmes ever retains any sort of grudging affection for.

On the other hand, since Irene is basically the only interesting female character Doyle ever put in his Holmes stories, you can't blame authors for a rich tradition of Holmesian stories where she is utilized in various ways Doyle never intended. He simply didn't give us any other women to work with. Even the long-suffering Mrs. Hudson (excellently played in her brief film appearance, by the by) is a cipher.

Having read the Carole Douglas Irene Adler novels, I was perfectly ready to accept her as a strong recurring character (actually I thought Rachel McAdams' performance was a little weak, but at least she was mostly not a fainting heroine and could think/fend for herself - that's always so refreshing in Hollywood depictions of women). It seems, though, that when one digs down, the use of Irene as a major, recurrent character that Holmes has crossed swords with in the past is not the part people are objecting to. It is the implication that Holmes has had romantic liaisons with her, possibly even has done the mattress dance with her a few times. Horrors!

It is true that until very recently, I subscribed to the view that Holmes was as close to an entirely asexual character as literature has ever come. He just seems so uninterested in the whole idea (yes, even with Watson). But then I read Laurie King's books, where she not only manages to pull off the idea of Holmes being in a stable long-term relationship, but one with a definite physical component. (And with a huge age difference between the participants!) It is her great feat of judo, and the reason her books should be read even if you have trouble swallowing some of her other stunts. And it's opened the door to new possibilities for me vis-a-vis Holmes.

So, in short: Holmes getting it on now and again? I'm down with that.

6. Where's Mycroft? Where's Moriarty?

Folks, you can't have everything at once, or you'll have nothing left for dessert. Honestly.

It's a good movie. It even has a good soundtrack and good credits. Go see it. And if a diehard Holmes fan tells you not to see it, tell him he's being a grouch.

P.S. I can't tell you how much fun this entry was to write.