I've now watched (forced myself through) about four episodes. They're very consistent, and I feel sure I get it.
Sherlock Holmes was unique in detective fiction, because he was the first detective who relied on clues, and "deductive reasoning." He didn't just guess right. He figured things out, and Doyle (mostly 1890s) let the reader know how he did it. All of the Holmes iterations have been like that.
The other essential feature of Sherlock Holmes is how attentive and dispassionate he was in evaluating crime scenes and the dynamics behind them. The Sherlock Holmes of the Doyle stories was intent/intense. He had little interest in politeness, and he delegated Watson, who was a retired doctor, to something like helper status. But what underlay this was Holmes' cold observation, reasoning, and deduction.
Jumping ahead to the Rathbone years (1940s), Holmes could be charming, and he was very attentive to others' reactions. But he was still intent, and Rathbone played him as someone who just didn't ever miss anything. Neither did Doyle's Holmes.
By the time we get to Cumberbatch, Holmes even declares himself as somehow pathological. When someone calls Cumberbatch's Holmes a "psychopath," Cumberbatch corrects the insult, and declares himself a "high-functioning sociopath." He still doesn't miss anything, and he still always gets it right, but now, there's actually something wrong with him. Apart from the substance abuse, that was in the Doyle stories, the first Rathbone movie (which ends with Holmes leaving the room after the crime is solved, and telling Watson "the needle"), and which was replaced almost entirely by nicotine in the Cumberbatch movies. Except Cumberbatch's Holmes no longer smoked. He just thought and talked about it all the time, and he wore nicotine patches.
Once we get to Jonny Lee Miller ("Elementary"), all hell has broken loose. Yes, Holmes has a history of substance abuse, which is why Watson (who was a surgeon, but quit because a patient died, and is now "Ms Watson") is imposed on Holmes' life by Holmes' father. But two other things have happened. Holmes has minimal ability to get along with anyone (Watson included), and he seems much more autistic than he ever did before. And he starts to get things wrong. He's out of control, autistic and hyperverbal (all the time), and he can't contain himself. He's still Sherlock Holmes, so he still has his range of skills and his mental approach to things, but he's unrestrained. He insults and offends people as Doyle's Holmes wouldn't, and Rathbone didn't, and Cumberbatch sort of only did strategically, and Watson has to rein him in as much as she monitors him to make sure he doesn't relapse. (That's still the theory and the device as to what Watson is doing there.) Although "Elementary's" Watson is better than Rathbone's Watson, because Nigel Bruce played Watson as sort of an incompetent and bumbling idiot. I'm reasonably sure that wasn't Bruce's idea, but that's how that Watson was written. And Bruce's Watson was not even a good doctor. (We assume Doyle's Watson was a good doctor, Cumberbatch's Watson was clearly a good doctor, and we can make assumptions about "Elementary's" Watson, who shrank away from medicine because she had one bad outcome.) There was one Rathbone episode where a very strong person was killing other people by breaking their backs. Rathbone asks Watson to examine the corpse, and he suggests that the cause of death was a broken lumbar vertebra. Watson confirms that it was the third lumbar vertebra. That's not going to kill anyone. The correct conclusion was that it would have been a cervical vertebra. Clearly, this was the writer's fault, but someone should have picked this up.
Anyway, it's hard, bordering on painful, to watch "Elementary." Miller/Holmes is too manic, things move so quickly that it's hard to appreciate the process of deduction, Watson (Lucy Liu) should not have been demoted (or demoted herself), and should still be Dr Watson, and proud of it, as all the Watsons were), and Holmes is not engaging. He's not likeable. He's closer to pathetic and annoying. (Jeremy Brett was annoying, too, but he was not at all pathetic.) His only identifiable area of self-control is that he hasn't relapsed (yet, in the four episodes I watched), and frankly, considering his history of substance abuse/addiction, and his restraint with respect to relapsing (which he frequently reassures he has no intention of doing), you wonder why he doesn't have more control in other areas. Unless someone (the writers) want to make him more flagrantly autistic, in which case he's doing the best he can. So how is he so sure he won't relapse?
I've seen as much of this series as I can bear.
I got a call tonight from Chester Morris, who talked about a supposed Sherlock Holmes story called "The Bee Keeper," and in which Holmes married Mary Russell. Chester's memory was that this was a Doyle story.
ReplyDeleteIn Doyle's writings, he said that Holmes' ambition, once he retired, was to keep bees.
There is in fact a 1994 story, called "The Bee Keeper," and it's the first of a series of books written by Laurie King. It has Ms King's character, Mary Russell, 15, moving with her aunt to Sussex, England, where she meets 54 year old Sherlock Holmes, who had retired, and gone on to keep bees, as he said he intended to do. Russell becomes a protegee to Holmes, and she goes to college to study various things.
This story has nothing to do with Doyle, except it uses the character of Holmes, who retired to keep bees, as Doyle said he would, and then evolves into a more modern (although set in 1915) tale.
So this is one of the many Sherlock Holmes-inspired stories.
Of note, the Cumberbatch stories, mostly written by Mark Gatiss and Steve Moffatt, are take-offs of the Doyle stories. The titles are very close to Doyle's titles, and Gatiss and Moffatt use many devices Doyle used, although the Gatiss/Moffatt movies are very modern. This is less true of the movies starring Rathbone, although some of them focus on the Nazis, and other figures in the 1940s, and there is no content relation in the "Elementary" stories.