A-Z Characters & Transformation: The Lover Sees Through the Disguise

One of the best episodes of Granada's Sherlock Holmes is "The Adventure of the Crooked Man." 

Years earlier, Nancy DeVoy fell in love with Henry Wood. A fellow officer, James Barclay, was jealous of the relationship since he wanted Nancy for himself. He arranged for Henry to fall into enemy hands, a move that Nancy--who becomes his wife--later characterizes as resembling David's treatment of his general Uriah. 

Henry survives torture and mutilation and finds his way back to England. Thirty years have passed, but he encounters Nancy who recognizes him. He then confronts her husband who dies from the shock. Holmes's investigation doesn't uncover a murder but does clear Nancy of suspicious in her husband's death. 

I find it entirely believable that Nancy would recognize her past fiancee, despite the passage of time and physical damage. 

Whether or not a wife/fiancee would recognize her lover from years earlier is a question I've discussed with my mother since we both love mysteries, and mysteries often use such disguises, such as in Agatha Christie's Murder in Mesopotamia. My mother believes that it depends entirely on the people involved. (After all, I'm not sure David McCallum ever changed!)

The wife in Murder in Mesopotamia, for instance, is rather self-absorbed. It's a little odd that she wouldn't recognize the man she married over twenty years earlier but the novel's set-up and the character's personality prepares readers for that possibility. In Henry Wood's case, on the other hand, he could still retain the voice, speech patterns, and underlying facial bones of the man he once was, especially since--unlike the husband in Murder in Mesopotamia--he isn't attempting to hide himself. 

In this rather romantic tale (and Arthur Conan Doyle was a romantic!), the disguise is not from the lover but from the detectives/authorities. And the disguise is one that Conan Doyle and Christie relied on: people's assumptions about what they are going to see. 

It takes Holmes to see past the "crooked man" who uses magician tricks to entertain soldiers to the young soldier of the past, to connect that man to the man with whom Nancy fell in love.

Nancy never suffers a doubt.   

Love as Hard Work in Elementary

This time of year is a great time to discuss the belief system of  Elementary's Holmes.

I love Elementary in part because Miller's Sherlock, however misanthropic, tries hard to be a good guy. 

Although Elementary often falls back on the classic motive for murder--greed--it has an interesting bonus theme:

Being in a relationship is work! And it may entail hurting others. And it's work! And not many villains like work. 

The pilot episode of Elementary presents a husband who seems as irritated by his wife's existence as desirous of her money--referring to himself in the third person, he states that the "husband wants out of the marriage." A later episode "Deja Vu All Over Again" revolves around the same desire for freedom, only in this case, the husband punishes the wife for the impulse. And the episode "Ears to You" has an ex-wife who couldn't be bothered to go through the hard work of a divorce.

The motivations are mostly all show-not-tell. But the scripts consistently avoid displays of villainous greed--or even need. Rather, the murderous significant others are unwilling to give up any of their prerogatives for the sake of the significant other, from money (sure) to lifestyles to attention. 

Another Season 1 episode "While You Were Sleeping" sets the stage. Sherlock solves the case when he hears a recovering addict admit that when she was on drugs, she only cared about herself, not her doctor boyfriend or what her choices would do to him. He later refers to the murderess--a twin sister killing off heirs to the family money--as having a "little heart."

Sherlock understands the villains' reluctance to work at relationships. He finds them difficult too.

He nevertheless condemns their illegal and harmful solutions. When the supposed activist against the government kills the young woman who helps him, Sherlock is unimpressed by the "security" implications. Like Poirot, he cares most for the individuals "who deserve not to have taken from them their lives." And despite his own reluctance to invest in a relationship when he is not sure he has the requisite qualities--especially regarding fathering a child--he expects civilized members of a society to at least try, or, at the very least, not murder.

The theme that relationships take effort underscores the show. Sherlock attempts to build his friendship with Joan. He advises Marcus to take chances in his personal relationships. He encourages Captain Gregson to work at his failing marriage and then helps him in his later relationship with Paige. In the episode "You Do It Yourself," he gives the ultimate British compliment to the young research assistant who agrees to marry the woman he loves, becoming an instant father:

"Good show."

Sherlock Holmes and That Violin

Violins are associated with genius. Consequently, Holmes is often given one. Even Elementary--which managed to squash the opera-loving aspect of Holmes--gave him a violin, though it is rarely referenced after Season 1. 

Data plays a violin as Holmes on the holodeck in Star Trek: The Next Generation and also as himself (see "Sarek"). And so on and so forth. Violins are perceived as the quintessential "is that person SMART or what?!" indicator. 

The motif has, of course, been spoofed--Holmes who are actually playing record players and, also from Elementary, Holmes who play other instruments, like bugles. 

My absolute favorite example, however, comes from My Roommate is a Detective. Lu Yao isn't playing the violin because he can play. He is scratching away at it to wake up and annoy his roommate. 

Reality Really Is Stranger Than Fiction

The proper actor for Lord Peter Wimsey

This is partly a Lesson from Fan Fiction. But it goes beyond that.

In my fan fiction, I've realized that having my characters miss information or clues--that time traveler is a con-artist!--because they are busy, tired, or simply preoccupied is unbelievable--

Even though it is entirely true-to-life.

In the novel Whose Body by Dorothy L. Sayers, Lord Peter Wimsey delivers the following monologue:

You see...if ever you want to commit a murder, the thing you've got to do is to prevent people from associating their ideas...You see, it's only in Sherlock Holmes and stories like that, that people think things out logically. Or'nar'ly, if someone tells you something out of the way, you just say, 'By Jove!' or 'How sad!" and leave it at that, and half the time you forget about it, unless something turns up afterwards to drive it home. For instance, I told you when I came in that I'd been down to Salisbury, and that's true, only I don't suppose it impressed you much. I don't suppose it'd impress you much if you read in the paper tomorrow of a tragic discovery of a dead lawyer down in Salisbury, but if I went to Salisbury again next week, and there was a Salisbury doctor found dead the day after, you might begin to think I was a bird of ill omen for Salisbury residents, and if I went there again the week after and you heard that the see of Salisbury had fallen vacant suddenly, you might begin to wonder what took me to Salisbury...and you might think of going down to Salisbury yourself and asking all kinds of people if they'd happened to see a young man in plum-colored socks hanging around the Bishop's Palace.

He goes on to suggest that only after his theoretical behavior in Salisbury caused suspicions would his listeners remember something he mentioned years before about Salisbury.

Humans love the power of hindsight. We love to claim that we always saw the various relationships of action and inaction and interaction amongst tangents, red herrings, apparent red herrings, things and people and events and news and weather....

The truth is, Sayers through Wimsey is right: a particular set of events means little to nothing until and unless something gives that event a reason for it to come to our attention. As brain experts point out, the human brain tends to eliminate "unnecessary" information in day-to-day life. It takes training to slow the brain down and ponder whether the unnecessary information might actually be necessary.

But in a novel or short story or episode or movie, the information has been brought to the brain's attention. We have to pay attention; consequently, if a character ignores that information, the character looks stupid--

Which is unfair to the character. There's a great House episode which didn't get enough emphasis in which Chase points out that House has chased a particular hare down a rabbit hole dozens of times before--he was wrong all the previous times; why should he be right now? "Because it's this television episode" is not a realistic answer.

Watson truly isn't stupid. Sherlock is simply very observant. 

Elementary: Strong to the End

For New Year's, I finished up Elementary by watching The Final Season.

It has its weak points: some of the mysteries are a little rushed and tad sketchy on the clue side. It is shorter than the average U.S. season, so the arcs, namely Odin Reichenbach, run most of the season, as opposed to the season being a combination of single episode mysteries and arcs.

The strengths outweigh the weaknesses. James Frain is magnificent. Rather than being the overblown villain of so many mystery shows, he is a deeply flawed man who truly (mostly) believes he is principled. His insidious reach is far more believable than the "big bads" of so many other shows (in which the bad guys just magically know everything). And his undoing is inevitable since those who fear him also loathe him. Even the man himself is unable to sustain his villainy; at some level, he is aware of the compromises he makes to retain his supposed principles, which principles become conflated--as with so many self-righteous people--with power. He is very well-written. 

Check out The Closer, Season 2, "Critical Missing"

for a forty-minute virtuoso performance by Frain

Another strength of the season is the finale. So many seasons fall apart in the finale. The writers of those shows act almost embarrassed at their desire to end things well. They fall back on some of the most (and worst) pretentious literary ideas in Hollywood: it was just a dream, everybody dies, multiple alternative endings, abstract and completely deconstructed endings with no real pay-offs.

Two shows that end perfectly are Monk (however simple the plot) and Elementary. Holmes and Watson forever is the way things are meant to be.

The final strength is the strength of the show overall. The Elementary producers/writers never forgot their mandate. The show never becomes entirely a family drama or entirely a soap opera or entirely a social lecture or entirely a conspiracy theory or entirely about the "big bad" villain or entirely anything but a mystery show. Sure, the show swerves in all those directions. But it continually pulls back to being a tribute to Holmes & Watson as they were meant to be.

Love the Baskerville dog--it's so cute!

Granted, Jonny Lee Miller is one of the sweetest Holmes on record, but he is entirely consistent with the original.

So are the episodes. Watch them closely. Not only do the writers make continual references to Arthur Conan Doyle's written texts, they also use a similar approach/tone. The combination of science and "new" discoveries--the use of a gentlemanly/gentlewomanly threat--the chivalrous behavior of Watson and Holmes--the edge of suspense--the slight horror element that always returns, ultimately, to forensics--the tension and friendship with the police. All of this is part of the original tales.

Elementary is a strong, noble, and loving tribute. 

Holmes as Voyeur

In "The Crooked Man," Holmes and Watson

solve the mystery for their own benefit--not in

order to apprehend a criminal.

Watching Jeremy Brett's Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, I've been reminded all over again that these are action/adventures tales rather than detective stories. What is astonishing about the series' episodes, which are quite faithful to the original tales, is how often Holmes and Watson don't prevent the crimes. They arrive after people have been hung or kidnapped, attacked in their homes, even murdered.

Again, this is largely due to Doyle wanting to write action/suspense stories (as opposed to forensic examinations). Also, however, detection for the Victorians/Edwardians was not the same as it is for us. Historians of the murder mystery point out that detective stories increased by a tremendous degree in Victorianism's later years, specifically with (1) the advent of the "private" home; (2) the inception of the police.

That is, when society became more private--when the "family" moved indoors outside of the public gaze--obsession with what WAS going on behind closed doors grew. The policeman or detective (female and male) who crept inside was both an abhorrent and coveted figure: how awful that she/he would transgress family privacy; how wonderful that she/he can figure out what is really going on.

The point of the Doyle stories isn't so much that crime has been stopped or the criminal punished (contemporary concerns) but that the privacy of the home has been stripped away, the truth of the family revealed.

It's voyeurism--and maybe, in essence, all detective fiction is.

You think The National Enquirer is bad . . .

The Compassionate Heroine (Who is Cool, for a Change)

Pollyanna is more the adorkable optimist than

the empathizer. Still, one can't help but worry

that Pollyanna will grow up to hand over

thousands of dollars to real estate fraudsters.

A common stereotype--occasionally archetype--is the emotional, people-oriented heroine, who goes up against the grouchy, logical, people-eschewing hero.

There is some (minor) truth to this dichotomy. Generally speaking, more women than men tend to enter people-oriented professions. Ponder-worthy enough, women also more easily move between fact or "thing"-based jobs and people-based jobs while men tend to excel at one particular type of job. So men tend to rise to the tops of certain professions but they don't always prove as flexible as women when it comes to changing careers/roles.

Troi, on the other hand, is definitely an empathizer.

Still, these are macro, not micro observations. At the micro level, there are men who easily change careers and there are men who love people-oriented professions, just as there are women who loathe them.

My focus here: the compassionate heroine who shows up to remind all the non-nice people how important it is to be nice. She is not ALWAYS awful (I will bring up some positive examples at a later date). Still, I often cringe a little when this heroine appears for the same reason that I cringe a little at church when people talk about women being more service-oriented than men because they "care" more about people's problems. I know exactly how service-oriented I am, and it rarely involves me wanting to climb inside people's personal lives and learn all about and/or fix their deep, dark secrets. (I often think, "Why can't we women be like the men and just clean people's garages?")

Which is why I have to give ultra kudos to Lucy Liu as Joan Watson.

Joan Watson's character on Elementary is people-oriented (as is Sherlock in a different way). She is also compassionate, empathetic, and more than ready to remind Sherlock of the importance of those attributes.

And yet, she is one tough cookie.

I hate to admit this, considering I was raised Christian, but Joan Watson's character is honestly the first time I have seen female compassion for others as a strength, not a weakness.

Yup, I'll admit that emotionally--not necessarily intellectually--I have almost always perceived compassion as something women should do/practice even though other people will take advantage. Don't get me wrong: the older I get, the more important I think compassion is though I still tend to prefer ordinary civility to "I feel your pain" empathy.

Still, as AI philosophers and neurologists point out, emotion is part of the decision-making process, and empathy plays an important role in that (macro) process--that is, human beings differ but the human race requires some type of trend towards projected insight/feeling to survive. (To clarify, "compassion" is to feel sorrow and/or want what is best for someone; "empathy" is to see things from that person's point of view; "magnanimity" is to extend compassion to someone despite that person's poor behavior. For the purposes of this post, I've conflated these terms.)

Yet Joan Watson manages to help/care about people without leaving the impression that she is about to get conned into buying a condo somewhere to help somebody earn enough money to pay for that very important operation without which his or her child/mother/aunt/grandpa will die.

Joan's compassion extends to Sherlock. In Season 2,

she sets aside his "debt" to his father to concentrate

on what is best for Sherlock: to stay in New York.

That is, she has the capacity to create boundaries, yet not give up on being kind. 

I'm not sure that Hollywood or television realizes how powerful this type of woman is to other women. When I was still watching NCIS (I tend to give up on shows that last more than 7 seasons), I was surprised and impressed by how many female viewers liked the show precisely because of Ziva's character. I've mentioned elsewhere that this was because she was a tomboy, which I think is true. But Ziva is also quite feminine and compassionate. And yet, like Joan Waston, she retains the ability to say, "Okay, I feel for you. Yet I'm going to arrest you. I'm also not going to give you my stuff or let you take over my life."

Which is very, very cool.

Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes, and the Paranormal: It's All About the Atmosphere

Ectoplasm: one of the odder

variations amongst spiritualists.

The "ectoplasm" is cheesecloth.

Books about Arthur Conan Doyle often read something like this: "But then, after creating the scientific Mr. Holmes, Conan Doyle proceeded to go off the deep end and invest in hunting for ghosts."

Along the same theme, several tribute authors have Holmes shake his head bemusedly at the sad mental decline of his friend/publisher, Mr. Arthur Conan Doyle.

Modern authors and critics make two mistakes here:

(1) Although Sherlock would have found Arthur Conan Doyle a far more bonhomous personality than himself, he would not have found his interest in spiritualism odd--not a Sherlock of the nineteenth century anyway. Spiritualism--at least initially--was greeted by the scientific community as a possible scientific advance. If humans could create a telegraph that communicated around the world, why couldn't humans create a device that communicated beyond this world? Scientific American offered an award to the first person to prove the existence of the afterlife.

Cottingley Fairies

To hugely summarize the Conan Doyle/Houdini relationship, Conan Doyle and Houdini investigated various spiritualists in America. From the beginning, Conan Doyle was admittedly more optimistic and Houdini was miles more skeptical but their mandate, at first, was the same: to uncover hoaxes and find the real thing.

They split when Conan Doyle thought they had found the real thing and Houdini continued to maintain that all spiritualists were frauds and hucksters (Houdini was right).

It is difficult to "get" Conan Doyle's intransigence in the face of what appears (to modern eyes) as obvious wackiness until one remembers that he lost a son and other family members to the horrors of World War I. In his dedication to occult phenomena, he supported the existence of the Cottingley fairies based on images that (to modern eyes) appear absolutely and obviously manufactured. It reminds me of a folklore class in which I showed the famous Patterson-Gimlin Bigfoot clip; a bemused student in the front row said, "And people thought that wasn't a guy in a suit?"

In "Possibility Two," Sherlock agrees to investigate

a man who has been "poisoned" by a genetic mutation.

The bee is his payment.

As our eyes become more sophisticated, our expectations for what comprises fraud increase. There's a reason that con artists generally stick to the abstract painters rather than earlier artists; it is one thing to fool people with a Mondrian; it is another to fool them with a Rembrandt. However, even with a Mondrian, a true expert can often spot the fraud. Most con artists rely less on the product and more on the mark's willingness to be defrauded. Conan Doyle was willing to be defrauded. Houdini wasn't.

Despite Conan Doyle going admittedly a little strange (with those fairies and all), his hunt for the paranormal was still in keeping with nineteenth century scientific thought. The connection between forensics and, say, palm reading was at that time closer than makes us empiricists comfortable. From this perspective, Elementary's occasional episode in which an extreme scientific discovery plays a role is in keeping with the Holmes' tradition.

I love them all--but don't forget, folks:

Brett is still the yardstick (I realize.

that statement is debatable :).

(2) The Sherlock Holmes' stories, despite their emphasis on forensics, are mainly and principally adventure stories, not CSI-type discourses on fingerprinting.  Grissom is not running around shouting, "Preserve the evidence!" Watson is running around shooting guns. Most importantly, the stories are filled to the brim with atmosphere. All Sherlock Holmes, especially BBC's 1980 series with Jeremy Brett, utilize this atmosphere. Brett/Burke/Hardwicke -- Downey/Law -- Miller/Liu -- Cumberbatch/Freeman, everything up to and including the modernized versions hark back to the dark, oil-lamp London of bygone eras.

Sherlock Holmes has lasted for many reasons and one of them, yes, is the forensics. The forensics alone wouldn't have been enough though. Neither would the adventure. Neither would the characterization. Other mystery writers of the same era were producing forensics and adventure and memorable characterization.

Conan Doyle put it all together into one perfect creation.

And I'm sure Paget's pictures didn't hurt.

Sherlock: Brett and Everett

I recently watched Rupert Everett as Sherlock Holmes in The Case of the Silk Stocking. I enjoy Everett in general and, on paper, you'd think he'd make a perfect Holmes. He is almost too handsome, but he has the classic Holmes' profile. He is tall, saturnine. He exudes an off-kilter vibe.

As Holmes on the screen, however, he is all wrong. He comes across as bored aristocrat, a la his role in The Ideal Husband. He is too genial on the one hand, too off-hand on the other. At one point, he comes into Watson's apartment and sprawls on a sofa opposite Watson's fiance. As he exchanges witty conversation with her, he does not come across, even vaguely, as a highly critical and intense misogynist. Most disappointing, he doesn't even come across as particularly brilliant.

I think it is a misuse of Everett. As a detective aristocrat, he would be perfect. He is far more Wimsey than Holmes.

To be fair, I am comparing Everett to Jeremy Brett. I consider Granada's Sherlock Holmes series to be the most brilliant on record with Brett as the standard bearer for all future Holmes. Brett not only has the perfect profile, his face has more roughness, more vulture-like qualities than Everett's. He is a coiled spring, a contained manic-depressive who leaps, at a moment, from low to high energy. He NEVER sprawls. He is private, self-contained with a brain that works 24/7. He is much more Monk than Wimsey. He is also intensely middleclass (this is important to the context: Watson and Holmes are gentlemen, but they are NOT aristocrats; they came out of a class that considered its middleclass status preferable to aristocracy; Queen Victoria had made middleclass conservatism cool).

I also love Granada's Watsons: David Burke and Edward Hardwicke. They play Watson as an intelligent professional man. His intelligence makes Holmes' brilliance more apparent. Neither of them are buffoons. And both of them, Hardwicke especially, have an immense kindliness of manner, displaying decent, gentleman-like behavior at every turn.

Finally, what is so wonderful about Granada's Holmes, produced by Michael Cox, is that it captures the feel/essence of the stories without being simply retellings. Brett's influence and the director's influence on the outcome is apparent. The stories are fleshed out with more details, more perspectives, more nuances--you feel that this is truly Holmes come to life. On the other hand, the series displays a great deal of respect for Arthur Conan Doyle and for the stories.

This is a huge contrast to the latest Miss Marple mysteries (2004) where the writers continually alter HUGE hunks of the original stories. I endured them for awhile, but eventually the producer(s)' contempt for Christie's craft got to me. They alter plot lines. They change Christie's characterizations. They even switch murderers! It never seems to occur to them that the reason people like Christie is because she tells a good story. She wasn't an intellectual writer, but she was a stunning craftswoman, and these would-be adapters aren't even half that good.

And I don't expect them to be. But when you are offered decent material, use it! In comparison, both Michael Cox and Brian Eastman (who does the Poirot movies) have exhibited a strong comprehension of the power and structure of the original stories as well as an ability to transform and visualize that comprehension.

Back to Everett--it didn't bother me that they made up a new story. Making up new stories about Holmes is a time-honored tradition. But their Holmes simply wasn't Holmes. Why not just make the film about some 1890s aristocrat who gets dragged into doing a bit of detecting? (Answer: they wanted to make money off the Holmes' name.)