The Little Professor

If academic conflicts were plotted like Star Trek: Discovery

WARNING: If you have not yet finished watching season one of Star Trek: Discovery, there is a MASSIVE SPOILER in here. 

 

 

[As the episode opens, the CAMERA flies by a series of slightly-familiar academic buildings, now augmented by centuries of technology.  A female voice speaks.]

PROFESSOR OF XENOSCIENCES MICHAEL BURNHAM: Each day we awaken to the promise of new beginnings and new challenges.  We face forward into the impenetrable depths of innumerable galaxies. Our lives may be forever changed by the mysteries that elude our ever-questing gaze.  Today…

[The CAMERA zooms in through a window.  We see a DEPARTMENT CONFERENCE ROOM, occupied by two yet-undifferentiated ACADEMICS.]

BURNHAM: …I stare into the abyss of the unknown and, quite possibly, the unknowable…

[The CAMERA focuses on two DEPARTMENT CHAIRS, PIKE and LELAND, who scowl at each other across a DESK.  The DESK’s surface is covered with rapidly-flashing but indecipherable displays.]

BURNHAM: …can my department chair finally convince the dean that Xenosciences needs 250 more credits for that new undergraduate game lounge?

[CLOSE-UP on BURNHAM’s concerned face as she peers into the room through an observation window.]

LELAND: I don’t mind telling you, Chris, that Xenoliteratures has been monitoring your department’s attempt to monopolize the dean’s discretionary funds very closely.  Very closely.  Not least because you refuse to acknowledge anything that happened last semester—

PIKE [lolling casually in his chair]: Now, I know Xenoliteratures is where you’ve got that hermeneutics of suspicion thing goin’ on, but really—

LELAND: Burnham set off a major turf war with Xenosports over undergraduate recruitment, and it’s still in the local press.

PIKE: Yeah, but the system gave her “Professor of the Year” honors at the end, so it’s all good.

LELAND: Culber’s contract got cancelled, but somehow he’s back in the classroom.

PIKE: The termination was just an administrative error, Leland! He wound up with an…extended sabbatical.

LELAND: And now Saru, the guy who ran screaming at the very sight of an Assistant to the Vice President, is leading demonstrations in the quad!

PIKE: He got tenure, for cryin’ out loud!

LELAND: Professor Tyler—I mean Voq—I mean Tylvoq—I mean Tylvoqer—oh, the hell with it—here has been running your communications with the dean through our new Discursive Deconstructor Apparatus—it’s ex-clu-sive Xenolit tech, you wouldn’t understand—and he has arrived at some pretty damning conclusions.  Haven’t you, Tyler?

TYLER: The rhetoric of your most recent email once again highlights your failed attempt to encode a subversive neo-Vulcanian rhetoric of post-positivistic logicality within the confines of academic praxis.

[TYLER pauses.  PIKE stares.]

TYLER: Seriously, what kind of cost-benefit analysis did you perform before you sent that email? Have you even heard of economic forecasting models?  Did you even stop to think that an appeal to rational self-interest might be mutually profitable for all departments concerned?

[TYLER pauses.  PIKE stares.]

LELAND [whispering]: It’s…yeah, it’s the interdisciplinarity.  The part of him that got a BA in Economics just will not go away.  [Louder] Anyway.  We know what evil plans you’re hatching over there, and we intend to infiltrate—I mean, stop them by any means necessary.

[CUT to the HALLWAY, where BURNHAM is watching this exchange with obvious anxiety.  ASSISTANT PROFESSOR SILVIA TILLY and PROFESSOR PAUL STAMETS stand next to her, fidgeting.]

TILLY: This, is, like, soooo annoying.  Like, can you believe the nerve of these Xenanities people, coming over here with their freakin’ EX-CLU-SIVE tech and telling us, us, that they’ve got some sort of [waves hands around] super-duper-high-powered insight into our motives? I mean, like, this is totally grody—

[STAMETS shoots her a look.  TILLY deflates and looks repentant.]

TILLY: Sorry, I’ve been researching twentieth-century slang to help me deal with the whole cursing thing.  There was this all-female secret society called “Valley Girls,” who I guess lived in valleys and had a hard time communicating with people who lived on hills, and…anyway, what I mean is: can’t we get the credits from somebody else?

STAMETS: I’ve hunted up and down the mycelial network to find a suitable research grant.  Nobody wants to fund an undergraduate game lounge, even though I’ve identified 323.8 potential academic uses for it—interactive physics simulations,  five-dimensional juggling exercises, Vulcan hopscotch—

TILLY: --You know that the powers that be only pay lip service to pedagogical innovation, right? It took forever to get the administration to approve my pilot course on using roguelikes to study starship engineering—“fix the nacelles before you get stung to death by a soldier ant,” that sort of thing.

BURNHAM: We’re doomed.

STAMETS: …Pretty sure that’s the other show with a “Star” in it.

[ASSOCIATE DEAN PHILIPPA GEORGIOU suddenly appears out of nowhere.]

GEORGIOU: Only the weak bother asking for money.  The strong know that the best way to get it is to strike early and hard.

[She pulls out a fountain pen and burnishes it for emphasis.]

BURNHAM [wearily]: Insights like this are what I get for saving your career.

GEORGIOU: “Saving my career”?! I had wealth, power, legions of faculty at my feet, an Instagram feed with 1.3 million followers—

BURNHAM: --You ran a diploma mill called “Hahrverd.”

[GEORGIOU sniffs.]

BURNHAM: Besides, shouldn’t you be on the dean’s side? Or Leland’s, even?

GEORGIOU: Leland wouldn’t dare cross me—at least, not after I let him know that I know about his little escapades with the student fees for the Xenoliterature Club newsletter.  As for Dean Cornwell [evil chuckle], you do realize that she’s working with the administration to rebrand this  division as a Xenoculinary school? Right?

EVERYONE: NOOOO!!!

GEORGIOU [to Stamets]: And your mushrooms will be first on the menu.

STAMETS: We can’t let them turn the mycelial network into cream of mushroom soup! 

TILLY: We need help!

BURNHAM: What we need is a deus ex machina!

[On cue, a mysterious RED BEING appears, accompanied by COPIOUS CGI.]

BURNHAM: Look, a mysterious being of hitherto unfathomable power!

GEORGIOU [suddenly transforming her fountain pen into a tricorder]: Its energy readings exceed all known measurements!

STAMETS: It appears to exist simultaneously in multiple positions along the space-time continuum!

TILLY: Yes, but can it save the mushrooms?

[More COPIOUS CGI.  After it dies down, BURNHAM, TILLY, and STAMETS find themselves in the conference room.  Nobody else is present.  BURNHAM picks up a PADD from the table.]

BURNHAM [reading]: “…Our conversations with faculty stakeholders have been mutually productive”—where do they get these writers?!—“and we have decided that it is in the best interests of our academic community to delay implementing Section 31 of our Intragalactic Academic Presence Plan.”

STAMETS: I’m guessing that my mushrooms are safe.

TILLY: Is there anything there about the game lounge?

BURNHAM [scrolling down]: Let’s see…ah, yes.  “In order to promote student success, we have decided to develop a new undergraduate game lounge, to be [shocked pause] shared by Xenanities and Xenosciences”?!!

[They stare at each other in horror.]

[Cut to the DEAN’S OFFICE, where CORNWELL, PIKE, and LELAND are glowering at each other.]

CORNWELL: Stuff it, guys.  Just because there’s no plausible reason for you two to work together doesn’t mean that I can’t make you do it anyway.

LELAND [glumly]: I knew I should never have let you audit that creative writing course.

PIKE [with a forced smile]: Well, old buddy I haven’t spoken to in about a decade except when forced to by Dean Cornwell here, I look forward to meeting you in the new holographic Andorian tennis simulator.

LELAND [equally forced]: And I look forward to sitting down with you over a nice cup of Tellarite tea and discussing the newest engagement of antestructuralist theory with warp physics.

[Looking over their heads, CORNWELL catches a glimpse of GEORGIOU watching them through an observation window.  They share a meaningful glance…]

[Roll CREDITS.]

 

Sherlock Holmes (2013)

Last year, a student mentioned in passing that there had been a recent Russian adaptation of Sherlock Holmes--not the famous Soviet-era Livanov version, but one much newer, starring Igor Petrenko (Holmes), Andrey Panin (Watson), and Mikhail Boyarskiy (Lestrade).  The series appears to have a small but dedicated fanbase.   (The Calvert Journal has an overview of the longstanding Russian enthusiasm for things Holmesian.)  I'd been on the lookout for new films or TV episodes for the Sherlock Holmes and adaptation course I teach occasionally, and was wondering if there was anything I could swap in for my current Hound trifecta of Rathbone/Livanov/Cumberbatch. After some poking about, I found a fan-subbed version of all eight episodes on YouTube.   

This adaptation neatly sidesteps the usual complaints about "fidelity" by beginning from the proposition that the stories rarely had much to do with the actual cases--indeed, that the "real" Holmes is almost nothing like his narrative version.  Of course, this conceit is not new, and originates in Doyle's own stories (given Holmes' grumbling about Watson getting "romance" all over his "logic").  Such metafictional reflections have cropped up on film in The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, in novels like The Last Sherlock Holmes Story, Holmes Entangled, and A Slight Trick of the Mind, on occasion in Sherlock, and so on. Two things, however, are new here.  First is just how much Watson reworks "reality": the first episode, for example, is a very loose "The Adventure of Black Peter," the second a wildly rewritten The Sign of Four (without its outcome or much of anything else), and the last one is a kind of exploded "The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans," with the plans, the motives, and the explanations all changed.  In between, we have barely-recognizable takes on "The Musgrave Ritual" (mind-boggling in its inflation to something positively Hammer Horror-esque), "A Scandal in Bohemia," "The Adventure of the Red-Headed League," "The Final Problem," etc., etc., etc., often combined within the same episode.  Second, though, is that the series' central character is arguably Watson, not Holmes. (I seem to be in agreement [PDF] here with Sherlockian Howard Ostrom, who notes that "the Watson figure is stronger than that of Holmes" [6]; while he's much more enthusiastic than I am about how the series turned out, he makes a number of interesting points about its troubled reception history in Russia and how its politics were understood there.)  The real arc of this Sherlock Holmes is Watson's emotional, moral, and professional development, from a PTSD-stricken ex-army officer to  bestselling short-story author, an arc that also draws on some of Arthur Conan Doyle's biography in terms of how Watson feels about his ultimate success.  

As there will be spoilers below, I'll put the rest below the fold.

The Crown

The second season of The Crown might just as well have been subtitled "The Americans are coming!"  Not that the season is all Yanks, all the time (or even most of the time), mind you, only that one catches slow glimpses of American power waxing as British power further wanes.  The Kennedys, says Philip (of all people!) are like "royalty," and even supposedly staid aristocrats respond to them like teenagers with a celebrity crush.  Similarly, Billy Graham cruises through, his emotional revivalism disgruntling the more respectable class of Anglicans.  More ominously, an American historian forces the British government's hand on the Marburg files, which reveal much about the Duke of Windsor's dalliances with the Nazis.  Everyone, especially the Queen Mother, grouses about the strange fissures emerging in British society: too much feeling on display, louder grumbles from the working classes, insufficient respect for the divine right of kings, and an increasingly noticeable unwillingness on some parts of the Commonwealth to continue deferring to the UK's might.  Or lack of might, given that the season opens with Nasser considerably damaging the UK's brand over the Suez Canal crisis.

Historians quip that "the middle class is always rising"; it's The Crown's thesis, meanwhile, that the monarchy is always in crisis mode.  And to solve a crisis, you need to work the optics.  The series' fixation on media is a hallmark of modern monarchy films, including The Crown scriptwriter Peter Morgan's The Queen,* and like The Queen, a good chunk of this season involves us watching the characters on the screen watching screens of their own--that is, when they aren't listening to the radio, reading the papers, dealing with photographers, or watching themselves being satirized on stage by Beyond the Fringe.  In particular, the clashing styles of photographers Cecil Beaton and Anthony Armstrong-Jones embody this season's take on the monarchy's relationship to the twentieth century, with Beaton producing images of an untouchable, otherworldly monarchy and Armstrong-Jones images that seem intimate and stripped of artifice.  (The contrast is further embodied in the technological differences between their cameras.)  The royals have little to do except perform for the media and, in turn, consume their own images through the media.  Lord Altrincham's critique of Elizabeth, as represented here, has nothing to do with substance (as one character points out, the great thing about a constitutional monarchy is that the monarchs have no power) and everything to do with acting; when Elizabeth dines with the hoi polloi in Buckingham Palace, she behaves with outward grace and a distinct lack of inward graciousness.  Her successful intervention in foreign policy by dancing with Kwame Nkrumah is explicitly staged as a battle of competing photo ops, in which she trumps the Prime Minister and her advisors with a greater display of media savvy.  At the same time, the season drills down on the lack of "humanity" (as Philip glumly observes when he dismisses his errant personal secretary) of this approach to the public eye: Eileen Parker's rage when both Lascelles and Elizabeth try to get her to back down on divorcing her adulterous husband in order to save Philip's reputation is one of the more spectacular examples, as is Jackie Kennedy's sad apology to Elizabeth over what turns out to have been an abuse- and drug-induced spiel of insults. 

Last season's movie camera makes another symbolic appearance, as Elizabeth passes it on to Philip as he goes away to find himself on a five-month Commonwealth tour.  On the one hand, giving Philip the camera hints that Elizabeth has relinquished the director's eye in favor of being the camera's object; on the other hand, it also suggests, as we see with Nkrumah, that she has instead learned to manage the camera from in front.  Philip's travels, though, parallel Elizabeth's later voyage to Ghana in another way.  The Commonwealth tour is supposed to be a largely all-male escape from the cameras--notably, when Philip gives in to "vanity" (his word) and invites a female reporter to interview him in Australia, he quickly discovers that his hormones have kept him from perceiving that the woman might have a brain.  Both Philip and his secretary, Mike Parker, treat the Commonwealth as an opportunity for male adventure; while the cameras linger on natural beauty and partly-clothed bodies, Parker's lascivious letters to the Thursday Club (where waitresses have to deal with pawing hands as part of the job) indicate just how much exploitation is involved.  (That being said, your mileage may vary about just how much exploitation the series is engaging in here.)  Indeed, one of the season's not-so-subtle arguments is that the older men in charge seem entirely incapable of grasping how they're perceived by those not like themselves, whether overseas (Anthony Eden's massive miscalculations) or at home (the painfully out-of-touch speech that Michael Adeane writes for Elizabeth; Macmillan's choice of successor).  The women, one hastens to add, do not actually fare that much better, as Elizabeth's cringe-inducing encounter with Eileen Parker suggests.  But whereas Philip largely treats the Commonwealth as a personal playground of games and dancing that liberates him from the constraints of public life (that is, until Parker's scandal brings everything to a crashing halt), Elizabeth dances the foxtrot with Nkrumah in what both understand to be a significant political gesture.  Elizabeth accommodates herself to life before the camera, and finds a degree of power there, while Philip, who believes that he can escape the cameras, learns otherwise.  Still, as the season's final image of them--a squabbling extended family, not the poised and alone Elizabeth, before Cecil Beaton's eye--suggests, it's difficult to successfully package the messiness of private life. 

*--Alert viewers will probably pick up the direct visual quotation from The Queen: the stag, both alive and dead. 

Brief note: Star Trek: Discovery

Like Sherlock Holmes pastiches, new Star Trek films and series tend to be endlessly citational.  It is therefore no surprise that the two-part pilot reworks the scenario of the original series' "The Menagerie" (itself composed out of that series' original pilot), in which Spock, our half-Vulcan son of Sarek, mutinies to bring his former captain, Christopher Pike, to Talos IV.  In TOS, of course, Spock's court-martial has a happy ending (as does Pike).  But in ST:Discovery, Michael Burnham (human ward of Sarek) mutinies to save her captain from certain death at the hands of the Klingons, only to fail on all counts and plead guilty at her own court-martial, theoretically ending her career.  As she is the series lead, it clearly won't, but still. (Still, at least we now have a good reason for Spock pretending she doesn't exist.) Indeed, her captain dies the same way (impaled) as does the captain of the Kelvin in the first Abrams reboot.  Too, the "Vulcan hello" of the first episode, rejected by both Captain Georgiou and Admiral Anderson as being not the Starfleet "way"--Starfleet refuses to shoot first--is the equivalent of Sisko slugging Q in DS9.  ("I'm not Picard," snaps Sisko.)  Same universe (or is it?), but not the same series.

Obviously, one can carp endlessly about deviations from canon (heresy!).  For starters: since when have Vulcans been capable of long-range telepathy? (Picking up hundreds of Vulcans dying at once, yes; individual communication, no.)   Wouldn't Amanda have something to say about her husband turning Burnham into Vulcan mini-me? That said, I've always subscribed to the "mysterious historical filter" theory of Star Trek, in which our own moment in time limits what we "see" on the screen, so the Abramsesque sets aren't troubling. Certainly less troubling than the sometimes weird pacing and that terrible Troi-cum-Spock science officer (well-acted, yes, but the character...).  Everything looks pretty, and the makeup and effects are all excellent, the   much-maligned lens flares aside. 

The new Klingons have provoked the most exasperation, and for good reason--not only has the makeup been redone yet again (perhaps we could have just returned to TOS-era Klingons while we're at it? No?), but as Aaron Bady points out, their representation right now is "deeply racist" (complete with stereotypical evil albino, no less). Nevertheless, the episode does hint at potential future plot lines that have to do with unity and difference, which may at least complicate how the Klingons have been introduced.  T'Kuvma, who casts himself as the heir of the legendary warrior Kahless, promotes a new religion that promises to bring together the now-degraded and fragmented Houses into union under the aegis of war.  In his dream of Klingon imperial reunion, even the most marginalized Klingons have a part--he is himself an outcast and he embraces another, Voq, who will presumably become the next leader.  But T'Kuvma's Reformation of sorts has no place for the non-Klingon, who exists only to be killed in heroic battle.  The Federation, by contrast, celebrates its inclusivity: besides the non-humans everywhere, the episode opens with Georgiou and Burnham on a mercy mission to a species in danger of extinction.  When faced with the Klingons, however, their protocols immediately fall apart.  Moreover--citations again!--the Klingons' objection to "We come in peace" is eerily reminiscent of the famous "root beer" conversation between Quark and Garak in DS9 about the Federation insinuating itself into your consciousness.  Burnham's upbringing with the Vulcans seems like a third way between the two: on the one hand, Sarek and the other Vulcans have taken her in (so, the Federation--celebrate your differences); on the other hand, she has been raised as a Vulcan (so, the Klingons--subsume all differences).  We'll see.  

 

Brief note: To Walk Invisible

Some time ago, Lucasta Miller chronicled in The Bronte Myth how the entire Bronte family has been repeatedly reinvented--as domestic heroines, as eerily "wild" products of an apparently bookless upbringing, as the children of a dubiously sane father, and so on. (Arguably, this process started with Charlotte's own critiques of her sisters' fiction after their death.)  To Walk Invisible apparently takes some of Miller's work on board, along with that of the Bronte family's most important recent biographer, Juliet Barker: Patrick is kindly and supportive; the sisters are not domestic proto-goddesses (Emily, in particular, appears to enjoy making bread primarily because it enables her to punch it); and not even Anne, the most conventional of the three sisters, seems entirely enthusiastic about a life devoted to "duty."   Indeed, the final scenes of the film, a walk-through of the modern parsonage museum, reminds us that the Brontes' lives have been, for lack of a better word, curated.   Instead, the film focuses on the problems of ambition and career, especially inasmuch as it is supposed to shape (or not shape) the lives of men and women.  Unlike Victoria, which trudges year-by-year through the sovereign's life, To Walk Invisible takes on only those years immediately surrounding the publication of the Bronte's earliest works, ending shortly after Branwell's death in 1848.  This proves ironic: it is Branwell's ultimately shapeless life that grants the film its chronological shape.

Although the film roots the family's story-telling propensities in their childhood play with tin soldiers (which, in semi-surreal flashbacks, become animate), the adult sisters divide over how to regard their writing activities.  Charlotte, who has stopped writing at the time the movie begins, returns to it as a profession, a means of supporting herself and her sisters after her father dies.    By contrast, Anne and Emily understand writing purely as a means of self-expression and liberation, continuing to explore their jointly-imagined fantasy world into adulthood. For them, writing is a vocation, a quasi-divine calling borne of love and internal compulsion, not of material need.  This split between Charlotte and her sisters recurs in the film's representation of their relationship, in which Emily, Anne, and Branwell are all clearly closer to each other than anyone is to Charlotte.  At the same time, Charlotte's thwarted desire for her teacher, Heger, along with her amusingly awkward relationship with her future husband,  links her thematically to Branwell and his failed romance with Mrs. Robinson.  Both Charlotte and Branwell share emotional trajectories that drive them out of the immediate family to find fulfillment--indeed, they both have friends who aren't relatives--whereas Anne and Emily are entirely bound up in their sororal relationship.  Branwell's inability, however, to live up to what everyone sees as proper early-Victorian codes of manhood also makes him Charlotte's most frustrating sibling. Everyone, granted, is annoyed with Branwell, who spends the film drinking himself to death out of frustration and despair, but Charlotte is by far the least sympathetic to his problems.  Charlotte's professionalism, which makes her the most pro-active about identifying and dealing with publishers, putting manuscripts in the mail, and so on, leads her to run roughshod over her sisters' feelings (she has to sneak around Emily's room to see her poems and is not exactly kind about Anne's work, calling it at most "competent") in a way that the film represents as necessary, but it also echoes Branwell's own solipsism when it comes to his relatives.  This link recurs in the film's muted "vision" theme, which yokes the near-sighted Charlotte and Branwell, the characters most obtuse about other people, to their father, temporarily blinded by cataracts and unable to "see" the true qualities of any of his children.  Charlotte's triumph near the end, when Patrick Bronte finally learns about Jane Eyre, occupies the place in the narrative that Patrick has spent the entire film yearning to assign to his son.

Sherlock: The Final(e) Problem: A Dialogue

HALF-LP: We've seen what is probably the very last episode of Sherlock.  It's time for us to deliver a well-considered analysis of its strengths and weaknesses.

OTHER HALF-LP: OMG!!! WTH?!! AYKM?!

HALF-LP: Ahem.  This is an academic blog.  It is a place for high-minded discourse.  Let's try this again.

OTHER HALF-LP: THAT WAS CLICHE SALAD, TOSSED TOGETHER FROM EVERY HORROR MOVIE AND POLICE PROCEDURAL FEATURING OVER-THE-TOP SUPERVILLAINS WITH TOO MUCH TIME ON THEIR HANDS, STUCK IN RIDICULOUSLY SPACIOUS PRISON FACILITIES. 

HALF-LP:  ...OK, you're writing in complete sentences now, but I can't help noticing the all caps.  Would you really allow your students to do something like that in an academic essay? Time to model good behavior.

OTHER HALF-LP: If I must.  First, the plot had more holes than swiss cheese--

HALF-LP: And you're complaining about cliches?

OTHER HALF-LP: I think the writing may have contaminated my capacity for invention.  More seriously, the entire concept of Euros--who was apparently endowed with some super-mesmerist capabilities that would have left Mesmer himself agog--merely recycled the kind of hyper-manipulative villain so beloved of procedurals like CSI (think, for example, of that show's eidetic miniaturist).  There didn't seem to be any self-critical distancing from that kind of character, as the series has tried to do in the past; Euros is just a straight rehash.  In fact, I thought the puzzles, which were all designed to elicit extreme emotional responses, hinted at the source of the series' failure, albeit unintentionally.

HALF-LP: How so?

OTHER HALF-LP: Because the series finale (it's pretty clear that that's what this was) made it clear that the writers ultimately wanted to solve Holmes, rather than to represent Holmes the problem-solver.  And yet, they could find no way to solve Holmes that made any sense in terms of their own series' narrative development.  As Scott Bailey said in his comment on my last Sherlock post, "Watson is just another stick used to beat Sherlock, and the Deep Sad Pain of Sherlock is the core of the show."  Hence, the grand "reveal," in which Holmes turns out to have rewritten his own past, is also a rewrite of the entire series--Moriarty has always been working for Euros, etc., etc., etc.  Everything turns out to be about "family" (as the final shots of the episode reiterate).  There's no greater mystery than Holmes himself!

HALF-LP: But why is that a bad thing, necessarily?

OTHER HALF-LP: Oh, nothing is necessarily bad.  But remember the swiss cheese plot? The only way for the authors to represent Holmes' salvation via emotion was to put him through this ludicrous series of death games (couldn't Moriarty just point out that this was silly, like he did in the Abominable Bride?); they couldn't figure out how to get Holmes to show love in any other way.  And yet, the plot references "The Three Garridebs," which is the one story in which Watson sees just how much Holmes cares about him:

"You're not hurt, Watson? For God's sake, say that you are not hurt!"

It was worth a wound -- it was worth many wounds -- to know the depth of loyalty and love which lay behind that cold mask. The clear, hard eyes were dimmed for a moment, and the firm lips were shaking. For the one and only time I caught a glimpse of a great heart as well as of a great brain. All my years of humble but single-minded service culminated in that moment of revelation.

...And then Holmes goes back to being his normal self, which is the point: this is not a transformative moment, just an instance of emotional honesty.  Nor has it been engineered by another character to make Holmes engage in some sort of emotional outburst--it's a perfectly understandable response to seeing his friend unexpectedly being shot.  Now, in one sense, this is, as we would now say, a bit of fanservice; but it's also in line with the rest of the stories, which rest pretty comfortably in Holmes' impenetrability.  Holmes' interiority is not the point of Doyle's stories, whereas Sherlock eventually became the central mystery of Sherlock.  It is central to the original stories that Holmes not be like everyone else--that's Watson's plot function.  Sherlock sets out to domesticate Holmes, but even rewriting itself isn't enough to make that narrative arc plausible.  Hence the aforementioned silly games, taking the place of crime-solving--the writers couldn't figure out any way to make their Sherlock respond spontaneously, so they had to introduce a character who acted like a not-very-polished script writer, battering the character into submission. 

HALF-LP: It seems to me that your primary objection to the series is that it's not a very good adaptation of the Sherlock Holmes stories.

OTHER HALF-LP: It's not a very good reflection on the Sherlock Holmes stories, which tends to be key to even a freewheeling adaptation of any original text.  Mitch Cullin's A Slight Trick of the Mind, for example, is also about "solving" Holmes, and yet it takes on Holmes' emotional isolation in ways that closely engage both with Doyle's stories and with previous adaptations.  Sherlock started out that way, but eventually threw Doyle (and everything else) entirely overboard.  If you judge it as its own thing, it ended up as a not-very-original decayed procedural.  If you judge it as Sherlock Holmes...well. 

Sherlock

Two comments that will, at first, appear to be tangential to the subject at hand. 

1) When I was in high school, one show I followed with some faithfulness was Beauty and the Beast.  Towards the end of its run, though, even adolescent I  began to notice that the series had developed this weirdly self-devouring attitude to its emotional drama, in which all personal relationships slowly morphed into warped and contorted angst.  It seemed to me that something creative had gone awry somewhere.

2) When Jeremy Brett was shooting the Granada Sherlock Holmes series, he was initially famous (notorious?) for demanding that everything in the scripts have some explicit relationship to what was on Doyle's page.

These thoughts are, alas, not tangential at all, as "The Six Thatchers," the opener for Sherlock's fourth series, makes abundantly clear.  For some time now, Sherlock has primarily rested its laurels on its representation of the Holmes/Watson/lately Mary Watson/sort-of Moriarty relationship, as opposed to more minor matters, such as coherent plots.  If developing Holmes' friendship with Watson necessarily results from the shift to a visual medium and away from Watson-the-narrator-function, it is still the case that in Doyle's stories, the characterization emerges from the action, and not the action from the characterization.  That is: we learn a great deal about Watson from how he narrates, rather than from any extensive backstory or, in some cases, continuing story (he...has a brother, you say? How many wives, again?); similarly, we learn about Holmes by watching Watson watching him work (or grumble about not working), but we never learn more than tiny snippets about his life pre-Watson.  Thus, the Granada series' slightly revisionist Watson emerges plausibly from a close reading of the originals, whose Watson is a strong storyteller with excellent eye for detail.   Sherlock, by contrast, has by now evolved (or devolved) entirely into the permutations of how these characters relate to each other--usually dysfunctionally.  Worse still, it has been drinking deeply at the well of Our Heroes Must be Personally Menaced by Grand Conspiracies, which has been the downfall of many a series related to detective work of some sort.  (There must be a mathematical formula which allows us to calculate when a series will decide that it needs a Brilliant Villain who has nothing better to do than Endlessly Persecute Our Hero and Torment His Loved Ones.)  Matters are only worsened by this version of Holmes, a self-described "high-functioning sociopath" who is so brutally unpleasant that nobody with any alternatives would want to spend time in his near, or even far, proximity.  It is not clear why this Watson likes him, let alone supposedly loves him or feels any loyalty to him.  Indeed, the series' moment of greatest psychological verisimilitude occurs immediately after Holmes reveals to Watson that he didn't die after all: Watson proceeds to beat him up.  Repeatedly.  Across London.  If anything, the most plausible finale to this series would be the end of Act I in Charles Marowitz' Sherlock's Last Case, in which Watson, driven insane by Holmes' behavior, (believes he) murders him.

Ah. The episode, you say? Like most Sherlock installments, "The Six Thatchers" mashes up various Holmes stories--notably "The Adventure of the Six Napoleons," "The Adventure of the Empty House," and "The Adventure of the Yellow Face"--with, also as per the usual, a super-added plot having to do with the creepier side of the British intelligence services. Oh, and "The Appointment in Samarra."  In theory, "Appointment in Samarra" is what drives the plot's organization, although it's noteworthy that Sherlock omits a key point of Maugham's retelling that is integral to what plays out on screen:  the merchant recognizes Death, but, more importantly, misinterprets Death's behavior, and it's that that sends him fleeing from Baghdad to Samarra. All events play out to a predetermined ending, even when Death herself is initially under the impression that something has wrecked the pattern.  In "The Six Thatchers," Sherlock misinterprets the point of shattering the Thatcher busts, which eventually propels the narrative forward to the deaths of both the perpetrator and Mary Watson herself.  (At a meta level, the viewer who remembers "Six Napoleons" will also misinterpret the plot, as the pearl turns out to be a red herring.)  But Mary's death, of course, was itself supposedly predetermined by Doyle's stories, so that at no point has she ever been able to "escape" the fate of her original.  This despite the episode reworking other aspects of Doyle's stories so that they don't play out as planned, most notably "The Adventure of the Yellow Face," whose plot hinges on a child born from an interracial marriage in the nineteenth-century South.  Here, instead of Doyle's praise for love and honor vanquishing bigotry, as well as for a mother's determination to protect her child, we have an actual instead of imaginary affair; the reveal that, really, Watson is worse, rather than better, than Mary thinks him; and a rather cavalier attitude to the Watsons' baby.  ("Norbury," as it turns out, remains key.)  Some plot reversals, it would appear, are more viable than others.   

Unfortunately, the plot and pacing are themselves rather a mess, which left me contemplating the sort of matters that viewers ought not to be contemplating.   How concealing a flash drive inside of a dry, hollow bust would work is unexplained; in "Six Napoleons," the pearl was concealed before the plaster had dried, which was why the busts needed to be smashed instead of gently shaken.   The child care arrangements in the Watson home seem somewhat strange, as apparently both Mary and John can take off with no notice to go globe-trotting; one would imagine that even Mrs. Hudson might begin to balk at some point. Neither Mycroft nor the British government can afford to turn the lights on (granted, this is a standard feature in British mysteries; only the shot of dust motes in a random beam of light was missing).  We will not go into Watson's...interesting...vocalizations at Mary's death (already a target of some derision on Twitter), which spoiled the effect.  What effect there was, as my tears remained unjerked.  Let us hope that there is nowhere to go but up.

The Crown

Since the mid-90s, at least, British monarchy films have usually been in comic mode: there's a crisis of some sort --> the monarch temporarily loses his or her public "glamour," leaving the institution's future at stake --> the monarch is "healed" in some fashion --> the monarch's status as national symbol is fully restored and everyone lives happily ever after (well, sort of).  The stakes are especially high in the symbolic monarchy films, in which the monarch has little to do with the day-to-day operations of the country's political machine and everything to do with the country's sense of itself as a unified nation.  But the new Netflix series The Crown is interesting because it is not, in fact, comic, even though it does its almighty best to represent Elizabeth II as a patriotic, self-sacrificing (in more ways than one) hero.  Although the production crew is hardly composed of Tom Nairns, the first season's narrative arc tracks not the consoling, unifying powers of royal glamour, but its very stark limitations in an age of imperial collapse. 

The ideal monarch, as Elizabeth more than once is both told and says herself, remains silent and does nothing.  "Anointed" (by God) and not "appointed" (by man), the monarch is, as Walter Bagehot said, "dignified" instead of "effective."  (This may be the first miniseries featuring lectures on Bagehot.)  "Its apparent separation from business," Bagehot argues, "is what removes it both from enmities and from desecration, which preserves its mystery, which enables it to confine the affection of conflicting parties--to be a visible symbol of unity to those still so imperfectly educated as to need a symbol." But in The Crown, being apolitical is merely one step on the road to the monarch's radical de-selfing.  Both Churchill and the private secretary Tommy Lascelles lecture Elizabeth and/or Princess Margaret on the horrific dangers of "individualism"--that is, the monarch (or any member of the royal family, really) allowing any personal feelings or beliefs, no matter how apparently anodyne, to intrude on the performance of their duties, whether that be Elizabeth's choice of a private secretary or Margaret's choice of a husband.  In this context, Elizabeth's love of horses, which Margaret describes as a "passion," looks rather like one of the sole outlets for her to assert agency and selfhood.  Equally striking, though, is that even though Elizabeth eventually gets on board with the process of erasing herself, substituting "monarchy" for "the monarch," most of that process involves being given orders by a bunch of men.  At various points, Elizabeth is lectured by Churchill, by her private secretary, by clergy, by the Duke of Windsor (!), and by various members of the cabinet; the only man she can effectively resist turns out to be her husband Philip, who by the end of the season has largely devolved into a party-hard drunk. Even when Elizabeth does take action, as when she calls out Salisbury and Churchill for keeping her out of the loop on Churchill's health, she needs a man to urge her on to do it.  It was hard not to notice that in the final shot, when a photographer urges her to let "Elizabeth Windsor" go entirely and allow the Queen to fully emerge--the symbolic consolidation of her image--it's still a man giving instructions.  George VI's wedding gift to the queen, a film camera, goes more and more unused as the season progresses, as if the queen loses her independent gaze along with her identity.  (The camera's disappearance from the plot also hints at how the monarchy loses control of the media: Philip's decision to have the coronation televised appears to mark the end, rather than the beginning, of the Windsors' ability to keep TV and the press under control.)  Of course, the result of all this patriotic self-erasure is that Elizabeth's family simply collapses in on itself, as she repeatedly betrays promises to family members and fails to transform Philip into an equally empty consort.

One of the ironies of having all this play out over ten hours (so far) is that the series fails to fully suppress something always simmering beneath the surface in other monarchy films and series: the self-interested, cutthroat politics driving the ongoing suppression of the queen's individuality.  Such maneuverings are always visible in films like Mrs. Brown or The Queen or The King's Speech, but these films nevertheless feature a crisis-to-resolution arc that makes the conclusions comforting (well, unless you're a republican).  But the background events of The Crown are all about the slow but steady collapse of Britain's role as a world power, as embodied in first Churchill's collapsing body and, in the final shots, Anthony Eden's degeneration into drug-addicted bliss as he watches a film of Nasser.  Eden's literal unconsciousness as the film becomes stuck and then burns, foreshadowing the outcome of the Suez Crisis (which presumably happens next season), suggests that the Constitutional balance of dignified/effective parties is considerably out of whack.  Churchill, who resists leaving his post despite multiple health crises, represents the old (imperial) era hanging on for far too long in a changing world, but the transition to Eden is not, in fact, a transition to "modernity" at all.  Notably, the film's one truly idealist voice for the future, Churchill's innocent new female secretary, is abruptly flattened by a bus a few episodes in. There is a queen at the end of the season, but a queen of what, exactly?

 

The Abominable Bride

Sherlock Holmes stories have been metafictional since there have been Sherlock Holmes stories, what with Holmes complaining that Watson likes to gin up the sensation to maximize his readership.   Since the 1970s or so, however, adaptations have taken the more mischievous and/or subversive approach of foregrounding the purported distance between Watson's character "Holmes" and the "real" Holmes, from Billy Wilder's The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes and Michael Dibdin's The Last Sherlock Holmes Story to more recent examples like Michael Chabon's The Final Solution and Mitch Cullin's A Slight Trick of the Mind. The Sherlock special The Abominable Bride is thus yet another excursus into the realm of explicit Holmes metafiction, with the added fillip that it takes on the current series' relationship to the Jeremy Brett Granada adaptation (establishing shots, a few snatches of the opening theme, the discussion of the story title at the end) and to its legions of online critics and fans.  

At one level, the episode sent up the Granada series' famous attempts to reconstruct "authentic" period detail, which here becomes a kind of shorthand for Holmes as walking dead, as it were.  This was perhaps most obvious in the closing shot, in which the 19th-century 221B set was abruptly juxtaposed with a 21st-century street scene, but also in the repeated references to the Paget illustrations (something for which the Granada series was also known), which here, rather cheekily, are ripped out of their original narrative contexts and made to serve an entirely different purpose.  More generally, the undeniably bonkers Gothic plot, which somehow manages to yoke "The Five Orange Pips" (the, er, five orange pips, the revenge plot, and the KKK imagery) to "The Greek Interpreter" (Mycroft, the obliquity of the ecliptic, the avenging woman) to the sort of bizarre church setting one expects from the steampunk Robert Downey, Jr. films, is uncomfortably reminiscent of the later Granada journeys into extended episodes (many of which viewers would like to forget).  "Is this silly enough for you yet?" inquires Moriarty.  But the repeated breakdowns in both cinematic style (Holmes' second confrontation with Mycroft in particular, with its odd upward angles and lighting) and language, as the 21st century kept erupting into the 19th, reminded viewers that such aspirations to authenticity have a bad habit of pulling apart at the seams when examined too closely.   Characters do what the authors want them to do, in good Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead fashion, which is why poor Mrs. Hudson goes from complaining about being reduced to a "plot function" to making everyone tea because, well, that's what she does. Of course, the whole thing is just a cocaine-and-who-knows-what-else dream, and so it's one added layer of irony that Holmes dreams up an "authentic" Holmes based on an adaptation of a series that does not exist in Sherlock's own universe.  Speaking of which, much of the episode relies on a stealth pun: shooting guns vs. shooting up.  The bride blows her brains out (well, sort of) just as the mysteriously reappearing Moriarty did/does--when she isn't murdering her husband with an awfully phallic rifle--and the solution to her mystery is also the solution to the 21st-century case of revenant Moriarty.  Meanwhile, the gun-toting feminist approach to patriarchy, as presented here, is as potentially lethal as Sherlock's own recreational use of cocaine, morphine, and whatever else (and, perhaps, just as addictive?).  

The quite deliberately embarrassing "ooh, feminists are the real KKK!" reveal at the end, even when taken as modern-day Sherlock's own drug-addled fantasy about what the women in his life really think*, seems suspiciously like a parody of a certain type of  social justice rhetoric.  Faced with a room full of avenging angels (well, in KKK garb), Holmes the good ally speechifies at length about silenced women engaging in resistance &c.  And it's there that Moriarty wearily pops up to point out how "silly" this all is--both the ridiculous framing (activists as the KKK) and Holmes' purported moment of truth.  Here, we gave you what you wanted, the  showrunners say to the segment of their audience who complain about the series' sexist aspects; now, isn't it all so ludicrous? (Moriarty's suggestion that Sherlock and John really ought to "elope" is equally sardonic fanservice, yet another shout-out to the sort of fandom ship-teasing that the showrunners have quite calculatedly employed.)  Then again, Moriarty's own "defeat" at Reichenbach Falls, where Watson magically shows up to save the day (with yet another gun, possibly Chekhov's), is itself overtly silly, what with the ineffective fistfighting and Moriarty's eventual demise.  Nothing much here to be taken seriously.

 In terms of how effective all this meta was...well, aside from the more mean-spirited facets of some of it, it might have worked better if so many other authors had not already explored these issues.  (A Slight Trick of the Mind and Mr. Holmes are all about why the Sherlock Holmes stories worked; they're also about the ethical limitations of such storytelling.)  This perhaps speaks to the source of my ongoing frustration with this series, which is that it keeps imagining that it is more original than it actually is--even when, as here, it is thumbing its nose at people who insist on fetishizing a previous adaptation. 

* ETA: A poster on Metafilter makes this interesting argument: "The link for me comes from reading David Graeber’s “Debt: the first 5,000 years” in which he writes about the way societies who based their economies on slave labour had a kind of societal guilt about the institution that expressed itself in (amongst other ways) bloody violence against the slightest hint of slave revolts out of the fear of what such a revolt would do to the slave-owning classes - in other words they feared the worst because they knew deep down that they deserved the worst. By the same argument, if we read the episode as taking part in Sherlock’s head & not representing anything real, then perhaps Moffat’s plot isn’t saying that feminism wants to kill all men, but rather that this is what men feared - that their subjugation of woma[n] meant that they deserved this, even if no woman ever seriously plotted to kill their husbands for some inchoate feminist cause. Perhaps then the feminist plot in this episode really represents Sherlock’s own buried feelings about his treatment of the women in his life, from Hooper to Irene Adler on? Treating women badly seems to be a Sherlock trope & deep down he knows he deserves censure for it."

 

In which I analyze my allergy to Sherlock

Many years ago, I came across a quotation from the pianist Charles Rosen, in which he said something to the effect that if everyone else loved something that bored him, he concluded that the fault lay with himself and not with the something.  I am attempting to put that philosophy into play with Sherlock.  Because...it took me two days to get through the season finale, which I found badly plotted, implausible, and, in general, deeply uninteresting and uninvolving.  (At least it was not as badly plotted as The Hounds of Baskerville, which took A. C. Doyle's one outstanding Sherlock Holmes novel, put it through a mandolin, and then drowned it in a Thousand Island dressing of conspiracy theories.)  But everyone else (well, except for Dad the Emeritus Historian of Graeco-Roman Egypt) loves Sherlock; ergo, it must be me.  So. 

Perhaps we can start with things I don't find objectionable:

The acting.  Cumberbatch and Freeman are doing excellent work with what they're given.  They have strong chemistry, fine dramatic chops, and solid comic timing; moreover, they tend to leave the scenery relatively unchewed (which cannot be said for Jeremy Brett's later episodes, unfortunately).  

Neo-Watson and revisionist Lestrade.  Martin Freeman's Watson is very much in the post-Burke and Hardwicke (er, that's not to be confused with Burke and Hare) mode, which is to say that he's in possession of little gray cells and reasonably willing to give Holmes what for.  In other words, this is a further nail in the coffin of the Nigel Bruce Watson, which is all to the good.  I'd have to say that the series' Lestrade (at least what we see of him) is one of its more interesting features: it's unusual to have a Lestrade around who is not a) primarily there to look useless, b) sneaking around looking like a small and unpleasant rodent, and c) obnoxious comic relief.   (Doyle's Lestrade eventually warmed up to Holmes and Watson, but this one seems to have arrived there much sooner--at least, he's already on a first-name basis with Watson.)

The meta.  I've said more than once that this series foregrounds its status as an adaptation, as it is loaded with nods not just to the canon, but to fan expectations developed from other adaptations.  It's practically the grand sum of all pre-existing adaptations, remixed with healthy doses of contemporary TV detective conventions and CSI-style editing.  (As Lestrade so kindly pointed out to us in the finale.)  In some ways, the series has also been parodying both tabloid celebrity culture and some of the less appealing aspects of fan culture (of the sort liable to wind up on Fandom Wank).  I'm an English professor, so I'm programmed to have no objections to all things meta.

However.

I think it's perhaps here that's also the rub for me.  As I said in my review of A Scandal in Belgravia, this series is far less original than it seems to think it is.  Take, for example, the plot of the series finale:  Moriarty appears to be quite familiar with the late Michael Dibdin's The Last Sherlock Holmes Story, and possibly Nicholas Meyer's The Seven-Percent Solution as well.  Reflections on Holmes and Watson as a romantic couple, or at least a bromantic one, have been floating around for decades--see Billy Wilder's The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes.  (On the professional publishing side, St. Martin's has published at least one novel with a [repressed] gay Watson, and of course there's a lifetime supply of Holmes/Watson fanfiction.)  Holmes as full-blown jerk, as opposed to bohemian gentleman, owes quite a bit to House. Irene Adler has been developing grand passions for Holmes since goodness knows when.  (I'm quite fond of Holmes and Adler as the proud mama and papa of Nero Wolfe, myself.)  And, of course, Moriarty as invasive killer weed is inescapable--doesn't everything have to go back to Moriarty?    Etc.  After decades upon decades of Sherlock Holmes parodies, pastiches, and revisions, it's not shocking that the series keeps retreading old ground.  It's just that it's not necessarily very interesting, either.  For lack of a better way of putting it, while the series likes to wink at itself and the Sherlock Holmes mythos, it doesn't want to do anything too harsh or too outlandish to it. (We get The Last Sherlock Holmes Story without its major twist.)  It doesn't probe the limits or moral implications of the legend (Michael Chabon, Mitch Cullin), or offer anything go-for-broke outrageous (Neil Gaiman), let alone real parodic play (Kim Newman).

Moreover, Lestrade's joke about CSI reminded me that Sherlock seems to be borrowing some of that series' least entertaining and/or remotely believable plots.  It's a criminal mastermind obsessed with the series lead! Who constructs weirdly overwrought schemes!  And then engages in "deep" mind games with the object of his affections (so to speak)! Which he finishes off with the sort of long speech that is supposed to sound profound, but which makes the audience wonder why the detective/CSI doesn't just shoot him/throw him off the roof/cold-cock him/forcefeed him hot peppers and be done with it! Of course Moriarty is Holmes' criminal double; we've known this since "The Final Problem."  But surely there are better, more economical ways of putting this doubling into action? (I once again nudge the reader in Dibdin's direction.  Or even Newman's.  We could even go back to Doyle, while we're at it.) 

To me, then, there's just too much deja vu involved (or, perhaps, deja lu).    I feel like I ought to be enjoying this series much more than I am.  But, so far, I'm not.