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
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
SPOILERS
ARE
AFOOT
Sherlock Holmes is, as you might expect, self-aware of its status as Yet Another Sherlock Holmes Adaptation, and there are both visual and verbal quotations from Holmes' earlier escapades on the large and small screens. The self-awareness also crops up in its plotting. Like several other recent adaptations, Moriarty is behind everything from the beginning--in this case, the entire season turns out to be leading up to an assassination attempt on Queen Victoria, against whom Moriarty apparently bears some kind of mysterious and never fully-explained (possibly romantic?) grudge. There is also rather a lot of Irene Adler, who turns out to be a violinist working as a thief for Moriarty (this may sound familiar); she is Holmes' true love, complete with romantic encounter in Paris, whom Holmes "dies" to protect at Reichenbach Falls. Alas, all does not end happily for our detective, as Irene eventually dies in his arms in a scene that is not, perhaps, as tear-jerking as the series hopes it is. It does not help that by downgrading Irene to one of Moriarty's unwilling flunkies, the series strips her of most of her brain power, and it seems to me that Holmes' obsession with her is implausible even given the fast-and-loose play with the canon. In other words, if you are one of those people with insuperable allergies to Holmes/Adler romances, this may not be the series for you. If you can deal with the romance, you may still find yourself displeased by the variable quality of the writing--some episodes are terrific, others have plotting that makes later Sherlock look like a model of Aristotelian design--and the equally variable quality of the historical research, from probably too many gun-toting policemen to American diplomatic wives' likely grasp of etiquette to the rather loose grasp of late-Victorian sexual and social mores.
Back to Watson. To understand what's going on with Watson's plot arc, we have to pay attention to the series' politics--that is, a twenty-first century Russian take on Victorian British imperialism, with the occasional sideswipe at the Yanks. The series represents late-Victorian Britain as squalid and impoverished, full of drunks stumbling about in the fog. Even Mrs. Hudson's boarding house is dark, dirty, and unattractive. The police force is not just thick-skulled, as per the canon, but ridden with corrupt officers who batter the prisoners and murder children; Lestrade, supposedly one of the good guys, arrests Holmes as a hobby and at one point executes several of his own men (!). The army turns out to be full of racists, complete with lengthy xenophobic villain rant (which sits jarringly next to the series' decision to put Irene Adler in blackface at one point...). Not surprisingly, the government is equally off-kilter, as it turns out that they have a bad habit of using the crown jewels for loan collateral. (We do meet Mycroft, who is as thin as the Sherlock version; he's also nowhere near as brilliant as his canonical equivalent.) Moreover, there are strong hints about British political and military degeneracy, as the Germans, in particular, seek to enhance their power on the world stage.
Watson self-identifies throughout as a conservative and Catholic. Unlike his canonical counterpart, he is a career army officer who has been successfully stationed abroad for years and only recently invalided out, suffering from an obvious wounded leg and a less-obvious case of PTSD. And also unlike his canonical counterpart, he comes to London specifically to be a writer, with apparently little interest in developing a middle-class patient clientele. Watson's initial goal is to publish war poetry, which the editor at the Morning Chronicle (a recurring figure) dismisses as sub-Kiplingesque--already suggesting Watson's political and emotional investment in empire. One of Watson's first disillusionments in the series comes when he realizes that a much-admired officer is, as I said, a violent (and Kipling-quoting) racist willing to murder a young Indian prince for profit--putting paid to any dreams Watson has of either military honor or imperial humanitarianism. And the series concludes with Watson, gung-ho for queen and national "traditions," discovering that the government is perfectly happy to turn tradition into a profit-making exercise. To the extent that he can maintain faith in anything, as it turns out, it is faith in Sherlock Holmes, who at least always turns out to be "right."
Watson's editor at the Morning Chronicle (rather more helpful than a newspaper editor probably would be; newspaper serials were well below The Strand in terms of cultural cachet) rejects Watson's story about the murderous officer on the grounds that a "chauvinist" army officer is an impossibility. This moment establishes a tension that recurs throughout the series, as Watson must learn how to target an audience without making it uncomfortable; even as his own bubbles get popped, in other words, he finds that the only way to establish himself as an author is to construct pleasurable new bubbles for the newspaper's readership. Petrenko mentioned in an interview that he was told "do not play a hero, our Sherlock Holmes shouldn't be one," and Watson's editor urges him to regard himself as the "hero," the one who transforms dull reality into something gripping and exciting. In collaboration with his editor, Watson reworks his Holmes--a twitchy geek with extremely limited fighting skills and dismaying table manners--into an elegant embodiment of the upper class with spectacular mental and physical strength, a transformation Holmes initially finds infuriating ("filthy hack writer!") but ultimately accepts. It is Holmes who, glimpsing a Basil Rathbone-esque figure in a deerstalker and Inverness cape, wryly suggests that that's what he ought to look like. Like Arthur Conan Doyle, though, Watson actually dislikes the stories that have made his reputation, and the final episode suggests the extent to which he has become mummified by his own creation: Holmes' room has become a shrine-like museum (a shout-out to the actual Sherlock Holmes museum in London?), adorned with the pipes he didn't smoke and the costume he didn't wear. Watson now has to devote his time to acting as docent, curating a fantasy for the besotted public, while his diaries reveal that he has slipped into a life of boredom (and a dying love affair with Mrs. Hudson). This is all the more ironic inasmuch as Watson's friendship with Holmes is seasoned with heavy doses of aggravation, not hero-worship. If you have ever wondered how Watson managed to refrain from hauling off and decking Holmes with a punch to the jaw, then this is the series for you, as by my count Watson effortlessly flattens Holmes about six times (when he isn't punching other people). Watson is also an equally super-powered sharpshooter: the Baker Street Journal argued some decades ago that if you need something shot in a Sherlock Holmes story, you'd better get Watson, and the series takes that assessment to new heights. (Watson is also capable of coolly doing things like impromptu autopsies, much to Holmes' horror.)
On his way to embracing his identity as "a writer," as he does at the end of the series, Watson also has to embrace what Holmes might mean. When Sherlock Holmes returns and finds himself museumified, in one of the series' funnier moments, he is both appalled and amused by how Watson has rewritten reality, but he also admits that he is beginning to resemble Watson's creation. In that sense, while Holmes remains undeniably a jerk, he nevertheless shows signs of becoming the righteous figure that Watson has imagined into being (despite Watson's annoyance at what he calls Holmes' "liberalism"). This character development seems predicated, unoriginally, on Holmes' love life being sacrificed at the altar of Irene Adler's murder--in the final episode, after all, Holmes does not save Irene but does save the queen instead, a rather significant substitution. (In one of the series' bizarre moments, Holmes demands that Watson not write about Irene, even though one of the opening voiceovers quotes from "A Scandal in Bohemia." Anyway.) But in the logic of the series, a Holmes finally stripped of his romance (in other words, his temptation to have a personal life) can go about being the one man who is always "right" in a world that the series represents as almost entirely wrong.
Still, on a practical note: can I teach this? The double whammy of a) characters who deviate so strongly from canon and b) the non-episodic nature of the series (Ostrow suggests that it's effectively a "novel" [5]) makes it difficult to just drop into Sherlock Holmes. The episode based on "The Musgrave Ritual," which makes off with the Livanov Hound's bizarre take on Sir Henry Baskerville for its characterization of Reginald Musgrave (complete with cowboy hat), could maybe substitute for the Livanov. Probably the only episode that would work is the first one, which could fit after the run of metafictional Holmes pastiches.