Sherlock Holmes and shifts in ideology
Feb. 28th, 2010 03:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethThis semester I'm studying 'Researching Popular Culture', which is focusing on crime fiction.
The idea is to see how ideology and myth play in a particular genre of fiction.
The stories we're looking at were written by and for a particular class (and ethnicity, and gender, and so on) of people, in a particular place, at a particular time. They got really popular. That suggests a large number of people found them both useful and comfortable.
Lit theory quote from Stephen Knight:
"W H Auden and C Day Lewis (writing as 'Nicholas Blake') see the form as a substitute for religious patterns of certainty; Ralph Harper, Gavin Lambert and several psychoanalysts find the basis of its patterns in the psychic anxieties of writers and readers. Another type of analysis has seen social attitudes and the pressures of the modern environment as the basic drive in the crime fiction:Colin Watson and Thomas Narcejac have, in different ways, related the stories to the collective patterns of modern experience. The articles on crime fiction found in The Journal of Popular Culture and John G Cawelti's work in particular also take this broad social view, rather more objectively and seriously than Watson or Narcejac. My own approach develops from this position, in the context of recent work on teh sociology of literature.
[...]
I will argue that major examples of crime fiction not only create an idea (or a hope, or a dream) about controlling crime, but both realise and validate a whole view of the world, one shared by the people who become the central audience to buy, read and find comfort in a particular variety of crime fiction."
[Knight, S. (1980) Form and Ideology in Crime Fiction. p1-2]
Or TV writer quote from Hart Hanson, who writes Bones, talking on what shows get the big ratings:
"To varying degrees, I believe the secret – there is no secret, first; I believe there is no secret – the secret, then, the secret to getting a mass audience… I didn’t make this up, I wish I knew who did, I’d give them credit. But if you cleave to, if you support – as an entertainer – the basic values of your culture and society, you have a much better chance of reaching a mass audience than if you challenge the mores and morals of a society. I hope a huge number of you are going, “Well, that’s what artists do. Artists challenge what we think.” And I would say, that’s right. So I’m not an artist. "
[...]
"If you have to go for 10, 12, 16 million people, you have to make friends with the mores of your culture. You have to know the mores of your culture and make friends with them."
[Hanson, H, Feb 2010, keynote speech at the "Future of Story" conference at Grant MacEwan University in Edmonton, transcribed here]
Values, mores, patterns of certainty, a whole world view: they're all talking about ideology, the pattern of ideas. To get popular, the ideology expressed in both form and content of a text has to be something a large audience want to read about, which for most people means it's an ideology they share.
We're taking a chronological view, starting with the earliest detective fiction and working forward, so we read some Poe, we read Jekyll & Hyde, and now we're reading Sherlock Holmes, by Arthur Conan Doyle. These are stories that became popular in their day and have remained popular since, so whatever idea structure they've got going for them, it has enduring power. And Sherlock Holmes was just once again adapted as a movie, which did great things at the box office over Christmas, hence proving popularity once again.
One benefit with starting with texts that are so far away is that the ideologies are just different enough to be more noticeable. The further back you go the easier it is to notice that actually writers didn't think much of women, or 'natives', or, well, much of anything that wasn't a white middle class male of a certain respectable character. And from that you can guess both the writers and their expected readers.
But the really nifty bit, and the thing that has grabbed all available brain space despite not being something that can pass the unit for me, is if you take the patterns in the original Sherlock Holmes and compare them to the current movie, you get a distinct difference in emphasis - and in the ideologies supported by the text. You can come bang up to date and read what grabbed people's attention in the here and now, and from that what values and mores the text is now supporting. The differences bring it into focus, make it obvious.
If you read 'The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes' you find repeating patterns in both protagonists and villains. The detective is an odd mixture of rationality and bohemian disarray, an authoritarian figure, consulted by both the regular police and the respected heads of local business, as well as international royalty. Yet he's accessible, both in-world through taking cases as they come to him rather than being in some ivory tower or available only to the very rich, and to the reader, through Watson, who narrates and connects to Holmes. Watson is that man of respectable character, the reliable married man, the medical doctor involved in the care of his patients but from the slight distance of the authority of his education. Their methods involve knowledge, both specialist, from Holmes, and readily available, from book shelves and careful observation. The villains are the interesting part - where there is crime it's of a carefully planned and targeted sort, not random street violence. This isn't Batman, you can't walk around a corner and lose everything. It sneaks up on you, ingratiates itself into your life, and leaves plenty of clues. The villains are employees, sometimes, stepfathers, often, and an employer once. Danger comes from within the economic and social relations of the middle class readership and middle class victims. The employee exploiting you for his own economic gain, or the male relative trying to control the love lives of his female relations in order to control their economic assets - in one case being both stepfather and fiance, in order to be sure to keep her in the house. Women, surprise surprise, tend to need rescuing from the danger represented by men... but then presenting male control as the danger is a bit surprising, when you think about it. But the proper response is for a good man to set things right for her, so that's back to basics then. Twice the case involves aristocratic victims, and both times they're involved with women of a different class, and have lost them to middle class men. In neither case is there technically a crime, and both times the aristos look a bit foolish. Violence is rarely random or from passion; indeed when one man is described as having uncontrollable rages it turns out to be something of a red herring or misdirection, since his methods involve greed and misapplied knowledge, not spontaneous violence. Fights are soon over, and not really the point - the point is analytical reasoning, the triumph of the individual mind.
So we've got professional, educated, middle class men, investigating from their specialised knowledge, solving the problems of middle class men and women, who are under threat from within their class, or who are the threat to other classes. The threats are more often economic than physical, with violence being used to economic ends, not simply out of passion. Observation, analysis, and logic are the focus, all concentrated in the authority figure of Sherlock Holmes.
Now compare that with the recent movie. The changes are all in the emphasis, but they're fascinating.
The books mention Holmes and his mess and his drug taking when he isn't on a case, but we don't see it, we get a paragraph and we're off to the next bit of brilliant logic. He doesn't use drugs to solve cases, he applies reason. He sits and smokes tobacco while he thinks, which then and now wasn't in the same category. He's also a violinist, with a keen appreciation of music, both playing and attending performances. The logical-rational is balanced with the bohemian-artistic until you get the keenly creative solutions built with bricks of data.
In the film, we don't see Holmes attending a concert, and his violin playing is mentioned in the context of small hours of the morning, hence more of a really irritating habit than an expression of where maths meets art. We see him with his violin... trying to control flies while chemically altered on something meant for eye surgery. Shifts the emphasis rather a lot.
And taking drugs, as far as I could see, was involved in actually solving the case - down the rabbit hole did he say? And the picture went all wibbly. (And writing close crit of something I watched once and don't have a copy of is not a grand idea.) (all things are if I recall correctly, with occasional help from imdb and wikiquote... :eyeroll:) Anyway, the 'magic' ritual thing, that looked like use of altered states to do thinking with. And that's just odd. Holmes used drugs because without a case to work his brain was spinning without a focus; once he had a focus, a case to work on, he was all rational intellect. That sequence moves the movie away from the pure logic Holmes argued for.
Then there's the place of that logic in the solving of the case... and the place of the solution in the catching of the criminal. The movie doesn't start with a sequence of pure deductions identifying a perpetrator, followed by sitting in the dark waiting for them (example from The red headed league). It starts with a lot of running and a fight sequence. Now they did a grand job of making the fights have an intellectual aspect, planned and precise; and Holmes was repeatedly mentioned as good with assorted weapons and his bare hands. But the book doesn't tend to show fights, and when it does it skims right over them, sometimes in the dark, without many details. The fights are not the point. In the film, they really are - there's a sequence of action scenes linked with logic, not logic culminating in an action scene. So it's a shift in emphasis. Sherlock Holmes in the original text represents a model of masculinity focused on the intellect, on understanding the material world, and on control. In the film he's re-emphasised in the current muscular mode, stripped to the waist for illustration. And, yes, I liked it, but that's the point, isn't it? Modern me likes the shifts in emphasis, and so did a lot of other modern people. What does it say about what we like? Men, yes, but a particular construction of men. And women. Expressed in action and movement, not logic and intellect.
Scenes where Holmes observes, and explains his observations, mixed in emotion and action, the plot thread that was about Watson and his wife, or the fight scenes about the main deductive plot. They don't just stand alone as interesting in and of themselves, they're interesting only because of the emotion they reveal (and Holmes getting drink on his head), or because he's fighting for his life at the same time. The logic with the map wasn't about Watson or in the middle of a fight... but it wasn't presented as pure observation, rather as altered state inspiration. It's as if they expect the audience to need something to keep their interest while they're being explained to. And Holmes makes errors, deductions about Watson's fiance Mary that both annoy her and turn out to be wrong. That's rather different than the book, where his little 'I see you've got ink on your finger and mismatched boots so I know your profession and mental state (and that you're short sighted)' moments serve to establish his mastery of facts and show his clients that they are known, and hence can explain things to him. The movie moment where he gets soaked kind of depends on the audience knowing Holmes is usually infallible when he does that kind of thing, because then we can see what a sulky thing he's being about the whole relationship, but taken without that background he's simply not infallible, deducing more than the observed facts support. And importantly he is seen in return, even when in disguise, which puts Mary and (both book and film) Irene on a different level than just about anyone else. Holmes is the observer, not the observed... except for with 'the woman', and with Watson, who knows him like no other. (You can link it back to the surveillance society / panopticon ideas of discipline.) And the errors aren't a simple delay in understanding, they're being fallibly human, and controlled by his emotions. Book Watson says emotion in Holmes would be like grit in a fine instrument. Film Watson rather demonstrates the effects. Is it there to make Holmes more appealing? Give him an emotional side in a society that currently values emotion? But the climax of the movie, the moment when you know Holmes has won, is when the fighting is over, the emotional bits set aside, and he reasons through everything that has happened, explaining it with logic, rationality, and science. So it's a film that takes a big detour through emotion and superstition, to demonstrate that reason beats all.
Kind of.
And then there's a bit of nature does the punishment, which comes up a couple of times in the stories, where a storm sinks a ship (presumably full of crew as well as a couple of murderers), or an animal trained to be violent turns on its owner. But here it isn't storms or animals, not nature unbounded, it's engineering and the forces of gravity - science striking again.
The main thing that struck me as different though is the emphasis of the story is not on the containing and distancing effects of intellectual puzzles. Holmes in this isn't a man who sits at home with a pipe and all the data. He more greatly resembles a later style of detective, the sort of man who knows his opponents because they keep trying to kill him. He gets beat up, repeatedly, and improvises to survive. There's even the bits where The Police Don't Understand, arresting him, and then hunting him. That's not a feature of any Holmes story I can think of, but it's a genre feature of later private detective stories, where the one lone man becomes the line between violence and oppression, between the corruption of crime and the corruption of the systems meant to govern crime. Holmes works with the police, they're helpful, albeit less knowledgeable and insightful. Movie Holmes hops subgenres to become the hunted man defeating a corrupt system.
And that's a big change. That's right up there with the change in the source of threat - murder, but not close up and familial, mostly. And not strictly economic. Political murder, from an aristocratic source, aimed at a change in government. That's not just a change in scale, that's a change in ideology. Instead of the basically stable world with the main problem being the illusion of respectability covering middle class competitive economics, there's an unstable government that can be toppled or saved by a single man, with the main problem being the illusion of respectability (one that Holmes really doesn't share), but here covering aristocratic empire building. Shift in threat, shift in world view. And rather distant from current threats. There isn't actually any plan for Britain to conquer America, we don't have to really worry about that. Or for people with 'Lord' in their names to gas the government, it's not really done. So instead of pressing problems, of employees, employers, parents and children, it's a film about distant hypotheticals at a scale the audience isn't expected to be involved with. Big shift.
If the film were based on the kind of personal events of the short stories, single murders, bad men controlling stepdaughters, would anyone have made it as a big screen movie? Would anyone have watched? But we watch it on TV, right? The endless repeats on ITV3 suggest we watch it a lot. So we can't make big generalising (shiny tempting) assertions about what sources of threat we find comfortable as an audience. The other stuff is still there.
But a film that comes down to 'aristocracy, bad, magic, bad, empire, bad, hitting things until they stop and then lecturing them, good' doesn't seem to me to be upsetting any applecarts or disagreeing with any majority. And the shift towards endurance, athleticism and martial arts as a solution, and away from science-logic, doesn't surprise either.
But the science-logic strand was strong, and applied familiar strands from TV - the CSI moments, the close examination of corpses, the steampunk chem lab stuff. And re-establishing control was all about re-establishing the science-logical interpretative framework.
Science meets violence?
Hello popular.
But the emotional pairing off that goes with it, that's fun and interesting too.
Except, you know what's still there?
Women still need saving, are still controlled and manipulated by men, even Irene Adler.
And while bonds between men, partners, politics, parents, are all important to how things play out... there's not a single bond between women shown. No two women talk. And there's a lot of missing women, dead mothers, absent and irrelevant wives, and never named murder victims. (Victims not of their near relatives, but of some distant politics. I find that erases the most interesting and useful bit of the stories we just read. With no comparable gain.)
Given the source texts, it is doing well to make Irene and Mary into take-control characters, and it's great fun when Irene gets to trick Holmes (again) and do a bit of kick arse action, plus applying logic and knowledge to technology. But they still exist in such a male world.
It's also interesting that this focus, action/violence/emotion instead of logic-science, going back to texts with not enough women in them and not actually fixing it, is what I saw in the new Star Trek movie.
And it seems like a pattern in a lot of other movies.
Why is it so popular to have films set up that way? Why the continuing popularity old texts despite those flaws? Why return to source texts flawed in exactly that way? Why duplicate that in the adaptation? Why is it considered a valuable part of the source, and why are the texts set up that way still popular?
If I could come up with any other answer than 'feminism is losing' I'd be rather happier.
I feel like I've spent a lot of words and gone round the long way to get to not very much conclusion at all.
And to do a presentation for class I have to start it with close reading something from the time we're studying, so this kind of general flapping isn't helping me pass.
Also not helpful is the scheme of work has us starting to study Chandler in week 6, after the assessment. Next week is week 4, but he told us to bring the books in and we'd probably start on it then. Before the week 5 assessment. That's 2 weeks less to do the reading in, and one of those a week we'd rather spend studying texts we can actually get marked on. But no. So now I have to (a) read and close read a text to go with the Victorian Studies Reader essays and turn into an assignment and (b) read The Big Sleep, both before tomorrow afternoon.
It would really help to have done more of that already.
Also, to get sleep that actually works, instead of the draining kind.
The idea is to see how ideology and myth play in a particular genre of fiction.
The stories we're looking at were written by and for a particular class (and ethnicity, and gender, and so on) of people, in a particular place, at a particular time. They got really popular. That suggests a large number of people found them both useful and comfortable.
Lit theory quote from Stephen Knight:
"W H Auden and C Day Lewis (writing as 'Nicholas Blake') see the form as a substitute for religious patterns of certainty; Ralph Harper, Gavin Lambert and several psychoanalysts find the basis of its patterns in the psychic anxieties of writers and readers. Another type of analysis has seen social attitudes and the pressures of the modern environment as the basic drive in the crime fiction:Colin Watson and Thomas Narcejac have, in different ways, related the stories to the collective patterns of modern experience. The articles on crime fiction found in The Journal of Popular Culture and John G Cawelti's work in particular also take this broad social view, rather more objectively and seriously than Watson or Narcejac. My own approach develops from this position, in the context of recent work on teh sociology of literature.
[...]
I will argue that major examples of crime fiction not only create an idea (or a hope, or a dream) about controlling crime, but both realise and validate a whole view of the world, one shared by the people who become the central audience to buy, read and find comfort in a particular variety of crime fiction."
[Knight, S. (1980) Form and Ideology in Crime Fiction. p1-2]
Or TV writer quote from Hart Hanson, who writes Bones, talking on what shows get the big ratings:
"To varying degrees, I believe the secret – there is no secret, first; I believe there is no secret – the secret, then, the secret to getting a mass audience… I didn’t make this up, I wish I knew who did, I’d give them credit. But if you cleave to, if you support – as an entertainer – the basic values of your culture and society, you have a much better chance of reaching a mass audience than if you challenge the mores and morals of a society. I hope a huge number of you are going, “Well, that’s what artists do. Artists challenge what we think.” And I would say, that’s right. So I’m not an artist. "
[...]
"If you have to go for 10, 12, 16 million people, you have to make friends with the mores of your culture. You have to know the mores of your culture and make friends with them."
[Hanson, H, Feb 2010, keynote speech at the "Future of Story" conference at Grant MacEwan University in Edmonton, transcribed here]
Values, mores, patterns of certainty, a whole world view: they're all talking about ideology, the pattern of ideas. To get popular, the ideology expressed in both form and content of a text has to be something a large audience want to read about, which for most people means it's an ideology they share.
We're taking a chronological view, starting with the earliest detective fiction and working forward, so we read some Poe, we read Jekyll & Hyde, and now we're reading Sherlock Holmes, by Arthur Conan Doyle. These are stories that became popular in their day and have remained popular since, so whatever idea structure they've got going for them, it has enduring power. And Sherlock Holmes was just once again adapted as a movie, which did great things at the box office over Christmas, hence proving popularity once again.
One benefit with starting with texts that are so far away is that the ideologies are just different enough to be more noticeable. The further back you go the easier it is to notice that actually writers didn't think much of women, or 'natives', or, well, much of anything that wasn't a white middle class male of a certain respectable character. And from that you can guess both the writers and their expected readers.
But the really nifty bit, and the thing that has grabbed all available brain space despite not being something that can pass the unit for me, is if you take the patterns in the original Sherlock Holmes and compare them to the current movie, you get a distinct difference in emphasis - and in the ideologies supported by the text. You can come bang up to date and read what grabbed people's attention in the here and now, and from that what values and mores the text is now supporting. The differences bring it into focus, make it obvious.
If you read 'The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes' you find repeating patterns in both protagonists and villains. The detective is an odd mixture of rationality and bohemian disarray, an authoritarian figure, consulted by both the regular police and the respected heads of local business, as well as international royalty. Yet he's accessible, both in-world through taking cases as they come to him rather than being in some ivory tower or available only to the very rich, and to the reader, through Watson, who narrates and connects to Holmes. Watson is that man of respectable character, the reliable married man, the medical doctor involved in the care of his patients but from the slight distance of the authority of his education. Their methods involve knowledge, both specialist, from Holmes, and readily available, from book shelves and careful observation. The villains are the interesting part - where there is crime it's of a carefully planned and targeted sort, not random street violence. This isn't Batman, you can't walk around a corner and lose everything. It sneaks up on you, ingratiates itself into your life, and leaves plenty of clues. The villains are employees, sometimes, stepfathers, often, and an employer once. Danger comes from within the economic and social relations of the middle class readership and middle class victims. The employee exploiting you for his own economic gain, or the male relative trying to control the love lives of his female relations in order to control their economic assets - in one case being both stepfather and fiance, in order to be sure to keep her in the house. Women, surprise surprise, tend to need rescuing from the danger represented by men... but then presenting male control as the danger is a bit surprising, when you think about it. But the proper response is for a good man to set things right for her, so that's back to basics then. Twice the case involves aristocratic victims, and both times they're involved with women of a different class, and have lost them to middle class men. In neither case is there technically a crime, and both times the aristos look a bit foolish. Violence is rarely random or from passion; indeed when one man is described as having uncontrollable rages it turns out to be something of a red herring or misdirection, since his methods involve greed and misapplied knowledge, not spontaneous violence. Fights are soon over, and not really the point - the point is analytical reasoning, the triumph of the individual mind.
So we've got professional, educated, middle class men, investigating from their specialised knowledge, solving the problems of middle class men and women, who are under threat from within their class, or who are the threat to other classes. The threats are more often economic than physical, with violence being used to economic ends, not simply out of passion. Observation, analysis, and logic are the focus, all concentrated in the authority figure of Sherlock Holmes.
Now compare that with the recent movie. The changes are all in the emphasis, but they're fascinating.
The books mention Holmes and his mess and his drug taking when he isn't on a case, but we don't see it, we get a paragraph and we're off to the next bit of brilliant logic. He doesn't use drugs to solve cases, he applies reason. He sits and smokes tobacco while he thinks, which then and now wasn't in the same category. He's also a violinist, with a keen appreciation of music, both playing and attending performances. The logical-rational is balanced with the bohemian-artistic until you get the keenly creative solutions built with bricks of data.
In the film, we don't see Holmes attending a concert, and his violin playing is mentioned in the context of small hours of the morning, hence more of a really irritating habit than an expression of where maths meets art. We see him with his violin... trying to control flies while chemically altered on something meant for eye surgery. Shifts the emphasis rather a lot.
And taking drugs, as far as I could see, was involved in actually solving the case - down the rabbit hole did he say? And the picture went all wibbly. (And writing close crit of something I watched once and don't have a copy of is not a grand idea.) (all things are if I recall correctly, with occasional help from imdb and wikiquote... :eyeroll:) Anyway, the 'magic' ritual thing, that looked like use of altered states to do thinking with. And that's just odd. Holmes used drugs because without a case to work his brain was spinning without a focus; once he had a focus, a case to work on, he was all rational intellect. That sequence moves the movie away from the pure logic Holmes argued for.
Then there's the place of that logic in the solving of the case... and the place of the solution in the catching of the criminal. The movie doesn't start with a sequence of pure deductions identifying a perpetrator, followed by sitting in the dark waiting for them (example from The red headed league). It starts with a lot of running and a fight sequence. Now they did a grand job of making the fights have an intellectual aspect, planned and precise; and Holmes was repeatedly mentioned as good with assorted weapons and his bare hands. But the book doesn't tend to show fights, and when it does it skims right over them, sometimes in the dark, without many details. The fights are not the point. In the film, they really are - there's a sequence of action scenes linked with logic, not logic culminating in an action scene. So it's a shift in emphasis. Sherlock Holmes in the original text represents a model of masculinity focused on the intellect, on understanding the material world, and on control. In the film he's re-emphasised in the current muscular mode, stripped to the waist for illustration. And, yes, I liked it, but that's the point, isn't it? Modern me likes the shifts in emphasis, and so did a lot of other modern people. What does it say about what we like? Men, yes, but a particular construction of men. And women. Expressed in action and movement, not logic and intellect.
Scenes where Holmes observes, and explains his observations, mixed in emotion and action, the plot thread that was about Watson and his wife, or the fight scenes about the main deductive plot. They don't just stand alone as interesting in and of themselves, they're interesting only because of the emotion they reveal (and Holmes getting drink on his head), or because he's fighting for his life at the same time. The logic with the map wasn't about Watson or in the middle of a fight... but it wasn't presented as pure observation, rather as altered state inspiration. It's as if they expect the audience to need something to keep their interest while they're being explained to. And Holmes makes errors, deductions about Watson's fiance Mary that both annoy her and turn out to be wrong. That's rather different than the book, where his little 'I see you've got ink on your finger and mismatched boots so I know your profession and mental state (and that you're short sighted)' moments serve to establish his mastery of facts and show his clients that they are known, and hence can explain things to him. The movie moment where he gets soaked kind of depends on the audience knowing Holmes is usually infallible when he does that kind of thing, because then we can see what a sulky thing he's being about the whole relationship, but taken without that background he's simply not infallible, deducing more than the observed facts support. And importantly he is seen in return, even when in disguise, which puts Mary and (both book and film) Irene on a different level than just about anyone else. Holmes is the observer, not the observed... except for with 'the woman', and with Watson, who knows him like no other. (You can link it back to the surveillance society / panopticon ideas of discipline.) And the errors aren't a simple delay in understanding, they're being fallibly human, and controlled by his emotions. Book Watson says emotion in Holmes would be like grit in a fine instrument. Film Watson rather demonstrates the effects. Is it there to make Holmes more appealing? Give him an emotional side in a society that currently values emotion? But the climax of the movie, the moment when you know Holmes has won, is when the fighting is over, the emotional bits set aside, and he reasons through everything that has happened, explaining it with logic, rationality, and science. So it's a film that takes a big detour through emotion and superstition, to demonstrate that reason beats all.
Kind of.
And then there's a bit of nature does the punishment, which comes up a couple of times in the stories, where a storm sinks a ship (presumably full of crew as well as a couple of murderers), or an animal trained to be violent turns on its owner. But here it isn't storms or animals, not nature unbounded, it's engineering and the forces of gravity - science striking again.
The main thing that struck me as different though is the emphasis of the story is not on the containing and distancing effects of intellectual puzzles. Holmes in this isn't a man who sits at home with a pipe and all the data. He more greatly resembles a later style of detective, the sort of man who knows his opponents because they keep trying to kill him. He gets beat up, repeatedly, and improvises to survive. There's even the bits where The Police Don't Understand, arresting him, and then hunting him. That's not a feature of any Holmes story I can think of, but it's a genre feature of later private detective stories, where the one lone man becomes the line between violence and oppression, between the corruption of crime and the corruption of the systems meant to govern crime. Holmes works with the police, they're helpful, albeit less knowledgeable and insightful. Movie Holmes hops subgenres to become the hunted man defeating a corrupt system.
And that's a big change. That's right up there with the change in the source of threat - murder, but not close up and familial, mostly. And not strictly economic. Political murder, from an aristocratic source, aimed at a change in government. That's not just a change in scale, that's a change in ideology. Instead of the basically stable world with the main problem being the illusion of respectability covering middle class competitive economics, there's an unstable government that can be toppled or saved by a single man, with the main problem being the illusion of respectability (one that Holmes really doesn't share), but here covering aristocratic empire building. Shift in threat, shift in world view. And rather distant from current threats. There isn't actually any plan for Britain to conquer America, we don't have to really worry about that. Or for people with 'Lord' in their names to gas the government, it's not really done. So instead of pressing problems, of employees, employers, parents and children, it's a film about distant hypotheticals at a scale the audience isn't expected to be involved with. Big shift.
If the film were based on the kind of personal events of the short stories, single murders, bad men controlling stepdaughters, would anyone have made it as a big screen movie? Would anyone have watched? But we watch it on TV, right? The endless repeats on ITV3 suggest we watch it a lot. So we can't make big generalising (shiny tempting) assertions about what sources of threat we find comfortable as an audience. The other stuff is still there.
But a film that comes down to 'aristocracy, bad, magic, bad, empire, bad, hitting things until they stop and then lecturing them, good' doesn't seem to me to be upsetting any applecarts or disagreeing with any majority. And the shift towards endurance, athleticism and martial arts as a solution, and away from science-logic, doesn't surprise either.
But the science-logic strand was strong, and applied familiar strands from TV - the CSI moments, the close examination of corpses, the steampunk chem lab stuff. And re-establishing control was all about re-establishing the science-logical interpretative framework.
Science meets violence?
Hello popular.
But the emotional pairing off that goes with it, that's fun and interesting too.
Except, you know what's still there?
Women still need saving, are still controlled and manipulated by men, even Irene Adler.
And while bonds between men, partners, politics, parents, are all important to how things play out... there's not a single bond between women shown. No two women talk. And there's a lot of missing women, dead mothers, absent and irrelevant wives, and never named murder victims. (Victims not of their near relatives, but of some distant politics. I find that erases the most interesting and useful bit of the stories we just read. With no comparable gain.)
Given the source texts, it is doing well to make Irene and Mary into take-control characters, and it's great fun when Irene gets to trick Holmes (again) and do a bit of kick arse action, plus applying logic and knowledge to technology. But they still exist in such a male world.
It's also interesting that this focus, action/violence/emotion instead of logic-science, going back to texts with not enough women in them and not actually fixing it, is what I saw in the new Star Trek movie.
And it seems like a pattern in a lot of other movies.
Why is it so popular to have films set up that way? Why the continuing popularity old texts despite those flaws? Why return to source texts flawed in exactly that way? Why duplicate that in the adaptation? Why is it considered a valuable part of the source, and why are the texts set up that way still popular?
If I could come up with any other answer than 'feminism is losing' I'd be rather happier.
I feel like I've spent a lot of words and gone round the long way to get to not very much conclusion at all.
And to do a presentation for class I have to start it with close reading something from the time we're studying, so this kind of general flapping isn't helping me pass.
Also not helpful is the scheme of work has us starting to study Chandler in week 6, after the assessment. Next week is week 4, but he told us to bring the books in and we'd probably start on it then. Before the week 5 assessment. That's 2 weeks less to do the reading in, and one of those a week we'd rather spend studying texts we can actually get marked on. But no. So now I have to (a) read and close read a text to go with the Victorian Studies Reader essays and turn into an assignment and (b) read The Big Sleep, both before tomorrow afternoon.
It would really help to have done more of that already.
Also, to get sleep that actually works, instead of the draining kind.