A Sherlock for the 21st Century
Sherlock Holmes was to be updated, modernized, brought into the contemporary scene -- so ran the announcements late in 2009. Hardly the first time that Holmes had been brought forward from his native Victorian milieu and settled among a generation removed from that era by decades of world-altering events. Had not Universal and Basil Rathbone leaped fifty years from the paradoxical 20th Century Fox's Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, set in the late 19th Century, to the series of iconic 65 minute B-movies set during the 1940s and World War II? At least twice he he had been cryogenically frozen and revived, once for a TV movie in the 1980s (The Return of Sherlock Holmes, 1987, with Margaret Colin as Jane Watson, and Michael Pennington as Holmes.) and again in a cartoon series set in the 25th Century.
Holmes has survived his creator's attempt to kill him with some risible prose and a plunge over Reichenbach falls, hundreds of mediocre or worse adaptations and pastiches, parodies and dotty impersonators (Judge Justin Playfair of They Might Be Giants being among the better versions of a mad Holmes). And then there are the imitations that are spread across current television channels.
Foremost among the imitations is Dr. Gregory House, M.D., who practices medicine and Sherlockian inferences on House, M.D., oddly enough, on Newscorp's FOX, the modern incarnation of the great studio. House not only has taken possession of Holmes' old address, but he takes over Holmes' source, Dr. Joseph Bell, the mentor of Dr. Arthur Conan Doyle. It was Bell who astounded the young Doyle with his perception and deductive ability, as he accurately read his patients' jobs, habits, places of residence and familiar relations from clues gathered by quick examinations of their persons. Second among the current imitations is Patrick Jane, The Mentalist. Jane exercises the same perception and penetration, but with crime-solving rather than medicine as his field. He is mocking and heedless of authority, even as he works with the police. He sees to the bottom of the criminal rather than the crime. It becomes a test of minds for Jane, who delights in outthinking murderers. A true spiritual son of Holmes. Least of these is Adrian Monk. If these copies can succeed in the modern world, despite all the advances in technology and information gathering, why not, then, the original, the Master Detective himself?
All the old cautions apply, beginning with the one, "In theory..." Yes, it could work, and you would imagine that, having come up with the notion of re-creating Holmes in the present, the idea would be auto-completing, like the software that intuits your typing on Google. But it's not that easy. It takes a visionary mind to translate Macbeth to another culture. It takes a mediocre mind to advance Sherlock Holmes a century within his own culture. The type of mind it took to produce "Sherlock" is mercifully hidden from me.
One would expect the modern Holmes, or Sherlock as we must henceforth call him, to possess the same character traits -- the comprehensive genius, the obsessive concentration, the scalpel-like incisiveness, the shortness of temper that comes with a mind that is always straining against the plodding of mundane reality, but expressed in the idiom of today. All the long-cherished features of the character would beam out in a new and shinier 2.0 release. Whatever. What we get is a collection of tics passed off as traits. Or, to continue the software metaphor, we get all the bugs and none of the features. The new Sherlock owes more to Adrian Monk than to his forebear. And if that were not sufficiently annoying, the production delights in its debt to Numb3rs, from which its visual style steals all the gimmicks but none of the solidity. We see Sherlock observing and examining, and, for some unfathomable reason, each observation and factoid must be labeled on-screen for those in the viewing audience who cannot wait thirty seconds. Yes, because in thirty seconds Sherlock will explain everything he has seen and all that he has deduced during his examination of the scene. What, then, do the labels accomplish? They provide a display. For viewers with an attention span conditioned by the refresh rate of an LCD pixel, there must be some ever-changing optical stimulation, lest they become comatose before the character can speak.
But that's not all! There's less! Not satisfied with reducing Sherlock to a narrow set of quirks, the producers have deprived him of about half the wattage of his massive brain. Sherlock has not gone Green. No, he has gone brown, as in brownout, or the color of diarrhea. Whereas the original Holmes could divine the essence of a case in the bare clues of the Lauriston Gardens murder, setting his snares and revealing all only after the criminal had been captured, the new Sherlock has to have the crime explained to him by the killer himself. Sherlock blunders ahead, making the trademark brilliant observations about everyone and everything, but completely in the dark about the criminal he is supposedly searching out with laser-like intensity. Holmes knew everything about Jefferson Hope after a few minutes in A Study in Scarlet. In A Study in Pink, he knows nothing until the last few minutes. Even the basics of human nature, which Holmes understood with clinical precision, and knew to be necessary to the understanding of the criminal mind, elude Sherlock, who finds such essentials of criminal investigation "boring." And then there are the outright stupidities. The most glaring of which occurs when a policeman calls Sherlock "our favorite psychopath." Sherlock, in a frenzy, wheels upon him and shouts, "I'm not a psychopath, Anderson. I'm a high-functioning sociopath. Do your research." Do your research, indeed. Apart from the redundancy of "high-functioning sociopath," that line reeks of TV profiling, wherein some writer has taken the catchy "high-functioning schizophrenic" and combined it with the ever-popular sociopath to form what sounds like a convincing classification of psych disorder. The real Holmes, the real modern Holmes, would know, would be intimately knowledgeable about, the DSM IV psychiatric diagnosis of Antisocial Personality Disorder, which is the real term used by real doctors to classify the popularisms psychopath and sociopath. This Sherlock is not the great detective with the scientific method coded in his DNA and expressed like bioluminescence. This Sherlock is a mutant, whose defective genes are coded with some weird albinism that mimics brilliance.
But he is modern, with all the vapidity that the term implies. I give him that.
A footnote: The business of the police mistakenly calling the string of murders suicides is lifted from the Rathbone movie, The Spider Woman, one of the better entries in the Universal series. You would think that, what with the Holmes canon being in the public domain with the lapse of 75 years since Conan Doyle's death in 1932, the producers would have plenty of material to pollute without dipping their feet into movie adaptations, but they seem to have sunk well below even such low expectations.
"Sherlock" at PBS Masterpiece. Sunday Oct. 24, 2010.
