THE MYTHOLOGY AND SUBTERFUGE OF Sherlock
Witty and dazzling as it may be, BBC’s Sherlock isn’t simply a clever unlocking of Conan Doyle’s seemingly rigid original. The ferrying of Sherlock Holmes through time and quickening his Victorian soul is a resounding success on the front of sheer entertainment, but also a subtle, and often subversive, commentary on the salient issues of the current moment. Take your pick. Modern technology and its influence on people’s lives? Check. The painful process of acceptance of homosexuality as variant of norm? Oh yes. The state of political affairs? Even that. Many do perceive - and reject - Cumberbatch’s Holmes as too theatrical, too much of a walking firework display, not a hermetically sealed mystery in the shape of a sleuthing man, and thus hopelessly “out of character” in regard to Conan Doyle’s detective. But the psycho-physical setup of the new Sherlock is, too, a reflection of the state we’re in. The speed with which tragedy yo-yos into farce and back: instant. Transparency of emotion: all but indecent. Patience: zero.
But all of that is only a mirror in which we see ourselves, facepalm (in Internet speak) and laugh; the series’ creators’ strategy, in fact, goes deeper and touches upon more fundamental issues. A society—our society—where “being nice” and “doing good” are so well defined, where emotion is sacred, is injected with a hero whose heart is seemingly deaf to these notions. So, how on earth is good done by someone who isn’t—nor, by all accounts, intending to be—good? Oh yes, and we are, of course, inexorably in love with Benedict Cumberbatch’s Holmes, so excruciatingly adorable and so tantalizingly unavailable that most of us would happily ditch our moral beacons to have more of him—a bit of a subversive lesson in itself. Even without realizing any of this, our thought patterns are broken, and the process of self-observation and the questioning of our own motives have begun. No small achievement for a short TV series; no wonder it’s gone iconic as soon as the first episode’s end titles rolled.
But here comes the most important kind of compelling magic of Sherlock: as the series progresses, it becomes more and more obvious that the ciphers of the plot, in all their witty, sparkly brilliance, are secondary to the cipher of the main character. The sleuthing stories are transport; Sherlock Holmes is the one being solved. He seems fairly obvious in the beginning - a brilliant mind, “a high-functioning sociopath”, his fancy tickled by detective work and his underfed, infantile ego touchingly visible. But enter John Watson, the limping military angel, the unlocker, and Sherlock’s hermetic heart is warmed and unsealed, allowing the contradictions in him to bloom openly—and all the more violently for that. We, in turn, are given to the torment of guessing, of choosing sides, of merging the impossible opposites within him, to turning him this way and that, to trying him on. Who is he? The answer—even as we assail, without success, the creators of the show for the original meaning—is to be found nowhere but within ourselves, and that truly pushes Sherlockup through the clouds of entertainment and into the stratosphere of real art.
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