Atomic Nerds

When I was 15, I went through a rite that I think is nearly mandatory for introverted bookworms, which is reading the entire Sherlock Holmes canon as originally written by Arthur Conan Doyle. It was as much an act of profound summer boredom as anything else, as I found I don’t actually enjoy Conan Doyle’s writing all that much; I can get through the Victoriana and language evolution that leads to such hilarities as having Watson constantly ejaculating in public and Holmes knocking up poor Mrs. Hudson, but the fundamental structure of Holmes stories is rather like the structure of just-so stories; they are, basically speaking, written backward. Start with the conclusion, then reconstruct a plausible chain of “deduction” backward from small details that otherwise might have huge numbers of different possible and valid explanations but, because of the way the universe’s structure is set up, lead always or with rare exception to the correct conclusions.

As a writer of mysteries, Doyle was middling at best, which is a bit of a pity because I do love a well-crafted mystery and that’s what I was originally after in the stories. As a creator of characters and a writer of adventure stories, on the other hand, he was very good, and this is the fundamental reason why Sherlock Holmes has a vast body of what is essentially professional fanfiction based on the universe Doyle created. The details of the stories are very nearly irrelevant except as plot devices, but the characters of the eccentric and individualistic genius fighting crime aided by his brave sidekick (because eccentric geniuses are not very interesting at all if no one is writing them down) was an enduring and highly appealing concept, with the Victorian setting making for a very good “age of adventure” one- although if there’s one thing makers of adaptations have been unable to resist, it’s been putting those same appealing characters in an updated, modern setting. Those of us who are used to thinking of the “classic” Holmes movies as those featuring Nigel Bruce and Basil Rathbone usually forget that that was a modernized adaption of its day, updating Holmes and Watson from the close of the nineteenth century to the thirties and forties- a distinction lost on those for whom both are “back then”.

To someone whose primary and strongest introduction to the Holmes mythos was reading the canon, the adaptations have some… interesting… trends, and by interesting I mean often infuriating. The most notable to any fan of the original books is what nearly every one save the most recent has done- which is to stretch Watson out of shape to the point of being unrecognizable as the same character featured in the books. We originally meet Watson returning with fresh war wounds and a tendency to scream in the night from the Afghan front*, and he spends the rest of the books beating villains about the head and shoulders, shooting them, collecting clues and being a fairly active participant in the intellectual “solving the mystery” bits; functionally speaking, he’s a bright action hero (with obligatory ladykilling habits) who happens to be the sidekick because the protagonist is, in-universe, one of the most intelligent men in the world. By the time he makes it into most adaptations, his role serving a plot device in the book canon- to be the man who writes down Holmes’s exploits- has become his entire role, and his function to the story is to serve as a human exposition device by being such an idiot Holmes has to explain the significance of every clue should Watson otherwise accidentally eat it or something equally silly.

Holmes likewise suffered a great deal of whitewashing as a character in the journey from page to screen. Original flavor Holmes was smug, lazy, self-centered, eccentric to the point of being otherwise impossible to live with before Watson came along, and often frankly misanthropic; he solves cases because it entertains him and gratifies his ego less than he does because he loves justice. By the time he makes it to the screen, he has generally undergone a makeover as a noble Victorian gentleman pursuing truth and justice in a deerstalker hat and cape. (Something he never wore in the novels except in depictions by a certain illustrator but became ubiquitous symbols on the screen.) Restoring Holmes to his roots began happening earlier in popular adaptations than it did for poor Watson, as Jeremy Brett began blazing that path. Anti-heroes are apparently more in favor than sidekicks that are actually useful.

As annoying as both tendencies are, they’re both following the grooves of narrative tropes that are more popularly satisfying- and useful to filmmakers- than their original incarnations. Movie heroes are supposed to be heroic, and it wasn’t until the late eighties and early nineties that anti-heroes did become broadly popular; a cocaine-using Holmes would never have been acceptable to the Hays code era, but it was more than that that made his original characterization unpalatable to both filmmakers and audiences. He doesn’t just represent a brilliant man but a profoundly threatening version of an intellectual character- one who really doesn’t think much of his fellow man at all and does what he does for love of intellectual pursuit rather than much sympathy for others. Traditionally speaking, that’s a classic villain characterization rather than a heroic one, and I think the discomfort of that contrast underlies another, nearly universal feature of even the most recent and more faithful adaptions, which is the massively inflated role of Professor Moriarty.

In the original Holmes stories, Moriarty was a plot device more than he was a character; Doyle was completely sick of writing Holmes and wanted to move on to more “serious” literature, and so he resolved to kill off Holmes and thereby end the series. Thus Moriarty was introduced, explained away as a curiously unmentioned “arch enemy”, and went over Reichenbach falls with Holmes in what was intended to be the ending of the series: Holmes defeated by the only villain smart enough to manage it. The public outcry was so great- and the temptation of more money equally so- that Doyle brought him back as clumsily as he had written Holmes out, and that story as well as a throwaway mention in another are the only other times Moriarty appears in the canon.

Nearly every subsequent adaptation, however, especially ones meant to be a single-shot rather than a long series, feature Moriarty prominently and recurringly as Holmes’s ultimate arch-enemy, and the plot will revolve ultimately around his defeat, usually by means less anticlimactic than tossing the both of them off a waterfall. Part of this is just that culturally speaking, we love hero/villain tangos; even if Doyle had little enough use for them except as an exit door, they fit very naturally into the storytelling imaginations of audiences and writers alike. It also gives audience and writer alike another comfortable groove- the polarized comparison of hero and villain. As I said, Holmes’ fundamental original characterization is one more associated with villains than heroes; heroes are action-oriented and act out of a sense of decency or rightness, villains are cerebral and act out of self-interested indifference to mankind. Especially if you’re going to use that characterization straight without bothering to whitewash him, Moriarty provides a polarizing contrast- in shorthand, of course the threateningly intelligent misanthrope is the hero, because this is the threateningly intelligent and misanthropic villain and they are enemies.

Irene Adler gets a similar casting upgrade in many adaptations; originally, she gets a turn in one story as an antagonist and is very occasionally mentioned thereafter as the only one to have escaped Holmes by simply outwitting him, largely due to his assumption that women are stupid and harmless. However, she receives an upgrade to love interest in every adaptation she appears in that I’m aware of- despite Holmes’s original characterization as completely uninterested in sex or romance of any kind. Having a love interest is another way to humanize a hero and therefore make him more sympathetic and acceptably heroic. Part of this is the apparent discomfort of many writers with not including a romantic subplot of any kind in a movie or book series, but she is also as useful as Moriarty in underlining his hero status.

Probably the bulk of Watson’s morphing into a useless moron is a temptation to provide comic relief as strong as the temptation to provide a love story, but by the same token the bumbling but well-meaning Watson also underlines “this is the story’s hero”- villains don’t keep useless people around and aren’t kind to them, and the bumbling but well-meaning character is usually presented as innately good- innocence (partially represented by stupidity) is not devoted to villains. For that matter, an intelligent and capable Watson represents a kind of threat of its own to Holmes’s status as the primary hero- by being action-oriented and romance-oriented he is a much more traditional hero and in danger of therefore overshadowing Holmes, especially in visual mediums that favor action. Rational and science-oriented, when not a villain characteristic, is more often found in sidekicks to action-oriented, love-interest-getting heroes. Reasserting the original Holmes’s martial artistry and boxing capabilities, which is part and parcel with the more faithful characterization, is also one way to free up Holmes to be the unquestionable primary hero of the story while allowing Watson to retain his own original badass status.

As pleased as I am with more recent and much more faithful adaptations that honor characterization in what was always a deeply character-driven universe, I do have to wonder what effects the popular reception will have on future adaptations. I would not be entirely surprised five years hence to see the “edgiest” Holmes and Watson yet in which Watson shoots villains Sin City style and Holmes snorts cocaine off Watson’s prostitutes. We can only hope.

*A particularly egregious review of new BBC adaptation Sherlock includes a noting of Watson returning from the war in Afghanistan as one example of the updates made for the purposes of the series’ modernization to the 21st century… palms struck faces around the world for that one, I hope.

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