Meta: Neoliberal Holmes, or, Everything I Know About Modern Life I Learned from Sherlock

[magnetic_pole]

Every age gets the Holmes it deserves.

Everything I know about the twenty-first century I learned from Sherlock (BBC, 2010):

*

All problems have solutions.

All solutions are rational.

Everything that is rational can be comprehended, analyzed, and discarded.

By you.

You know everything worth knowing.

You are the master of the universe.

*

Merit rises to the top. Raw intelligence, that's what matters.

You can't look for intelligence in the Metropolitan Police Force. Why even bother? The private sector is where insight is found. Trust the consultants.

The state is there to facilitate your work. And defuse bombs. And take the bodies to the morgue.

*

People respond to intelligence. They desire intelligence. They answer the text messages that intelligence sends. They fetch things for intelligence. They are willing to put up with the rudeness that occasionally accompanies intelligence. They ask intelligence out on dates.

Intelligence is sexy.

Intelligence is power.

*

It used to be that clients would show up on your doorstep with a story, a plea, a mystery. This used to be how the game started.

Now victims show up dead.

Easier that way, to assess their problems.

More efficient.

Besides, you'd rather text than talk.

*

Look at London. Bright lights, big city. It's beautiful.

The light is beautiful. The colors are beautiful. The clothes are beautiful. This whole show is beautiful.

*

London is safe. Clean. Well-lit. Seen through a plate of glass, a kaleidoscope of reflections.

*

This is a city of well-maintained classical buildings (distant past) and high-tech modernism (present and future).

No one of interest ever lived or worked in something built in the sixties, anyway.

*

Some people say London is a battlefield. You see it more as a playground.

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Money is no object.

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Buses and subways are for people whose time is less valuable than yours.

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The vast majority of people in London are white. People who are not white are statistically more likely to be blood-thirsty, murdering villains. Or dead, victims themselves.

What? You're just counting. Numbers, hard numbers, that's what you want.

*

You just happen to be white.

*

Did that man just call his hostage a "stupid bitch?" Did he really? What right does anyone have to call any woman...

But, wait. He's a psychopathic murderer. That's how we know he's crazy.

Because no sane man would ever say that out loud.

*

Once, famously, a woman got the best of you.

Now, you get the best of the woman, every time.

Freak. Ha!

That was then, this is now.

*

Women protest that they don't want to take care of you, but they really do.

*

He taught me, rather than he learned me.

I was, not I were.

Hanged, instead of hung.

The man has killed his wife in a brutal stabbing, but what really rubs you wrong is his dialect.

Nothing like a death sentence to cure someone of being working class.

*

Homeless people, your "eyes and ears" around the city, emerge when they might be useful. Otherwise, they are invisible. Disinfect yourself after contact.

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It doesn't help anyone to care.

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Sometimes a disguise will gain you entry to an important place. Discard it as soon as possible. Don't even bother to keep up the pretense. You don't want anyone to mistake you for a working man.

*

On the other hand, people may assume you're gay. Don't worry. Don't protest. We won't go there.

*

Text flashes before you. Clues flash before you. Fast. Disorienting. Don't get distracted. The crucial details here are not factual, not for anyone except the master of the universe.

The key to this show, for lesser mortals, is character. Watch for Sherlock's expression. How does he feel about the situation at hand?

You spend a lot of time watching Sherlock's face.

Sometimes, you watch John watching Sherlock's face.

Funny how riveting a cold man's face is.

*

Selling drugs is dangerous; you can get out of your depth before you know it, in trouble, in debt, you'll kill your near-brother-in-law on the off-chance that you'll be able to sell something of his for a profit. Selling drugs leads to a life of crime.

Buying drugs and occasionally enjoying them, on the other hand, would be entirely fine. It would be interesting, actually. It would add to your mystique.

But of course, you're clean. Did everyone hear that? You're clean.

*

You are untouchable. Your friends are untouchable. The law exists to facilitate your investigations. When it's convenient.

The state itself is outdated. You have the world in your hand, on a mobile or a laptop. The new order is conflict-free and flexible.

*

Even when someone dies, it's not your fault.

People die, that's what they do.

Oh, sorry. Other people die. That's what they do.

*

You, on the other hand. You solve problems. Lestrade and Donovan and Dimmock have tried, but your methods have been tested in the open market, proved to be the best.

No problem is ever solved collaboratively. No assistance is helpful. No other types of intelligence are acknowledged.

There is no such thing as society, only individual problems, and individual problem solvers.

They should take your word as gospel.

*

People are taken hostage. Bombs are detonated. People are killed. A child's life is on the line. A roommate deals with loss. A woman grieves the man who would have married her. A man shakes in terror. A head sits in the refrigerator.

Their names and stories pass by too quickly to catch. None of them really matter, anyway. Only ninety minutes, total. Still two mysteries to go. Real problems are abstract, logical, and impersonal, unconnected to daily life, personal experience, local knowledge, or the vagaries of chance.

This is the great game. The one thing that matters in this game--

No, it's not that we win. We always win.

The one thing that really matters is that Sherlock Holmes might...

God, is that John?

He's got a vest! He's covered in explosives!

...the one thing that really matters...

Look at Sherlock Holmes' face. Watch carefully for any register of emotion. This is what we've been waiting for: a hint of anger, fear, or compassion. The show has been training you to do this for more than four hours, training you to search for the slightest sign of emotion in this man's face. You are riveted.

...the one thing that really matters is that Sherlock Holmes just might have a heart, after all.

Because that's what important. The master of the universe loves and suffers like the rest of us.

*

P.S. Thanks to rose71 for listening and, well, being rose71.

Comments

this is a long and possibly useless comment, and was written while 80% asleep.

[cartoonheroine]

This is completely brilliant and absolutely true in every way. It's everything that disgusts me about this series and every series. And yet despite knowing that, despite having known it from the start, despite being a Jewish feminist lesbian and a rather ardent independent liberal, I'm entranced by this show and its cast. Completely entranced, and the spell has continued for months. I think some part of the answer to my continued enjoyment of Sherlock comes in three chunks.

I think the first chunk of it is because the whole thing is such a trainwreck — such a bleak, fucked landscape of the world we live in. The world is fucked, these characters are fucked, and the characters and the world are stuck on a repeating loop, forever destroying one another. Sherlock is a product of his environment; the environment is a product of men like Sherlock. In a way it's almost a dystopia, grey and violent and everything going wrong at once. And everyone loves a good trainwreck. Everyone loves a good dystopia. Watching makes you sick, but you can't look away. On its own, this wouldn't be enough to keep my attention, though, which leads to

The second chunk of it, which is the last line of your critique: The master of the universe loves and suffers like the rest of us. I suppose I was led into this perfect trap by the writers of the show, but it's a hard one to escape: much like the love of death and destruction, the deep longing to see a merge of god and human seems inescapable. Watching Sherlock in those final scenes is like watching a stone be infused with blood. Similar moments in other TV series and films, featuring both male and female characters, have always fascinated me completely.

The final chunk is a sort of combination of the first two, and resides in the realm of fandom. Needless to say, the realm of fandom itself has plenty of its own problems, some of which have been brought up in this post's previous comments (most notably, the ever-complicated question of why nearly all women in fandom tend to express themselves through male characters, and why any of us relate so closely to them in the first place). But placing those problems aside for the time being, I've found many of the authors in the Sherlock fandom to be some of the most intelligent and insightful authors I've seen in a long time. Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of horrible tropes and potholes of ignorance to be found, but more than anything else, the incredible re-tellings and re-toolings of this story are what's continued to fascinate me. With certain backgrounds stitched in, readings of certain characters can become entirely different. The terrible, wrong ugliness and the discovery of love can be combined in a safe space where one doesn't insult the other.

But am I insulting myself by looking to alternate constructions of this story in order to satisfy my fantasy, when the story itself was so clearly insulting me in the first place? I guess I'm the dumped girlfriend who's still in love after getting smacked around, so I find a rebound who looks just like my ex but treats me like a princess. And now I'm trying to justify why this is perfectly healthy to my friends (AKA you).

Honestly I am nearly asleep on my keyboard right now but I found this post through irisbleufic and it hit me really strongly, I just had to reply and it turned into all this rambling bullshit. To summarize: you are right about everything, in every way. I agree with you completely and always have, and I feel this way deeply about many other shows I watch. And yet here I am, a looney dyke who just wants to see Sherlock find a best friend he loves. I tried to explain it, to myself and to you. It took a long time and I don't think it worked very well. I'm gonna go to sleep now.

Re: this is a long and possibly useless comment, and was written while 80% asleep.

[magnetic_pole]

No, no useless at all! I had conflicting feelings, too. As you might have seen in previous comments, I read a kids' version of the Sherlock Holmes stories when I was very young, and I've loved him ever since. I enjoyed these episodes, even as I reacted violently against this version of Holmes and the message they were sending. Culture is complicated. :)

I didn't realize that the creators of this series were also the creators or writers of the new Dr Who, and friends tell me this explains a lot about the themes of human and superhuman and the peculiar, shorthand kind of character development we see. I do know that this scenario--organizing an entire movie or show around the explanation of and excuses for a man's bad behavior--is all too common.

I *do* think that you can read and write these stories against the grain and find something new and wonderful in them, and I don't think that makes you (us) bad progressives, or bad lesbians, or bad people. But I just wish we didn't have to, you know?

Thanks for such a long and thoughtful comment, cartoonheroine. M.