Sherlock Holmes Version 2.

0:

Recent Screen Re-Imaginings of Doyle (Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes, with Robert

Downey Jr., and the BBC Sherlock, with Benedict Cumberbatch)

Author version of ‘Sherlock Holmes Version 2.0: Adapting Doyle in the Twenty-First

Century’. In Sabine Vanacker & Catherine Wynne, eds., Sherlock Holmes and Conan Doyle:

Multi-Media Afterlives (London: Palgrave, Crime Files Series 2013). pp.124-139.

BRAN NICOL

A decade into the Twentieth Century, it seemed Sherlock Holmes had entered a kind of semi-

retirement. In ‘The Devil’s Foot’, published in The Strand in December 1910, Watson

explains that the reason he has provided his readers with so few new case studies over recent

years is because of his friend’s ‘aversion to publicity’. It is certainly not, he continues –

protesting perhaps a little too much – because of ‘any lack of interesting material’ (‘The

Devil’s Foot’, His Last Bow, p.153). Instead of a new case Holmes has suggested that he

write about one which he solved in Cornwall some 13 years before. Even then, Holmes seems

to have been a little worse for wear, and is away from London to recuperate on the advice of

his doctor:

It was, then, in the spring of the year 1897 that Holmes’s iron constitution showed

some symptoms of giving way in the face of constant hard work of a most exacting

kind, aggravated, perhaps, by occasional indiscretions of his own. (p.153)

Work and occasional indiscretions. These elements are crucial to the enduring appeal of the

character of Holmes – despite the hint of decline in this story and others in The Last Bow –

and, as this essay will highlight, are central to the most recent adaptations.

1
 Fast forward one hundred years, and Sherlock Holmes has been injected with a new

energy. In 2009 we are just as likely to find him waking up while tied naked to a bedpost

following a night of (heterosexual) passion, or swinging on a chandelier to escape in the Lord

Chief Justice’s palace in London, as assessing incriminating evidence. A year later, perhaps

even more improbably, we see him checking the weather forecast on his smartphone and

quoting the 1970s children’s TV series, Jim’ll Fix It. (Oh, if only he could have deduced

that…) These references are from two of the most recent and successful updatings of

Sherlock Holmes: the $500m-grossing Guy Ritchie movie of 2009, starring Robert Downey

Jr. as Holmes and Jude Law as Watson, in which Holmes is rewired as blockbuster action

hero, and Sherlock, the critically-acclaimed three-part BBC series of 2010, which transposes

Holmes consulting-detective business to present-day London, and stars Benedict

Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman as the main characters.

Perhaps inevitably, both projects justified their innovations by claiming that they

return us to something essential but frequently overlooked in the original Doyle canon.

Ritchie noted of his film that ‘[t]here's quite a lot of intense action sequences in the stories,

sometimes that hasn't been reflected in the movies’ (Telegraph, 2008), while Mark Gatiss, the

co-creator (along with Steven Moffat) of the BBC series, stated that the motivation behind

their updated Holmes was to ‘blow[-] away the fog’ from what had become an overly

reverential approach to adapting Doyle, where earlier film-makers had tended to place the

emphasis on ‘the trappings, the Hansom cabs, the costume, the fog’, (BBC DVD) etc. at the

expense of what was the source of the original’s appeal. He leaves unspoken exactly what

this is, but to deduce from his own series, he means the brilliance of ‘the Holmes method’,

the relationship between Holmes and Watson, and, most of all, the peculiarities of Holmes’s

personality.

2
 For all their status as specific reworkings of the Holmes stories, both, too, are

symptomatic of how the classic ‘logic-and-deduction’ model of detective fiction, which

Conan Doyle was so instrumental in establishing, has, on screen, mutated into a variety of

‘crime thriller’ which blends the traditional indulgence in esoteric puzzles with dramatic

action and suspense.1In fact the solving of puzzles is reduced in comparison to the action in

Ritchie’s film, and turned into a kind of thrilling drama of its own in the BBC series.

According to Martin Rubin, the thriller as a category is predicated upon suspense, and

continually evokes fear and anxiety. This is true of these rebooted Sherlock Holmes thrillers.

But in the case of the superior BBC version, the suspense is accompanied by a focus on

Holmes’s own tendency towards what we might call ‘sociopathology’, or his disregard for the

feelings of others in attempting to get his way.2 In what follows I want to contend that this

combination invites a response from the viewers which itself is curiously ‘sociopathological’

in its attitude to the characters on screen, and thus symptomatic of the pleasure the crime

thriller affords us in the early Twenty-first Century.

‘MALIGNANT ENEMY OR GUARDIAN ANGEL’?

Screen versions of Sherlock Holmes have created iconic and memorable figures which are

symptomatic of the age in which they were produced: the irreverent Basil Rathbone/Nigel

Bruce pairing in the films of the late 1930s and 1940s, the decadent anachronism of Robert

Stephens in Billy Wilder’s 1970 The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, the dark severity of

Jeremy Brett in the Granada TV series from 1984 – 1994. The two adaptations in question

here are no different in this respect. But perhaps the most appropriate Holmes for the late

twentieth and early twenty-first centuries is one who does not share his name nor is even a

detective.

3
 In Hannibal Lecter, the former psychiatrist and serial killer at the heart of Jonathan

Demme’s 1991 film of Thomas Harris’s novel The Silence of the Lambs (1988), we are given

an insight into what might be considered a parallel universe where the cold, incisive

personality and methodology of someone like Holmes had fermented in the febrile, violent,

morally bankrupt atmosphere of our age: a man whose ‘high-powered perception’ is geared

towards self-gratification. As in the Holmes stories, Lecter works alongside the police,

sometimes helping them, sometimes keeping things from them. And, like Holmes, he is able

to construct personalities and hypotheses from almost imperceptible details. In the movie’s

famous Baltimore jail scene, in which the young apprentice FBI agent Clarice Starling

confronts the notorious killer behind his glass-walled cell, Lecter engages in an unmistakably

Holmesian ‘introductory exercise’ to demonstrate how he is able to penetrate the very core of

her identity: ‘You use Evyan skin cream, and sometimes you wear L'Air du Temps, but not

today. You brought your best bag, though, didn't you?’ From this deduction it is a few short

steps for him to recognise what has driven her to escape her humble upbringings and move

up, ‘all the way to the F... B... I’ .

In her book Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction: Gender Sexuality and the Body (2000)

Gill Plain argues that a profound shift took place in crime fiction as it moved towards the end

of the twentieth century. While in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries crime fiction

was about ‘confronting and taming the monstrous’ (Plain, p.3) this task has become much

more complex as the genre has developed. Crime fiction originally kept ‘the other’

(especially sexuality and the body) at bay, but recent innovations (Plain focuses in particular

on the rise of the lesbian detective and the serial killer narrative) confirm that what was

previously ‘other’ or monstrous to the detective universe is now incorporated within. There is

consequently an absence of the truly monstrous rather than an excess of it. The Hannibal

Lecter series provide a good example. In each of the three novels (Red Dragon [1981], The

4
Silence of the Lambs, and Hannibal [1991]), the serial killer is not simply a monstrous

outsider to be contained but is firmly inside the narrative, and indeed for much of it we are

taken inside his mind. Moreover, the proximity between hunter (detective) and killer which is

accentuated throughout the Hannibal series means in fact, Plain argues, that ‘the killer rather

than the detective [is] the point of identification for the reader’ (Plain, p.227). In Hannibal, in

particular, we have the eponymous ‘monster of the contemporary psyche [...] not below but

above ground’ (Plain, p.227), free to roam and therefore no longer contained by the insulating

conventions of the detective narrative

The way Doyle’s stories contain monstrosity verifies Plain’s argument about the

original paradigm which twentieth-century crime fiction progressively collapses. What is

‘other’ in the Sherlock Holmes canon – frequently suggested by the arresting, disturbing

narratives or ‘scenes’ (the creeping man, the yellow face, etc.) at the heart of what Thomas

Sebeok has called the ‘inner story’, around which Holmes and Watson’s investigations (the

main story) revolve (Sebeok, 1997, p.277) – is always explained and ultimately eliminated by

Holmes’s confident detective-work. There is nevertheless something monstrous about

Sherlock Holmes himself, which remains after the cases are solved – precisely because of his

inhuman capacity for intellectual endeavour. Nowhere is this clearer than in The Hound of the

Baskervilles (1901-2), a novel which sees, in its middle section, Holmes terrorize Watson by

wandering around the moor at night when he has told his friend he has gone back to London.

Even though Watson notes that ‘the man on the tor’ is extremely tall and thin, the process of

uncanny defamiliarization means he is unable to guess his identity until Holmes chooses to

reveal himself. Watson feels as if he is in the grip of an ‘unseen force’ and worries, ‘Was he

our malignant enemy, or was he by chance our guardian angel?’ (Doyle, Hound, p.120). Here

Holmes himself generates one of the uncanny scenes around which the narrative is

constructed. The strange episode, while ostensibly the result of a conviction that the case can

5
only be solved once the criminal lets down his guard in the detective’s apparent absence,

shows Holmes’s potential to elude the strictures of normality and inhabit the ‘monstrous’

zone in the story’s location in a way that links him powerfully with the mythic hound. It is

notable that, on three occasions during this episode, Watson describes the strange man as

‘dogging’ him (Doyle, Hound, p.100, p.114, p.119). Canine references in a novel of this title

surely cannot be ignored: here they underline the fact that there are two monstrous creatures

upsetting the natural order of things not one: the hound and the great detective.

The problem faced by any Sherlock Holmes adaptation which seeks to resist falling

into mere historical pastiche is not so much how to follow the great Holmeses of the past,

such as Rathbone or Brett. After the Other has become integrated in crime fiction, as Plain

argues, and following the serial killer narrative in particular, how can an adaptation depict an

eccentric genius who does not conform to social norms without him becoming too

unpalatable or disturbing? More than ever, our society is menaced by those who are

abnormal, who are outsiders. This is something, I shall argue in what follows, which has

shaped the two recent adaptations in focus here. Our culture instinctively finds the excessive

abilities and personality traits of a man like Holmes suspicious at best, dangerous at worst.

Downey Jr. said of preparing to play the part in the film, ‘The more I look into the books, the

more fantastic it becomes. Holmes is such a weirdo’ (BBC News Online, 2008). In the BBC

series, Holmes is repeatedly addressed as ‘freak’ by the police sergeant Sally Donovan, who

is forced by her superior, Inspector Lestrade, to allow him to work alongside her. In the first

episode, A Study in Pink (first aired on 25th July 2010), as they stand at a crime scene, she

warns Watson about Holmes:

Stay away from that guy. [...] You know why he’s here? He’s not paid or anything.

He likes it. He gets off on it. The weirder the crime, the more he gets off. [...] One day

6
 we’ll be standing around a body and Sherlock Holmes will be the one who put it

there. [...] Because he’s a psychopath. Psychopaths get bored.

Holmes, inevitably overhearing the conversation, acknowledges that sometimes people do

assume he is the murderer, but insists that he’s not a psychopath but ‘a high-functioning

sociopath’.

This remark may be tongue-in-cheek, but it is a significant departure for Sherlock

Holmes adaptations to explicitly define Holmes as pathological. The BBC series does not shy

away from presenting its Holmes as comparable to the obviously unhinged villains he

confronts. By contrast, Ritchie’s film version carefully keeps its Holmes on the merely

eccentric or ‘weird’ side of abnormal. He is a reckless risk-taker and thrill-seeker, devoid of

the carefully sustained balance between asceticism and excess which defines the original. He

is a variation on Robert Stephens’s decadent aesthete in Wilder’s The Private Life of Sherlock

Holmes (1970) but swashbuckling instead of languid. That his abnormality does not extend

into the pathological is conveyed through the comparison the film sets up with its master-

criminal Lord Henry Blackwood (Mark Strong). Blackwood is a backwards-engineered

megalomanic psychopath, who exhibits no empathy at all with his victims (‘Five otherwise

meaningless creatures called to serve a greater purpose’). Holmes speculates that if he and

Watson were to dissect Blackwood’s brain after he is hanged they would find ‘some

deformity that’d be scientifically significant’.

That Holmes’s eccentricity does not come close to Blackwood’s monstrosity is made

clear in a significant intertextual reference in the episode where Blackwood summons

Holmes to his cell before he is hanged. The scene is a clear echo of Starling’s Baltimore visit

to Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs. Holmes is directed down a corridor remarkably similar

in scale, architecture and lighting to the one in Demme’s film, the guard warning him that

many of the prisoners have had to be moved away because Blackwood ‘has a peculiar effect

7
on the inmates, as though he can get inside their heads’. Blackwood’s cell is adorned with

inscriptions and pictograms,3 and even some of the close-ups, in which the faces of criminal

and detective appear in the same frame, eliminating the protective bars between them,

resemble the previous film. Whether or not this is a deliberate echo is not the point. Rather,

so iconic is the Hannibal Lecter scene in cinematic history, the source of numerous parodies

in popular culture, that it is difficult for the viewer not to be reminded at some level of the

most famous serial-killer film of all. In this way, Ritchie’s movie conveys to its viewers the

fact that, despite its Victorian London setting (albeit one rendered in a hyperreal style 4),

Holmes is dealing with a phenomenon we are familiar with from our own cultural landscape:

the psychopathic mass killer. It also provides the film’s viewers with a kind of insurance

policy, a guarantee that, unlike The Silence of the Lambs, it is not the Holmes figure who is

the dangerous intellectual schemer, but his adversary.

The film’s containment of Holmes’s power is achieved by effectively reducing the

significance of his intellect in favour of emphasizing his physical bravery and skill. It

downgrades the famous ‘Holmes method’ – the quasi-scientific procedure for deduction

based on observation which is, Pierre Bayard has remarked, ‘the primary reason that these

texts have become famous (Bayard, 2008, p.30) – to a mere incidental quirk of nature. To

acknowledge its credentials as an authentic Sherlock Holmes movie, the method is duly

foregrounded early in the film. Mary Morstan (a character who featured in The Sign of Four

and is here Watson’s fiancée) remarks to Holmes that making ‘grand assumptions out of such

tiny details’ seems ‘far-fetched’, only for the detective to counter that ‘In fact the little details

are by far the most important.’ But his actual deployment of the method is confined to showy

set-pieces, such as proving his point by cruelly shattering Morstan’s self-esteem by deducing

facts about her previous marriage in front of Watson, or, later, being able to pinpoint exactly

which place in London he has been taken by Hansom cab although blindfolded. Solving the

8
real mystery, an elaborate series of illusions fuelled by the Biblical delirium of Blackwood

and his acolytes, requires a more general combination of sharp reasoning and inspired

research with extreme bravery and physical prowess – the kind of methodology deployed by

any number of cinematic blockbuster heroes faced with a supervillain, like Batman 5 or

Indiana Jones. Even though Ritchie’s Holmes is able to determine how Blackwood has

managed to pull off such terrifying illusions (the plot here is reminiscent of Holmes’s

exposure of the supernatural sham in The Hound of the Baskervilles), in this movie Holmes

comes across essentially as a clever, eccentric action-hero, a figure who does for the detective

story what Captain Jack Sparrow of the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise (2003-11) does for

the pirate adventure, rather than the pioneer of a new, historically-specific system for solving

crime. Ritchie may have been correct when he implied that the original stories were as much

melodramas as crypto-criminological case studies (Telegraph, 2008),, but there is no reason

for this to be Sherlock Holmes, for the job could have been done by any other hero.

‘DATA, DATA, DATA’: HOLMES REBOOTED

‘Data, data, data — I cannot make bricks without clay’ (‘The Adventure of the Copper Beeches’ [Adventures of

Sherlock Holmes, p.289])

In Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes, the distinctive Holmes method becomes transmuted into

eccentricity, the potentially disturbing power of the intellect safely channelled into physical

power, as Holmes fights, jumps and shoots his way to solving the crime. This marks an

interesting change from the way the body figures in Doyle’s original stories. In Detective

Fiction and the Rise of Forensic Science, Ronald R. Thomas’s study of how detective fiction

supported criminology in making the ‘nineteenth-century person legible for a modern

technological culture’ (Thomas, 2004, p.17), Holmes is described as a machine which makes

9
the body tell the truth, a literary counterpart of contemporary devices used in crime detection,

such as the lie detector or fingerprinting techniques. But in Ritchie’s film it is the effect on

Holmes’s own body of his profession and lifestyle which is continually foregrounded – most

indulgently in a bare-knuckle boxing scene (perhaps reflecting Doyle’s own love of pugilism)

where Holmes and an opponent fight bare-chested in front of a baying audience. The function

of this emphasis on the detective’s body displaces Holmes into the kind of universe inhabited

by the noir private eye rather than the gentleman detective. More significantly, though, it has

the effect of domesticating the power of his intellect. The mind is directed towards the needs

of the body in this Holmes film rather than the other way around. We can see this even more

clearly in Sherlock Holmes’s distinctive, video-game-esque, approach to combat sequences.

The conceit is to show a fight twice in quick succession, the second in ‘real time’, as it would

have actually happened, but the first a slow-motion close-up depicting how Holmes’s brain

visualizes each stage of his attack in advance in in order to take advantage of his opponent’s

weaknesses. This is accompanied by an interior monologue which conveys his logic as he

assesses his enemy:

Head cocked to the left: partial deafness in ear: first point of attack. Two, throat.

Paralyze vocal chords. Stop screaming. Three, got to be heavy drinker. Floating rib to

the liver. Four, finally, dragging left leg. Fist to patella. Summary of prognosis,

conscious in 90 seconds. Martial efficacy, quarter of an hour. Full faculty recovery,

unlikely.

In this way the 2009 movie envisages Holmes as a figure just as ‘computerized’ as the

gaming action-heroes who feature increasingly in popular cinema, such as the Prince of

Persia or Neo from The Matrix, and transmogrifies the Holmes method into a kind of onboard

computer geared up to enhance bodily performance.

10
 The comparison between Holmes and a computer is an inevitable refiguration of the

original idea of Holmes as a ‘machine’ which is more in tune with the tropes of

postmodernity. It is also made in the 2010 BBC series, but this time in a way which properly

recontextualizes the Holmes method rather than reducing it – giving it a full ‘system update’,

in other words.

Moffat’s and Gatiss’s BBC series is one of the most ambitious re-imaginings of

Holmes ever attempted. Three episodes were shown in July and August 2010, ‘A Study in

Pink’, ‘The Blind Banker’ and ‘The Great Game’. These managed plausibly to transpose the

distinctive features of the original stories into the twenty-first century world. In the opening

episode, for example, the re-styled Watson – a forty-something, slightly disaffected man

searching listlessly for a fulfilling job and relationship – has just returned from the recent

‘war against terror’ in Afghanistan, just as the original incarnation served there during the

second Anglo-Afghan war of 1878-80. This Watson keeps a blog instead of writing his

memoirs, while Sherlock Holmes maintains a website, ‘The Science of Deduction’, and uses

a nicotine patch instead of a pipe (one case is, inevitably, ‘a three-patch problem’ [‘A Study

in Pink’]). Other features are cleverly preserved and updated, such as the duo repeatedly

hailing taxis to hurtle from one city location to another, or enlisting the help of a graffiti artist

just as the original Holmes called upon the ‘Baker Street Irregulars’. Some amusingly

plausible interactions with contemporary culture are suggested, as when Holmes passes the

time by solving the ‘mysteries’ on The Jeremy Kyle Show (‘course he wasn’t the boy’s father!

Look at the turn-ups on his jeans!’). Most impressively, though, the series manages to sustain

the parallel between Holmes’s technique and character and the high-tech digital world of the

twenty-first century.

At the beginning of ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’ Watson describes Holmes as ‘the most

perfect reasoning and observing machine that the world has seen’ (Doyle, ‘Scandal’, p.3).

11
Thomas quotes the line often in support of his argument that Holmes is best understood as a

fictional machine rather than a literary character (Thomas, 2004, p.32, p.119). But Benedict

Cumberbatch’s 2010 Holmes is more like a version of the machine which drives twenty-first

century crime investigation: the computer. Presented with a crime scene, this Holmes

processes the information rapidly and accurately, circumventing the laborious process of

collecting then analysing forensic, ballistic, or biographical data. Here we have the Holmes

for our age: a central processing unit. This is conveyed most obviously in the series by the

scenes when Holmes surveys and analyses a body or a crime scene. Accompanied by

dramatic music, CSI-style high-definition ‘dolly-zooms’ provide close-ups of objects while

Holmes intones a breathless kind of forensic poetry to his mesmerized audience, Lestrade and

Watson: ‘I found this inside his trouser pockets. Sodden by the river, but still recognisably...

ticket stubs. He worked in a museum or gallery. Did a quick check. The Hickman gallery has

reported one of its attendants as missing, Alex Woodbridge...’ (‘The Great Game’). To

underline the idea of Holmes as wired into some mysterious vast crime-solving mainframe,

during such episodes the screen is overlaid with text showing the menus of a smartphone or

the content of SMS messages as he searches for information.

The parallel is made explicitly in the third of the episodes, ‘The Great Game’. Early in

the episode there is an exchange which updates Watson’s famous expression of amazement

from A Study in Scarlet about how Holmes’s ‘ignorance was as remarkable as his

knowledge’, ie. that he knows almost nothing about ‘contemporary literature, philosophy and

politics’ and is even ‘ignorant of the Copernican Theory and of the composition of the Solar

System’ (Doyle, Scarlet, p.17). The Watson of 123 years later comments on his companion’s

‘spectacular ignorance’, his inability to name the prime minister or know ‘whether the earth

goes round the sun’, and exclaims, ‘It’s primary school stuff. How can you not know that?!’.

Holmes reply replaces Doyle’s original, rather awkward, analogy between an empty attic

12
which a workman needs carefully to stock with ‘nothing but the tools which may help him in

doing his work’ (Doyle, Scarlet, p.17) with a more predictable but quite accurate comparison:

‘Well, if I ever did, I’ve deleted it. [...] Listen. [pointing to his head] This is my hard drive,

and it only makes sense to put things in there that are useful’ (‘The Great Game’).

That the link between forensic technology and the Holmes method is made as easily

in the twenty-first century as it was in the nineteenth is not surprising because when it comes

to investigation the latter age is, in crucial respects, simply a development of the one which

provided Holmes’s original context. Ours is a more advanced and accelerated form of the

system Jean Baudrillard described as ‘production’, which emerged with the scientific,

positivist ethos of the nineteenth century. Production is a process by which everything can

‘be produced, be read, become real, visible, and marked with the sign of effectiveness; [...]

transcribed into force relations, into conceptual systems or into calculable energy; [...] said,

gathered, indexed and registered’ (Baudrillard, 1977, pp.21-2). What is created by this

process, for Baudrillard, is precisely ‘reality’, that is, a system of values, rules, perceptions

that we all subscribe to. Reality is thus ‘coded’ in Baudrillard’s terms according to what is

essentially a binaristic system where everything has a value, an opposite, and a meaning. Our

contemporary digital culture makes this ‘productive’ basis for modern existence – and the

‘hyperreality’ it engenders due to its special ability to produce copies that are themselves

originals – even more pervasive. Without drawing on Baudrillard (the kind of reference best

left to The Matrix) the 2010 Sherlock Holmes nonetheless subtly demonstrates that this

binaristic, digital world of value is a more important background for its narratives than

London. In the second episode, ‘The Blind Banker’, Holmes tells Watson:

The world’s run on codes and ciphers, John. From the million pound security system

at the bank to the PIN machine you took exception to [at the beginning of the episode

Watson’s card is refused by an automatic supermarket till]. Cryptography inhabits our

13
 every waking moment. But it’s all computer generated – electronic codes, electronic

ciphering methods. (‘The Blind Banker’)

The specific context for this declaration is to compare modern coding with the more ‘ancient’

kind of cryptography they have come up against in this case (a complex yarn about a Chinese

drug-smuggling ring which communicates through obscure messages inscribed on artworks

and antiques) but, more generally, it describes the environment of the whole series. It is a

computerized world, conveyed visually by the brief speeded-up transitional shots of London

which punctuate the series’s narratives – a ‘clean’ London, quite the opposite of the

traditional ‘Holmesian’ world of shadows and fog, exaggerated in Ritchie’s film – going

about its unceasing business, all bright lights and speeding cars, like the circuitry of a

gigantic computer. It is natural that such a computerized world would produce a

computerized detective. While his eccentricities make him, on the face of it, an anomalous

figure in this world, in fact this Sherlock Holmes is perfectly in keeping with it, its

personification. The police officers he works beside openly despise this ‘freak’ who intrudes

into their own carefully-controlled environment, but this is no doubt because he is the

walking incarnation of the systems they adhere to rather than a disturbing alternative to them.

Moffat’s and Gatiss’s Holmes is the symptom of the postmodern age of production.

This is also how we must account for his sociopathy. A repeated refrain in the series

is Holmes’s apparent inability to empathize with others on an emotional level. At one point in

‘A Study in Pink’ Watson is appalled that Holmes has difficulty grasping the fact a mother

might still be ‘upset’ by the memory of her stillborn daughter 14 years later. A running joke

in the series is the proposterous idea of Holmes having friends. As it is in the original,

emotion would seem to be a threat as dangerous to the smooth-functioning of the Holmes

method as a virus is to a hard drive: after comparing Holmes to a ‘perfect reasoning and

observing machine’ Watson goes on to note that ‘[g]rit in a sensitive instrument, or a crack in

14
one of his own high-power lenses, would not be more disturbing than a strong emotion in a

nature such as his’ (‘Scandal’, Adventures, p.3). Yet besides the fact that it is necessary in

order that his system will not malfunction, Holmes’s lack of empathy is also the natural

product of the ‘sociopathic’ world represented by modern crime drama. Crime narratives in

popular fiction and television present us with a world in which emotion has been sidelined. It

is a world in which the ‘waning of affect’ which famously typifies postmodernity according

to Fredric Jameson (Jameson, 1991, p.61), is inscribed in every scene. Not that the depiction

of emotion is absent from the contemporary crime thriller. Far from it: characters continually

cry at the death of a loved one, rage at someone who stands in the way of their desire, express

terror as they are persecuted or tortured, etc. We watch such expressions of emotion on

screen continually in every crime drama. But we do so largely unmoved, because we know

that what really matters is the plot. More precisely, detective fiction is itself symptomatic of

the modern scientific, positivist, digitized universe, all ones and zeroes and positive values. It

too (as I have argued elsewhere [Nicol, 2011]) is an exemplary expression of the modern

‘project’ of production, in Baudrillard’s terms: the job of the detective is to bring what is

hidden or obscured or mysterious into the light, make it readable, intelligible, real, so it can

be interpreted, judged, brought to account. Watching detective drama puts the viewer in the

position of the high-functioning sociopath: we recognise emotion but we do not really

empathize with those who suffer from it, for we are coldly interested in getting to the bottom

of the mystery.

‘GIVE ME WORK’ (The Sign of Four,

‘The work itself, the pleasure of finding a field for my peculiar powers, is my highest reward.’

(The Sign of Four, p.8)

15
It is possible to read the BBC series as a comment on the ‘sociopathy’ of the detective and

detective fiction as a genre, a parallel perhaps to Mark Haddon’s novel, The Curious Incident

of the Dog in the Night-time (2003), which tells the story of a 15-year-old boy with an

unspecified autistic disorder, who uses the techniques he has gleaned from reading the

Holmes stories to investigate the death of a neighbour’s dog and eventually stumbles upon

the key to the real mystery (his mother’s disappearance) after a long and difficult process of

trying to decode adult emotion. There is something ‘autistic’ or even ‘sociopathic’ about

detective-work: it can effectively sift through the facts, but it is not equipped to deal with

emotion.

But the lack of empathy and limited emotions are not the only pathological traits

exhibited by the 2010 Sherlock Holmes. He experiences two more extreme kinds of emotion,

both of which are linked with each other: boredom, and the thrill of making cognitive

connections. Boredom is fundamental to the constitution of Doyle’s original Holmes. In

another of the early myth-creating tales, The Sign of Four (1890), a concerned Watson

confronts his friend with the risk posed to his great intellectual powers by persisting with the

‘pathological and morbid process’ of taking cocaine. Holmes replies

My mind [...] rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work, give me the most

abstruse cryptogram, or the most intricate analysis, and I am in my own proper

atmosphere. I can dispense then with artificial stimulants. But I abhor the dull routine

of existence. I crave for mental exaltation. (Doyle, Sign, p.8).

Boredom is the opposite of work for Holmes, and the intolerable gap between the two is

filled by the temporary high provided by ‘artificial stimulants’. Given the care with which the

Moffat/Gatiss series transposes many of the original elements of Doyle’s stories into early

twenty-first century equivalents, it is surprising that Holmes’s use of drugs is not something it

has chosen to update (though there is a staged drugs bust at the detective’s home in ‘A Study

16
in Pink’).6 But Holmes’s boredom is still there, and arguably even more important. The third

episode, ‘The Great Game’ begins with Holmes alone in his apartment, so intensely bored

that he fires a number of gunshots into his wall, then looks out of the window and observes

how ‘quiet, calm, peaceful’ it is, only to conclude, ‘Isn’t it hateful?’. Mrs Hudson points out

that he’ll soon be cheered up if a ‘nice murder’ comes along. This is another sociopathic

element of Holmes which raises the spectre of criminality: psychopaths, as Sergeant Donovan

says, get bored. Sure enough, later in the episode when Lestrade asks Holmes why in the

world would anyone torture a woman by strapping explosives to her, Holmes replies, ‘Oh... I

can’t be the only person in the world that gets bored’. Soon after, the criminal in question –

revealed as Moriarty, recast as a besuited psychopathic middle manager – admits that he has

embarked upon his campaign of destruction ‘because I’m bored’. ‘We were made for each

other, Sherlock’, he remarks.

Work has always been central to the crime thriller, especially the hard-boiled/noir

tradition of private eye movies, from The Maltese Falcon (1941) to Zodiac (2007). The

private eye, as John Irwin has argued, symbolizes the significance of work in modern

American constructions of masculinity (Irwin, 2006, p.36). He typically lives for his work,

and chooses work over love (Nicol, 2013). This is not usually the case in the classic ‘logic-

and-deduction’ detective story. Although the detective works relentlessly, he does so in the

name of pleasure or justice, not because he needs to make a living. (Where private eye

movies deal upfront with the issue of the detective’s payment for work rendered, the idea of a

monetary reward is treated with scorn by Sherlock Holmes.) Nevertheless, Holmes’s plea

‘give me work’ shows that he provides an important tangent to the function of work in

detective fiction and films, not considered by Irwin – and this too is central to the BBC

Sherlock Holmes. The Moffat/Gatiss Holmes is a man for whom the very idea of a life

without work makes little sense. He spends the time he has alone conducting experiments

17
which will advance his ‘science of deduction’. On two occasions in the series, Watson opens

the fridge to find human body parts (eyes and then a head). A comic sub-story in ‘The Great

Game’ is about Watson’s attempts to start a relationship up with Molly Hooper only for

Holmes to prevent them from enjoying any time together by constantly engaging Watson in

work.

Work in the series is not about economics, as it is in hard-boiled fiction – or at least it

has more to do with a libidinal economy than a monetary one. Work provides the antidote to

the intense boredom Holmes experiences in that it promises the jouissance he craves from

intellectual endeavour. The exquisite pleasure Holmes derives from his method is conveyed

brilliantly by Cumberbatch when he dramatizes the method ‘in action’, ie. when Holmes

makes a connection between apparently unassociated facts or discovers a new piece of

information. His face lights up, and he exclaims ‘ohhhh!’ or ‘ahhhh!’. The state of mind he

conveys resembles what Freud termed ‘epistemophilia’, or when

‘[t]he thought process itself becomes sexualized, for the sexual pleasure which is

normally attached to the content of thought becomes shifted on to the act of thinking

itself, and the satisfaction derived from reaching the conclusion of a line of thought is

experienced as a sexual satisfaction. (Freud, 1984, p.124).

As one of the ‘component instincts’, epistemophilia, the drive to know, is a normal part of

subjectivity, as it is central to children’s formative research into sexual identity. But Freud

insisted that the epistemophilic drive may be pathological (a feature of obsessional neurosis,

for example, as in the case of his patient ‘The Rat Man’). The extreme pleasure

Cumberbatch’s Holmes takes from the thought process is clearly not normal. Indeed his

epistemophilia might be considered perversely the most sexualized aspect of the BBC series,

despite the clever red herrings it lays down with regard to the possibility of homosexual

attraction between Holmes and Watson – a compelling skein of pink running through the

18
series (and far more in keeping with the homosocial nature of the original stories than the

heteronormative exploits of Robert Downey Jr. in Sherlock Holmes). The closest thing on

screen to an exhibition of sexual desire – certainly more erotic than Watson’s laborious

courtship of Molly Hooper – is the jouissance of Holmes’s cognitive activity.

This is, finally, another way that the updated Sherlock Holmes, for all his

abnormality, for all his monstrosity, is actually symptomatic of the postmodern sensibility.

Just as he is uninterested in others and unable to empathize with them, he is also subject to

highs and lows, alternating between periods of extreme boredom and moments of euphoria –

the kind of mood swings which postmodern culture induces in its subjects as a result of its

characteristic ‘waning of affect’, which Jameson (appropriating an idea in Lyotard’s Libidinal

Economy [1974]) terms ‘intensities’ (Stephenson, 1989, p.4). But Holmes is not just typical

of the age in this respect, he is also the counterpart of the viewer of the series itself, and the

genre it represents more generally: the contemporary crime thriller. It is a commonplace of

criticism on detective fiction that the detective is the reader’s textual surrogate, someone who

is engaged in a parallel process to that of the reader as s/he decodes the text: interpreting

signs, piecing together the narrative. In Tzvetan Todorov’s neat formulation, ‘author : reader

= criminal : detective’ (Todorov, 1977, p.49). A variation on this parallel relationship pertains

in the crime thriller which combines, as the BBC Sherlock Holmes series does so effectively,

the action of the hard-boiled thriller with the cerebral puzzle-solving of the classic ‘logic-and-

deduction’ detective story. As we watch we surrender ourselves to the emotions traditionally

generated by the thriller (fear, suspense) while also periodically indulging in the pleasures of

cognition, along with the detective. This means that just as we assume the non-empathetic

demeanour of the sociopath as we watch the suffering of others, just as we ironically seek to

escape routine existence by watching a form which revolves around work, so we also become

– while immersed in the drama – subject to similar moodswings to those of the most

19
pathological Sherlock Holmes yet. It seems appropriate that the crime thriller has achieved a

seemingly unassailable dominance among the various genres of popular culture. More than

its capacity to incorporate ‘the other’ within its examples, might this be because it parallels

the depiction of the volatile ‘intensities’ of our age by the very way in which we are invited to

enjoy the text? Where the realist novel was once valued for the ‘love’ which conditioned the

empathetic approach to characters by both author and reader (Bayley, 1960), the crime

thriller is typified by an attitude of cold disregard. For all its undoubted verve, the BBC

series, in contrast to the limited video-game action-hero of the Ritchie film, brings a very

nineteenth-century creation, Sherlock Holmes, perfectly into line with the character of our

times.

WORKS CITED

Baudrillard, Jean (1977) Forget Foucault. Translation 1987 (translator not cited). New York:

Semiotext(e).

Baudrillard, Jean (1994). Simulacra and Simulation. Translated by Sheila Glaser. Ann Arbor:

The University of Michigan Press.

Bayard, Pierre (2008) Sherlock Holmes Was Wrong: Re-opening the Case of the Hound of

the Baskervilles. London: Bloomsbury.

Bayley, John (1960) The Characters of Love. London: Constable.

BBC News Online (2008) ‘Law to star in Ritchie’s Sherlock’, BBC News Online. October 1,

2008. Retrieved 4th July 2011: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/7646463.stm

Daily Telegraph, The, 19th Sept, 2008:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/celebritynews/2989033/Jude-Law-to-star-in-

Sherlock-Holmes-remake.html

20
Freud, Sigmund (1984) ‘Notes Upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis [‘The Rat Man’]’, Case

Histories II, Pelican Freud Library, vol. 9 (Harmondsworth: Pelican), pp.36–128.

Jameson, Fredric (1991) Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Durham,

NC: Duke University Press.

Irwin, John T. (2006) Unless the Threat of Death is Behind Them: Hard-Boiled Fiction and

Film Noir. (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press).

Nicol, Bran (2011) ‘Detective Fiction and the “Original Crime”: Baudrillard, Calle, Poe’,

Cultural Politics, 7:3, November 2011, pp. 445-463.

Nicol, Bran (2013) The Private Eye: Detectives in the Movies. London: Reaktion Books.

Plain, Gill. (2001) Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction: Gender, Sexuality and the Body.

Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Rubin, Martin (1994) Thrillers. Cambridge University Press.

Sebeok, Thomas. (1997) ‘Give Me Another Horse’. In Capozzi, R., Reading Eco: An

Anthology. Bloomington & Indianapolis, In: Indiana University Press, pp.276-83.

Stephenson, Anders (1989) ‘Regarding Postmodernism: A Conversation with Frederic

Jameson.’ In Andrew Ross, ed., Universal Abandon?: The Politics of Postmodernism.

Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp.3-30.

Thomas, Ronald R. (2004) Detective Fiction and the Rise of Forensic Science. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press.

Todorov, Tzvetan. (1975), ‘The Typology of Detective Fiction’ [1966]. The Poetics of Prose.

London: Jonathan Cape, pp.42-52

1
Marti ‘u i argues that The o ept of thriller falls so e ay et ee a ge re proper a d a des ripti e
quality that is attached to other, more clearly defined genres – such as spy thriller, detective thriller, horror

21
thriller. […] The thriller a e o eptualized as a etage re that gathers se eral other ge res u der its
u rella, a d as a a d i the spe tru that olors ea h of those parti ular ge res ‘u i , 999, p.
2
The ter so iopathy , o ge erally preferred a o gst psy hiatrists to psy hopathy , is, like a y i the
discourse of psychiatry, rather loosely defined. The DSM-IV (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental
Disorders, Fourth Edition [ 99 ] des ri es it as a pervasive pattern of disregard for and violation of the rights
of others occurring since age 15 years hi h is e ide ed i at least three out of se e eha ioural traits:
failure to conform to social norms by acting unlawfully, deceitfulness, impulsivity, irritability and aggression,
reckless disregard for safety of self and others, consistent irresponsibility, lack of remorse. I am using the term
here i the ore ge eral se se that features i orks hi h diag ose ultural psy hopathology , su h as
Martha “tout s The Sociopath Next Door (New York: Broadway Books, 2 a d Paul Ba iak s a d ‘o ert
Hare s Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work (London: Harper Collins, 2007), as an attitude towards
the other person which is characterized by a lack of empathy and remorse.
3
The lines Blackwood quotes are from The Book of Revelations and relate to the figure of the Red Dragon, a
yth fa oured y a other psy hopath i Harris s first Lecter story, of this title.
4
Jea Baudrillard s ter for the effe t of the real hi h is al ays already si ulated ei g reprodu ed so
effectively that it comes to seem imaginary, or more real than real (Baudrillard, 1994). This is the effect of
‘it hie s larger-than-life, CGI-enhanced London.
5
Warner Brothers took on the Sherlock Holmes project after perceiving it had similar revisionary potential to
Batman Begins.
6
‘it hie s fil also lea es out the drug-taking element in favour of suggesting that Holmes has a fondness for
alcohol, though this is perhaps more understandable gi e the o ie s status as fa ily lo k uster.

22