TV: BBC Sherlock – Lacking Social Cues
Apr. 8th, 2012 07:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
narcasseIn the midst of mass overhauling my living space, still, which is essentially boiling down to dumping books by the hundreds, and trying to remember everything I’ve forgotten about anatomy as an aid to making sense of MRI results, I may have finally managed to order my thoughts on at least one topic.
When Sherlock first aired, I paid vague attention and ended up watching the first two episodes on iPlayer. I’d never actually bothered to use BBC iPlayer before so I could even put part of my enjoyment of A Study in Pink down to the novelty of using said program, but, nevertheless, I enjoyed it. I recall delightedly speculating on whether or not they’d find a way to adapt The Valley of Fear and telling myself that the first part of A Study in Scarlet was going to be stupidly difficult to adapt, so they were allowed a free pass on that one. Then came The Blind Banker, my viewing of which dissolved into irate shouting and threats of punitive justice, the likes of which only a British Oriental can make. I don’t know if all the Orientalism in The Blind Banker was meant to be taken as a send-up of arrogant turn of the century Western Orientalist attitudes but if it was, it failed miserably. In fact, henceforth the writer of said episode is someone I’ve designated as Mr Racefail, though to be entirely fair, he could also be Mr Fetishing-WOC as well. The amount of rage that that episode generated would have been enough to put me off the series entirely and in fact did for a while, until I decided to give the third episode a chance because it was written by Mark Gatiss of The League of Gentlemen. Unfortunately, The Great Game just didn’t engage me terribly. It was interesting, and much like Angels and Demons enough to hold my attention for the duration, but afterwards, I just didn’t care.
I did actually want to like this adaptation because I’m a fan of detective fiction and, more specifically, I’m a long-term Sherlockian. Granted, I may not have examined the original canon too closely in recent years but I have a shockingly accurate recall for elements of the Granada series and am still in the process of digesting the Lenfilm version. I grew up wanting to be Sherlock Holmes, wanting to have a similarly vast and ordered knowledge of a specialist subject in which I excelled above all others. As it stands, though I of course excel at being myself, what I’ve probably instead taken away from that aspiration is a propensity to sit around in my dressing-gown at all hours and to smoke far too much. In fact, in retrospect, my ongoing quest to sample just about every type of cigarette I can get my hands on isn’t too far removed from writing a monograph on the differences between various types of tobacco ash. Then again, Sherlock Holmes can probably bear equal blame alongside other childhood heroes, the likes of which include Raistlin Majere, Sascha Vykos, and the Marquise de Merteuil. The overriding theme being intense study, be that of history, the esoteric or human behaviour, and the devastatingly affective application thereof. Regardless of health issues, fanaticism or amorality, I took away from those examples the best and finest of their attributes. I aspired to be as meticulous in my study and affective in my application, so as never to lose myself in theorem without making it of some use to the wider reality. And, of course, having worked that out now, it also explains why I was desperate to get out of academia.
Bearing in mind the above, I was looking forward to a modern update of one of my favourite characters, and, for the first episode at least, I enjoyed what had been done with the source material. In all actuality, it’s highly likely that I enjoyed the first episode because of how closely it stuck to the source material. I have a history of disliking modern adaptations and have had less than positive things to say about many of them in the past. Equally, I have similar feelings in regards to inaccurate portrayals of anything, though I’ve since got over the fact that CSI detectives are capable of running Southern Blots in a half hour. You can’t even plate a gel in less than 3 hours so getting full results would be impossible. I deal with it by realising that CSI isn’t meant to be taken seriously. It’s a silly soap opera romp that happens to centre around criminal investigations, where the science isn’t important and the focus is about the broad strokes of human emotion involved. Similarly, when it comes to the likes of Conan Doyle or Dorothy L. Sayers, I’m happy to accept that the reader will never be able to evaluate the accuracy of anything because the solution to the crime will rely on the gentleman detective’s encyclopaedically knowledge of crime, and that all the evidence is delivered to the reader through his perspective. These are not Choose Your Own Adventure stories where you are presented with the evidence to sift as you see fit. You’re just along for the ride and to marvel at the intricate way that the hero pieces it all together: Parker is Lord Peter’s sounding board and highlights the relevant points, Watson asks Holmes for the explanations that the reader needs to have to make it all make sense. I don’t expect to pit my wits against the main character and if I find that I am, I’m usually disappointed. Thus my problem with this latest adaptation.
I can’t fault the premise of adapting a decent set of detective adventure stories for the modern age. Neither can I fault updating certain aspects of the story that might have more resonance with a modern audience. But what I can fault is the execution. I watched A Scandal in Belgravia with trepidation and, sadly, mostly hated it in the end. I shouldn’t have been too surprised really, considering this is a series that has had the main character engage in slut-shaming, the sort of grammatical pedantry that only people with nothing else to say for themselves found their personalities on, and similar. There’s a comment, toward the start of the episode, which, in the right context, could be the sort of petty bitching that can occur between gay men of a certain temperament, but, in the given context, just came off as homophobic. There’s a later comment regarding a character’s chest size that was similarly pointed but completely unnecessary. Which is where it all falls down.
The argument is made throughout the series that the main character has little to no comprehension of social cues and thus speaks his mind, regardless of the etiquette of the situation. In fact, I would argue that the entire central premise of the series is that modern day Sherlock Holmes has no comprehension of what is and isn’t socially acceptable. And yet, none of the evidence supports that supposition, because his actions and comments are always geared to insult and belittle, instead of simply being hapless. The issue with a lack of social understanding is that you can’t turn it off when it’s convenient for you. You cannot understand situations well enough to interact smoothly but you also can’t understand them well enough to deliberately insult people either. Either you do say perfectly clueless things and do not understand why they’re inappropriate, or, you use your apparent lack of understanding to hide behind so as to get away with deliberately insulting people. It doesn’t work both ways. To use an example from a comment I received some time ago, the commenter doesn’t get to call me a slut, and then, when I point this out, retreat behind the excuse that they didn’t realise what they’d said, while in the same breath saying that they were joking. Either they didn’t realise what they were saying or they did.
Thus, much like Torchwood, where the central premise appears to be that the main character is so attractive that everybody falls for him, I simply cannot buy into the required suspension of disbelief to go along with it. Curiously enough, both John Barrowman and Benedict Cumberbach seem to suffer from a rather substantial amount of loose skin in the face, which is unfortunate when they smile. I’ve been reliably informed that this may be the product of dehydration, as well as the obvious, so I’ll cease all further unnecessary and unflattering speculation at this point. Returning to the point then, without buying into this necessary central premise a lot of Sherlock stops being the light entertainment it’s meant to be. The main character isn’t embarrassingly clueless when it comes to social cues, he’s just unpleasant and deliberately cruel to those weaker than himself. In essence, instead of being a socially maladapted genius he becomes a bully whose only claim to anything approaching use in society is his specialised knowledge in one particular area. Of course the argument will be made that he lashes out now because he initially received negative feedback, in essence the argument that you’re a bastard now because some girl wouldn’t sleep with you when you were 18, which has never held water. Certainly, it would be a way of controlling the situation, to automatically provoke hatred, so as not to run the risk of engendering it later when you’d be blindsided by it, but it’s not a healthy or effective way of dealing with things.
On the other side of the argument, of course, is the issue of learning social skills, which is equally, a poor excuse. Now granted, the big, bad, world is frightening and it can feel like a trial of humiliation and ostracism to go out there and get anything done. It’s easy to worry about saying or doing the socially acceptable thing, it can be hugely terrifying to have to go into a completely new situation and interact with people that you’ve never met before, it can be downright crippling to have to face a completely unexpected, and thus unprepared for, conversation. In the throes of such anxiety it’s so easy to hear every laugh behind you as being at your expense, every glance directed towards your vicinity as a look of censure. But, the essential truth of the matter is that everybody deals with that. You have a choice, to hide and live in fear, or to go out and do what you need to get done with all that scorn, courage and profound indifference that Camus was talking about.
I love public speaking but am pretty certain that I make a fool of myself almost every time I meet someone new. I worry that my handshake isn’t firm enough, that my conversation doesn’t flow well enough, that I’m simply not coming across as particularly interesting. Some of my issues come from not understanding social cues, some from lack of practice and some from genuine clumsiness on my part. I’m just not very good at picking up social cues, therefore, it’s something I’m working to improve on. I study body language, sales techniques and linguistic inflection so as to help me understand what’s going on. None of it ‘comes naturally’ but that doesn’t have to doom me to being poor at social interaction when I need to get something done. There are certain aspects of the whole rigmarole that I find pointless and tedious but I need to be aware of how to navigate them if I want to achieve further objectives. Thus, having had to struggle to learn such things myself, and being forced to continually study them if I’m to keep up, I have little to no tolerance for the argument that such skills are so esoteric that they can’t be learnt. I have an unmitigated rage for any argument that having failed to gain a skill naturally, an essential survival skill of all things, that this then gives someone a free pass to do as they please, with everybody else around them forced to make the accommodation. Learning the accepted social cues isn’t easy but it is doable, and because humans prefer a social habitat, it is an essential skill that no amount of difficulty excuses. Baring actual autism and similar, where the individual doesn’t have the capacity to understand the framework, of course, which is irrelevant anyway for the purposes of my argument.
To conclude then, the reason that I don’t actually like Sherlock is less to do with the mediocre, and in some places quite dire, plot and more to do with the expression of the central character. A character who is pointlessly cruel and then falls back on the excuse of not understanding social interaction as a ‘get out of jail free’ card. He obviously does understand social standards well enough to fling out some rather pointed barbs after all. And even then, if the opposing argument is accepted that he doesn’t understand anything else but his specialisation, I equally have no patience for a series centred around a detective who takes far too long to solve anything because he’s having to learn common sense before he can come up with a useful application of his skill set. I have no patience for people who hide behind their fear of learning social skills and use it as an excuse to try to force others to do everything for them in real life. As someone who has had his crippling fear of failure practically beaten out of him by reality, I don’t see why anybody should get a free pass when it comes to learning essential life skills. After all, I don’t have to like mass ‘meet and greet’ functions but goddamn it, I can do them. And, as a contrast, because I do believe that the series is leaning far more towards the main character being malicious rather than anything else, I equally dislike the excuse of specialised knowledge being an excuse for outright cruelty. Quite possibly because, in the past, I’ve been there. It is, after all, very easy to lose sight of sensible application of theory from your ivory tower. Though, of course, without application, a theorem may as well not exist at all.
When Sherlock first aired, I paid vague attention and ended up watching the first two episodes on iPlayer. I’d never actually bothered to use BBC iPlayer before so I could even put part of my enjoyment of A Study in Pink down to the novelty of using said program, but, nevertheless, I enjoyed it. I recall delightedly speculating on whether or not they’d find a way to adapt The Valley of Fear and telling myself that the first part of A Study in Scarlet was going to be stupidly difficult to adapt, so they were allowed a free pass on that one. Then came The Blind Banker, my viewing of which dissolved into irate shouting and threats of punitive justice, the likes of which only a British Oriental can make. I don’t know if all the Orientalism in The Blind Banker was meant to be taken as a send-up of arrogant turn of the century Western Orientalist attitudes but if it was, it failed miserably. In fact, henceforth the writer of said episode is someone I’ve designated as Mr Racefail, though to be entirely fair, he could also be Mr Fetishing-WOC as well. The amount of rage that that episode generated would have been enough to put me off the series entirely and in fact did for a while, until I decided to give the third episode a chance because it was written by Mark Gatiss of The League of Gentlemen. Unfortunately, The Great Game just didn’t engage me terribly. It was interesting, and much like Angels and Demons enough to hold my attention for the duration, but afterwards, I just didn’t care.
I did actually want to like this adaptation because I’m a fan of detective fiction and, more specifically, I’m a long-term Sherlockian. Granted, I may not have examined the original canon too closely in recent years but I have a shockingly accurate recall for elements of the Granada series and am still in the process of digesting the Lenfilm version. I grew up wanting to be Sherlock Holmes, wanting to have a similarly vast and ordered knowledge of a specialist subject in which I excelled above all others. As it stands, though I of course excel at being myself, what I’ve probably instead taken away from that aspiration is a propensity to sit around in my dressing-gown at all hours and to smoke far too much. In fact, in retrospect, my ongoing quest to sample just about every type of cigarette I can get my hands on isn’t too far removed from writing a monograph on the differences between various types of tobacco ash. Then again, Sherlock Holmes can probably bear equal blame alongside other childhood heroes, the likes of which include Raistlin Majere, Sascha Vykos, and the Marquise de Merteuil. The overriding theme being intense study, be that of history, the esoteric or human behaviour, and the devastatingly affective application thereof. Regardless of health issues, fanaticism or amorality, I took away from those examples the best and finest of their attributes. I aspired to be as meticulous in my study and affective in my application, so as never to lose myself in theorem without making it of some use to the wider reality. And, of course, having worked that out now, it also explains why I was desperate to get out of academia.
Bearing in mind the above, I was looking forward to a modern update of one of my favourite characters, and, for the first episode at least, I enjoyed what had been done with the source material. In all actuality, it’s highly likely that I enjoyed the first episode because of how closely it stuck to the source material. I have a history of disliking modern adaptations and have had less than positive things to say about many of them in the past. Equally, I have similar feelings in regards to inaccurate portrayals of anything, though I’ve since got over the fact that CSI detectives are capable of running Southern Blots in a half hour. You can’t even plate a gel in less than 3 hours so getting full results would be impossible. I deal with it by realising that CSI isn’t meant to be taken seriously. It’s a silly soap opera romp that happens to centre around criminal investigations, where the science isn’t important and the focus is about the broad strokes of human emotion involved. Similarly, when it comes to the likes of Conan Doyle or Dorothy L. Sayers, I’m happy to accept that the reader will never be able to evaluate the accuracy of anything because the solution to the crime will rely on the gentleman detective’s encyclopaedically knowledge of crime, and that all the evidence is delivered to the reader through his perspective. These are not Choose Your Own Adventure stories where you are presented with the evidence to sift as you see fit. You’re just along for the ride and to marvel at the intricate way that the hero pieces it all together: Parker is Lord Peter’s sounding board and highlights the relevant points, Watson asks Holmes for the explanations that the reader needs to have to make it all make sense. I don’t expect to pit my wits against the main character and if I find that I am, I’m usually disappointed. Thus my problem with this latest adaptation.
I can’t fault the premise of adapting a decent set of detective adventure stories for the modern age. Neither can I fault updating certain aspects of the story that might have more resonance with a modern audience. But what I can fault is the execution. I watched A Scandal in Belgravia with trepidation and, sadly, mostly hated it in the end. I shouldn’t have been too surprised really, considering this is a series that has had the main character engage in slut-shaming, the sort of grammatical pedantry that only people with nothing else to say for themselves found their personalities on, and similar. There’s a comment, toward the start of the episode, which, in the right context, could be the sort of petty bitching that can occur between gay men of a certain temperament, but, in the given context, just came off as homophobic. There’s a later comment regarding a character’s chest size that was similarly pointed but completely unnecessary. Which is where it all falls down.
The argument is made throughout the series that the main character has little to no comprehension of social cues and thus speaks his mind, regardless of the etiquette of the situation. In fact, I would argue that the entire central premise of the series is that modern day Sherlock Holmes has no comprehension of what is and isn’t socially acceptable. And yet, none of the evidence supports that supposition, because his actions and comments are always geared to insult and belittle, instead of simply being hapless. The issue with a lack of social understanding is that you can’t turn it off when it’s convenient for you. You cannot understand situations well enough to interact smoothly but you also can’t understand them well enough to deliberately insult people either. Either you do say perfectly clueless things and do not understand why they’re inappropriate, or, you use your apparent lack of understanding to hide behind so as to get away with deliberately insulting people. It doesn’t work both ways. To use an example from a comment I received some time ago, the commenter doesn’t get to call me a slut, and then, when I point this out, retreat behind the excuse that they didn’t realise what they’d said, while in the same breath saying that they were joking. Either they didn’t realise what they were saying or they did.
Thus, much like Torchwood, where the central premise appears to be that the main character is so attractive that everybody falls for him, I simply cannot buy into the required suspension of disbelief to go along with it. Curiously enough, both John Barrowman and Benedict Cumberbach seem to suffer from a rather substantial amount of loose skin in the face, which is unfortunate when they smile. I’ve been reliably informed that this may be the product of dehydration, as well as the obvious, so I’ll cease all further unnecessary and unflattering speculation at this point. Returning to the point then, without buying into this necessary central premise a lot of Sherlock stops being the light entertainment it’s meant to be. The main character isn’t embarrassingly clueless when it comes to social cues, he’s just unpleasant and deliberately cruel to those weaker than himself. In essence, instead of being a socially maladapted genius he becomes a bully whose only claim to anything approaching use in society is his specialised knowledge in one particular area. Of course the argument will be made that he lashes out now because he initially received negative feedback, in essence the argument that you’re a bastard now because some girl wouldn’t sleep with you when you were 18, which has never held water. Certainly, it would be a way of controlling the situation, to automatically provoke hatred, so as not to run the risk of engendering it later when you’d be blindsided by it, but it’s not a healthy or effective way of dealing with things.
On the other side of the argument, of course, is the issue of learning social skills, which is equally, a poor excuse. Now granted, the big, bad, world is frightening and it can feel like a trial of humiliation and ostracism to go out there and get anything done. It’s easy to worry about saying or doing the socially acceptable thing, it can be hugely terrifying to have to go into a completely new situation and interact with people that you’ve never met before, it can be downright crippling to have to face a completely unexpected, and thus unprepared for, conversation. In the throes of such anxiety it’s so easy to hear every laugh behind you as being at your expense, every glance directed towards your vicinity as a look of censure. But, the essential truth of the matter is that everybody deals with that. You have a choice, to hide and live in fear, or to go out and do what you need to get done with all that scorn, courage and profound indifference that Camus was talking about.
I love public speaking but am pretty certain that I make a fool of myself almost every time I meet someone new. I worry that my handshake isn’t firm enough, that my conversation doesn’t flow well enough, that I’m simply not coming across as particularly interesting. Some of my issues come from not understanding social cues, some from lack of practice and some from genuine clumsiness on my part. I’m just not very good at picking up social cues, therefore, it’s something I’m working to improve on. I study body language, sales techniques and linguistic inflection so as to help me understand what’s going on. None of it ‘comes naturally’ but that doesn’t have to doom me to being poor at social interaction when I need to get something done. There are certain aspects of the whole rigmarole that I find pointless and tedious but I need to be aware of how to navigate them if I want to achieve further objectives. Thus, having had to struggle to learn such things myself, and being forced to continually study them if I’m to keep up, I have little to no tolerance for the argument that such skills are so esoteric that they can’t be learnt. I have an unmitigated rage for any argument that having failed to gain a skill naturally, an essential survival skill of all things, that this then gives someone a free pass to do as they please, with everybody else around them forced to make the accommodation. Learning the accepted social cues isn’t easy but it is doable, and because humans prefer a social habitat, it is an essential skill that no amount of difficulty excuses. Baring actual autism and similar, where the individual doesn’t have the capacity to understand the framework, of course, which is irrelevant anyway for the purposes of my argument.
To conclude then, the reason that I don’t actually like Sherlock is less to do with the mediocre, and in some places quite dire, plot and more to do with the expression of the central character. A character who is pointlessly cruel and then falls back on the excuse of not understanding social interaction as a ‘get out of jail free’ card. He obviously does understand social standards well enough to fling out some rather pointed barbs after all. And even then, if the opposing argument is accepted that he doesn’t understand anything else but his specialisation, I equally have no patience for a series centred around a detective who takes far too long to solve anything because he’s having to learn common sense before he can come up with a useful application of his skill set. I have no patience for people who hide behind their fear of learning social skills and use it as an excuse to try to force others to do everything for them in real life. As someone who has had his crippling fear of failure practically beaten out of him by reality, I don’t see why anybody should get a free pass when it comes to learning essential life skills. After all, I don’t have to like mass ‘meet and greet’ functions but goddamn it, I can do them. And, as a contrast, because I do believe that the series is leaning far more towards the main character being malicious rather than anything else, I equally dislike the excuse of specialised knowledge being an excuse for outright cruelty. Quite possibly because, in the past, I’ve been there. It is, after all, very easy to lose sight of sensible application of theory from your ivory tower. Though, of course, without application, a theorem may as well not exist at all.
