#sherlock intertext

[sarahthecoat]

meta from 2021 that i was glad to find and re read today. revisited @thewatsonbeekeepers #tjlc tag and read the discussions in the notes. there's more!

The Wizard of Oz and tjlc - more thoughts

Edited to add in a link to this meta  by @bug-catcher-in-viridian-forest which inspired these thoughts - v wonderful eye for detail in these parallels and would definitely recommend reading it before this!

Entirely indebted to @bug-catcher-in-viridian-forest​, whose post made me think about this - I have no idea how recent this post is, because the time stamp says 2016 but it contains details from s4, which suggests a tumblr fuckup! But my 2c based off this -

I’m a big EMPer. And - as I mention in every meta I write, not just because it’s a hyperfixation but because it’s super important to tjlc - I’m a huge David Lynch fan. David Lynch is the guy who defined the dream-movie genre, who made it more than The Wizard of Oz and turned it into the most self-referential meta psychological thriller possible - and won huge critical plaudits for it. (Incidentally, except from Tarantino - his response to imo Lynch’s most underappreciated film, Fire Walk With Me, is hilarious. Look it up. But anyway.) Lynch is obsessed with The Wizard of Oz, and has stated it’s his favourite movie, and even went so far as to remake it as a very loosely adapted thriller in Wild at Heart. My meta on TAB (x) talks about how indebted Mofftiss are to David Lynch, and how making a dream based piece of media is basically impossible without using him as a reference point. Like a fool, I forgot Lynch’s own biggest reference point - The Wizard of Oz.

@bug-catcher-in-viridian-forest​ makes a lot of excellent parallels, but I want to pull on them in the light of EMP theory! The biggest one is that Eurus is Dorothy - red shoes, pigtails, blue and white dress. This is also, crucially, something Lynch does with his characters who are meant to parallel Dorothy - see Dorothy Vallens in Blue Velvet and her red shoes, for example.

Only the most iconic costume in the history of film. Anyway. Red shoes are also seen on the girl on the plane, although her costume is stripes, so not a perfect link - we do know, however, that they are the same person. Parallels with flying the plane and flying the house - lovely. Parallels with the name of the east wind - obviously this is derived from ACD canon, but it’s nevertheless lovely. However, where I want to jump in now is the plot of TWoO, because this is really important.

Everybody knows that Dorothy has a dog (making child!Eurus playing with Redbeard even more striking in resemblance) - but what is really important in TWoO is that her dog is going to die. That’s the reason she runs away from home, which is what leads to her getting knocked unconscious and having this mad dream. @sagestreet​ has pointed out exactly why dogs are connected with homosexuality, and I’ve elaborated in my EMP series on the idea that Sherlock realises he needs to wake up because John is suicidal without him. This ties in beyond well. Incidentally, the bit about TWoO that never works for me is that when Dorothy wakes up, Toto is still destined for death. Everybody just conveniently ignores it. What Sherlock has right - if we’re right (we may never tell, but I assure you guys that the series 5 I dreamed the other night was fantastic. is that reality shifting?*) - is that the dream can actually make a difference to the situation, because the dream is the difference between life and death. Think of If I Stay. Or something like that.

Okay. But here’s the deal. TWoO is all about home. When Dorothy is asked what she has learned from her dream (the knowledge that she needs to wake up), Dorothy says:

If I ever go looking for my heart’s desire again, I won’t look any further than my own backyard, because if it isn’t there, I never really lost it to begin with.

If I may say, that is a terrible mantra. And I love that film. But anyway. (MGM movies are a hyperfixation - come and talk to me about them.) Mofftiss know that this is a fucked up end to a fantastic film, not least because it leaves Toto dying. In queer terms, this is a terrible end to the movie - queer film icon John Waters famously said:

So Mofftiss, with Gatiss being the good queer writer that he is, don’t take the backyard literally. Just a Dorothy’s heart’s desire was literally to be home on the farm, and that’s where she finds the impetus to wake up, what does Sherlock need to do to wake up?

I’m incapable of finding images on the web (my metas are so sparse in comparison to everyone else!) but it’s literally in his backyard, as he pushes down the fake wall to get into the garden where the answers are. And this time, home is much more complicated - the ancestry that is built up in Musgrave hall, which is metaphorically connected to the history of Sherlock Holmes as a character, is pushed down just like a wall in Sherlock’s mind, instead helping him to find an internal home, a unity with Eurus, the other part of himself. That’s the necessary home here, not the home-as-absolute-normality that TWoO seems to espouse, which is inevitably exclusive of queerness. And then we get that literal scene of Eurus waking up inside her bedroom from this nightmare scenario she has invented.

The original post also points out comparisons between John and the scarecrow and Sherlock and the tin man, but I think it’s more helpful to understand the theme linking the three friends of Dorothy (no pun intended ;) ). The idea here is that all of them are convinced that they lack something because of the way they are made, but of course they learn throughout the dream that they have it intrinsically. As I’ve mentioned above, Dorothy is where that logic falls down - it also doesn’t work as nicely thematically with the lion, because lions are not supposed to be cowardly - scarecrows, on the other hand, are supposed to be brainless, and tin men are supposed to lack hearts. The idea that you can go beyond the role assigned to you and still find the love you’re not allowed to have - that is peak EMP theory. Nothing better. And the fact that it ties back into the original dream movie - !!

I genuinely haven’t given this a huge amount of thought - these are cursory thoughts. I want to go and watch Wild at Heart and get back with more thoughts, because I’m pretty sure there will be a lot more parallels on overlaying TWoO onto a much darker story.

Anyway! @sagestreet​ @sarahthecoat​ @lukessense​ @therealsaintscully​ @possiblyimbiassed​ @ebaeschnbliah​ @raggedyblue​ @helloliriels​ if you’re interested!

[sarahthecoat]

the quiet man

I have been gradually re reading @ivyblossom 's the quiet man over the past several months or so, and tonight i am reading a bit of chapter 56. I think i can add the TSOT "knee grope" to my personal list of TQM references in S3.

[may-shepard]

Doyle’s The Parasite and s4

This little non-Sherlockian, paranormal gem, published in Harper’s Weekly starting in November 1894--that’s right, a little less than a year after Doyle published The Final Problem (November / December 1893)--deserves our attention. When @longsnowsmoon5 pointed it out a week or two ago, a few of us shouted about it a bit, but we didn’t really dig deep with it. Since then, I’ve re-read it twice, and boy howdy. 

In case you’re not familiar, here are some plot elements to whet your interest: 

a skeptical physiologist (Austin Gilroy) who allows himself to become a subject in a mesmerism / mind control experiment

a woman with mind control abilities (Miss Penclosa) who is generally unimpressive and walks with a crutch, but is surprisingly powerful

two people about whom Gilroy cares--his fiancée Agatha and his colleague, Charles Sadler--who are also both mesmerised (to offer some comfort to more tender readers of this meta, I read both Agatha and Charles as Sherlock equivalents when translated into the BBC Sherlock narrative)

obsession--specifically, Miss Penclosa’s desire to seduce Gilroy

supernatural mind control abilities that cause Gilroy to behave erratically, cause missing time, and, eventually, make him do things he would never otherwise do, some of them criminal

narrative bonus feature: the story is told from Gilroy’s perspective, in the form of his journal entries

(I recommend reading it at Gutenberg because there is much more to it of interest than I’ve been able to cover in this meta.)

Sound like it might, maybe, have some relevance to s4? I think it does, especially in terms of figuring out what the fuck is happening to both John and Sherlock. 

Reading s4 through the code of The Parasite may help explain Sherlock’s sudden propensity for intuition / premonition, and John’s erratic behaviour. Ultimately, including The Parasite as one of the many intertexts of s4 offers a great deal of support to readings like @jenna221b‘s theory about Mary manipulating John using TD12, which in turn adds support to the ever growing pile of evidence that Mary is a villain (thanks to @teaandqueerbaiting for that monster post). It also informs readings of Mary as femme fatale and the Woman in Green (femme fatale thread by @inevitably-johnlocked, Woman in Green addition by @deducingbbcsherlock​). Although I’m not sure mofftiss should ever be let off any hooks for s4, this reading might offer John fans (myself included) a much needed opportunity for a more positive reading of John in this series. 

Details under the cut.

Although the fandom as a whole has put its finger on a massive number of movie intertexts for s4, many of which seem to have unduly influenced this series, especially TFP, The Parasite is, to my mind, the standout literary intertext, for two reasons: 

First, it represents one of Doyle’s dips into the “strange tale” / paranormal / horror genre. Given the general bent of s4 away from the detective story genre and toward something uncanny / weird tales-ish / disturbing, The Parasite seems a more likely fit with s4 than the stories from which the series borrows its titles: The Final Problem, The Six Napoleons, and The Dying Detective. With s4′s final revelation of Eurus as the ultimate antagonist of the series (although I read that revelation as hallucinatory), it points very directly to the themes of The Parasite. 

Second, specific features and key plot points of The Parasite are echoed in series 4 character / plot / thematic developments. These serve as an interpretive aid in understanding what the hell, exactly, happened in s4, to very, very interesting effect.

A Study in Genre Hopping

One of the major disappointments / wtferies / cause of mass despair of TFP, and s4 in general, was the apparent sudden switch in genre. Sherlock Holmes, although in this incarnation an astoundingly sensitive fellow, has always been the centre of stories that stuck to a certain rational, materialist, logical ethos. If you can think clearly enough, and know the right facts, you can understand the world around you. Almost sort of comforting, right? 

Well. 

This series offered us a Sherlock transformed--into a really, really, kind, good man, which, YAY!--but also into a sort of intuitive soothsayer. The show even went out of its way to signal the turn away from Sherlock’s deductive methodologies, quite early, in this moment in TST, as Sherlock is deducing this client, and explaining how he’s arrived at his conclusions:

KINGSLEY: Sorry. I-I thought you’d done something clever. (Sherlock’s head turns towards him.) KINGSLEY: No, no. Ah, but now you’ve explained it, it’s dead simple, innit?

Excuse you, Kingsley.

Meanwhile, Sherlock is intuiting stuff all over the place, like in this moment in Mycroft’s office:

SHERLOCK (thoughtfully, looking off to one side): There’s something important about this. (For a few moments, the reflection and sound of dark blue rippling water seems to surround him.) SHERLOCK: I’m sure. Maybe it’s Moriarty. Maybe it’s not. But something’s coming. (The water disappears. Mycroft frowns and leans forward, folding his hands on the desk.) MYCROFT: Are you having a premonition, brother mine? (Sherlock blinks and looks towards Mycroft.) SHERLOCK: The world is woven from billions of lives, every strand crossing every other. What we call premonition is just movement of the web. If you could attenuate to every strand of quivering data, the future would be entirely calculable, as inevitable as mathematics.

This series emphasizes, from the beginning, the idea that we’re not in the land of deduction any more. Something else is at play, something that can only be arrived at through following intuition:

JOHN: Now what’s wrong? SHERLOCK: Not sure. I just ... ‘By the pricking of my thumbs.’ JOHN (scoffing sarcastically): Seriously? You?! SHERLOCK: Intuitions are not to be ignored, John. They represent data processed too fast for the conscious mind to comprehend.

We never quite seem to discover what these intuitions might be trying to say, not really. The Thatcher busts continue to give Sherlock the heebie jeebies. They lead him to AGRA and Ajay, and Mary’s past, a series of events that ends in Mary’s death (“Mary’s” “death”). We never really get a sense of why the Thatcher busts give Sherlock these intuitive hits, or why that water effect happens when he looks at them, or. (They are surely not geniune premonitions. They are something else.)

As beginnings go, I think that it could actually have been an interesting setup to something or other. One of the best things a writer can do to a character is take away their usual method of doing things and plunge them into an unknown territory. And Sherlock is clearly lost. Something is not right with him. He’s in some kind of altered state. But what does it all mean? 

If we follow the throughline offered to us on a textual level in s4, all of this means, apparently, nearly getting murdered in a truly weird hospital room, and ending up on Horror Movie Mashup Island for some hijinks with the plot device secret sister that literally no one cares about. Not exactly the payoff one might hope for, is it? 

In times of textual failure, it pays to follow the subtext, however, and, in this case, the intertext, because this is where The Parasite comes in--at least, I think it does. We are, at least, on the level of the text, in hinky jinky supernatural territory, from the beginning of the series--or at least, things are presented that way. (They are not really that way, but I’ll get to that in due time.) 

A Nefarious Plot

Back to plot of The Parasite. The story starts when the main character, Austin Gilroy, gets roped into attending a party thrown by Wilson, a wacky eccentric academic who is all wrapped up in pursuing the brand spanking new field of human psychology (ahhh...the state of science in the late 19th century). Wilson has decided to start by pursuing the most out there phenomena he can find: specifically, cases of extreme mesmerism. He thinks he’s found the perfect practitioner in Miss Penclosa, who humblebrags her way into Gilroy’s attention, and, essentially, challenges him to pick anyone in the room for her to influence, by way of demonstrating what she can do.

Miss Penclosa claims to have extraordinary powers of exertion over others--powers that depend, she asserts, not on anything known to science, but on her ability to extend her will into whomever she chooses. Gilroy picks his fiancée, Agatha Marden, believing that she’s strong of mind and unlikely to be influenced. Miss Penclosa puts her in a trance, and whispers in her ear--

--oopsie--

--Miss Penclosa whispers in Agatha’s ear, and all is well. 

Until the next morning, when Agatha turns up at Gilroy’s house and tells him their engagement is over. She offers no further explanation, simply assures him that they’re finished, and she leaves. 

Gilroy discovers it’s all part of the demonstration; half an hour later, Agatha doesn’t remember breaking up with him, and the engagement is still on. But, in an excessively creepy moment, Gilroy asks Miss Penclosa if Agatha would have killed him if she’d programmed her to, and Miss Penclosa agrees, yes, she would. 

In fact, Miss Penclosa affirms that she has only scratched the surface of revealing her abilities. She has “further powers.” He, of course, wants to know more. She replies:

"I shall be only too happy to tell you any thing you wish to know. Let me see; what was it you asked me? Oh, about the further powers. Professor Wilson won't believe in them, but they are quite true all the same. For example, it is possible for an operator to gain complete command over his subject— presuming that the latter is a good one. Without any previous suggestion he may make him do whatever he likes."

"Without the subject's knowledge?"

"That depends. If the force were strongly exerted, he would know no more about it than Miss Marden did when she came round and frightened you so. Or, if the influence was less powerful, he might be conscious of what he was doing, but be quite unable to prevent himself from doing it."

"Would he have lost his own will power, then?"

"It would be over-ridden by another stronger one."

"Have you ever exercised this power yourself?"

"Several times."

This sort of wildly successful, wide-ranging mind control, is, of course, familiar from TFP:

GOVERNOR: Everyone we sent in there; it-it’s hard to describe. (John turns as the governor continues.) GOVERNOR: It’s ... it’s like she ...

MYCROFT: ... recruited them.

SO! So far we’ve got mind control powers, people under the influence of mind control powers, and those same people doing things they would never normally do. It’s enough of a connection, especially with Murder Mind Control Island TFP, to argue that The Parasite is at work in s4. BUT GUESS WHAT? IT GETS BETTER, IN THE SENSE OF MUCH MORE SCREAMINGLY RELEVANT.

It gets better because Gilroy’s narration, through his journal entries, in addition to some implications of missing days / time fuckery throughout the story, offers a first person description of what it’s like to be under the influence of Miss Penclosa. He describes not being able to help himself, but, once she decides to use her mojo as a tool of seduction, Gilroy holds hands with her, and spends time talking about how boring Agatha is, in comparison with Miss Penclosa. He tries to resist, and Miss Penclosa’s influence only deepens. He decides that, at all costs, he’ll never go anywhere near her again. And yet, when the evening rolls around and their usual meeting time comes, he finds himself simply and irresistibly drawn to her. 

So, he locks himself in his room and slides the key under the door. When the moment for his standing appointment comes, he finds himself on the floor, trying to reach the key with a quill pen. This is how he describes what he feels:

It was all wonderfully clear, and yet disassociated from the rest of my life, as the incidents of even the most vivid dream might be. A peculiar double consciousness possessed me. There was the predominant alien will, which was bent upon drawing me to the side of its owner, and there was the feebler protesting personality, which I recognized as being myself, tugging feebly at the overmastering impulse as a led terrier might at its chain. 

(Gilroy compares himself to a dog, and others compare him to a dog, so many times, I lost track.)

Most striking of all about The Parasite is what happens when Gilroy confronts Miss Penclosa, telling her that he finds her disgusting:

The very sight of you and the sound of your voice fill me with horror and disgust. The thought of you is repulsive. That is how I feel toward you, and if it pleases you by your tricks to draw me again to your side as you have done tonight, you will at least, I should think, have little satisfaction in trying to make a lover out of a man who has told you his real opinion of you. You may put what words you will into my mouth, but you cannot help remembering--

I stopped, for the woman’s head had fallen back, and she had fainted. 

Mary is no fainter (I mean, idk, maybe faking your death is a type of fainting), but John certainly makes a move toward rejecting her in Morocco:

MARY: I always liked ‘Mary.’

JOHN (smiling): Yeah, me too.

JOHN: I used to.

Gilroy’s repudiation of Miss Penclosa triggers an endgame, in which she causes him to do increasingly terrible (and out of character) things that threaten to ruin his life. She goes after his career first, making him interrupt his own lectures at the university with gibberish. He becomes a laughingstock--people start attending his lectures to see what bizarre things he’s going to say next. 

The university suspends Gilroy’s lectures, deciding that he’s not mentally fit to run classes, effectively taking his career away from him. 

Has something similar happened to John? It’s certainly implied in TLD:

NURSE CORNISH: You involved much? JOHN: Sorry? NURSE CORNISH: Um, with Mr Holmes – Sherlock and all his cases?

JOHN: Uh, yeah. I’m John Watson. NURSE CORNISH (looking as if that means nothing to her): Okay. JOHN: Doctor Watson.

NURSE CORNISH: I love his blog, don’t you? JOHN: His blog?

...

JOHN (interrupting): It’s my blog.

SHERLOCK: It is. He writes the blog. NURSE CORNISH (to John): It’s yours? JOHN: Yes.

NURSE CORNISH: You write Sherlock’s blog? JOHN: Yes.

NURSE CORNISH: It’s ... gone downhill a little bit, hasn’t it?

I can’t think what the hell would fuel this exchange, unless the blog has genuinely gone downhill (you guys, I miss the blog), or Nurse Cornish is in on the whole gaslighting / manipulation / mind control deal (extremely possible, as implied by her position in front of a big hairy grinning yikes worthy head shot of Culverton Smith). Since the blog has stopped, or whatever is actually (”actually”) happening, it’s impossible to check and see if the blog really has gone downhill. If we take The Parasite as an intertext, however, we could certainly imagine John’s writings, and his sense of self, deteriorating as a result of the forces that are manipulating him. 

Things take a turn for the extremely disturbing when Gilroy thinks he has found an ally in Charles Sadler, a friend and colleague. [I’ll just say here that this is the bit that convinced me that Mofftiss are cribbing off The Parasite, and, if anything in this meta has a trigger warning, the next bit should, for physical violence on par with the morgue scene, or, one might say, exactly like the morgue scene.]  Charles Sadler has also been under the influence of Miss Penclosa, albeit to a lesser degree. Gilroy plans to talk to Sadler after they spend an evening together, at a university function, where Gilroy goes to prove that he hasn’t completely lost his sanity. Miss Penclosa is there, watching both of them from the sidelines. She knows that Sadler might support Gilroy. Gilroy narrates:

To-night is the university ball, and I must go. God knows I never felt less in the humor for festivity, but I must not have it said that I am unfit to appear in public. If I am seen there, and have speech with some of the elders of the university it will go a long way toward showing them that it would be unjust to take my chair away from me.

10 P. M. I have been to the ball. Charles Sadler and I went together, but I have come away before him. I shall wait up for him, however, for, indeed, I fear to go to sleep these nights. He is a cheery, practical fellow, and a chat with him will steady my nerves. On the whole, the evening was a great success. I talked to every one who has influence, and I think that I made them realize that my chair is not vacant quite yet. The creature was at the ball—unable to dance, of course, but sitting with Mrs. Wilson. Again and again her eyes rested upon me. They were almost the last things I saw before I left the room. Once, as I sat sideways to her, I watched her, and saw that her gaze was following some one else. It was Sadler, who was dancing at the time with the second Miss Thurston. To judge by her expression, it is well for him that he is not in her grip as I am. He does not know the escape he has had. I think I hear his step in the street now, and I will go down and let him in. If he will—

Gilroy wakes up the next morning, having broken off his journal entry with no memory of doing so, only to find that his hand is “greatly swollen” for some reason he can’t recall.

JOHN: I really hit him, Greg.

JOHN: Hit him hard.

Gilroy goes to Charles Sadler’s rooms, and is shocked by what he finds there:

I went to Sadler and found him, to my surprise, in bed. As I entered he sat up and turned a face toward me which sickened me as I looked at it.

"Why, Sadler, what has happened?" I cried, but my heart turned cold as I said it.

"Gilroy," he answered, mumbling with his swollen lips, "I have for some weeks been under the impression that you are a madman. Now I know it, and that you are a dangerous one as well. If it were not that I am unwilling to make a scandal in the college, you would now be in the hands of the police."

"Do you mean——" I cried.

"I mean that as I opened the door last night you rushed out upon me, struck me with both your fists in the face, knocked me down, kicked me furiously in the side, and left me lying almost unconscious in the street. Look at your own hand bearing witness against you."

I won’t screencap the morgue beating, because it’s traumatised people more than enough, but I was really, really struck by the identical quality of the choreography of what Gilroy does to Sadler, set against what John does to Sherlock. 

John Watson, who wonders why everything is always his fault in HLV, may not in fact be to blame for these terrible actions, if we follow The Parasite intertext. If he is being manipulated, if Mary is in his head the same way that Miss Penclosa is in Gilroy’s, then it may be that John has been in some way compelled to hurt the one person who matters most to him. 

The story of The Parasite progresses quickly from Gilroy’s attack on Charles Sadler. Miss Penclosa takes Gilroy over once more, and tries to force him to throw a bottle of vitriol (sulfuric acid) in Agatha’s face. Gilroy comes awake in Agatha’s room, vitriol in hand, and realises that the influence has lifted. It turns out that Miss Penclosa is dead--having tried to force him to do something so absolutely awful to Gilroy’s beloved, Miss Penclosa has exerted too much of her will / mojo / magical effort-stuff, and it’s killed her. Love conquers all? Ish? In any case, Gilroy and Agatha (and Charles Sadler too, I suppose) are free.

Implications for s4

Some free association style thoughts:

The Mary John sees in his mind may or may not be actual Mary (I really *love* the idea that Mary is still lurking around both John and Sherlock throughout TLD); she is, at least, the trace of an undue and unnatural influence that Mary has on him. 

It’s possible that by the time we get to John’s confession scene in 221B at the end of TLD, he has, somehow, through the power of his will, transformed this mental image into something genuinely benevolent / representative of what he in fact wants--like Gilroy, exerting his own will to drain the spectre of Mary’s influence. However, it’s also possible that there are two Marys--the trace of the Mary that is trying to destroy John (and through him, Sherlock) and the image of Mary that John has made into something better.

This reading is suggested by the appearance of “scary Mary” in the Childrens Ward scene in TLD (balancing the frame behind John with Nurse Cornish--I SEE YOU VILLAIN) 

with “angelic / Jiminy Cricket” Mary, who sits in front of him:

(I will just add, once you become aware of Scary Mary in this scene, it is NOT OKAY to watch it, it’s super creepshow.)

Obviously I wouldn’t argue for a magical mind mojo influence deal in s4. We don’t need to presume anything supernatural, because the narrative gives us a perfectly good mind control mechanism in TD12. Like others have argued, Mary could have been dosing John for as long as the narrative suits. Sherlock may or may not have been dosed by her as well--evidence suggests there may be other people involved. 

I personally have always favoured the idea of Mary as henchwoman (because of her coding as Moran in HLV / The Empty House scene), rather than as main supervillain, although I don’t much care either way--she bad. I like the idea of Eurus as Moriarty sib, orchestrating John’s deterioration through Mary, even as Sherlock is similarly fucked with. The plan is to tear John and Sherlock apart, and it very nearly works, too. 

As for Sherlock himself, he may have been receiving his “treatments” by another hand (Wiggins? I know...say it ain’t so...but Wiggins).

.

WIGGINS: Is ‘cup of tea’ code?

...

SHERLOCK: Stop talking. It makes me aware of your existence. 

(If John talks to not-there / sometimes-there Mary, does Sherlock talk to not-there / sometimes-there Wiggins, who shows up from time to time to assure that Sherlock is fully dosed?)

So. What looks like genre-hopping, a sudden embrace of nonsense, and serious gaps in both plot and storytelling technique from the beginning of TST, may simply be the artifacts of memories erased, replaced, manipulated, and controlled. If Mary can make John hallucinate her, then she or whoever she’s working with can also, presumably, make Sherlock think he’s having a premonition / intuitive hit, when he is, in fact, trying to process memories that have been taken from him, or ideas that have been planted. Since TST is probably Mary’s exit plan--wild speculation here--could it be that she needed to make sure Sherlock found the breadcrumb trail of the Thatcher statues that would lead to her “death,” in order to make her exit plan work? 

Similarly, many of the qualities of TFP could be the legacy of mind control on John’s hallucinating, dying mind after he is shot at the end of TLD. Sister X-Man’s uncanny abilities could be the explanation invented by the dreamer / John for the anomalies he has been encountering in his waking life. Unable to process or understand what has happened, even his own actions, and unable to deal with the idea that Mary is at the root of his personal torment, he ascribes executive function in the prison in his mind to a madwoman who can make people do whatever she wants, and who is a mishmash of his own impulses and desires, and the influence he’s been under. The events of TFP are John’s mind offering a partial explanation of a probable truth that has only barely leaked through the text of s4. 

So, what really happened in s4?

Tentatively, I think that the real plot of s4 concerns Mary's failure to take John away from Sherlock, which was, I would argue, always her assignment. Sherlock is too stalwart, too loyal--he even befriends the woman sent to destroy him. Because of her failure, Mary is now withdrawn from the field via a faked death, leaving maximum carnage in her wake by manipulating John to behave in a totally self- and Sherlock-destructive way. This plan also fails to ruin John and Sherlock, because they do the unexpected--John allows himself to be forgiven, and Sherlock forgives. At the end of TLD, they’re closer than ever.

The only thing left is for John to die. It’s the last in a series of plans to burn the heart out of Sherlock. Enter TFP--the extended Garridebs moment--and the cliffhanger of the century.

Tagging @devoursjohnlock and @shamelessmash because look! I finally posted this.

[hellframe]

To be serious, there's nothing too specific. Tartt portrayed Francis as a dandy, and it's just a coincidence that I had erratic interest in dandyism some time ago — for fun, it was nothing special, tbh.

And I've got curious about things in TSH that I couldn't understand, so I did some research.

There's an article in which Tartt was named 'a privately idiosyncratic T. S. Eliot freak' (J. Kaplan, 'Smart Tartt'). I wanted to know why, and how this Eliot's frame could help to interpret the novel. I found a lot of things in TSH that somehow recall Eliot's biography, studies, works, poems. A plenty of things, if you know what to look at.

It's hard to decide what information is relevant for TSH and what is not, but if Tartt wrote the novel for about 8-9 years, she did a lot of reading, I guess.

The 'Eliot frame' sometimes helps: if Eliot wrote about something, Tartt as his 'freak' definitely knew about it. Eliot liked Sherlock Holmes stories, and he wrote criticism on Baudelaire. Mark Twain is here because he is from Missouri, like Eliot and Henry Winter, and Eliot wrote an introduction to Huckleberry Finn.

These 'connections' must be something called intertextual analysis, or whatever. But I am just a little cat, and my little paws can't do serious studies.

Btw, there was a fine study by F. Pauw — "If on a winter's night a reveller": the classical intertext in Donna Tartt's The Secret History.

He gave a short account of references to Eliot in the novel:

But there's much more, and I haven't found anything about Eliot's intertext in TSH on web. So I make some trivial observations, keeping in mind that TSH needs a commentary, like Joyce's Ulysses.

I should say, there's an amazing cycle of lectures on YouTube 'The works of T. S. Eliot' by Victor Strandberg. It made me reconsider the way of reading TSH.

(Idk what's the problem with comments, it's not me it's tumblr.)

Francis Abernathy: fake pince-nez

I was wondering where Francis ‘borrowed’ this accessory, so let there be some observations.

First of all, there’s a sassy definition of a typical dandy by Paul de Saint-Victor (La Presse, 21 August 1859):

'Black Prince of Elegance, the demigod of boredom who looked at the world with an eye as glassy as his pince-nez, suffering because his disarranged cravat had a crease, like ancient Sybarite who suffered because his rose was crushed.'

Then I thought that red hair combined with pince-nez reminds of Ezra Pound, known for his dandyish style and some other unpleasant things.

[Considering that Henry Winter could be read as a projection of T. S. Eliot, I think it's logical to compare Francis to Eliot's friend Pound, who edited The Waste Land, btw.]

Pince-nez also wore Mark Twain, another elegant redhead. Speaking of Twain, he left a description of one notable encounter in his Autobiography (vol. 2, 1924):

'Last night I was at a large dinner party at Norman Hapgood's palace uptown, and a very long and very slender gentleman was introduced to me — a gentleman with a fine, alert, and intellectual face, with a becoming gold pince-nez on his nose and clothed in an evening costume which was perfect from the broad spread of immaculate bosom to the rosetted slippers on his feet. His gait, his bows, and his intonations were those of an English gentleman, and I took him for an earl.'

Dapper-looking, tall, thin young gentleman in pince-nez, giving an impression of English aristocracy at uptown dinner parties. Doesn’t it sound like Francis?

Another possible source is 'The Adventure of the Golden Pince-Nez', one of Sherlock Holmes short stories. This pince-nez belongs to a refined and well-dressed lady, who committed an accidental murder, and then committed a suicide.

Eventually, when I was reading a review on Baudelaire’s last oeuvre, among his notes about Belgium I discovered a curious fact: Baudelaire complained that Belgians sold pince-nez with plain glass as a fashion accessory.

So I put my nose into that piece of prejudiced decadent writing:

'The pince-nez, with its cord, perched on the nose. A multitude of vitreous eyes, even among the officers. An optician told me that the majority of pince-nez that sells are clear glass. Thus this national pince-nez craze is nothing more than a pathetic effort to appear elegant and yet one more sign of the spirit of imitation and conformity.'

Late Fragments: Flares, My Heart Laid Bare, Prose Poems, Belgium Disrobed, trans. by Richard Sieburth (p. 301)

Francis bought his phony pince-nez in Belgium. That's it.

[itsalways2017]

My favourite intertext (?) in Sherlock is that they based TRF on Wilde’s trial, therefore making Sherlock a Wilde mirror. Like can you be any LESS obvious?

[msclaritea]

~Sherlock's Last Shot~

“And it shall come to pass, when I bring a cloud over the earth, that the bow shall be seen in the cloud.“ Genesis 9-14

In The Blind Banker, as Sherlock is going through the book collections of the Black Lotus victims, he pauses at this passage in the bible. What does it mean? Something quite beautiful about rainbows.

“In this heaven-bow, there are many wonders: first, the beautiful shape and various colors; in which respect Plato thinks the poets feign Iris, or the rainbow, to be the daughter of Thaumas, or admiration. The waterish colors therein signify (say some) the former overthrow of the world by water. The fiery colours, the future judgment of the world by fire. The green, that present grace of freedom from both, by virtue of God’s covenant, whereof this bow is a sign.”

“That (Rain)bow in the clouds is the sign of God’s promise that whatever else God does to seek our restoration, destruction is off the table.”

A Rainbow follows Sherlock & John, TEH

After the great flood, God gives his promise of peace in the form of a covenant; His Vow. Covenant agreements were often remembered using some kind of visual sign or symbol “In the Genesis verse, God explained that the sign of this particular covenant would be His Bow, set in the clouds. This evokes the idea of a warrior setting his weapon aside once the battle is over and the time has come for peace.” The sign of this covenant, God’s bow in the clouds, is precisely the bow of battle. Ancient depictions of a deity armed with bow and arrow are not unusual. To hang up one’s bow is to retire from battle. .

The story title, His Last Bow was inspired by the Preface to The Reverberator , by Henry James, where he uses the bow as metaphor in the art of writing…how the writer conducts a sort of mental war with his materials, and he must approach his work like that of a soldier. “A soldier/writer may have need, in case of ‘anecdotic grace does breakdown’ of another string, or second to my bow.”

By John V. Hennessy in Sherlock Holmes: A Secret History

The symbol of the Rainbow has carried the dual distinction of a connection to Sun and Rain. Fire and Water (TAB/S4 Parallel)

Given all of this, a different interpretation of the title of His Last Bow is prompted. It is not Bow, as in, ‘to bow’, but as in His Last Shot.

ADDITIONS UNDER THE CUT

Read the synopsis to The Reverberator, to see where Arthur Conan Doyle got his idea for His Last Bow. Plots with themes including scheming nobility and foreigners, marrying for dark motives were favorite themes of his. Also, naming women in his stories after flowers. Here is the story of Henry James, and the lengths his family went to hide his Queerness. He can be added to the list of homosexual men/writers, who were a great influence on Sir Doyle. An interesting write-up about an H.J. expert, who uses the author's own work, to form a working profile of the man, shows that..."Mr. Edel's biographic scenario - darkly visible in James's fiction, he thinks - begins with a primal drama created by a crippled father, a dominant mother and a formidable elder brother, William, with whom the novelist was to be locked in a contest that lasted for life." Apparently, their younger sister, Alice was envious of her two brothers.           You meet William as Colonel Sir James Damery, in The Illustrious Client.

"Sharp to the half-hour, Colonel Sir James Damery was announced. It is hardly necessary to describe him, for many will remember that large, bluff, honest personality, that broad, clean-shaven face, and, above all, that pleasant, mellow voice. Frankness shone from his gray Irish eyes, and good humour played round his mobile, smiling lips. His lucent top-hat, his dark frock-coat, indeed, every detail, from the pearl pin in the black satin cravat to the lavender spats over the varnished shoes, spoke of the meticulous care in dress for which he was famous. The big, masterful aristocrat dominated the little room."

Special mention: The Rainbow across Mary's Chest from @johnlockstars

[mid0nz-archive]

The Cannibal & the Consulting Criminal: How Silence and Sherlock Taught Me to Read

(I’m writing a series of autobiographical essays. This meta is a messy. messy warm up…)  

PART I:  TSotL The Odd Flash of Contextual Intelligence

Know your intertexts (and the limits of their influence)

I’ve spent a LOT of time writing about the influence of Harris on Mark Gatiss in particular. We have Harris to thank for Sherlock’s mind palace for starters. Moriarty and Dr. Lecter share many traits. Then again so do the psychiatrist and Sherlock. I’ll come back to these obvious connections between Sherlock and TSotL in a later part of this meta. (The connections are actually quite superficial.) For now I want to return to my first obsession: the genius cannibal who taught me how to read and the fandom that saved me from him.

Do your research.

Thomas Harris, author of The Silence of the Lambs, choses every word with great care. How many people, for example, do you know called Hannibal? Clarice is more common I suppose, but it’s certainly not a run-of-the-mill monicker. While starlings are the most common of birds have you ever met someone with that surname? Have you ever met a Lecter?  What if I told you there is an extremely obscure historical figure called Hannibal the Starling? (You’ll find the reference in Smith’s Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology if you seek.) Would you think that Harris must have heard of that man? Possibly. Possibly. If I told you that Harris makes most of his characters’ names up– that they sound plausible enough, but unless you’re an everyman like a Jack Crawford or a Will Graham you’re a Francis Dolarhyde or an Ardelia Mapp.

Ardelia Mapp? In the novel Ardelia is Clarice Starling’s roommate at the FBI academy. When exams roll around and Clarice has been too busy hunting Buffalo Bill to read her textbooks, it’s Ardelia who makes sure that Clarice knows all about search and seizures. Adelia Mapp. Ardeila Mapp. What kind of name is that? It helps if we cram along with Clarice:

Mapp v. Ohio, 367 U.S. 643 (1961), was a landmark case in criminal procedure, in which the United States Supreme Court decided that evidence obtained in violation of the Fourth Amendment, which protects against “unreasonable searches and seizures”, may not be used in criminal prosecutions in state [or] federal courts. (x)

Hey Thomas Harris!

Recognize when there’s a joke and you’re not getting it.

Thomas Harris amuses himself with language. Clarice comes from the Latin root clar and the words related to pertain to brilliance and light and the illustrative. And Lecter? So many people have tried to trace its origins but all becomes clear when you think about its etymology. In Latin lector means reader.

Clarice’s boss, Jack Crawford, likes to quote impressive sounding things out of context. Dr. Lecter mocks him for picking and choosing passages of the Meditations of the Roman Emperor, Stoic philosopher, and persecutor of Christians, Marcus Aurelius.

“I’ve read the cases, Clarice, have you? Everything you need to know to find him is right there [in the case files], if you’re paying attention. Even Inspector Emeritus, Crawford should have figured it out. Incidentally, did you read Crawford’s stupefying speech last year to the National Police academy? Spouting Marcus Aurelius on duty and honor and fortitude— we’ll see what kind of a Stoic Crawford is when Bella [his wife] bites the big one. He copies his philosophy out of Bartlett’s Familiar, I think. If he understood Marcus Aurelius, he might solve this case.”   “Tell me how.”   “When you show the odd flash of contextual intelligence, I forget your generation can’t read, Clarice. The Emperor councils simplicity. First principles. Of each particular thing, ask: What is it in itself, in its own constitution? What is its causal nature?”   “That doesn’t mean anything to me.”   “What does he do, the man you want?”

I could go on and on about how Harris allows Dr. Lecter to reference Stoicism and all kinds of other ideas for his own amusement. I say amusement because the reader need not understand Dr. Lecter’s jokes to enjoy Harris’ books. Clarice doesn’t and she doesn’t pretend to. Oh how Dr. Lecter fancies his student! I could go on and on because the entire fucking book is a compendium of in-jokes. That in itself is Stoic food for thought. Diogenes Laertius recounts a Stoic idea that Harris likes to chew on.

“Some appearances are expert (technikai), others are inexpert; at any rate a picture is observed differently by an expert and the inexpert person.”

Julia Annas explains:

A non-expert will just see figures; the expert will see figures that represent gods.  The expert is right— there really is that significance- and the non-expert is missing something. What is more surprising to us is the claim that the appearance is itself “expert.” The expert is not seeing anything that is not there for the ignoramus to see.  It is the fault of the ignoramus that he fails to see what is to be seen, because he fails to understand the content of what is presents to him. (82) - Hellenistic Philosophy of Mind by Julia Annas

Lecter, the consummate reader, is the expert. Clarice, who’s not more than one generation from the mines, is the ignoramus.  Yet she shows the odd flash of contextual intelligence.

Discern clues from NOISE.

Though their relationship was weird, close, and lasting Clarice would never realize that Dr. Lecter gave her everything she needed to know to catch Buffalo Bill the first time they met!

On that fateful day, with instructions from Jack Crawford to note anything and everything she sees, Clarice shows enough intelligence to asks Dr. Lecter about the drawings in his cell. Dr. Lecter replies:

It’s Florence. That’s the Palazzo Vecchio and the Duomo, seen from the Belvedere. Do you know Florence?“

If Clarice were prepared "to read” Dr. Lecter’s work, she might have understood the significance of the image. She’s the very model of the Stoic ignoramus.

Clarice finds Buffalo Bill/Jame Gumb by recognizing his personal acquaintance with the first victim he skinned, Fredrica Bimmel. They both lived in Belvedere, Ohio where Clarice finds Gumb while Crawford’s teams go all SWAT on John Grant’s last known address. We find out later in the novel that Dr. Lecter knew Gumb lived in Belvedere, Ohio.  Perhaps he was musing on the facts of the case while composing his sketches.

Jack Crawford, of all people, should have noticed the name “Belvedere” and made the connection.  His dying wife’s name is Phyllis but he’s called her Bella for most of their entire relationship. Phyllis and Jack were both stationed in Italy and during one of their outings, a man called Phyllis “Bella,” or beauty.  Bella is the feminine form; “bel” is the masculine form, as in bel vedere, or beautiful view.  We learn later that Clarice has to work hard to trick herself into seeing any beauty in Belvedere, Ohio.  

Now you’ve got the facts. Theorize with them.

There is another explanation as to why Crawford might have missed the clue in Dr. Lecter’s drawing from Clarice’s notes.  Clarice does not know Italian. How would she have written the sketch’s title in her report? Dr. Lecter does not say, when she asks about the sketch, that is is the Old Plaza and the Dome seen from the Belvedere (pronounced in English, be-vuh-deer as in Belvedere, Ohio). Dr. Lecter says all the proper names in Italian except “Florence.” Florence is the English name for the city Italians call Firenze.  Clarice’s ear would catch “Florence” and it may be that her report stated that the sketch was of Florence, but no further details.  She doesn’t, after all, ask Dr. Lecter how to spell the names of the places with which she is unfamiliar.  Crawford, reading a reasonably detailed report from Clarice, might have only noted that Dr. Lecter was sketching Florence– enough detail for a report if you don’t know what you’re looking at.  Clarice, while an ignoramus in the Stoic sense, shows potential.  Dr. Lecter is polite when he surmises that she is “innocent of the Gospel of St. John.” He calls her innocent, not ignorant.  She’s simply not an expert in iconography. She sees all she can see in the image.  Crawford, however, is experienced enough with Dr. Lecter to know how important images are to him.  Will Graham captured Dr. Lecter in Red Dragon by recognizing that one of his victims was posed in a tableau of a Wound Man in one of Dr. Lecter’s books.  Graham was an expert. We can’t be sure from simply reading the text that Dr. Lecter isn’t making the epiphany of “Belvedere” especially difficult to decode even if Clarice were to have written a verbatim transcript of their discussion. In speech Dr. Lecter may be pronouncing the proper names as an American would, or, alternately, with an Italian accent.  He could be pronouncing the incidental proper names (Palazzo Vecchio and the Duomo) in an Italian accent and “Belvedere” in an American accent to dare Clarice and Jack to take notice. Or, he could be pronouncing all the names in an Italian accent, a fact could be lost in translation between Clarice, innocent of Italian, and Crawford, who knows just enough to have had an epiphany. Each scenario is possible and each reveals a slightly different interpretation of Dr. Lecter’s motives. If we take Thomas Harris himself as the final authority, in the audiobook Harris reads Dr. Lecter’s part. Harris says all proper nouns including “Belvedere” with an Italian accent (albeit with a Mississippi drawl.)

Yeah ok SO WHAT?! And what about Sherlock?!

In Part II I’ll talk about TSotL as an intertext to Sherlock and the limits of this influence. I’ll compare Dr. Lecter’s method of reading to James Moriarty’s. I’ll talk about why & how I crawled out of the cannibal’s skull and into the consulting criminal’s and where I am going next… Or I just might try to revamp this to make more sense. I dunno…

[sarahthecoat]

ooh, interesting!

[weirdletter]

No Ghosts Need Apply: Gothic influences in criminal science, the detective and Doyle’s Holmesian Canon, by Camilla Del Grazia, Edward Everett Root Publishers, 2020. Info: eerpublishing.com.

This innovative new work highlights how the presence of Gothic elements in the Holmesian Canon problematizes the normative action of the detective. It examines the anxieties which accompanied the changing universe of Victorian and Edwardian society in the context of the development of criminal science. Recently the figure of Sherlock Holmes has been the object of countless re-writings, re-interpretations, and adaptations in a vast array of media including literature, graphic novels, TV series, and cinematic renditions. The vast majority of these adaptations tend to present the detective and his adventures as the triumph of rationality and of the scientific method over the disruptive forces of crime, but neglecting to take into account the dreadful considerations that these forces bring to light. Sherlock Holmes is generally portrayed as a beacon of rationality, the scientific detective par excellence whose logic solutions actively safeguard late Victorian and Edwardian society and its collective unconscious. His empirical approach to the mysteries he is called to solve usually sparks comparisons with thinkers like Tyndall, Huxley or Spencer, thus firmly encapsulating him in the positivist milieu of the time. Buried just beneath this normalizing façade, however, lies a complex relationship with the Gothic tradition and its tropes, an intertext which Doyle knowingly plays upon while openly disavowing it. The problematic distinction between “serious” realistic literature and the supernatural dates back to the dialectic between novel and romance, and was brought to the forefront during the Romantic age, especially in the context of the rise of the Gothic novel. Yet Gothic literature and its later incarnations, the Sensation novel and the fin de siècle horror, allowed for an unparalleled degree of freedom in tackling repressed anxieties in a variety of issues, ranging from heredity in all its connotations, to social mobility, to space and colonization. A perceptive writer, Doyle immediately recognised the potential of Gothic echoes in articulating disquiets produced by a multiplicity of factors: from scientific and technologic development and the uncanny possibilities they engendered, to the Imperial enterprise and the fear of contagion and reverse colonization, to the emergence of disruptive forces within the Victorian family and society, the ultimate objects of the detective’s protection. To let the detective’s rational light shine, Doyle summoned a particularly deep darkness: one that even Holmes’ brilliant solutions struggle to dispel. Camilla Del Grazia provides a broad overview of the rise of the Gothic novel, introducing the debate around the realist novel and romances, with particular focus on the critical condemnation of “irrational” elements. Central features of classic Gothic novels are considered in relation to the works of Horace Walpole, Anne Radcliffe, Clara Reeve, and Matthew Lewis. Particular attention is paid to specific aspects of the Gothic novel. Specifically its uncanny use of the past and of remote spaces as instruments of suppression, and the characterization of its three main figures: the hero, the persecuted maiden, and the tyrannical villain. The work also investigates the evolution of the Gothic genre from its outset to its fin de siècle articulations. The author initially examines its reception after 1790 and the parodic adaptations that it engendered, and provides specific insight into Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey and Thomas Love Peacock’s Nightmare Abbey. Del Grazia considers the evolution of Gothic tropes in early Victorian literature, and their application in the novels of Charles Dickens and Charlotte and Emily Brontë. She then focuses on their reinterpretation in the short stories of Edgar Allan Poe. The work also offers a theoretical overview of the complex scenery of fin de siècle English literature, including an account of the Victorian Gothic novels of Robert Louis Stevenson, Oscar Wilde and Bram Stoker, and  their profound impact on the cultural milieu of the end of the century. Sensation novels are considered as the joining link between the Gothic genre and detective fiction, with specific reference to the novels of Wilkie Collins, and his depiction of female confinement as well as private detection. To provide an exhaustive introduction to the creation of the character of Sherlock Holmes, an examination of first instances of crime fiction is then provided, by comparing the works of Emile Gaboriau, Edgar Allan Poe, Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens and the detective figures that they shaped. The second section of the present work is concerned with the identification of Gothic tropes in the Holmesian Canon, and their articulation in different categories according to their ramifications and sphere of action. The author specifically examines the uncanny consequences of the reception of new technologies and scientific discoveries on Victorian culture and social order, analyzing instances of degeneration, regression and atavism in Holmes’ cases, and delineating a Sherlockian “criminal type”. The concept of melancholy and its reinterpretation in light of the theorizations of criminal anthropology is then applied to the figure of the “great detective”, in order to demonstrate how his powerful normalizing influence is achieved at the cost of his exclusion from society. Lastly, Victorian society is analysed, with a focus on the climate of social tension that preceded the outbreak of the First World War. Specifically, the Gothic elements of intrigue and secret societies are analyzed in their Holmesian rewriting, while the strictly Victorian themes of the integrity of family and of the evolution of female identity are considered in their problematic development.

[may-shepard]

@marcespot tags are the glitchiest! Also I started watching The Perfume of the Lady in Black and holy crap you are right about the pervasiveness of water. Also aksjdhjajjssndhk that giallo aesthetic where their lips are forming English words but somehow it's still badly dubbed, I love that so much, talk about v-effekt.

[garkgatiss]

“I take it you’re still abroad”. My reading of this is pretty out there. I interpret London as being “Home”, and “Home” represents johnlock. This is why in TAB it was ‘impertinent’ and ‘offensive’ to suggest they elope, because London is home and that’s where they should be married. To elope would essentially be being exiled for being who you are. Plus, in TFP we have lots of mentions that the girl on the plane was going ‘Home’. That equates ‘home’ to the ‘landing’ right there. I also think being ‘abroad’ represents the sherlock holmes stories being exported and changed and adapted in ways that betrayed the heart of the stories. So I think home=London=johnlock, and so abroad = no johnlock yet. Sherlock’s response in the intercepted transmission is basically “well, obviously”.

@tjlcisthenewsexy​ DUDE. I don’t think this is out there at all, this actually converges perfectly with my own interpretation of how they’ve equated Sherlock with England, with the goal of ultimately correcting this pervasive and homophobic idea that it’s an attack on their own national identity to make Sherlock Holmes gay.

This idea pops up in all SORTS of intertexts, particularly in From Russia With Love, where the Russians are basically trying to “destroy the English spirit” i.e. “the myth of Sherlock Holmes” by killing and manufacturing a scandal to permanently discredit James Bond. Not a chapter later, the guys who get assigned this hit job are bitching and moaning about how much Bond loves women, because if he were a homosexual like the last guy, the reputation-destroying scandal would be ready-made. There’s some good excerpts in the big Bond meta (x). I am so so sure that the way The Vesuvius Club is set up, where Lucifer Box is presented as into women from the beginning but revealed midway through to be also into men, is to spite one specific line from FRWL where the guy is reading Bond’s file that goes: “Weakness for women (therefore not homosexual, thought Kronsteen).” Like I cannot even begin to fathom how much FRWL must irritate Mark Gatiss, thematically it’s SO wrong about so many things.

But this specific idea is ALL over the damn place, and dates back even to Doyle’s era, where in Ireland, Irish agitators were basically outing/accusing homosexual British government officials in order to destabilize British rule there. There’s a whole book chapter titled: "The Victorian Age: The Rhetorical Conflation of Homosexuality and Poor Government in the Cleveland Street and Dublin Castle Scandals." It’s established that Sherlock Holmes = Strengthens England just as solidly as Gay = Weakens England, which means the show has to grapple with those ideas, address them over the course of their ‘argument’, in order to make a compelling point about Sherlock Holmes, gay man and national hero.

So in the show, we get things like Sherlock preventing an actual Guy Fawkes-esque terrorist attack on Parliament, Mycroft as a representation of Sherlock’s superego (i.e. “the British government”), the (gay) tea set with the silhouette of the British Isles on it, things like:

SHERLOCK: I’m not the Commonwealth.

JOHN: And that’s as modest as he gets.

and:

JOHN: What? No – no, I’m not ill. I’ve, er, well, I’m ... moving on.

MRS HUDSON: You’re emigrating.

It’s significant how they emphasize that Magnussen is foreign, Mary isn’t English either, Moriarty’s Irishness of course gets into canon and Doyle’s complex feelings about his own Irishness, which maybe someday I’ll feel like I grasp well enough to discuss with accuracy and nuance, but basically what I’m saying is YES. Yes yes yes yes, you’re exactly right and I hadn’t even thought of those lines in this context. Elopement isn’t an option because Sherlock IS England.

[sarahthecoat]

mmhmm.

okay but,

[w-1231]

INTERTEXT

Jordan Peele’s film,US, features plenty of “easter eggs” and historicalreferences. One of the featured references that was shown in the duration of the movie is the 1986 Hands Across America movement which was re-enacted by the antagonists in the movie (Zuckerman,2019). The re-enacted reference is a form of intertextuality because it served as a brief historical reference which gave a brief meaning to the movie, if the allusion was deciphered. 

Inglourious Basterds, Sgt. DonnyDonowitz (played by Eli Roth) was seen portraying a similar shot ofTony Montana (a character fom the movie, Scarface) during a Nazigunfireinthecinema(Sherlock,2020).InglouriousBasterds’portrayal of a similar scene portrayed in Scarface is seen as anintertextuality since it recreates and references a scene in Scarface

[sarahthecoat]

Children of Paradise

I’ve begun reading John Yorke’s Into the Woods, but I also got the Criterion Collection dvd of Children of Paradise out of the library the same day. It’s not exactly a direct intertext with Sherlock, but it’s a CLASSIC of French cinema, and was made towards the end of the Nazi occupation of France, so in order to say anything meaningful and get it past the censors, it’s LADEN with subtext. Mirrors, recurring motifs, contrasting opposites, characters that are nearly allegorical, use of lighting and stairs/different levels, windows, curtains, balconies, etc. all to convey meaning. The interplay between what is on stage, back stage, out in the audience, hidden or revealed by the curtain. Acting and mime and communicating,   pretending and authenticity, and talking and being silent. Flowers, moonlight, food, drink, champagne, dancing, blindness and sight, you name it, it’s packed in here. The commentaries on each half are also well worth the time spent listening to them. I can well imagine Mofftiss as film buffs are acquainted with this, it’s a master class in subtext, it’s about film and theater and pantomime, it’s intensely romantic. And there’s a scene in a turkish bath. I highly recommend it.

[monikakrasnorada]

RE: the latest Mark Gatiss kerfuffle

Yesterday, the precious, @shylockgnomes posted this newspaper interview with Mark Gatiss. Needless to say, there isn’t a single comment on that thread (other than mine) that isn’t so salty that you could drink the rivers dry and still not quench your thirst. 

It’s frustrating as fuck.

I am posting this knowing full well that I will get hate for it, or unfollowed, but it’s come to the point now that I really don’t care. We are the SHERLOCK fandom ans should know how to read between the lines. 

What happened to the fandom mantra:

Lying liars who lie.

S4 didn’t go the way fandom  thought it should, so we are throwing Mofftiss under the bus for it?? I am no stan of either man. I think they are so full of themselves as to make me vomit, but everything they say, no matter what it is about, is never straight-forward. They always hide their meaning behind their educated hubris. Taking it personally that they aren’t treating us the way we think they should is our own fault. They are who they are and will always be.

So, I commented as such on that post of Torry’s and privately got a lovely response, which I have been permitted to share here. I will keep them anonymous because I don’t care anymore to get hate or people calling me out on this. They can come forward if they want to, but enough is enough. We have to stop acting like wounded children and allowing Mofftiss to continue to play us as they do. We are never gonna get showrunners of Hannibal’s ilk. They aren’t those kinds of dudes. Never will be. 

This show is an amazing tour de force of meta, subtext, intertext. Why on earth would we believe the creators of such a complicated tale would ever be straight-forward with their responses. Whether it’s to criticism, or what the show is about. There continued complaint is that media consumers want to be spoon-fed warm pap. Well, isn’t that what all of our whinging amounts to? 

I would hope fandom would read this comment sent to me, and just think!

I can't even form thoughts as to why people's reactions are ridiculous. Like....he's not a snob, he's just of a certain class and a certain generation. He's an intellectual and he talks like one. It's exactly like Mark said - something rises up and people want to cut it down. I see nothing wrong with anything he said. It is true that the ratings thing is bollocks. Ratings naturally fall after the first episode of a season. 5 mill for the finale is a perfectly acceptable rating night for a regular episode of much beloved doctor who. The ratings were good, of course they were, the audience were already established, they didnt need to do anything at all to get decent ratings. 

And this "attentive smart audience deserves better" attitude?? Ridiculous. Entitled crap. Watch the show. If you don't like Mark as a person, don't read his interviews. Do we need to have our egos stroked for being clever? Do we need to be treated kindly by writers? No. I just don't understand that. They aren't our parents. They created a thing and we love it. They owe us nothing else, in my opinion. But in know that's not the popular view.

It's like people need to be congratulated for being a fan. When all Moftiss have done is create the art they were driven to create, in exactly the way they wanted. They never cared about audience reaction, right from the beginning. All they wanted is for enough people to like it for them to be able to keep making it.They say they thought it would have a cult following....in other words, they WANTED just a cult following.

Honestly, if series 4 cuts the audience back to that cultish few like us who.....omg. That's seriously their intention isn't it?? Dang. That's neat.

I don't think Moftiss have a negative view of fangirls or BC fans or anything like that. I think they have a negative view of people, period. Lol. They're smarter than to stereotype fans, at least Steven is. Even if that doesn't come through in interviews. Mark as a gay man might feel strongly about fetishization and that's unfortunate because I'm sure he misunderstands that many many women get into shipping m/m because of being repressed gay/bi and that's the way that it starts rising up out of your miserable repressed subconscious, and Mark would have no idea about how repression works in women because it's such a insidious thing all tied up with misogyny, and I wouldn't bother even holding that against him unless I sat down with him and had a chat then discovered that he was a total dick. Until then, I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that interviewers pick and choose quotes to inflame readers, and to tell the perspective they've chosen to tell. I don't like people holding snootiness against him. First of all, it's just British. And second, it's tall poppy syndrome - taking our most brilliant intellectuals and wanting to bring them down for making the rest of us feel dumb, whereas we should really be letting them run the world. Fuccckkkkk.

 It's unbelievable that people are directing their anger at the wrong thing. All that useful anger wasted. Like you wrote just now "imagine that, calling out homophobia falling on deaf ears”

[sarahthecoat]

good to see this again, and read the discussion in the notes.

“[Season 4] is going to be… I suppose you’d say… consequences. It’s consequences.” - Steven Moffat x

Remember this quote? These are from Doctor Who’s The Zygon Inversion, episode co-written by Steven Moffat:

Somebody is playing word games. It turns out, actually, (after I thought to check), that Moffs was quoted saying this just 3 months before The Zygon Inversion was filmed, which is - I mean I don’t know much about how these things happen - but like…..possibly around the general time that Moffat was likely to be writing the episode??? The interview linked above where Moffs was quoted was published in March 2015. The Zygon Inversion was filmed in May 2015. Connection much? So according to their own little riddle, if S4 was consequences, then it wasn’t the truth.