notes on the first season of Moffatt's Cumberbatch/Freeman interpretation of the Adventures of Detective Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson

"here comes The Freak"

The young police-person on the squad refers to Mr. Holmes as "the freak". Mr. Holmes does much to earn his sobriquet, and appears to have no vulnerable sensitivity to the barb. He is, however, shown to have the occasional spasm of sensitive emotion, shown during a fit of inconsolable boredom from a lack of stimulating cases, expressed in ire towards Mr. Watson's denigration of Holmes' curious gaps of knowledge. Sherlock's rationalist approach to emotions and social interaction garners various recalcitrances of annoyance, anger, and frustration, but no character other than the feisty young squaddie responds to his aura with such persistent, direct, and demeaning insult.

This is 'bullying'; the kind of bullying that the exceptional, no matter the quality of exception, learn to bear within the warren of the human animal. The show-creators have selected well the situation and conditions for bully-behavior, as the young squaddie is also unusual, though not in any exceptional manner. She is not shown to be exceptionally smart, or dumb; neither unusually perceptive nor dull; she does not punch the clock, disinterested, for a paycheck and pension; she is not a driven professional to succeed in her job or climb the ranks of authority, status, and power. She is not a technical specialist, such as the field forensic or laboratory coroner. Any one of the characters showing these particular characteristics has a way to handle Mr. Holmes' grating habits, idiosyncracies, grating style, and intimidating intellect: the clock-puncher does not care, and follows orders without undue, work-inducing fuss; the climber or do-gooder finds a way to leverage the situation to advantage; the prideful instigate turf-war and cite regulations; another arrogant yet insightful competes, or learns; the dull are bewildered or frightened. It is only the utterly unexceptional, the flat-footed pedestrian, the person without portfolio, who lacks a ready and active attitude towards an oddity. Our young squaddie fills the role with aplomb, as she shows no self-perception of particular worth. If she were another budding crack deductive detective, the barb would be competitive trash-talking; if she were a machine-cog clock-puncher, the barb would be a resigned exasperation; but she is none of these, reducing her barb to a bully's put-down, the downward pressure on others, to buoy the self without rising above.

What the young squaddie has, that is not exceptional, is vulnerability. She is young, female in a sausage-fest, and demonstrates an ambiguous ethnic Otherness, though without also bringing any particular cultural expression, through language, belief, or view-point. She is vulnerable to all sorts of bullying for being identifiably different, and makes sure to use offense as the best form of defense around this chink in her prickly armor. The audience never sees her Other-ness used against her; no other character bullies her on-screen. This vacuum of justification fills out the rest of the bully's usual milieu; internal strife motivates a pointed, directed barb at a likely target, as opposed to the wild thrashing that can emanate from the frequently assaulted. She is a bully for being subtly aware of her own vulnerability, and solves her insecurity by pushing someone else down.

There is no reason to expect the bully to be without social intuition, and the insecure squaddie demonstrates a powerful and devious form of understanding when she predicts an evil turn for Holmes' life. She impugns his fanatical interest in the most curious of murders, prognosticating that he will naturally, and inevitably t,ake a psychopathic, murderous turn himself, one of these days. No simple bully insult, this, especially as her prediction is not preached directly to the superlative detective; instead, it is a prophecy shaped to enhance her social position. On top of the insult to the third party, being the bullying aspect, she makes a gloomy prediction that has no blow-back into her own life. Just as with her denigrating sobriquet, she faces no punishment, derision, or reproach for openly declaring the looming psychopathy of The Freak. In this, she only gains: her slight bullying adds another stone to her psychological wall, and if she manages to correctly predict Sherlock's malicious turn (consummated in season three, I believe), she can gloat upon her prophecy and rise even higher in her own esteem.

Self-fulfilling prophecy is a subtle yet effective affectation of the abuser. The key, is that the abuse, itself, forms the impetus to a fulfilled prediction of Lowliness. Here is the script: persistently lob small packets offense and harassment, with an inherent or explicit propaganda of the target's weakness and inferiority. By the magic of cognitive bias, the target's commonplace tolerance of slight slights will dissappear against the searing beacon of an occasional, explosive demonstration of anger, frustration, tears, and other falling rocks of crumbling self-posession. Once displayed, the abuser's gaze down his own nose is excused and explained, at least in his own mind, by tickling out the proof that this lowly Other, this Animal, can be cajoled into a screeching monkey.

While slipping over to the appropriate thumbnail picture to resume playback of Sherlock, I could not avoid assault by an advertisement-trailer on the streaming video provider. The scene: in a socially-charged situation, a person of the distaff persuasion receives an un-classy, sexist-ish response to her sudden neophytic appearance at a chess tournament, theatrically set at least a half-century past (judging by clothes and other context clues). The politics of the present day forces the exchange to reflect, without subtlety and entirely within the surface reading, exactly those self-same politics. In this, we see by the shape of self-fulfilling bully-breakdown prophecy pattern, which shows, in umrbal outline, the edifice of the culture-shaper's mind. Drama emanates from this asshole-behavior, tolerated by the snubbed Protagonist-Other, until and unless the bruises compound to an emotional outpouring. This follows along the self-fulfilling prophecy trope; the abuser-bully can talk down to the Lower Caste, whether on bullying-purpose or in bewildered discomfort at the exceptional situation.

From so many entertainment-commentary-drama's exemplar of this pattern, we abstract into the blurry collage of Present Cultural Viewpoint. Contradictions abound from this trope, in broader context. Inculcating culturally-correct behavior is not the consistent emphasis of these narrative entertainments; rather, dramatic departure from polite and civilized behavior provides audience instruction in virtue, by virtue of the negative space behind each example of chauvinistic rudeness. Thus are we taught to remain ever-vigilant towards brutish faux pas, to hunt spoiled fruit rather than grow a peaceful garden. All is accepted, in the abstract: an introductory scene of Holmes and Watson shows the Brave Yet Fumbling And Conscientious Warrior-Healer stumbling all over himself, retreating from an accidental presumption of the Terrifyingly Perspicatious Oddity's sexual interest in women, then of men, then of both and/or neither, hastily retreating to a judgement-abnegating declaration that it's all fine. We presume, since Sherlock is a protagonist, that his interests will not bend towards, say, beasts of the field, even though the Virtuous accepted all. Watson's sputtering displays a lovely piece of British cultural humor, where the nerurotic-polite perform their Vaudeville act of practiced ineffectiveness at retreating from each attempted-yet-failed form of complimentary dignity. Although All Is Accepted, in theory, in practice, some remain valid recipients of judgement and aspersion, by themselves snubbing a Culturally Incorrect Target of Supposition or Presumption, leading to a Dramatically Important Narrative Element in the Hero(ine)'s journey towards in-group acceptance, by mechanism of shame transformed into Progressive Catharsis.

I recall when the popular strains of action-super-hero periodicals were denigrated for their focus on male and male-stereotype heroes, so excused by their creators as being entirely appropriate to fulfill the day-dreams of their paying audience, namely, an audience of adolescent males. Such audience-targeting was not to be tolerated; the authors needed Approved Diversity to withstand the withering gaze of Cultural Moderators. How much progress have we made, since those terrible times of a few decades ago, that our re-interpretation of Holmes & Watson can have a female ethno-minority-person accepted readily as selfish bully, as an every-day abuser among the set-pieces of the cast. In days of yore, an Ethnically Diverse cast-member's presence would necessitate economy of presentation, disallowing such throw-away, common-place existence; she would need be more than boringly, disgustingly Human. Her snipes are narratively important, as well, as it opens up future episodes to explore exactly her scried eventuality. No contradiction yet, until we ponder that the cultural milieu of the show paid no lip-service to the inappropriate, un-professional, cruelly acidic, but not Culturally Incorrect behavior of ragging on the Terribly Unusual Person who is allowed, and required, to Take It Like a Man. Where was the nose-tweak from another character to demonstrate progressive intolerance of intolerance? Perhaps we have not come so far, yet, from those hallowed days of yore.

The authors showed enough modernity to reflect tolerance of certain forms of diversity, but not enough progressive grit and fiber to make at least some wink to the audience, to convey some understanding or awareness that this business-as-usual cruelty comes from unstoppable, or simply unstopped, human indecency?

Rationality necessitates its strict practitioner be a cultural outsider, for rationality does not, and cannot, describe a broader culture. Non-contradiction is a logical universal, and thus describes any form of thinking that eschews intellectual dishonesty; strict, Holmes-ian observational rationality refuses all deductions from information without evidence. Cultures must extend beyond these restrictions, by including non-evident, assumptive judgements and justifications of belief and viewpoint. In short, rationality solves crimes, but only culture can decide what is to be a crime, in the first place.

Rationality gives greater potency in describing an individual, since a person who takes its strictures earnestly is so universally unusual to our experience. In this, a rationalist is much like, perhaps nearly identical to, the religiously devout, with a powerful obeisance to an external authority, whose practice so easily leads to a certain arrogance of form in proportion to self-judged mastery of one's chosen panchreston of explanation. Yet either devotion still fails to provide the finer detail that paints an identifiable portrait; for this, just like with culture, one needs some viewpoint and value judgement. Sherlock's individuality turns up here and there, sometimes to his surprise: turning up his collar to look cool, playing melodies he finds beautiful on the violin, competing with Mycroft, caring for Doctor Watson and Madame Hudson. These are inconsistent with his strict, nearly sociopathic rationality; thus, in them do we find his individuality, his culture-of-one.

Non-contradiction is the universal logic, but yields no deductive fruit of its own; logic requires axiomata, a.k.a. assumptions. Rationality does not describe a culture, though it may describe an individual; but individuation in rationality derives from personal contradiction, from the exception that proves the rule even in the most devoutly logical. Only in contradiction do we find the individual; only in assumption do we find culture. Point-of-view introduces arbitrary error, forbidding itself from science; yet every observation must eventually yield to points of view, to be observed.

Thus, a culture which claims to have no point of view on the differences among us, is the one bound to make un-real assumptions about them.

How can a culture, then, navigate all these facets of contradiction, of insanity in individual mob? How dare it judge one, when all is accepted? How dare it not, with humanity's incessant, infuriating inhumany to itself?

Rationality and abuse are both brutal practices: they share an avoidance of ingesting others' emotive state. A society aiming to eliminate abuse, might imply a domination of one's emotive internal state over others. Which would destroy not only individual and collective rationality, but also opens society to a spiral of empathy-bullying, an ironic bipartite tyranny, of the emotionally effusive cry-bully along with its chirally matched obverse, those sociopaths inherently immune to empathy. A society in search of civility and politeness-- with care to both the usual case, and to the exceptions, to emotion, as well as rationality, that holds back the bullies, without creating new ones-- has a difficult investigation before it.

Thus might we look to the (self-appointed) Civilized Socities for demostration of anything resembling solution to our dilemma. If there are dedicated rules of treatment, then one may "obey the script", and be above reproach. When one is without a script, one improvises; and extemporaneous thought has a necessarily inferior polish versus a revised draft. However, a Civilized Script, with punishment of deviance through reproach, inherently encodes imperfect behavior. No script can get everything right; no general rule can account for every exception. Therein lies the rub, where social script enables a society to mesh as clockwork gears, as it forces the unusually-toothed to grind against the regularity of society, or hide their unusualness in a demeanor of uniformity. Poor choices will be made in proportion to the degree of off-the-cuff behavior, playing out every rough personal foible upon an imperfect, rubble-strewn stage of sudden imagination.

The screw of complication thus turns: there is no singular degree of improvisation appropriate to every interaction, and there is no definitive script of proper behavior for all societies. Comes to mind, a story of cultural difference laid bare in the stark realities of war. In the Second World War, both American and German forces took prisoners of the other. When Americans captured Germans, they behaved as their cultural and military training demanded of them: they would line up, in order of rank, and take orders from their new, foreign commanders. American forces, meanwhile, would do no such thing under capture. As soon as their fighting strictures were over, they would strip the more annoying uniform elements, and coagulate into a gaggle of fraternization across all ranks. German captors would find themselves at a loss at how to even wrangle such an unruly mob of individuals. Similarly, these cultures would play out their features on the battlefield: American forces used simpler tactics and plans, as they lacked the precision of training and obedience native to their German counterparts; but when the situation went pear-shaped, and the plan went straight to Hell, German forces would find themselves at a loss of initiative without directive from above, while American troops would make their own decisions, improvise, and take command of themselves. At the most extreme end was a characteristic of the even more stringent Japanese culture, upon capture. The Japanese troops were cut off in a totalitarian propagandistic-information state (not unlike certain Internet and Cable-news bubble-subcultures, sadly) that emphasized how the White Menace was an evil force, against whom death was preferrable to the inhumane torture inevitable within capture. Those Japanese soldiers insufficiently plucky to die before capture, were bewildered by the genteel and humane treatment of the Americans. So unprepared for an interaction beyond vile aggressive hostility were the Japanese, that some of them would dutifully respond to any politely stated request for information about their own troop deployments; so ingrained was obedience in their culture, that they could not conceive of disrespecting their new superiors with intransigent interrogative silence.

Where there is no script, extemporaneous dialogue will result, burdening the actors with stressful effort of management; where the script places boundaries, would-be transgressors live in a gilded cage of propriety, and actual transgressors trudge through a gauntlet of reproach.

Any society, from a single pair of friends to a globe-spanning empire, with the power to enforce its own interpretation of Civilization, has the fearsome power to help or harm all involved. Where powers of behavioral inculcation smooth over rough patches and lubricate gritty, ill-fitting gears of the exceptional slipping or grinding against an otherwise self-similar society, the system bestows a boon to all in the synchronized dance of a unified society. Yet each society's script-writers merely improvise another draft, remixing dusty old scripts with a touch of personal flair, inevitably introducing their own preferred imperfections upon the world. Utopian visions that dream perfect, uniformly enmeshed gears lead to clockwork societies that must ignore the brutal and inhuman treatment necessary to bend our messy lives and chaotic world into unyielding order.

How, then, should society move forward under such astounding burden, to bring forth spontaneous order, and hold back inevitable but unpredictable chaos? How should the system, how should each actor in the system, have reproached the squaddie-bully, that she bends towards civility towards plausibly-psychopathic Holmes? Should the chess-tournament-bureaucrat who looked down upon a female entrant be shamed, flogged, or snubbed into obediance to an invariantly polite demeanor?

The thread from bullying, discomfort, and obnoxious miscreant to proper social response winds sinuously up the social tapestry, illuminating stitch by stitch a greater tableau reflecting the manifold diversities of humanity: that the exceptional, the identifiably different, must in every society trudge an uphill and lonely journey to expressing their unusual distinction to society's benfit. Mr. Holmes, in almost all modern tellings, bears endemic social opprobrium with aplomb, and in the end only receives respect when his particular skills suddenly gratify society's desire for justice; never for his individual character alone, not for his unique dedication to rational arts.

I have not yet consumed the story about the lady chess-player, but I'll bet a day's pay that she doesn't enter the tournaments just to play, and lose, against practiced geniuses of the field. Nay, she must be an identifiable powerhouse of the field in order to motivate a narrative explaining the loss to society in keeping the Diverse out of the systems of power, status, and respect. Art requires artifice; we must suspend our disbelief to receive the lesson to judge not, lest one turn into the rearmost sphincter of our society. Sherlock's story cuts to the bone: even embodied within Cumberbatch's chiseled cheek-bones, just-imperfectly-enough tousled hair, svelte, elegant, stylish, custom-tailored suit, and ethnic normalcy to the classic English milieu, the character still manages to be Outside the System. In this we find a self-harm, a miniscule suicide, a self-destruction in a true system-level failure.

But such self-serving systemic failure is not the only tragedy here. Cultural mythos does not celebrate a dowdy house-wife who happens to enjoy a chess match, entering the tournaments for simple accomplishment of her own intellectual and personal enjoyment. Cultural mythos skips right over all the failed Sherlocks, who did not live in a time of fascinating murders to be solved, who did not live in a society sufficiently tolerant to wild oddities so as to only moderately violate their everyday dignity. Instead, we cast only the most beautiful of people, delicate artistic actors at the peak of the social mountain, who play pretend as unloved geniuses, while out in the world the ugly weirdos continue to toil on in unloved obscurity.