The Adventure of Transmedia Sherlock-Part One

The spin of the millennium saw a spur of Sherlock Holmes screen adaptations in various forms. Chronologically, the first was Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes in 2009. Next was BBC Entertainment’s series Sherlock which was telecast in 2010 and 2011. 2011 saw Guy Ritchie’s second production, Sherlock Holmes: a Game of Shadows. Next in 2012, ABC came up with Elementary, yet another series based on Sherlock Holmes.

Sherlock fanart by Becky Dudek

What is both unique and common among these productions are that none of these are adaptation in the strictest sense of the term. The plots in these productions do not follow any Sherlock Holmes stories stringently. But these productions are rather in conversation with Conan Doyle’s canon of Sherlock Holmes stories.

While Guy Ritchie’s films try to remain true to the time and environment created by Conan Doyle, the television versions try to locate the canon in contemporary time. However, while being true to the canon universe, Guy Ritchie’s films remains critical about the characterisation in the canon. In this sense it is comparable to Granpa TV’s Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, where Jeremy Brett played the title role.  Jeremy Brett changed the imagination of Sherlock Holmes- from a polite, Victorian, reticent character of the Rathbone series to an energetic, neurotic genius. Guy Ritchie’s characterisation of Sherlock takes a step further in that direction. The entire range of characters has been thoroughly re-imagined. Robert Downey, Jr. as Sherlock Holmes and Jude Law as John Watson blend aptly with this new imagination.

These films try to look at the 19th Century story-world with an insufficient understanding. Thus the inadequacies found in the old style judged by 21st Century standards are compensated by incorporating modern sense of genre stylistics in these films, with the result that we perceive a melange of detective tropes, spy genre, buddy film genres in those films.

To convincingly re-establish Victorian Modernity in the story-world, these films over-assert themselves. In the first film, the supernatural, which is destined to crash and burn under the rapid aggression of modernity, is shown in excess to draw attention to infallible rationality. The second film plunges the canon detective genre into spy genre hinting towards a world war. This bring to question the motive of those films –whether it is trying to create a pastiche of the canon or attempting to render the earlier genre inadequate.

As for Elementary, the newest attempt at modernising Sherlock Holmes, places him in the contemporary New York. In this series, Sherlock Holmes is a recovering addict in care of Dr. Joan Watson. This is a truly American version of Sherlock Holmes. This series limits the homoerotic subtext between Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson blatantly. Dr. Watson here is rendered a female character played by Lucy Liu.

Among these BBC Sherlock remains a exceptional take on Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes canon. Although the series contemporises Conan Doyle’s characters by placing them in present day London, it is by the similarities with the canon that marks the series unique. The re-envision of Sherlock Holmes’ character is more of an updating than modernising.  Sherlock Holmes was an exceptionally modern and rational character even for his time. He was also in touch with popular culture of date. He applied state-of-the-art scientific methods through advanced discoveries and innovations. Likewise Sherlock Holmes in this series integrates with this age, even the digital dimension of it. The series thus attempts to balance the 19th Century Victorian context with 21st Century postmodern conditions in updating its character and plot to address the demands of time.