В качестве извинительной акции и в виде раскаяния помещаю портрет Ватсона-Хардвика- велосипедиста))



И очередное исследование. На этот раз по "Скандалу в Богемии"

Things nearly every adaptation misses about “Scandal In Bohemia”


I was just rereading “Scandal in Bohemia” again, and I just want to say that there is so much more in this story than gets into most adaptations of it:

* OK, The Woman this, The Woman that…but can we talk about Watson’s first description of the King of Bohemia? It goes on for a paragraph, describes EVERY DETAIL of the King’s extremely flamboyant ensemble (he’s got a blue cloak lined with “flame-coloured silk,” for instance), and will not shut up about how strapping and strong Holmes’s “gigantic” new client is. It is not only the ladies for whom our Boswell has a keen eye, my friends.

* Irene Adler may be an “adventuress,” but her actual occupation is opera singer. Specifically, she’s a contralto. I just found this nifty piece on the Met’s blog about how the contralto is a vanishing breed. The contralto is the lowest singing voice you can have if you’re a woman working in opera. Contraltos also often cross over into the mezzo range and vice versa. The fact that she’s used to wearing men’s clothing indicates that she probably sings a lot of trouser roles. For the love of God, next person who adapts “Scandal in Bohemia,” pick one of the many trouser roles out there that require two female singers to make love on stage and freaking SHOW US IRENE ADLER IN IT belting the bejeezus out of whatever aria it is in her kickass contralto voice. Queer women everywhere will THANK YOU.

* Adler’s birthdate is given as 1858. Since it must be at least 1888 in SCAN–it’s post-SIGN–Irene Adler is now at least 30. However, Holmes keeps referring to her, in the King’s presence, as a “young person,” despite the fact that for that day and age (even 5 years ago, when she and the KOB had their thing), she would not actually have been considered that young. So tell us, Holmes…exactly how old do you think the KOB is? Or are you subtly signaling to Watson that the KOB may not be as strong as he looks once you get past the astrahkan?

* Have you ever wondered why Holmes is able to just whip up a mob of “loungers” and riff-raff to stage his little covert operation? Yes, I know the King of Bohemia gave him a bag full of gold for expenses and he had to spend it somehow. But it occurs to me for the first time that this prefigures something that happens in “The Man with the Twisted Lip,” where something that appears to be evidence of the poverty that was rampant in London at this period turns out to be a sham mocked up for other purposes. What Holmes stages outside Irene Adler’s house is the kind of thing that does actually happen in depressed urban areas; the guy who runs to open the carriage door is the Victorian equivalent of the guy who wants to clean your windshield at the gas station. The spectacle of a half dozen unemployed men–I’m sorry, “loungers”–fighting each other over the ‘right’ to earn a penny by opening a (comparatively) rich woman’s carriage door is actually kind of heartbreaking–or it would be, if it weren’t another of Sherlock Holmes’s tricks.

* Irene Adler is not in love with Sherlock Holmes. She’s in love with Godfrey Norton, and before that she was in love with the King of Bohemia. Let’s remember that she left London to get the fuck away from both Holmes and her stalker ex-boyfriend. She left him that photo and that letter in the spirit in which any protagonist might leave such missives for his or her arch-nemesis.

* What impresses Sherlock Holmes about Irene Adler is not how beautiful or hot she is–we know from SIGN that he makes a Thing about not giving a shit about the beauty of women–but the fact that she surprised him. She failed to conform to type. In his experience of the world that doesn’t happen very often. And, of course, she out-maneuvered his ass. But she is not actually a master criminal. She’s a woman who has managed to stay single and keep her head above water in a world that does its best to force women into the protection of one male figure or another. She’s had a few lovers and she’s probably been involved in some other “adventures,” but why this always translates into her being Moriarty’s BFF I will never understand.

Now that we’re between XF episodes I am finally getting around to reblogging this. Totally agree with everything here, and it’s bothered me to no end that the SH/IA romance idea just keeps picking up steam instead of maybe just one adaptation going back to the original saying “wouldn’t it be cool to do something different that conforms so much more closely to the actually story??”

I think part of the problem modern adaptations have with the the issue of Holmes being surprised is that, in the end, it does rely on period-typical casual misogyny. The some indicative lines:

“Women are naturally secretive…”
“When a woman thinks that her house is on fire, her instinct is at once to rush to the thing which she values most…. A married woman grabs at her baby; an unmarried one reaches for her jewel-box.”

So of course Irene surprised Holmes. “She eclipsed the whole of her sex,” etc. I think the problem with modern adaptations is that they try to retain the whole thing about gender being what makes her surprising, but also don’t want to make Holmes, today, a period atypical misogynist, so it keeps coming back to sex for some reason. He’s surprised because he wants her, or surprised because somehow she’s sexy and smart (what? the two can co-exist?). So actually, I think this winds up making the misogyny problems worse; it’s unfaithful to the original story; and is uncharacteristic for Holmes / takes his character in directions that are not always so interesting.

My latest thinking about this is that while retaining some cool aspects of the story, like cross dressing, modern adapters have to move away from gender as the key rubric of this story. And, it has to move away from the whole “the woman” aspect too–making anyone eclipse the whole of their [fill in the blank: gender, race, religion, profession, age, ethnicity, body type, and so on] is just not going to wash today. I think the story can be adapted in an interesting way by having Holmes be forced to confront one of his biases–maybe about class, or race, or non-English-speaking people, or disabled people, etc. There are still a lot of socially acceptable prejudices out there unfortunately; I can definitely imagine some middle class highly educated detective saying something like, “she’s a high school drop out, Watson, she’s hardly likely to pose much of a challenge!”

Anyway, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this, so if you have any thoughts about it I’d be very interested to hear them!

Стырено вот отсюда

holmesoverture.tumblr.com/post/161929556179/thi...

Вообще, очень рекомендую эту страничку