My very first week in college, before I had even turned eighteen, I was asked what my favorite movie was (crowd of strangers seated in a circle, ice-breaking). After a moment I offered "La Strada" and "A Hard Day's Night." An appreciative murmur went up as a couple dozen college kids kicked themselves for not having thought of Fellini.
I can no longer remember what I saw in it. It must be still there (as it were), but I've lost it.
I still think "A Hard Day's Night" is a great movie.
Thursday, December 30, 2010
Thursday, December 23, 2010
On logos and magic in Plato's presentation of Socrates.
Plato's Socrates was not a normal human being. He went barefoot in winter and in battle. He stood motionless for hours, even a day, on end. He gave up his craft -- presumably stone-masonry, his father's craft -- to stand in the market-place or at the baths asking people questions about truth, beauty, goodness. Though hemlock is a miserable death and a long process of loss of functions, he died with dignity and quietness. He associated with strange people: Pythagoreans, priests with odd beliefs, boys, slaves, aspiring tyrants, future tyrants; yet somehow the dully respectable and practical Xenophon became a devoted follower (of the historical Socrates, not Plato's), too. Other pupils and friends of the historical Socrates included the hedonist Aristippus and the devoutly ascetic Antisthenes, and perhaps Aristophanes, whose brutal mockery in "The Clouds" Plato's Socrates claims in "Apology" set the stage for his later condemnation, yet who is given the most beautiful speech of the "Symposium." He moved in aristocratic circles -- Plato was descended from Solon and other legends of Athens, Alcibiades, Nicias, Laches, and later Xenophon were important generals, the famous sophists he conversed with and their wealthy hosts hardly made it a practice to invite members of the laboring classes to their speeches and soirées -- which does not sound so strange until we reflect and realize that we can't think of a single other classical Athenian who demonstrated even that degree of social mobility. Later came others like him -- court poets and philosophers, and a very few -- really I can only think of Cleanthes (the second head of the Stoic school, 4-3c BCE) at the moment -- who succeeded as figures of culture and learning without patronage or private wealth; and Cleanthes gardened for a living even when he was a prominent philosopher, and is condescended to for his manners and appearance and intelligence (!) in our ancient sources. (He was nicknamed "the Ox.") -- The Stoics and Epicureans actively embraced outsiders of various sorts, it is true. Epicurus's school received the only female pupils we know of in any school but the Academy, which supposedly took on two female pupils under Plato's rule (Axiothea and something with an "L") one of whom was reputed to dress in male garb while the other wore women's clothing. The Stoa was founded by a foreigner of dubious pedigree -- for, as Cicero points out repeatedly in his Tusculan Disputations (isn't it?), Zeno was from Cyprus, and therefore not necessarily of Greek descent -- and headed next by Cleanthes, though from Chrysippus to Marcus Aurelius most of its spokesmen are high-hats. The important late exception is Epictetus, who began his philosophical studies as a slave and later was freed, in middle age I think. But that was at Rome, and the Roman Empire offered dramatically better chances for social improvement than Athens ever had at its peak. There, the classes simply did not mingle. Yet Socrates did.
Certain words that characterize the oddness of Socrates recur throughout Plato: atopia, or being out of place, bizarre, absurd; eironia, "irony," which really meant "dissembling" (Socrates is rarely simply sarcastic), or preparing a face to meet the faces that you meet; epo[i]de -- incantation (lit. "sung over")-- and other words of magic spells and charms. Reversal too is a constant theme. In the "Apology," Socrates proposes as the alternative to the death penalty that he be given a state pension. In "Euthyphro," he stops a moment on the way to his trial for impiety to point out that well-regarded priests know less of piety than he. In "Protagoras" he engineers such thorough confusion that by the end he and Protagoras have switched their positions on all the issues they were considering. In "Gorgias" he acknowledges that by Athenian standards he is politically powerless and a poor speaker, then redefines politics and rhetoric so that he is the only person in Athens with any grasp of either. Further he cites the Pythagorean (and perhaps Heraclitean -- cf. "immortal mortals, mortal immortals") teaching that "who knows whether we the living are really dead, while the dead have life?" In "Phaedo" he asks his friends to offer a thanksgiving offering to Aesclepius the healer god after his death. And more, and more and more, climaxing, surely, in Alcibiades's drunken rant in "Symposium" about how ugly old Socrates refuses to play the part of lover but instead others woo him as if he were a beautiful young boy. His is the last speech. The dialogue ends with Socrates -- alone sober after the night's revelries -- trying to persuade the tragedian Agathon and the comic playwright Aristophanes that the true poet should be able to compose both tragedies and comedies, at dawn, while they struggle not to join the rest of the company in sleep. The echo of Socrates's night with Alcibiades, when too Socrates seemed simply not to see the physical temptations to which everyone else succumbed, and to which Alcibiades frantically endeavored to rouse him, is unmistakable. Alcibiades thinks that Socrates must have bewitched him to make him act the fool so, while remaining himself teasingly unaffected.
Charmides and Phaedrus (?) too accuse Socrates of witchcraft, and Meno compares his effect to the sting of a puffer-fish. Thrasymachus in "Republic" i and Callicles in "Gorgias" have nastier words for it: they feel not enthralled but bullied. In one important way Plato clearly sides with them against the charmed. For they recognize that Socrates has only his words for a net and a spell, and that he traps them and catches them with just words. They are not special, magical words unique to Socrates. On the contrary, he draws them out of every interlocutor, from famous sophists like Protagoras and Hippias to teenagers like Charmides and Theaetetus to Meno's innumerate slave. The words are theirs, not Socrates's. Famously he calls himself a midwife in "Theaetetus," because he can only help others nurture and deliver the babies conceived (if we accept "Symposium"'s account) in encounters with the Forms. "Symposium" suggests that we fall in love because we are already pregnant and wish "to give birth in beauty" -- that is, to express the goodness and truth and beauty we feel certain we have within us -- and for that we need others' help. Socrates helps through talking with us, through asking questions and worrying our replies until the weak spots show. His magic is speech and reasoned argument (both central meanings of the Greek "logos"), not a mumbled spell or sacrificed bird or buried curse-tablet. His wizardry and his bullying aggression are partial views of his midwifery.
Socrates was strange. He moved in social circles beyond his class, he sought out beautiful boys and then ignored their bodies, he humbled great speakers and arguers with simple questions, he sometimes felt no effects from cold and alcohol, he refused to take money for what he considered to be the most valuable service of all, his aid in the care of souls. Other contemporaries tried to explain him as magical. (The pseudo-Platonic "Theages" suggests the astonishing claims made for him when one of its characters claims to become wiser and better through mere physical proximity to Socrates.) Xenophon mostly ignores such claims, fearing perhaps that they come too close to the critiques that led to his trial and death. Plato, on the other hand, as is his wont, does something more ambitious and more audacious. He acknowledges the magic of Socrates, but offers a revisionist account on which it is nothing more than logos -- something we all have -- and on which any special talent or might of Socrates's lay in midwifery -- a profession of poor women (including Socrates's mother, he says in "Theaetetus") that no one powerful would dream of pursuing. It's true, Plato tells us, that Socrates is different, bizarre, dissembling, magical. In a culminating reversal, those very qualities only show the more clearly what is universally human in him.
Certain words that characterize the oddness of Socrates recur throughout Plato: atopia, or being out of place, bizarre, absurd; eironia, "irony," which really meant "dissembling" (Socrates is rarely simply sarcastic), or preparing a face to meet the faces that you meet; epo[i]de -- incantation (lit. "sung over")-- and other words of magic spells and charms. Reversal too is a constant theme. In the "Apology," Socrates proposes as the alternative to the death penalty that he be given a state pension. In "Euthyphro," he stops a moment on the way to his trial for impiety to point out that well-regarded priests know less of piety than he. In "Protagoras" he engineers such thorough confusion that by the end he and Protagoras have switched their positions on all the issues they were considering. In "Gorgias" he acknowledges that by Athenian standards he is politically powerless and a poor speaker, then redefines politics and rhetoric so that he is the only person in Athens with any grasp of either. Further he cites the Pythagorean (and perhaps Heraclitean -- cf. "immortal mortals, mortal immortals") teaching that "who knows whether we the living are really dead, while the dead have life?" In "Phaedo" he asks his friends to offer a thanksgiving offering to Aesclepius the healer god after his death. And more, and more and more, climaxing, surely, in Alcibiades's drunken rant in "Symposium" about how ugly old Socrates refuses to play the part of lover but instead others woo him as if he were a beautiful young boy. His is the last speech. The dialogue ends with Socrates -- alone sober after the night's revelries -- trying to persuade the tragedian Agathon and the comic playwright Aristophanes that the true poet should be able to compose both tragedies and comedies, at dawn, while they struggle not to join the rest of the company in sleep. The echo of Socrates's night with Alcibiades, when too Socrates seemed simply not to see the physical temptations to which everyone else succumbed, and to which Alcibiades frantically endeavored to rouse him, is unmistakable. Alcibiades thinks that Socrates must have bewitched him to make him act the fool so, while remaining himself teasingly unaffected.
Charmides and Phaedrus (?) too accuse Socrates of witchcraft, and Meno compares his effect to the sting of a puffer-fish. Thrasymachus in "Republic" i and Callicles in "Gorgias" have nastier words for it: they feel not enthralled but bullied. In one important way Plato clearly sides with them against the charmed. For they recognize that Socrates has only his words for a net and a spell, and that he traps them and catches them with just words. They are not special, magical words unique to Socrates. On the contrary, he draws them out of every interlocutor, from famous sophists like Protagoras and Hippias to teenagers like Charmides and Theaetetus to Meno's innumerate slave. The words are theirs, not Socrates's. Famously he calls himself a midwife in "Theaetetus," because he can only help others nurture and deliver the babies conceived (if we accept "Symposium"'s account) in encounters with the Forms. "Symposium" suggests that we fall in love because we are already pregnant and wish "to give birth in beauty" -- that is, to express the goodness and truth and beauty we feel certain we have within us -- and for that we need others' help. Socrates helps through talking with us, through asking questions and worrying our replies until the weak spots show. His magic is speech and reasoned argument (both central meanings of the Greek "logos"), not a mumbled spell or sacrificed bird or buried curse-tablet. His wizardry and his bullying aggression are partial views of his midwifery.
Socrates was strange. He moved in social circles beyond his class, he sought out beautiful boys and then ignored their bodies, he humbled great speakers and arguers with simple questions, he sometimes felt no effects from cold and alcohol, he refused to take money for what he considered to be the most valuable service of all, his aid in the care of souls. Other contemporaries tried to explain him as magical. (The pseudo-Platonic "Theages" suggests the astonishing claims made for him when one of its characters claims to become wiser and better through mere physical proximity to Socrates.) Xenophon mostly ignores such claims, fearing perhaps that they come too close to the critiques that led to his trial and death. Plato, on the other hand, as is his wont, does something more ambitious and more audacious. He acknowledges the magic of Socrates, but offers a revisionist account on which it is nothing more than logos -- something we all have -- and on which any special talent or might of Socrates's lay in midwifery -- a profession of poor women (including Socrates's mother, he says in "Theaetetus") that no one powerful would dream of pursuing. It's true, Plato tells us, that Socrates is different, bizarre, dissembling, magical. In a culminating reversal, those very qualities only show the more clearly what is universally human in him.
Monday, December 20, 2010
On the applicability of philosophy to "real life" so-called.
I am methodologically a moderate skeptic, an enthusiast by temperament. I do not believe in philosophical conclusions that are sepable from the process by which one has attained them (for if the question can be answered so simply, it's hard to see that we needed philosophy for it, really). I have no qualms about ascribing falsity and many about ascribing truth -- though fewest of the three to ascribing insight. My beloved Stoics had some crazy views -- I don't hesitate much about applying that term, either -- but much understanding.
Epictetus tells us that life is a game precisely in the respect that seems to distinguish the two, namely that in a game the outcome is not very important while adherence to the rules is imperative -- since inconsistent adherence means playing the game ill, or, at some point on the spectrum, ceasing to play the game at all. Now we are used to thinking that life is not like this. We are used to thinking that whether you win or lose within the game of life has quite a bit of importance to us the agents concerned, and should have. Clearly it makes a difference to one whether one's aorta bursts or not, and whether operations on our hearts are successful or not. ("Successful" -- it's built in already there.) Yes, this matters. But Epictetus (following his Stoic forebears) tries to show why it needn't matter in the way we might antecedently have assumed. This involves lots of high philosophy, naturally enough -- axiology (=consideration of what value is and of what is valuable), theology and metaphysics to ground value, logic including epistemology (as they divided it) to keep us from error and guide us towards understanding on the way. It is all very fascinating and largely the subject of my dissertation and not at all suitable for this sort or level of explanation.
Instead let me assume it all, and hint at some consequences.
Epictetus argues that if this is so, then we haven't anything to regret when we act correctly yet fail to attain our objective. This is so because nothing has been lost by our losing it that could determine whether our lives are happy or not -- I think by "happy" he very nearly means "meaningful, in such a way as to be worth living." So: failing to get a job does not eliminate the chance for a meaningful life. Dying destroys us, but not our lives, not the sense we'd learned to make of things. Losing a child, even, cannot mean losing all the worth one might ever have attained to -- though I would imagine it makes most things look very unworthy of the time we give to them.
Is this true? I wouldn't know how to answer that question. Certainly Epictetus relies on false beliefs to get to it, and not incidentally, not separably. Certainly the Stoic view is so radical as to be hard to understand. (What would it mean for a life to disappear yet for its happiness to match a god's?) Certainly such points can be hackneyed to death with the large axe, or is that a carriage, of Hollywood fairy tale treacle. All I can add is that learning to think of the ways in which merely doing something right in itself constitutes succeeding at it, no matter how all occasions do conspire against us, i.e., how external features cooperate with our efforts -- that exercise, that learning, that reflective choice to change perspective -- is not a matter of books, but of how books can change and shape our lives.
Epictetus tells us that life is a game precisely in the respect that seems to distinguish the two, namely that in a game the outcome is not very important while adherence to the rules is imperative -- since inconsistent adherence means playing the game ill, or, at some point on the spectrum, ceasing to play the game at all. Now we are used to thinking that life is not like this. We are used to thinking that whether you win or lose within the game of life has quite a bit of importance to us the agents concerned, and should have. Clearly it makes a difference to one whether one's aorta bursts or not, and whether operations on our hearts are successful or not. ("Successful" -- it's built in already there.) Yes, this matters. But Epictetus (following his Stoic forebears) tries to show why it needn't matter in the way we might antecedently have assumed. This involves lots of high philosophy, naturally enough -- axiology (=consideration of what value is and of what is valuable), theology and metaphysics to ground value, logic including epistemology (as they divided it) to keep us from error and guide us towards understanding on the way. It is all very fascinating and largely the subject of my dissertation and not at all suitable for this sort or level of explanation.
Instead let me assume it all, and hint at some consequences.
Epictetus argues that if this is so, then we haven't anything to regret when we act correctly yet fail to attain our objective. This is so because nothing has been lost by our losing it that could determine whether our lives are happy or not -- I think by "happy" he very nearly means "meaningful, in such a way as to be worth living." So: failing to get a job does not eliminate the chance for a meaningful life. Dying destroys us, but not our lives, not the sense we'd learned to make of things. Losing a child, even, cannot mean losing all the worth one might ever have attained to -- though I would imagine it makes most things look very unworthy of the time we give to them.
Is this true? I wouldn't know how to answer that question. Certainly Epictetus relies on false beliefs to get to it, and not incidentally, not separably. Certainly the Stoic view is so radical as to be hard to understand. (What would it mean for a life to disappear yet for its happiness to match a god's?) Certainly such points can be hackneyed to death with the large axe, or is that a carriage, of Hollywood fairy tale treacle. All I can add is that learning to think of the ways in which merely doing something right in itself constitutes succeeding at it, no matter how all occasions do conspire against us, i.e., how external features cooperate with our efforts -- that exercise, that learning, that reflective choice to change perspective -- is not a matter of books, but of how books can change and shape our lives.
Monday, December 6, 2010
On canonicity (with respect to the sexuality of Sherlock Holmes).
H&I were watching a bit of "Young Sherlock Holmes" over dinner (lentil stew with ras el hanout, and brioche. multicultural!) and were shocked to find that Holmes is portrayed therein as actively heterosexual. Now, it's explicitly not inspired by any of the stories (though the deerstalker hat, and Watson with his pipe, and even the fascination with obscure pre-colonial ritual are clear nods to the canon as popularly construed, and Holmes's interest in fencing may nod to his literary pugilism). And it's perfectly plausible -- even, in the genre conventions of contemporary tales of Victorian manhood, likely -- that a young man could have been interested in young women and only later frustrated or simply bored out of such pursuits. I do not ask a children's movie from the eighties, produced by Steven Spielberg, to break cinematic ground in the depiction of adolescent sexual ambivalence. Yet surely no other depiction of Holmes has had him actively motivated by a romantic attachment to a woman. Even people who think he had an affair with Irene Adler (of which Nero Wolfe was the product -- obviously) don't take this to have been a life-changer; on the contrary her importance lies in the uniqueness of the incident.
Now, the Holmes canon is especially complex, for a number of reasons. One is about the author. Arthur Conan Doyle was so patently, and avowedly, commercially motivated at various points -- e.g., famously he hadn't intended to bring Holmes back from the Reichenbach Falls, but the public outcry and the dribbling diminution of funds in his account altered his constancy; besides which most devotees believe that he sometimes simply incorporated other material into Holmes stories so it would sell. Meanwhile, Doyle was writing the stories for so long that inevitably (?) they changed dramatically in tone, theme, and content. (The early stories are mainly ordinary domestic dramas whose characters act for clear, usually financial or romantic, reasons; while the international intrigues, supernatural debunkings, criminal conspiracies, and ... uh ... World War One ... come later.)
Another is about the character: that Holmes has so many blanks in his life, so many puzzles. Some of the major ones: why does Holmes think he needs Watson? what is Holmes's attitude towards women? what is Holmes's background (besides the existence of Mycroft) and what was his life like before (besides that he attended Oxford)? why does he do detective work at all? what are we to make of his drug use? his chemical experiments? his violin-playing? his extended bouts of melancholia punctuated by periods of intense activity -- the alternation of listless ineffectuality with what must feel from the inside like omnipotence? why is he such a devoted and accomplished actor, a master of make-up, accents, and class-crossing manners? how contemptuous is he of other people, really? of Watson? of the audience of the stories? how important is Irene Adler to him? Moriarty (+Moran et al.)? Mycroft? Watson?
A third is that adaptations (mainly on screen, but also literary sequels) were so free from the beginning that fanon has always been a major part of the canon. Basil Rathbone defined Sherlock Holmes for forty years. Before him multiple options existed -- in fact h tells me that, though now audiences complain that Nigel Bruce's dullard Watson is quite unlike Conan Doyle's, until he played Watson for comic relief many adaptations saw no reason to include Watson at all. Unthinkable -- post-Rathbone, that is! -- In the seventies was "The Seven-Per-Cent Solution," a lovely film and one of only two I've seen that contain a pivotal duel in the form of a tennis match, and also a drastic revision to the self-possessed, self-controlled man of reason we thought we knew. Nicholas Meyer's (I've only seen the film, but he's the novelist) Holmes is a broken addict and a monomaniac, who needs Watson more or less to stay alive. It's terribly funny, and terribly important to the way people see Holmes. To me Billy Wilder's mutilated and partly lost "The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes," even earlier (1970), is even better; not a zany farce (which I love) but a real attempt to solve the puzzles of Holmes, originally segment by segment but in the version that's come down to us in rather choppy, episodic, but thematically united format. Of course there are dozens (hundreds?) of others, but these are the ones I'll focus on.
Rathbone-Holmes is strictly orthodox as a character, and he's quite uninterested in sex. The films on the other hand depart more from the stories than almost any other versions. (Except "Hound of the Baskervilles." There you have to go to the Hammer Films version -- starring Peter Cushing as Holmes and Christopher Lee as Baskerville -- whose innovations include attempted ritual sacrifice, an entirely different female Stapleton, a tarantula in a mine shaft, and webbed feet.) As I recall, "The Five Orange Pips" has almost nothing to do with the story, and also, in later ones Sherlock Holmes fights Nazis. Nazis! (But how can you blame them, when Conan Doyle had Holmes patriotically collaborate with the British Secret Service in WWI?) Anyway, Rathbone-Holmes keeps Watson around because he's amusing to the audience, he acts and does science because he can do anything and why shouldn't he, and he has essentially no character flaws other than extreme isolation.
S-P-CS-Holmes offers very different solutions to the puzzles of the series. Holmes keeps Watson around because he's severely mentally incapacitated and essentially would die without him. He's maybe interested in women, if they fall into his lap and owe him their lives; what he really wants is a vacation.
Wilder's Holmes is gay. Not recent-Robert-Downey,-Jr.-Holmes endless-yearning-in-his-eyes, physically-intimate,-pettily,-sabotagingly-jealous-of-Watson-and-hostile-towards-anyone-who-might-take-him-away gay. Explicitly, completely, painfully, and -- again unlike in the recent version -- to Watson's blissful ignorance, gay. (Again -- in 1970!) Jude Law Watson loves Holmes back but can't deal with him, either, and clearly considers himself capable of having another relationship as dominant in his life. The Watson in "Private Life" just doesn't think in those terms. While Holmes is politely, spitefully declining a prima ballerina's demand for insemination on the grounds that "Tchaikovsky is not an isolated case" (T being another failed inseminator -- "how shall I put it? -- women not his glass of tea"), Watson is enjoying the chorus line, and quite horrified to hear that the ballerina now takes him for Holmes's lover. (When they get back to Baker Street: "I hope I'm not being presumptuous, but Holmes, HAVE there been women in your life?" Pause. "The answer is yes ... You are being presumptuous." And: "Watson, this is a very small flat. We don't want to clutter it up with women." And: "When rebuffed at the front door, one's only option is to try the tradesman's entrance." -- !) As in the stories Holmes uses cocaine because he is bipolar (?) and self-medicating. As in the stories Holmes mistrusts women, with the additional explanation (common enough) of early failure. As is not in the stories, Watson is so devoted to Holmes and so concerned about his drug use that he goes to absurd lengths (like, making up a case and nailing a lot of things to the ceiling) to keep him intellectually engaged.
This is a long way of explaining why the boarding school alternate universe and the goofy drugs-and-ancient-Egypt plot and the "let's winkingly show our hero taking up all the clichés of his later career, just like in 'Indiana Jones 3'" and even the rivalry with a stupid irritatingly-impossible-not-to-read-as-Draco-Malfoy-now posh blond boy -- bothered h&me less, or surprised us less, than the romance with a girl. Who, by the way, looked at least eight years older than he was, in a move of dubious legality on the part of the imagined trysters.
By the way, I've often wondered whether Conan Doyle had been reading the Nicomachean Ethics (Bekker pages in the 1120s) when he came up with Holmes, because with the exception of the elements that require massive wealth he's Aristotle's great-souled man to a T --
Now, the Holmes canon is especially complex, for a number of reasons. One is about the author. Arthur Conan Doyle was so patently, and avowedly, commercially motivated at various points -- e.g., famously he hadn't intended to bring Holmes back from the Reichenbach Falls, but the public outcry and the dribbling diminution of funds in his account altered his constancy; besides which most devotees believe that he sometimes simply incorporated other material into Holmes stories so it would sell. Meanwhile, Doyle was writing the stories for so long that inevitably (?) they changed dramatically in tone, theme, and content. (The early stories are mainly ordinary domestic dramas whose characters act for clear, usually financial or romantic, reasons; while the international intrigues, supernatural debunkings, criminal conspiracies, and ... uh ... World War One ... come later.)
Another is about the character: that Holmes has so many blanks in his life, so many puzzles. Some of the major ones: why does Holmes think he needs Watson? what is Holmes's attitude towards women? what is Holmes's background (besides the existence of Mycroft) and what was his life like before (besides that he attended Oxford)? why does he do detective work at all? what are we to make of his drug use? his chemical experiments? his violin-playing? his extended bouts of melancholia punctuated by periods of intense activity -- the alternation of listless ineffectuality with what must feel from the inside like omnipotence? why is he such a devoted and accomplished actor, a master of make-up, accents, and class-crossing manners? how contemptuous is he of other people, really? of Watson? of the audience of the stories? how important is Irene Adler to him? Moriarty (+Moran et al.)? Mycroft? Watson?
A third is that adaptations (mainly on screen, but also literary sequels) were so free from the beginning that fanon has always been a major part of the canon. Basil Rathbone defined Sherlock Holmes for forty years. Before him multiple options existed -- in fact h tells me that, though now audiences complain that Nigel Bruce's dullard Watson is quite unlike Conan Doyle's, until he played Watson for comic relief many adaptations saw no reason to include Watson at all. Unthinkable -- post-Rathbone, that is! -- In the seventies was "The Seven-Per-Cent Solution," a lovely film and one of only two I've seen that contain a pivotal duel in the form of a tennis match, and also a drastic revision to the self-possessed, self-controlled man of reason we thought we knew. Nicholas Meyer's (I've only seen the film, but he's the novelist) Holmes is a broken addict and a monomaniac, who needs Watson more or less to stay alive. It's terribly funny, and terribly important to the way people see Holmes. To me Billy Wilder's mutilated and partly lost "The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes," even earlier (1970), is even better; not a zany farce (which I love) but a real attempt to solve the puzzles of Holmes, originally segment by segment but in the version that's come down to us in rather choppy, episodic, but thematically united format. Of course there are dozens (hundreds?) of others, but these are the ones I'll focus on.
Rathbone-Holmes is strictly orthodox as a character, and he's quite uninterested in sex. The films on the other hand depart more from the stories than almost any other versions. (Except "Hound of the Baskervilles." There you have to go to the Hammer Films version -- starring Peter Cushing as Holmes and Christopher Lee as Baskerville -- whose innovations include attempted ritual sacrifice, an entirely different female Stapleton, a tarantula in a mine shaft, and webbed feet.) As I recall, "The Five Orange Pips" has almost nothing to do with the story, and also, in later ones Sherlock Holmes fights Nazis. Nazis! (But how can you blame them, when Conan Doyle had Holmes patriotically collaborate with the British Secret Service in WWI?) Anyway, Rathbone-Holmes keeps Watson around because he's amusing to the audience, he acts and does science because he can do anything and why shouldn't he, and he has essentially no character flaws other than extreme isolation.
S-P-CS-Holmes offers very different solutions to the puzzles of the series. Holmes keeps Watson around because he's severely mentally incapacitated and essentially would die without him. He's maybe interested in women, if they fall into his lap and owe him their lives; what he really wants is a vacation.
Wilder's Holmes is gay. Not recent-Robert-Downey,-Jr.-Holmes endless-yearning-in-his-eyes, physically-intimate,-pettily,-sabotagingly-jealous-of-Watson-and-hostile-towards-anyone-who-might-take-him-away gay. Explicitly, completely, painfully, and -- again unlike in the recent version -- to Watson's blissful ignorance, gay. (Again -- in 1970!) Jude Law Watson loves Holmes back but can't deal with him, either, and clearly considers himself capable of having another relationship as dominant in his life. The Watson in "Private Life" just doesn't think in those terms. While Holmes is politely, spitefully declining a prima ballerina's demand for insemination on the grounds that "Tchaikovsky is not an isolated case" (T being another failed inseminator -- "how shall I put it? -- women not his glass of tea"), Watson is enjoying the chorus line, and quite horrified to hear that the ballerina now takes him for Holmes's lover. (When they get back to Baker Street: "I hope I'm not being presumptuous, but Holmes, HAVE there been women in your life?" Pause. "The answer is yes ... You are being presumptuous." And: "Watson, this is a very small flat. We don't want to clutter it up with women." And: "When rebuffed at the front door, one's only option is to try the tradesman's entrance." -- !) As in the stories Holmes uses cocaine because he is bipolar (?) and self-medicating. As in the stories Holmes mistrusts women, with the additional explanation (common enough) of early failure. As is not in the stories, Watson is so devoted to Holmes and so concerned about his drug use that he goes to absurd lengths (like, making up a case and nailing a lot of things to the ceiling) to keep him intellectually engaged.
This is a long way of explaining why the boarding school alternate universe and the goofy drugs-and-ancient-Egypt plot and the "let's winkingly show our hero taking up all the clichés of his later career, just like in 'Indiana Jones 3'" and even the rivalry with a stupid irritatingly-impossible-not-to-read-as-Draco-Malfoy-now posh blond boy -- bothered h&me less, or surprised us less, than the romance with a girl. Who, by the way, looked at least eight years older than he was, in a move of dubious legality on the part of the imagined trysters.
By the way, I've often wondered whether Conan Doyle had been reading the Nicomachean Ethics (Bekker pages in the 1120s) when he came up with Holmes, because with the exception of the elements that require massive wealth he's Aristotle's great-souled man to a T --
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