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 --

On generosity in story-telling, and the Lubitsch Touch.

H & I watched "Trouble in Paradise" again the other day -- h's second, and my perhaps dozenth or twentieth, viewing. Although I remember all the jokes and can recite them along with the characters still in between viewings I always forget what an uproariously funny movie it is. We were watching it in the theater -- my first time since I first saw it, in 2003; h's first time full stop -- and it does make a difference to have the other people there. In my case it makes me nervous, because I usually start laughing before anyone else and feel foolish. And it is always interesting to hear what gets the biggest laughs (not always what I laugh hardest at, naturally). But the general benefit of having other people there is that it lets you see things through their eyes a bit -- through your knowledge that their eyes are watching, anyhow. That is why watching a favorite film with a respected and admired acquaintance who hasn't seen it is so nerve-wracking: because watching the other person watch verges on overwhelming watching. But with a friendly or anonymous crowd, it lets you see things you might have missed. Sometimes it lets you see a scene or hear a line as new. -- Incidentally, this is one of the underrated pleasures of "MST3K," too -- not just that they notice more details because they have watched the movie six times, but that they remark on different details because different things really are salient to them, because a string of scenes in which people look at hands adds up to something for them in a way it never would have for me on my own. And now -- on occasion -- it points to something outside itself to my eyes, too. This is why people repeat catch phrases; they represent the hollowed-out version of our wonder at the fact of shared, and more miraculous yet -- transferred or transmitted, experience.

Lubitsch never lost this wonder. His films are full of the details people absorb from other people, or details that they share without knowing it made marvelous by our knowledge that they share it. That's the meaning of Lily and Mariette (Miriam Hopkins and Kay Francis) separately waiting till a companion looks the other way to dunk a croissant into coffee. It's the meaning of the montages in which we see first Mariette and then Gaston (Herbert Marshall) responded to by an array of subordinates, and at least a part of the meaning of the (riotous) early scene in which the concierge mediatess between Italian-speaking police and English-only Filiba (Edward Everett Horton, whose absent-mindedly benevolent affect Lubitsch subverts both here and in "Trouble in Paradise"'s near-Siamese twin, "Design for Living"). There's a kind of trust offered the viewer here too: I'll show you their absurdities if you acknowledge how common they are; I'll show you their faults if you promise to forgive them. Even the smallest of characters are bathed in the director's gentleness and wonder and generosity: the butler (Robert Greig, recognizable nine years later as the butler in "The Lady Eve") whose mutters and eye-rolls summarize weeks of Mariette and Gaston's flirtation, the waiter who highlights how comical Gaston's grandiosity is by studiously taking down the order "moon ... in champagne ...," the maid whose single appearance is a five-second blushing "Maybe, M. Lavalle." They say it's because Lubitsch was an actor himself, and not so talented that he got beyond bit parts, that he made sure to distribute the fun a bit more widely than some others. Even the gondolier garbageman whose operatic solo opens the picture is Lubitsch telling us: look at us -- bringing beauty and grandiosity to the most ordinary, sordid tasks! Isn't it touching? But aren't we funny?

I've muddled it up by presenting two distinct kinds of generosity together. One, not so significant except for its link to the second, is formal: the generosity to let other people speak. Not just the camera, not just the script, and certainly not just the lead actors. (Lubitsch never has only one or two lead actors, either, that I can think of. Perhaps in "Bluebeard's Eighth Wife," which I can't remember well beyond the pajama scene at the very beginning? Or "Cluny Brown," which I haven't seen at all?) I always think of this as Chekhovian, because of the way Chekhov uses different perspectives to show that what moves us most can be invisible to others (think of the cut away to the little boys sneaking cigarettes in -- "The Lady with the Dog," perhaps?, and the famous shrinking of the central incident of "The Kiss" in the recounting to others), but also to show how we can learn to find the poignancy in small things. (Time to mention again that I hope to write more about Ozu some time ... )

The second generosity is substantive, and it's Chekhovian too. It's a way of interpreting the formal generosity, really: as a sign that they too are human beings, they are parties to meaning and sorrow beyond ours -- and they are party to ours not because we are so special but because of their own humanity. The idea of "the Lubitsch touch" must go back more than seven decades now. Billy Wilder is known to have kept a sign on his desk reading: "how would Lubitsch have done it?" (A sort of prophetic parody of those "WWJD?" bracelets, I like to think. Wilder was no slouch at empathy himself; forget that he wrote "Ninotchka," and forget the exceptional sensitivity in the face of opacity that defines "The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes," and just remember that it is not a coincidence that one of his two best-known movies ends with the line: "Nobody's perfect!" Even a trifling light comedy like "Sabrina" includes the sublime moment when Audrey Hepburn is charmed by Humphrey Bogart's record of "Yes, We Have No Bananas," thinking it a sign of what she missed while away in Paris, rather than what she missed because she was not born yet when he went to college. What is that but an admission of the silliness of the storyline -- one intended to show how to take the story's silliness to the movie's advantage. "The Major and he Minor"'s nutty vista of dozens of teenaged schoolgirls at a dance with Veronica Lake haircuts is along the same lines: the absurdity of the plot can no longer be read as contemptible-pathetic, it has to be seen as touching-pathetic.) Anyway, critics have focussed on sophistication -- or, more crudely -- sex as the essence of the Lubitsch touch, but that's at best partly right. Part of the beauty of "Trouble in Paradise," and "Design for Living," too, comes from the acute awareness that sophistication without generosity and wit is worse than useless -- indeed, contemptible, if it allows us to think better of ourselves than we deserve; and that deChristianized sex is also a moral matter, not per se or because of special metaphysical properties of human genitalia but because of the special properties of human character; and that the proverb is wrong, that folly and forgiveness are both human, that we ought to expect both of the same people, that a fool who can forgive is still a fool, but wiser than one who can't forgive.