mariajma: atlinmerrick: mid0nz: Mark Gatiss’s Sherlock Fan Fiction or,I Don’t Care
mariajma: atlinmerrick: mid0nz: Mark Gatiss’s Sherlock Fan Fiction or,I Don’t Care Why He Did It. I Want to Know How. You all have so many mixed feelings about Hearse, don’t you? I’m going to spend many hours of my life explaining why I think it’s fucking narrative genius. It’s on par with my favorite X-files episode: “Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose.” The writers of both episodes brilliantly take the piss out of the show in the way only somebody who loves it can. Both episodes are Meta (post-modern)— self-consciously crafted, self-reflexive, genuine love letters to the series in which they belong as well as to the fandom who adores them. Let’s look at the solutions to the Fall. We have Anderson’s high tech crazy-making Mission Impossible, a Hollywood spy thriller with plot so complex that the only audience members who can claim to understand it are the fans who’ve watched it several times. Spy thrillers are intoxicating. That’s their whole purpose. Practical schmactical. The plots of these spy thriller films are never the point, aren’t meant to hold up to logical scrutiny. Like Arthur Conan Doyle’s universe they’re hopelessly inconsistent. The viewer-reader has to perform mental gymnastics to make sense of the non-sensical. In that readerly act of contortion, we create our own fiction. As Anderson says after Sherlock’s reveal— that’s not the way he would have done it. That’s because he’s already “made his own movie.” Interestingly Anderson ships Sherlolly. Next we have the darling fangirl’s version of the Fall. Its production values are on par with the earliest episodes of Trek. Hers is not a suspense film like Anderson’s. It’s a slap-dash romance. The Sherlock/Moriarty kissing scene isn’t just a bone for Morlock shippers (though it’s clear from his script of The Great Game that Gatiss ships them), it’s a loving spoof of the narrative cliches and aesthetics of slash where everything leading up to the climatic “kiss” is clumsily crafted, that is to say it’s “poorly” written (at least by “Traditional Standards.”) But isn’t the money-shot close-up glorious! Like much slash, the homosexuals are sinister (poor John— the one rounded character), their interaction cliched. Didn’t Ben do wonders with his eyebrows!? He and Andrew didn’t have to speak and we knew all the dialog they left unspoken. Why? Enemies-to-lovers is a slash genre known to us all. Gatiss has sympathy for the Morlock shipper and he gives her a beautiful new year’s present. The gif to end all gifs. No manip necessary. And at last, there is the documentary Anderson is filming. But. We all know that documentaries, too are constructions. No matter how definitive and “true” they pretend to be, in the end they’re just another text. They’re fictions in the sense that they are only one version of “reality” (whatever that is), a version which itself is open to a million interpretations (not an unlimited number mind you. All texts have some semantic boundaries). Sherlock on film, the True Version of Events. There were 13 possible scenarios, Sherlock repeats that fact several times. Each of the scenarios was fully worked out. This is a nod to the writer’s conundrum, what Mofftisson had to contend with. Gatiss chose to show us at least these three with a nod and a wink. Each solution to the final problem is valid in that each is written for a specific purpose, specific audience with specific needs. Anderson is the only character who actually does care about HOW Sherlock did it if for no other reason than to prove himself right. I could hear all the ball-under-the-arm theorists squealing with delight from the four corners of the globe. Who’s to say Gatiss didn’t toss them that ball on purpose after-the-fact? For my part, I still believe that 29 was one of the codes and that they simply didn’t have enough time to work it into the final resolution. Nobody will convince me otherwise. It could have just as easily been the rubber ball that Gatiss made insignificant in the end. Isn’t that what documentaries do? Make some events, objects, people more significant than others in the interest of telling the “truth” in a limited amount of time? Each of these resolutions is delightful in its own way. But we never really do find out why Sherlock did it though the why can inspire just as many theories as the how. As a stylist Gatiss prefers emotions to remain ambiguous. We should thank him. Ambiguity. There be ships. I’ll just conclude this with a few thoughts on the fictions I write about Sherlock. The first principle of a convincing reading is that the why of a character’s actions is a governed by a degree of authorial logic. That which drives BBC Sherlock’s characters, the why can be deduced from textual data, the facts of the story, the how of how the writer wrote it. The musician scored it. The cinematographer shot it. The director framed it. Sherlock Holmes’s deductions of “the truth” might be the greatest literary device in all of English fiction. Mark Gatiss understands that, delights in it. Plays with it. After all he’s a fan himself. Mid0nz, I’m studying film and media full time, and I think in the two Sherlock posts of yours I just read you covered at least four weeks of my college work. God damn you’re good. Oh my god and that x files episode yesssss -- source link
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