Poetry or Truth? Part II: Brecht and The Great Game
S4 is fake. This is why.
Contents
[Looking for Part I? Start here!]
i. Brecht’s Epic Theatre
- V-Effekt
- Spass
- Gestus
- ‘Ostalgie’
- ‘It’s Not Chance, It’s Chess’
- The Street Scene
- Chinese Circus
- ‘Breathtakingly Prescient’
ii. The Great Game
- ‘Everyone’s Been Getting This Wrong’
- ‘A ‘Me’ Substitute’
- The Artist Observes Himself
So! Brecht. We arrive at Brecht through Esslin again, who wrote back-to-back seminal works on both Brecht and Theatre of the Absurd. Esslin was a big Brecht scholar as well and regarded his early works as an early example of the ‘Theatre of the Absurd’ that he was trying to define.
But Brecht quickly and definitively pursued his own unique philosophy and method of theatre, and he was prolific (and obstinate) enough regarding his approach that he’s one playwright whose actual intent we can spend a lot of time discussing. He called his approach ‘epic theatre’, in contrast to ‘dramatic theatre’, which describes most everything else, including both Chekhov and Theatre of the Absurd.
Unlike Chekhov, Brecht was not at all interested in Realism, but like Chekhov, Brecht’s motive was to present an event such that the audience reaction would question the decisions made in the narrative and thus spur them to the opposite action in real life. Brecht makes his distinction:
The dramatic theatre’s spectator says: Yes, I have felt like that too — Just like me — It’s only natural — It’ll never change — The sufferings of this man appall me, because they are inescapable — That’s great art; it all seems the most obvious thing in the world — I weep when they weep, I laugh when they laugh.
The epic theatre’s spectator says: I’d never have thought it — That’s not the way — That’s extraordinary, hardly believable — It’s got to stop — The sufferings of this man appall me, because they are unnecessary — That’s great art: nothing obvious in it — I laugh when they weep, I weep when they laugh. (x)
Plus, as it turns out, Brecht’s approach to theatre is a near perfect fit for a Holmes adaptation.
i. Brecht’s Epic Theatre
He wanted his audiences to remain objective and distant from emotional involvement so that they could make considered and rational judgements about any social comment or issues in his work.
The BBC gives a nice little summary of where Brecht is coming from. Yes, the same BBC. The fact that the BBC website has an educational slideshow dedicated to making Brecht accessible for the modern audience is the first in a series of absolutely delightful coincidences. I’ll let them start us off:
When naturalistic theatre was at its height and acted as a mirror to what was happening in society, [Brecht] decided to use it as a force for change. He wanted to make his audience think and famously said that theatre audiences at that time “hang up their brains with their hats in the cloakroom”.
In naturalistic or dramatic theatre the audience care about the lives of the characters onstage. They forget their own lives for a while and escape into the lives of others. When an audience cries for a character or feels emotion through the events happening to them it’s called catharsis.
Brecht was against cathartic theatre. He believed that while the audience believed in the action onstage and became emotionally involved they lost the ability to think and to judge. He wanted his audiences to remain objective and distant from emotional involvement so that they could make considered and rational judgements about any social comment or issues in his work. To do this he used a range of theatrical devices or techniques so that the audience were reminded throughout that they were watching theatre; a presentation of life, not real life itself.
Well if it isn’t Herr Bertolt ‘sentiment is the fly in the ointment, the grease on the lens’ Brecht, demanding Holmesian asceticism from his audience.
‘Don’t get involved,’ says Brecht to his audience.
‘Will caring about them help save them?’
‘Why can’t people just think?’
The appeal of Brecht’s methods is immediately apparent. Brecht writes for an audience of Sherlock Holmeses.
Brecht called his method of reminding the audience that they were watching ‘a presentation of life, not real life itself’, Verfremdungseffekt, or V-effekt. Translating roughly to ‘distancing effect’ or ‘alienation effect’, Brecht’s goal was exactly that: to force the audience to observe and analyze the events of his play without sympathizing with any particular character.
Do not suspend your disbelief. See and observe.
V-Effekt
In order to convince you to follow me further down the Brechtian rabbithole of authorial intent, I will now present, mostly without comment, the list helpfully provided by the BBC themselves on Slide 9 of their Brecht resource page, interleaved with select scenes and screencaps from BBC Sherlock:
Brechtian techniques as a stimulus for devised work
You might choose to adopt Brechtian techniques because you’ve been told that you must exploit the ideas of a major practitioner in your work. Or it may be that the objectivity of the style suits your piece. There are several elements you should consider if you’re going to create a piece in this style:
- The narration needs to be told in a montage style.
- Techniques to break down the fourth wall, making the audience directly conscious of the fact that they are watching a play.
- Use of a narrator. Because this character is outside the character framework, they change the relationship with the audience.
- Use of songs or music. Songs and dances are likely to provoke a more objective viewing, particularly if what you’re watching is serious and not the schmaltzy environment of a typical musical.
- Use of technology. If you project ideas onto a screen in a slide show or even have a still image there throughout each scene, it makes the audience analyse more thoroughly.
- Use of signs. If an actor starts each scene with a placard naming the scene or you have a board which is changed at the start of each scene, you’re reminding the audience about the fact that they are watching a play.
- Use of freeze frames / tableaux. This is obviously unnatural in the simple sense of that word, and should make the audience think about the frozen moment.
So.
Everybody on the same page? Don’t worry, there’s loads more.
Spass
From BBC again:
Spass literally translates as ‘fun’. Brecht wanted to make his audience think. He realised that while we are laughing we are also thinking. So much so that the playwright Eugène Ionesco called him a ‘postman’ because he was always delivering messages! However, Brechtian work isn’t boring and it’s definitely not always serious either. Even if the message itself is serious Brecht realised that comedy could be an excellent way of engaging the audience and forcing them to think about issues.
The idea of ‘spass’ is not so different from what we already know to be Moffat’s modus operandi: wrapping up important clues within a comedic moment. The melodrama of the Reichenbach Fall was foreshadowed by, of all the silly things, Moriarty’s ‘Stayin’ Alive’ disco ringtone all the way back in the pool scene at the beginning of S2. It was Chekhov’s favorite trick as well to juxtapose the comedic and tragic, as with the breaking string.
So while the fact that the show likes to have ‘fun’ does not count as an obvious Brecht reference, the BBC’s educational slides on Brecht are downright suspicious in the examples they give —
For example, a very serious work addressing suicide might break the action at a key moment in a character’s unhappiness to break into a parody of an American advert
— considering this the exact theme and delivery mechanism used in TLD, with Culverton Smith’s advertisements interleaved with Faith and Sherlock’s midnight stroll.
Gestus
Gestus, Brecht’s signature acting technique, is a method again designed to create emotional distance between the audience and the character. Rather than have the performance flow out from the actor’s instinctive embodiment of the character’s inner self, Brecht asks for a very calculated, ‘produced’ performance.
From BBC:
Gestus, another Brechtian technique, is a clear character gesture or movement used by the actor that captures a moment or attitude rather than delving into emotion. So every gesture was important. Brecht and his actors studied photographs of the plays in rehearsal to ensure each moment worked effectively. Could the audience tell by the actor’s gestures alone what was happening in the scene?
Initially, I didn’t have much to say about gestus in terms of supporting my interpretation of S4; evaluating what technique an actor is (secretly) using seemed the height of subjectivity and the weakest argument here among many.
But Darcy pointed me to Rachael Talalay’s March blog post, where she discusses her work on T6T. It struck me that she links to an article listing what are essentially ‘director no-nos’ for getting genuine, spontaneous performances out of your actors, and then explains that she chose to break all the rules anyway. The linked article repeats ad nauseam that the result of breaking these rules is that the resulting performance ‘will look like an actor, not a real person.’
There is a striking similarity between Talalay’s own words —
Within that approach, I have come up with a term: “audience-oriented” directing. For each scene I ask “What do I want the audience to understand/feel/see” and then I set about creating a series of shots, blocking, locations, design, acting, etc, that attempts to evoke those responses.
— and Brecht’s desire to use his actors to capture a ‘moment or attitude’.
But more than that, we know that dramatic and epic theatre have opposing goals. This is clear from the linked article, as we see that negative consequences of ignoring the advice for directing dramatic theatre are almost synonymous with the desired results of Brecht’s V-effekt:
If they try to repeat and copy emotions and reactions, it takes the truth out of your movie. The actors will appear to have phony emotions, thereby leaving the audience cold.
As soon as the actor tries to be frightened, be angry, be excited, or be in love, he will look like an actor, not a real person.
Any anticipation is obvious and visible to the viewer and makes your film tacky.
There is an important rule: an audience should cry after watching a performance, your actors shouldn’t. Did you get it? The viewer may be impressed and attached to the performance even without exposing over-the-top emotions from the actors (they should not over-act).
Altogether, it appears that Talalay is describing how she intentionally chose a method of directing to produce a ‘produced’, un-naturalistic, alienating result.
And consider that result: take, for instance, the aquarium scene. Would you say that Mary’s anticipation of Norbury’s bullet was incredibly tacky? Didn’t John’s grief bellowing come across bizarre and alienating? Did Mary’s tearful dying speech seem the tiniest bit over-acted?
If parts of the performances in S4 felt phoned-in and left you cold, it’s very likely it was intentional, and you can thank gestus.
‘Ostalgie’
Have you heard of that thing, in Germany?
‘Ostalgie.’ People who miss the old days under the Communists.
People are weird, aren’t they?
Ostalgie is a portmanteau of the German words Nostalgie (nostalgia) and Ost (east). It’s specifically a nostalgia for East Germany. There isn’t.. really… any contextual reason to use the German word here.
Except that Brecht, who became an ardent Marxist in his mid-twenties, weathered WWII in Hollywood but left in the wake of McCarthyist persecution to return to the country of his birth, living out the remainder of his life in communist East Berlin. He resumed his career there and received the Stalin Peace Prize in 1954.
‘It’s Not Chance, It’s Chess’
In exile in Europe in the 1930s, Brecht formed a close friendship with fellow German and Jewish exile Walter Benjamin. Benjamin was an acclaimed philosopher and culture critic in his own right, and became something of a hype man for Brecht; he read, discussed, critiqued, supported, and pitched Brecht’s works to publishers as a literary agent would. A whole book examines their collaboration, correspondence, and friendship.
I’ll let you read as many parallels as you like into this description of ‘mercurial self-confidence of Brecht’ and the ‘quiet, ironclad focus of Benjamin’. (x)
During their joint exile, Benjamin stayed with Brecht for several summers in Prague. They passed the time in part by playing chess, resulting in this rare series of photos of the two of them together:
Because the photo series shows the progression of the game, chess nerds have jumped on this set of photos to analyse the strategy of each player. (They conclude, adorably, that ‘both are more than ‘idlers in the garden of chess’.’) (x)
Look familiar yet?
The angle, the posture, the chessboard, the chronological progression from image to image. The sequential release of the images themselves. Sherlock fans have even approached the chess match shown using the same analysis.
So, just to recap: between Chekhov’s Breaking String and Brecht’s Chess Match, we have identified references to the two most frequently performed playwrights of the modern repertoire in S4 promotional photos.
The Street Scene
In an essay, Brecht uses the model of a ‘street scene’ to describe his goal for the objective detachment of Epic theatre: to serve the same simple function as a bystander describing the essentials of a real-life traffic accident that they have just witnessed.
The bystanders may not have observed what happened, or they may simply not agree with him, may ‘see things a different way’; the point is that the demonstrator acts the behaviour of driver or victim or both in such a way that the bystanders are able to form an opinion about the accident. (x)
The witness need not be an artist, and suspension of disbelief is not the goal— you don’t recreate the accident by crashing another car in demonstration!
The street demonstrator’s performance is essentially repetitive. The event has taken place; what you are seeing now is a repeat. (x)
Though the basic Doyle framing device of the client bringing their story to 221B fits this bill already, BBC Sherlock gives us our first literal street scene in TAB, moving the whole of 221B into the street to better observe Lestrade’s retelling:
The stage is set, the curtain rises. A street demonstration of how Moriarty could have survived.
The street demonstrator’s performance is essentially repetitive. The event has taken place; what you are seeing now is a repeat.
We encounter even more street scenes as we proceed to S4. If, according to Epic theatre, what we’re seeing now is a repeat, how coincidental is it that the case in T6T opens with Lestrade relaying the facts of a literal traffic accident, just as Brecht describes? How symbolic is it that the boy’s death in reality took place a week ago without witness, and the flamboyant explosion that appears to have killed him turns out to only be the thing that alerts us to his death?
And how apropos for an episode titled after a case that — according to not only the blog, but on-screen canon — was already solved, written up, and posted to John’s blog during S2.
Compare this with the return of Sonnet Code, as we note our first potential Shakespearean reference as T6T unfolds:
Sonnet 59, it its opening line, ruminates on ‘nothing new under the sun’ — favorite biblical verse of Doyle’s Holmes in STUD and fortune-cookie fortune of our John’s in ASIP:
If there be nothing new, but that which is
Hath been before, how are our brains beguil’d,
Which, labouring for invention, bear amiss
The second burthen of a former child!
In this context, ‘59’ is used here purposefully to indicate we’re witnessing a story based on a recycled case. Lending even more weight to this intended meaning are the next lines of the sonnet, which use the idea of a mother giving birth to the same child twice as metaphor for the creative process. Not only has the Six Thatchers case long been solved, but the reference appears during the depiction of Mary’s labor to deliver a child that, according to our view of John’s blog post just moments before, has already been born.
The theme of the ‘street demonstration’ returns again in TLD:
In this episode, Sherlock spends all night tooling around in ‘street scenes’: painting windows and pinboards out of thin air, recreating Culverton’s conference room table in the street for no apparent reason.
The all-night street scene marathon wraps up as Sherlock makes an actual scene in the middle of the street in morning rush hour traffic before the 221B backdrop unspools behind him and he’s transported home, reminding us — yet again — that we are watching a show.
Chinese Circus
Brecht didn’t come up with the idea of V-effekt all on his own, of course. While illusionism, the fourth wall, and suspension of disbelief were by now all integral parts of modern European theatre, Chinese theatre had evolved in a very different direction.
Brecht attended a performance of the Peking Opera in Berlin in 1935 and wrote at length about how he was adapting his own method from what he observed there:
Above all, the Chinese artist never acts as if there were a fourth wall besides the three surrounding him. He expresses his awareness of being watched. This immediately removes one of the European stage’s characteristic illusions. The audience can no longer have the illusion of being the unseen spectator at an event which is really taking place. A whole elaborate European stage technique, which helps to conceal the fact that the scenes are so arranged that the audience can view them in the easiest way, is thereby made unnecessary. The actors openly choose those positions which will best show them off the the audience, just as if they were acrobats. A further means is that the artist observes himself. (x)
Brecht’s connection to Chinese theatre is worth mentioning here specifically because of the otherwise-inexplicably racist episode of our very own BBC Sherlock. In this episode, our heroes just happen to attend a Chinese theatre performance. A Chinese-circus-show-within-a-Chekhovian-poetic-realism-show.
An Epic-theatre-show-within-a-dramatic-theatre-show.
Chinese drama is interchangeably called opera, but includes a combination of music, vocal performance, mime, dance, and acrobatics. The emcee of the Yellow Dragon Circus in TBB is credited as ‘Opera Singer’, and the troupe appears to include an acrobat and, most significantly, a ““warrior”” escapologist attempting to avoid being shot by a monstrous spear gun.
Recall from Part I that this episode is titled The Blind Banker, after the original Doyle poem about a veteran who is shot by Love’s Arrow.
Recall that at the latest Sherlocked USA event in May, the Friday night party theme was ‘Chinese Circus’, which would otherwise be an unfortunate callback to a seven-year-old and objectively unpopular episode.
Recall Wanda Ventham asking a small group of fans if we knew what S4 was really about at this very party.
Are you beginning to form an idea?
You said circus. This is not a circus. Look at the size of this crowd. Sherlock, this is … art.
‘Breathtakingly Prescient’
In this sense, the S1 episode titles themselves become a statement of intent, marking just how long the writers have been planning this game; a narrative fractal, tracing out the full trajectory of the show in miniature.
We begin with A Study in Pink, literally a character study, establishing our beloved camp gay detective and grumpy bi blogger as they are in life. We view them through the fourth wall, polished and intact. We come to know them well enough to spot a forgery.
The Blind Banker foreshadows a Brechtian Epic-theatre parable-interlude, wherein Love Personified shoots John Watson in the face. The Archer of Love’s aim is true at last. (It’s almost bizarre beyond mentioning that this episode was directed by Euros Lyn.)
And why, why, you ask, is this obscure theatrical stunt possibly justified in what ought to be a simple Sherlock Holmes mystery romance? And my answer to you is the remaining title, planned since the moment of conception:
The Great Game.
ii. The Great Game
The use of Brecht in S4 is, first and foremost, particularly interesting commentary on the framing device of Doyle’s original stories. As we well know, the original stories are filtered through Dr. Watson’s retelling, allowing him to tweak and withhold details as it suits him.
Put another way: like the Chinese actor, Dr. Watson is aware that he is being watched. He also expresses his awareness that he is being watched regularly: he addresses the readers directly, he tells them that he is withholding dates and identities from them all the time.
From the opening of CHAS (x):
It is years since the incidents of which I speak took place, and yet it is with diffidence that I allude to them. For a long time, even with the utmost discretion and reticence, it would have been impossible to make the facts public, but now the principal person concerned is beyond the reach of human law, and with due suppression the story may be told in such fashion as to injure no one. It records an absolutely unique experience in the career both of Mr. Sherlock Holmes and of myself. The reader will excuse me if I conceal the date or any other fact by which he might trace the actual occurrence.
Moffat and Gatiss are clearly on board with this reading of the stories. From an interview back in 2014 (x):
Moffat: Also, if you read [The Adventure Of] Charles Augustus Milverton, Dr. Watson in the opening paragraph tells you that he’s about to tell you a porkie. He says, ‘I even now must be very reticent.’ I think what Doyle is hinting at is that Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson sat in Baker Street and said, ‘Right, we’re going to have to go and kill him, aren’t we? That’s the only way we can do this.’ So they break in, kill him, and then Dr. Watson writes up a version of the story that puts the murder [on someone else].
Moffat and Gatiss play the Great Game so hard that they hypothesize Magnussen was killed by Sherlock himself, and the published version is a cover story. They not only hypothesize this, but they put it in their adaptation as the climax of S3.
We see this interpretation come full circle in the beginning of T6T, when the murder of Magnussen is rewritten, pinned — just as they described in 2014 — on someone else.
Again following Doyle’s example, they politely take a moment in the opening scene of S4 to tell us they’re ‘about to tell [us] a porkie’:
The show has emphasized this difference between poetry and truth since S1. We first see Sherlock and John first bicker over the portrayal of their first case in the episode titled, of course, The Great Game. Commentary on how their adventures are presented on John’s blog crops up regularly throughout the show. Sherlock’s best man speech centers around a critique of John’s blog.
A reporter, a photographer, a media magnate, a tv show host — arbiters of public perception and dissemination of knowledge — appear as villains. People who prey on and profit from exclusives. Shocking reveals. Secrets. The battle for control over the narrative is continually referenced.
TAB goes on at length about everything from Mrs. Hudson’s page-time allotment, ‘The illustrator is out of control.’ ‘Will there be a proper murder this time?’ These are all callbacks to similar conversations in TPLOSH, which also stands on the central conceit that Watson does not supply his readers with the whole truth.
Pastiche upon pastiche imagine the details of the undocumented cases mentioned by Watson in passing. Reams of paper have been dedicated to the scholarly analysis and reconciliation of the inconsistencies in Doyle’s canon. The ‘private life’ of Sherlock Holmes does not hold our interest, does not exist without a curated ‘public life’ that leaves questions unanswered.
In short: the framing device of the stories in itself is a critical component of the mythos of Sherlock Holmes.
Everyone’s Been Getting This Wrong
Ronald Knox wrote the satirical essay in 1911 that would become the foundation of all Sherlockian scholarship. Knox was an English priest, theologian, and author of his own series of detective stories.
Also, because it goes against the spirit of this analysis for me to omit it, Knox would very likely be considered gay in a modern context (x)(x). In his early twenties, he was ‘extremely (and not unreturnedly) fond’ of his student and future UK Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, and his biography was written by lifelong friend Evelyn Waugh.
But more relevant for now: Ronald Knox wrote the very first piece of Sherlockian Scholarship. He wrote it at age 23 as an Oxford divinity professor to satirize a particular vein of Biblical scholarship that irked him. (x)
It’s phenomenal.
Pitting a colorful cast of ‘preposterously named foreign scholars’ against each other, Knox not only proposes the first alternative reading of the Sherlock Holmes stories, but he invents at least five different readings and shadowboxes them all at once. The ultimate in straw men, he names his academic nemeses things like Piff-Pouff, Backnecke, and Papier-Mâché.
The essay is a work of art unto itself; Knox not only demonstrates an astounding knowledge of the canon, but quotes passages in three different languages and casually draws parallels to Plato. He is clearly a voracious supernerd of many disciplines, but particularly so when it comes to Sherlock Holmes. Knox is so comprehensive that my first assumption was that Piff-Pouff et al were real people he knew, casually producing unpublished Sherlockian analysis under silly pseudonyms. Not so. It’s Knox v. Knox v. Knox.
Sherlockian scholarship was not just born in Knox’s work, it was born walking, talking, and with a full set of teeth. (x)
In one essay, Knox single-handedly invented what we know today as the Great Game.
The Great Game is, of course, defined as using Holmes’ own methods of deduction to resolve the inconsistencies in the stories themselves. Knox lays out all the usual quibbles: Was it John or James Watson? James Moriarty and his brother, James Moriarty? How many different colored dressing gowns could one man possibly own? Based on what Knox considers to be irreconcilable details, he knocks down the theories of his scholarly ‘peers’ as they debate which of the Sherlock Holmes stories must be fabrications and why.
Think about that for a moment: it’s a Sherlockian scholarship tradition dating back to the very first 1911 to debate which of Watson’s stories are fake. Doyle continued to publish Sherlock Holmes stories until 1927.
The main contention Knox points to concerns the newest stories, which at the time were The Return stories, where Doyle picks up with Holmes’ return after disappearing into the Reichenbach in FINA. On the one hand, M. Piff-Pouff “accepts The Return stories as genuine, and regards The Final Problem as an incident faked by Watson for his own purposes.” In contrast, Backnecke “regard[s] The Final Problem as genuine, and The Return stories as a fabrication.”
Knox proceeds to systematically break down the evidence:
The evidence against these stories may be divided into (a) those suggested by changes in the character and methods of Holmes, (b) those resting on impossibilities in the narrative itself, (c) inconsistencies found by comparison with the previous narrative.
Sound at all familiar?
After weighing each argument, Knox delivers his own judgement: all the stories are authentic except the most recent Return stories, which he explains thus:
I believe that all the stories were written by Watson, but whereas the genuine cycle actually happened, the spurious adventures are the lucubration of his own unaided invention. Surely we may reconstruct the facts thus. Watson has been a bit of a gadabout. He is a spendthrift: so much we know from the beginning of The Study in Scarlet. His brother, as Holmes finds out by examining the scratches on the keyhole of his watch, was a confirmed drunkard. He himself, as a bachelor, haunts the Criterion Bar. In The Sign of Four he admits having had too much Beaune for lunch… […] What happens? His Elijah is taken away from him; his wife, as we know, dies: he slips back into the grip of his old enemy; his practice, already diminished by continued neglect, vanishes away; he is forced to earn a livelihood by patching together clumsy travesties of the wonderful incidents of which he was once the faithful recorder. (x)
Pointing to canon evidence that Watson is by nature irresponsible with both drink and money, Knox himself argues that…
- …upon the deaths of both Holmes and his wife…
- …Watson falls into an alcoholic depression…
- …no longer sees patients, and…
- …begins fabricating new adventures with Holmes that are…
- …poor imitations of the genuine article, which he must…
- …publish in order to make ends meet.
In short:
‘A ‘Me’ Substitute’
Our John is classically reticent on the subject of his own well-being — ‘last night was not good’ is about all we get—but the multiple John mirrors throughout S4 present a unified story.
We first meet Ajay, restless with nightmares, drinking alone in a tiny bedsit reminiscent of the opening scenes of ASIP, haunted by ‘amo’:
Next we see Sherlock’s savage deductions of Norbury, which tie her to John by the drinking and the hand tremor, and mention outright her modest salary and tiny flat:
And of course Faith, with her gun and her cane and her desperation, and a whole evening of deductions dedicated to the otherwise inconsequential fact of her tiny kitchen:
Suicidal, alone, and strapped for cash.
Culverton Smith, in this context, becomes a perversely aspirational mirror for John — ‘What if you were rich, and powerful, and necessary?’
As Culverton assumes the part of disparaging our own John’s professional faculties, a reference to Holmes’ original insult in DYIN, we are also witness to yet another manifestation of the author’s self-loathing. Does John still take shifts at the clinic where he once worked with Mary?
So when even Holmes himself insists, ‘life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent,’ it’s no surprise that the ‘lucubrations’ of our John’s ‘unaided invention’ fall short of the standard.
Dealing with grief, depression, money troubles, and most critically the absence of his ‘Elijah’ and the creative stimulation of their adventures together, John has been forced to just… make something up.
Ultimately, what this means is that S4 feels like a shade of the show we know and love on purpose.
This season is intentionally a self-parody, a coded message marking a trail that leads back to Knox’s original hypothesis. There is no other explanation for the consistency in subtextual language used throughout the show and the clarity of the subtextual message delivered now. From this perspective, the care and detail that went toward producing a substandard show is astounding.
T6T, TLD, and TFP are not real life for John and Sherlock. They are the clumsy travesties of the wonderful incidents of which John was once the faithful recorder.
The Artist Observes Himself
So we find ourselves here: the show has, for three seasons, not been filtered in any appreciable way. What we see onscreen is their real; our view of John and Sherlock is clear. We have been witness, in essence, to the private life of Sherlock Holmes, the raw material that John Watson uses to write his blog. The show is our window into the world of the author; we see John at work, producing and interacting with his Blog Content. The fourth wall remains intact.
Above, when I presented a list of Brechtian techniques from the BBC, I pointed to concrete examples of each technique except one, which I said I would revisit: the use of a narrator.
‘A character outside the character framework.’ Precisely the sort of character that is created when you play the Great Game.
The Author-Watson.
To apply Holmes’ method of reasoning, we may observe that the methods of Brecht have been thoroughly applied throughout S4. From this observation, we may deduce that these methods are being used to suggest the presence of a narrator.
In parallel fashion, we may observe that the subtext paints a picture of a John who is ‘suicidal, alone, and strapped for cash’, generating the very conditions under which Knox’s Watson begins to produce false accounts.
Consider that the official blog has stopped updating. Specifically:
Consider Mr. Blue Skull’s glowing replacement. The skull on the mantle, combined with the eyes of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, overlaid on the pages of A Study in Scarlet. (x) (x)
Our frame has moved.
The show is now our window into the world of the work; we see the author’s eyes peering in through the page alongside us.
The artist observes himself.
We no longer have an unfiltered view into the lives of John and Sherlock. Unfortunately, we are no longer able to ‘peep in at the queer things which are going on’; we must content ourselves with a fiction, a ‘clumsy travesty’, with all its ‘conventionalities and foreseen conclusions’.
We are seeing a presentation of life, not life itself. We are seeing John and Sherlock filtered through John’s narration.
The show is now the blog.
The truth is rarely pure, and never simple.
In S4, the writers of BBC Sherlock have constructed their own Great Game. They ask the audience to judge what is real and what is fabrication. They have telegraphed their intentions using nearly every method of Brecht’s Epic theatre in the book, which is an approach specifically designed to continually remind the audience that what they are watching is a play.
This is precisely what the Great Game has always been about: has the story you’ve been served been presented with fidelity? Which parts have been fabricated, and what does that say about the underlying truth of Holmes’ and Watson’s real lives?
S4 is about viewing with distance, with a critical eye, and reading between the lines. Using the skills Holmes has taught you. Being the audience Brecht was writing for.
The message between the lines — again — still — is the unresolved affections of Holmes and Watson.
