Posts on my dash today about Moffat & Gatiss’s intentions vs. posts depicting scenes from the show with the actors in Sherlock, and the way they’ve played their parts made me think, at first – maybe there is something out of phase in how the writers think about these characters vs. how the actors do… but then I thought, no… that’s not likely.
As much as a it is difficult to place authorial intention at any one locus in a thing like a TV show, if they have always intended that this is a story about the best friends that ever lived, and that the story they’ve told is about how they got to be the men of legend that they are, then I think everyone involved must have known that. So, why is it that the whole story is so outrageously, undeniably romantic, and why is it that I am absolutely positive that Sherlock is in love with John, and that John, though he can’t perhaps embrace it, loves Sherlock, too, and that both of them loved Mary?
Then I thought: maybe the actors really were endeavoring to act friendship. Deep, self-sacrificing friendship, once in a lifetime friendship, and the way they show it on screen simply LOOKS like love. Maybe its that in the imaginations of those actors as expressed by their actorly instruments, those two relationships – deep, true friendship and love – simply express themselves similarly?
Maybe it’s not that there is anything out of phase, it’s just that friendship like theirs LOOKS a lot like love. Maybe the real revelation is how little air there is between the two? How little real distinction.
Just an idea.
Let me see if I can do this. I’ve been up and at it for three hours and I may be out of good words.
Maybe it looks like Sherlock and John love each other because they do. Love and friendship are two words that we expect to cover a lot of ground. Which is why you used so many lovely words to describe the relationship you are seeing on the screen. What if they love each other deeply, steadfastly, selflessly without whatever element is necessary to tip that into the realm of romance?
What would that element be? Sex? Physical affection? Poetry and flowers? An all-consuming desire for one or all of those things? Is it like porn? We just know it when we see it? Or not. If we are being shown all of the elements of a great romance without the actual romance, what does it mean that we are filling that missing element in?
Maybe it’s a gendered thing. I see women speak of their friends in terms that seem very romantic all the time. Maybe we aren’t used to seeing two men behave in the same way.
Maybe we’ve lost the language for romantic relationships that aren’t sexual.
Reblogged because I love these thoughts and want to think more about all of them.
Yeah, I love love love this discussion, and I’ve also been thinking about how to articulate my response. The older I get, the less obvious to me is the distinction between friendship and romantic/sexual love, and the privileging of one over the other (YES, HELLO, TOPIC OF NEXT NOVEL!). And the less interesting/productive/healthy/compelling is the defining and policing of that line. (What even IS that line? Is it, as I suspect, intimately tied to patriarchal imperatives to control women’s sexual behaviour? To own us?) What would our relationships look like if we hadn’t all internalized this, I wonder? What would my life look like?
Maybe that’s one of the reasons I love Holmes in the first place – that line is so blurry, and neither Sherlock Holmes nor John Watson really seems to have a problem with that lack of definition (at least, in my headcanon). And yes, I find this more novel in depictions of masculine relationships, so maybe that’s part of why it’s so compelling.
I agree so much. I don’t see the line so clearly as I once did, and I also I see no point in ANY of the policing. Things are what they are and no amount of policing can change them. Why do we always need things to be so rigidly defined and why are we so attached to reifying the codes that define them?
Also, this is the thing that, I think, makes me not have any problem with the ambiguous, in-processness of the relationship depicted on Sherlock. I love the blurry line and the lack of finished-ness and the uncertainty. I love the vulnerability of where they are with one another. I like that it’s hard to tell where their lines are. I’m not sure I’ve seen male friendship depicted in that way, and I love the sense that it could be both and it could be either. I like that they have refused to define it. It feels like something I recognise. Something a bit real.
I think you’re right, too, about the way we treat sexual relationships vs. friendships and about the policing of that line. I think it is a way of exercising control over what is happening between people. I feel like the whole project is so misdirected, because friendship, love and desire emerge out of our interactions without our control, and it’s pointless to deny their existence when they do. It just makes people unhappy to police themselves and others.
The world is full of tales about male friendships that make it perfectly clear that if it weren’t for sex, the men involved would have no interest in women at all. It’s not Mofftiss’ invention and their show doesn’t even count as a story like that.
The only thing that’s even remotely novel about the way Moffat and Gatiss write this once in a lifetime friendship is that it includes ugly violence and lots of it. Don’t know how you are capable of forgetting that but whatever. No policing intended.
If ambiguity is such a desirable goal and an admirable quality in a show, why don’t the writers and actors say they were being ambiguous about the relationship on purpose? Why do they say it was all gay jokes and fangirls’ imagination?
Also, you must have noticed that there isn’t anything romantic about Sherlock and John’s relationship in s4. Or give me examples of the scenes where Benedict and Martin act in a way that could be interpreted as “outrageously, undeniably romantic”.
I’d love to have an example of a scene where Sherlock does his romantic friendship thing with Mary too. I mean, if the relationships are all equal and similarly ambiguous, let’s see those two have a long staring session and Mary could lick her lips or something. And then John could kick Mary like he did Sherlock, and Sherlock could shoot John and to seal the friendship we should see John and Mary saving Sherlock’s life and being sent away to die as a thank you.
I don’t know what anyone intended, neither do you, but it kind of bugs me when fans try to give the writers depth they themselves never said they had. And when fans pretend that there isn’t anything wrong with the way this friendship is depicted in the show.
Maybe we’ve lost the language for romantic relationships that aren’t sexual.
There’s nothing wrong with shipping and/or wanting your favourite characters to get together in canon romantically and sexually. Nobody’s lost anything because of it. It is, however, possible that something has been lost if Sherlock and John’s relationship is considered romantic after s4.
Reblogging for the last comment.
Thinking…
Published
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