One of the first lessons any of my employees gets is
“Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is a pattern”.
This rule of thumb holds true in many situations and it helps to spot oddities and find things that do not fit among big bundles of data. It is a rule I have internalised a long time ago and that runs in the back of my mind at all times, so it is not surprising that my “Three times is a pattern” alarm suddenly went off during TEH.
It is the third time we see the flat of a woman that is somewhat close to Sherlock (I do not count Kitty Riley in this) and the third time this woman has a wallpaper with birds on it. Coincidence? The universe – or in our case Arwel Wyn Jones – is rarely that lazy. We are talking about a man who puts glass skulls in the background of a scene and pins phoenixes on walls that remain invisible. Just because he can.
So where do we see birds on wallpaper? I do not count the walls at the wedding since they are technically a mural and not wallpaper.
The first person we see near bird wallpaper is Mrs Hudson. On the walls outside 221A we see finches.
This fits with her image. She’s a little old lady. Harmless. Like a finch. Just your garden variety landlady-not-housekeeper. That’s what she broadcasts to the outside world (hence the finches are outside her flat). We learn that this is not quite true when we see her through Magnussen’s eyes.
The second bird wallpaper we see is in Irene Adler’s bathroom. Mind you, it is not her private bedroom. This bedroom is her workplace. This bathroom is directly attached to her workplace but it is slightly hidden away.
I do not know enough about birds to be sure what kind of bird it is but If I had to guess I’d say it is a Chinese bird of paradise. Which is a good fit for Irene. Her sitting room is very respectable, like Irene in public in her impeccable outfits. The bedroom gets the Devil Damask treatment which is again a good fit for a dominatrix. Yet when all layers are away she is still an exotic bird. The naked woman Sherlock Holmes could not figure out. A very exotic specimen indeed.
We had coincidence, we had happenstance but for a pattern we need three instances, so what is number three?
It’s the wallpaper in Mary and John’s bedroom.
So what about that wallpaper? Especially in the colourway that Arwel has chosen for his set, the birds evoke parrots. A wall full of colourful parrots. What do parrots do? They repeat words and phrases.
What does Mary do when we first see her in front of this wallpaper? (gif borrowed from amygloriousponds)
She repeats a sentence she must have heard someone else say. Other people have pointed out the striking similarities between Mary’s and Magnussen’s phrases.
Mary parrots a phrase she clearly must have heard someone else say, while sitting in front of a wall of parrots – a wallpaper pattern that is not that good a choice for a bedroom. It is entirely too busy, people usually want a calm and relaxing room, not such a busy wall full of birds. This is a very interesting turnout indeed.
Arwel Wyn Jones knows his wallpaper.
Arwel choosing the parrot wallpaper for this room is – on the surface – very odd. This is not a pattern that is appropriate for a bedroom. If the pattern had only been chosen with its effect on camera in mind, there would have been countless other choices that would have worked better in the context of a bedroom.
(Trust me on that. In the last 16 months I have read more than two dozen monographies on the history of wallpaper design and usage. On top of that I have looked at roughly a million wallpaper pattern swatches. Yes you have read correctly. One million swatches. No, I am not kidding. It was all for science. And the masterpost)
So when I say that he could have chosen dozens of other spectacular patterns that are currently on the market, but went for one that is not only slightly off within the context it is being presented in, but that simultaneously fits into a meta-narrative pattern.
“The flat of any woman that is of importance to Sherlock has wallpaper with birds on it and those birds make a statement about her personality”.
Going with that pattern I would not be surprised to find something like this somewhere near Mummy Holmes next time:
YEP exactly @221bloodnun – just a few little things to add:
The person that applies wallpaper, i.e. Arwel, is called paperhanger, which in slang: one who passes worthless checks, i.e. The Blind Banker. I’ve addressed (partially) the possible connections between TBB, spaceships and the timey wimey in the stoppage time post.
The reason we’re given multiple pov’s and countless intertext: the stories of Holmes and Watson have always been bigger than their lives (not by choice perhaps, but “heroes” nonetheless), “your life is not your own” can be taken… literally. The artistic and cinematic techniques used to express a specific genre or a movement (-ism) are simply… semantics; all the theories seem right but only in parts is because they are. ACD did it with the form of his art, which is writing; Mofftiss is doing it with their form of art, which is cinema. Why brought Brecht’s theatre into the mix? Well, who was the dramatist of ACD’s contemporary with a connection to Holmes/Watson and 1895? Oscar Wilde’s consistent presence in Sherlock is not for shits and giggles, reading the subtext is only the beginning.
I know I kept shouting into the void about this, but when the 4th wall falls, it is no longer just about these characters lives, but the reality of their time. Sherlock Holmes and John Watson cannot exist in the 21st century without them addressing the trappings of Victorian fin de siècle, what ACD was really doing with Holmes/Watson stories, and everything that came after; i.e., Sherlock and John’s “back story.” I tend to believe Mofftiss when they said Johnlock wasn’t what they were doing – because it’s never the question of if, but why it remained hidden. Series 4 in many ways provided a road map to seek the evidence – all we need to do is dig deeper, and look harder.
And now I am sitting here thinking about the concept that Hitler was a paperhanger, because of the Cardinal Mundelein speech of 1937. @darlingtonsubstitution From the meta mentioned: “German Expressionism was the result of WWI, and several
Rathbone/Bruce Holmes films entailed them fighting the Nazis, which is
where Moffat and Gatiss have been hinting we’re headed next. “And we
have joked about doing one in black-and-white where they fight the
Nazis. So maybe that’s what we’ll do.” – Radio Times“ As for the life is not your own speech, it’s also related to another film for which I updated the old spheres and loops meta you knew from back in March, Stay.
YES in that Gatiss podcast interview, he said something along the line that “eras are falling all around us” – we talked about the whole political aspects of Sherlock that weren’t really noticeable, but suddenly visible after series 4? But instead of the 40s, I’m guessing we’re heading closer to the present in the timeline, perhaps the events that led to 1989, Project Hound, and Carl Powers. BTW did you watch Against the Law? I think it’s very relevant……
I’ve been working on this for a while, but it’s finally done! A masterpost with links to my screenshots of every wallpaper on BBC Sherlock so far. I’ve organized the recurring ones (mostly 221 Baker St) in their own section to make them easier to find. The rest are organized by episode. There are also a couple of shots of not-wallpaper mixed in there, because I am a rule flouter.
Finally updated my masterpost of all the Sherlock wallpapers! Now featuring series 4.
(Also I realized that I’d screwed up my screen caps for all the wallpaper in TLD, and they were teeny tiny. I’ve fixed that now – if you click on those images, you get full screen shots.)
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