Chaos Program

My boss and I have an ongoing disagreement that sometimes flares up (loudly), about who was the better detective: Hercule Poirot, or Sherlock Holmes? The boss takes the point of view that Holmes relied on “parlor tricks” while Poirot used pure intelligence to reason out the solutions.

I contend (very reasonably and with only enough shrillness in my voice to convince people to listen) that this shows a lack of understanding of Holmes’s true skills as a detective. The famous parlor tricks – where he figured out people’s life stories by observing tiny clues he noticed in a glance at them – are NOT how he solved cases at all. Unlike the indolent Poirot who seemed to get most of his information by eavesdropping, Holmes investigated cases. He used disguises to infiltrate locations and spy on suspects. He had a network of informants (The Baker Street Irregulars). He studied shipping and train schedules and knew the map of London intimately, in order to understand the movements of people and things related to his cases. He did experiments in order to improve his understanding of potential evidence. He worked at the business of investigating.

To be honest, it’s been decades since I absorbed the complete Sherlock Holmes novels and stories and I never did get into the Poirot stuff because I find Agatha Christie’s writing style to be dull. Really really really dull. Maybe it’s a British thing. Odd, really, since my mother has everything Christie ever wrote. Most of what I know about the brilliant Belgian detective I got from watching the series with David Suchet on TV. I enjoyed them and often found the solutions to be quite clever. But to compare Poirot’s skill at thinking to the monomaniacal investigative prowess of the great Sherlock Holmes is silly.

This argument and a related thought about a currently popular TV series came to mind yesterday when I saw a new movie inexplicably titled “Sherlock Holmes.” The movie was very entertaining, with humor, explosions, suspense and period (like) costumes and settings related to Victorian England. It even had characters with names confusingly like some of the ones in the Holmes stories. This is confusing because anyone expecting (possibly fooled by the title) a Sherlock Holmes story will not find it. Maybe this movie should have been named “Greg House, Consulting Detective, but in a Past Life.”

Ever seen House?

It’s a funny show about a more or less psychopathic doctor who is miles smarter than everyone else around him but who is so dishonest, manipulative, childish and insulting that almost no one can stand him. I’ve believed for years that the character House was probably inspired by Dr. Joseph Bell, who was, according to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the inspiration for Sherlock Holmes.

Like Holmes and House, Dr. Bell was uncommonly good at noticing seemingly small details about people and figuring out from them huge amounts about their lives, personalities, circumstances. This skill is what my boss referred to (not necessarily unfairly) as a parlor trick. It amazes people and often annoys them or even frightens them. The kind of person who can practice this sort of skill must be very confident to the point of arrogance and willing to be disliked for discovering things that people may have (mistakenly) considered private. A big mouth seems to be part of the package too.

The similarities between these different characters is significant because the relationship between Holmes and Dr. Watson in yesterday’s movie reminded me of the relationship between Dr. House and his best (possibly only) friend Dr. Wilson. In particular, Holmes’s clumsy attempts to meddle in Watson’s romance with Mary had much of the petty selfishness and childish humor of House, with none of the stuffiness or personal obliviousness that Holmes showed in Conan Doyle’s stories. Wilson and House often play pranks on each other and it is normal for Wilson to lie about his relationships for fear his friend will sabotage them.

Why would anyone re-write the Holmes-Watson relationship to make it less Victorian and more like House-Wilson’s adversarial version of friendship? There are three possible explanations:

1. Didn’t know any better. Just too ignorant of the Holmes stories to know what would work and what didn’t. This would certainly explain much about the movie, not just about Watson punching Holmes in the nose, or Holmes intentionally offending Mary.
2. Thought it would be funnier. No arguing with that. There was very little humor in the Holmes stories and Watson was one of the most unfunny characters ever written. The movie had a small amount of humor.
3. Not a good enough writer to get it right. The simplicity of the “mystery” in the movie and the reliance on explosions and stunts (like Holmes jumping out a high window and diving into the water) would tend to bear this explanation out.

Two of our three possible explanations boil down to incompetence. Doesn’t sound good when you look at it that way, does it? Most of the reviews I’ve seen went with that explanation, too. To be fair, whenever trying to work with well known material like Holmes, there will always be people like me to nitpick over historical accuracy (so to speak). Remember the debacle of the so-called “Bram Stoker’s Dracula?” It turned out to have very little resemblance to the Stoker version of the story. The use of the name was, to be kind, a miscalculation.

By contrast, House is a show that is (or was, in the first couple seasons) inspired by Holmes in a way, while being unique in its execution. It’s a bit of a mystery why the movie Sherlock Holmes was named for Sherlock Holmes when so little of Holmes made it into the story. Sometimes it seems that the culture of Hollywood is determined to avoid creativity at all costs.

So we have two lessons we can learn from this little farce:

1. Be observant. It won’t make you liked but it will make you seem very smart. You could maybe even be a great doctor or great detective if you can learn not just to observe but to reason about what you observe.
2. At least try to be creative! Change the names, for God’s sake! How hard would it have been to make the main character a brilliant detective who’s NOT Sherlock Holmes? Then instead of annoying fans, you could be lauded for doing something different.

Never mind. Who wants that anyway?

Tags: creativity, Holmes, House

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 29th, 2009 at 10:58 pm and is filed under movies and TV. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.