Two Sherlocks in one week: the first episode of the second season of the brilliant BBC television series, and the second Robert Downey Jr./Guy Ritchie film. Interesting as narrative that the film jumps to such a late place in the SH canon (Moriarty over the falls! that was originally the ending of everything), while the television version seems to be setting up a longer, more tangled line of work. Both have very different ways of making Sherlock Holmes post-[hyper]-modern, both direct the skill and energy in different directions –
but they do have something distinctive in common: much more than any previous version, or for that matter than most spy or speculative fictions, rather than emphasizing the complexity of the solution to the problem (which is present of course, but happens rapidly as though taken for granted, at least by SH himself) they emphasize the speed required to solve the problem, and the complex anticipatory and multiply directed actions required to survive the tangle of events.
This is sort of like the impressions that cyberpunk created; and of course it is the post-[hyper?]-modern world. I used to think that increasing transparency of government and corporate actions enforced by rapid information retrieval would lead to less public evil or repression becoming possible; instead we have a weirder world where we know perfectly well that extraordinarily illegal or immoral things are being done by people in charge, because we can see the tail ends of their actions, but we can't quite stop them. Except, of course, occasionally.
As though the attraction of these hyper-Sherlocks is not that they can resolve everything acceptably, but that they can create for us a fighting chance with evils – that they can catch some things, that they can raise the tension, that they can make life at least very difficult for the sociopath, for the greedy, for the selfishly controlling.
And maybe they can even make the whole game so difficult that some of the 'enemy' simply gives up in frustration...
Well: one can hope.
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