Sherlock: A Scandal in Belgravia

So Sherlock is back - complete with the problems that surrounded its treatment of minority groups in the first season. Within a couple of hours of the first story airing, Stavvers argued that the treatment of Irene Adler had seen what looked like a genuinely strong and self-directed female character reduced to tropish helplessness when we learnt that Moriarty had been advising her on her criminal activities, saw her security code compromised by her foolish willingness to be influenced by her romantic attraction to Sherlock, and then saw Sherlock rescue her from execution. Jane Clare Jones followed up in the Guardian saying much the same.

While I absolutely agree that problematic portrayals of female characters are, well, problematic, and fully recognise that Moffat is particularly prone to perpetrating them, the problems with this particular character didn't strike me as forcefully as they obviously did some viewers. I think this was because Sherlock as a programme makes so much use of misdirection, and reveals the 'true' solutions to its mysteries only fairly sparingly and sketchily. By comparison with, say, Moffat's recent Doctor Who Christmas special, this leaves an awful lot of room for us as viewers to generate our own alternate readings - indeed, it actively encourages us to do so.

Take, for example, the issue of how Irene Adler really feels about Sherlock. Our understanding of this is reversed multiple times during this story. For a long time, we're encouraged to believe that she is falling in love with him - all those comments about how 'brainy is the new sexy', the flirty texts, the conversation in Battersea Power Station where she suggests to Watson that both of them are strongly attracted to Sherlock in spite of their usual sexuality, the intimate scene between them in his flat. But on Mycroft's flight of the dead and in his office afterwards this apparent scenario is reversed, when she claims that she was playing Sherlock for a fool all along, entrapping him into decoding the Ministry of Defence official's email for her by merely making him believe she was in love with him. And moments later, the switch is flipped once more when Sherlock states that by taking her pulse and observing her dilated pupils in his flat he was able to detect the real truth - that her act had become a reality, and she had genuinely fallen for him after all.

I've no doubt that that is basically where Moffat signs off. This is his intended portrayal of the characters' motivations, and we are then meant to understand that Adler is undone by the weak, feminine sentimentality which drove her (already some six months earlier) to use a pun on Sherlock's name as the PIN code for her phone. That is problematic. But by the time this scenario was presented to me, I found I had got into a state whereby I was automatically reading everything I saw as potentially untrue. Sherlock was telling me assuredly that Adler had been attracted to him. But was even he right about that? Or, indeed, was that what he really thought, as opposed to (say) a bluff intended for Mycroft? And meanwhile, so much else in the episode remains ambiguous or incompletely explained. For example, did Sherlock ever really think that Irene Adler was actually dead the first time? After all, he'd had every opportunity to study her naked body in great detail. Would he really have been fooled by the substitution of a body which merely had the same measurements, when (for example) the shape and size of a woman's nipples, belly-button and indeed other parts are so very distinctive? Or was he complicit in helping her to fake her death that first time, too?

In that frame of mind, and with so much room for manoeuvre, almost everything about the story becomes extremely fluid. To continue with the example I've used above, it isn't hard to flip the switch on the does she / doesn't she fancy him question yet again. I've already suggested above that Sherlock himself may be lying about what Irene's pulse and pupils revealed to him - perhaps as part of a wider collaboration between the two of them of the sort which Roz Kaveney sketches out in the comments on Stavvers' blog. But even if he's not, she could have faked those symptoms. A little bit of ecstasy taken at the right moment would probably do the trick, for example - and she is clearly a woman who knows how to obtain and use illicit drugs effectively.

From that point onwards, you can go on to build all sorts of variant interpretations of the closing scenes. Did Irene, for example, a) make Sherlock believe she was in love with him so that he would finally figure out the code to her phone, as well as b) carefully manipulating him into falling in love with her in spite of himself so that he could then be relied upon to protect her from the consequences of that by helping her to fake her own death a second time? Because that could actually work out quite well for her by creating a clean break if she had begun to feel her embroilments with people like Moriarty had got rather too deep and she wanted a way out of it all - and she would have maintained total control of her own destiny throughout that scenario.

I am not saying that the above is the 'correct' reading of this episode, or even that it's the one I most subscribe to myself. My point is simply that this series fosters variant readings of itself to such as extent that even when the script-writers' intentions are problematic, I find the impact of that on me as a viewer is considerably watered down by the pervading sense that many different readings of what I am seeing are all true at once, and that I can never be 100% sure of any of the characters' aims and motivations. This, of course, is part of what make the show so irresistible, whatever the final verdict on Irene Adler.

Click here if you would like view this entry in light text on a dark background.

1. My Week with Marilyn (2011), dir. Simon Curtis

I saw this, my first film of 2012, today with ms_siobhan and planet_andy at the Hyde Park Picture House, and we all really enjoyed it.

I'm by no means an expert on Marilyn Monroe, so can't judge how accurate this portrayal of either the week in question or her character more generally was, but I am particularly interested in biopics at the moment because of an article which I am writing about screen portrayals of the emperor Augustus, so I watched it partly from that angle. I've been reading a rather good book by Dennis Bingham on the biopic as a genre, which emphasises how very much the biopic intersects and overlaps with other genres, and also argues that the lives of men and women are treated so differently in biopics that they virtually need to be understood as different genres themselves. Bingham suggests that biopics of women frequently view their lives in terms of suffering or victimhood, and particularly portray them as struggling (usually unsuccessfully) to negotiate an irresolvable tension between their public role and their personal life. All of this is easily identifiable in My Week with Marilyn - hardly surprisingly since it is central to her life-story anyway, at least in the mythologised version which most of us know.

The decision to focus on a short snapshot of her life was more interesting and innovative. Obviously, from the point of view of Colin Clark this was determined by the circumstances of his encounter with her, but the success of his memoirs and the decision to make it into a film say a lot about how effective this format can be for a biopic. It dispenses with the expectation of a comprehensive coverage, allowing the story to allude to earlier events and point the way to future ones as much or as little as suits it, while concentrating instead on drawing a rich and vivid character. I felt this worked very well here, especially combined with the use of Colin Clark as a point-of-view character who begins with a highly idealised view of Marilyn, and gradually moves to a much more real and intimate knowledge of her.

The cast was a veritable feast of British character-actors, many familiar from the small screen (My Family, Downton Abbey, Poirot), and they all deliver - but perhaps especially Kenneth Branagh as a wonderfully irritable Laurence Olivier. The script is sharp, and does a good job of exploring relevant issues such as the objectificaton of women, the effects of ageing, and the tension between the British theatrical acting tradition and the Hollywood screen equivalent. Colin Clark is very obviously a privileged posh-boy who gets where he does thanks to family money and connections, despite his protestations to the contrary, but that's not glossed over, and nor does he get away entirely without being criticised for it.

If you like biopics, Marilyn Monroe, portraits of the film production business, pretty scenery or British character actors, this one's for you.

Click here if you would like view this entry in light text on a dark background.