Тащу цитаты из его последнего эссе, посвящённого тем же темам, о которых столько говорят после "Скандала в Белгравии", чтобы перечитывать и радоваться.
читать дальшеThe thing about the latest round of "Is Steven Moffat sexist?" that's currently flapping round the blogosphere, is that if within the same week you can manage to get accused of hating women by a Guardian blogger, and simultaneously accused of championing women and hating men in the Christmas special by the Daily Mail ... you're probably doing something a little more complex than either side is giving you credit for.
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Thing is, as fans, we are absolutely stone-cold brilliant at making connections to other episodes -- it's the heart of what we do, the construction of a greater web of meaning connecting wildly different pieces of story. We're great at spotting patterns... but once we've locked onto one, it actively makes it harder for us to notice the parts which don't fit that pattern. We're flat-out geniuses at comparing, not so good at contrasting. Being similar equals being identical.
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That's part of the filtering process I've been talking about -- we seize on a connection, and it becomes a definition; the contrasts and bits which don't match quietly disappear. Anything which is like something else is treated as being that something else. Our talent for pattern-matching blinds us. Our great strength is also our great weakness.
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As a child, Tom Baker's Doctor being staggeringly rude was just fun; he's fast and funny and smart and no one else can keep up with how wonderful he is. It's only much later, as a grownup, as someone who's used to living life not as a star, that you begin to realize just how cruel he's being. When the Doctor abuses Harry Sullivan, or Sir Colin Thackeray, or Ralph Cornish, or the Brigadier, for no greater crime than that they're a bit ordinary compared to him, only now do you begin to register that the Doctor's being a bit of a gratuitously nasty bastard, really.
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If there's a difference between the old Who and the new, I think it's that now it actively tries to draw attention to these paradoxes of character. When the new series makes Mickey or Rory the butt of the Doctor's wit, they're the ones you sympathize with. (Contrast the opening scenes of Rise of the Cybermen with "Harry Sullivan is an imbecile!", see how much you're encouraged to notice that Mickey is actually hurt by his treatment.)
But it doesn't do this instead of showing the Doctor as a hero; no, the show keeps presenting him as incredibly brave and heroic and dazzling and kind and a self-involved arse. Love And Monsters even presents this subtext as text; the Doctor practically looks into the camera as he tells his fan Elton "Don't ever mistake me for nice." There's a dissonance, but we're expected to recognize that both these things are true.
And so it is with Sherlock. If there's an emphasized spine running through the whole show, it's what Lestrade says in the very first episode: Sherlock Holmes is a great man, and one day he may even be a good one. As he stands, the story makes clear, he's both a fascinating, charismatic genius and a thoroughly rotten human being. More than that, the text points out that there's development at work; John Watson is there to humanize him. If there's a first big turning point for the character, it's probably the end of The Great Game, which is the first time Sherlock shows any sort of genuine concern for the welfare of another person. Before then... check out how appalled Watson is earlier in that episode, when Sherlock's reaction to Moriarty killing an innocent is "Well technically I won". Sherlock is explicitly painted as a man who's a long way from decent.
Molly, of course, is there to drive home that point. Because as with Tom Baker, it's easy to shrug off Sherlock being rude to minor police functionaries or even Watson; that's all part of the fun. Even in the Christmas-party scene before he turns his gaze on Molly, he's already being beastly to his closest friend -- demolishing Watson's hopes that his sister has quit drinking, shattering his plans for a happy family Christmas. But hey, that's just Sherlock being Sherlock, it's all part of the game. It's only when he starts dissecting Molly that the scene breaks out of our comfortable expectations; now we recognize that Sherlock Holmes really is an arse.
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...fandom doesn't do ambivalence. We want wholeheartedness. And if the thrust of the story is different than what we're looking for, we'll seize on only the bits of the text which tell the story we want to be told... the rest can just vanish. For example: the episode of Torchwood which Kate still only knows as "The One Where Ianto Got A Haircut".
We can even tell, roughly, what some of those stories are going to be. In Buffy, it didn't take much to predict that as Spike became a breakout character, some of his fan following would try determinedly to file off his rough edges -- even to the point of "well he didn't kill all that many children, and they probably deserved it anyway". Which in turn led the writers to get more extreme in asserting what they saw as the character's true nature ("Hello! Still evil here!")... and that in turn led those fans to accuse the writers of writing their own characters out of character. Go figure.
But the thing is, you inevitably have a clear picture the Spike these fans wanted, just a bit off to the side of the Spike we actually got.
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The thing is that we're all aching for our own personal simple, unconflicted stories -- just like young me thought that Tom Baker's Doctor was an unalloyed bundle of wonderful. They're like unfulfilled archetypes in our heads, we're yearning for anything to match these outlines -- and if we get something even slightly close, we start reshaping it to fit.
And sometimes outright ignore that the story isn't what we're making it. Or alternatively, blame the makers for telling their story instead of ours.
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Foz [a novelist] describes the story she wants to see thus:
"Adler is meant to be the only woman who ever beats Sherlock: she has no sexual interest in him whatsoever - in fact, the story ends with her getting married to someone else - but her intelligence and skills impress him so profoundly that he keeps her photo and, as a direct result, stops devaluing the abilities of women."
And that phrase "meant to be" seems to be the key. Because the thing is, this isn't really a very good description of what Irene Adler is in the original story. It's more like, as Foz says, the story we've been telling to ourselves.
Because that description is partially true, but drastically incomplete. Really her reputation as The Woman Who Out-Thought Sherlock Holmes is entirely down to a couple of paragraphs of good press from Watson as narrator, rather than what she actually does in the action of the story. In that story, she doesn't actually keep pace with Holmes; she's genuinely taken in by Holmes' various deceptions -- even though she's been warned in advance to look out for him in particular. The victory she wins over Holmes is simply a matter of spotting when she's given herself away, and getting the hell outta Dodge before Holmes comes back -- having decided that she can't go up against "so formidable an opponent". Far from engaging in an intellectual battle of wits with Holmes, she's actively trying to avoid such a clash.
And as strong female characters go... well, the original Irene is way more Fatal Attraction than anything. She starts her whole blackmail scheme to ruin her ex, because she'd rather see him humiliated than let him marry someone else. (People who've been complaining about Adler being sexualized in the modern version may be forgetting that this is a story about a Victorian sex scandal.) She finally abandons her scheme for no better reason than that she's found the love of a good man, with Godfrey Norton. And her new husband -- conspicuously absent or downplayed from most of the commentary on Ms. Adler -- makes a respectable woman out of her; after the wedding, she ends up more explicitly defanged and harmless than the free agent at the end of Moffat's sсript.
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Something which the various commentaries tend to overlook is that the equivalent of the original short story reaches its end not even halfway through the episode. Pretty much immediately after that... we get his turning-point apology to Molly, as discussed above, and later his various expressions of intense regard for Mrs. Hudson. The episode is directly showing Sherlock's changing attitude towards women, as noted in the original story. Just as Foz asks, he's out-thought him, she's impressed him with her knowledge and skills, he retains her texts (the equivalent of the picture), and his attitude in general starts changing -- after the point when he's been beaten by Irene that first time around.
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That's the flipside of fandom's tendency to excuse texts because we love them: when we find a story which fails to live up to our personal preferences, that same passion leads us to declare it reprehensible. Any positive features just vanish.
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In fact, if you look at their respective goals in that story -- Irene wanting security, Holmes wanting to maintain his superiority and detachment... she does a better job of winning than he does. Far from ending the story with him sitting back talking about love with a gibe and a sneer, it turns out she's successfully pulled Holmes' strings to the point where he gives up on his resistance to sentiment. He actually cares about keeping her alive.
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The thing is, I think that's another one of those unfulfilled archetypes in our heads at work... in fandom's mind, Irene Adler has been turned from a symbol of strength to a symbol of independence -- which she never really was, in the text.
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Yes, [the story] contains these readings people are finding... and other ones besides. Some of them are progressive, some aren't. The presence of one element doesn't negate the presence of the other.
Он, кажется, в числе прочего, поднимает там тему, которую я