Is It Just Me Or Has Sherlock Lost It's Flair?

Sherlock awkward at weddings? Well that's an obvious 'duh'.

Sherlock used to be the most exciting show that damn near ever aired on this or any side of the pond. It made Benedict Cumberbatch a household name, as difficult as that name was to pronounce and launched a revolution in people picking up books again (and no 'The Hunger Games', and 'The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo' don't count) I mean real books by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle who created a character that seemingly lives forever. But now, after it's third season finished, I've noticed that there's a lot different and not in the good way. Cast is still there and all, but it's no longer the Sherlock Holmes show...it's turned into some ubiquitous Dr. John Watson love-special with crime happening in the background and far too many camera tricks to compensate for lack of content. 

Paul McGuigan, the visionary behind re-appropriating Sherlock for a modern audience in a modern setting.

The two genius creators and Sherlock uber-dorks Mark Gatiss (who doubles as Sherlock's brother Mycroft on the show) and Steven Moffat still serve as writers, but now they have copycat directors all trying to be the creative genius that is Paul McGuigan who directed 4 out of 6 episodes of the first two seasons. The four best ones I might add. There was a magic to Paul. He understood that 'appropriation' doesn't have to be a bastardization...a lesson Baz Lhurmann has yet to learn and re-envisioned the cannon of Sherlock Holmes that absolutely worked for a modern audience. Under his direction, the show, as different in aesthetic as it was to the original matertial maintained a level of integrity particularly within the obtuse and superhuman character of Sherlock Holmes.

John Watson's wedding...you know, who cares? It might as well have been something spoken about between the two protagonists in the past tense to save time.

The first episode of the third season was...not bad. It was basically back tracking to the cliffhanger of the last episode of season 2 where Sherlock 'dies' but we all know he doesn't and had to sit twiddling our thumbs for a fucking year and a half waiting for them to finally explain how the FUCK he managed to trick every motherfucker on the planet...including John Watson I might add. So that was fun to watch, a string of reveals, all of them seemingly plausible at first, but then we realize how, I'm not going to give it away but obviously we know Sherlock couldn't die because they had announced the renewal of the show for two more seasons even before that episode aired, and quite honestly it wasn't that important. But from that episode I already knew, they had switched protagonists. And don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with John Watson, he's a cool dude, a bit of an uptight white guy type, but not nearly as interesting, funny, witty, sexy, etc. as Sherlock Holmes, and to be fair, the show as well as the Arthur Conan Doyle cannon are named after him, and don't even include Watson's name in the title. 

Another character that has really stepped into her own this season is Molly Hooper (Louise Brealey) She's really becoming the Peggy to Sherlock's Don Draper. She's been much more involved and more influential in his life and that's actually paid off.

The second episode is of course also based on one of the original stories, but Gatiss and Moffat already exhausted the 'Big 3' (The Woman, the Dog, and the Professor) in the second season, so all that's left is scraps, and what they lack in content they have to improvise in irrelevant stories like John Watson's marriage to Mary...and by that point it's like...whatever. Detective Inspector LeStrade (Rupert Graves) gets an 'emergency text' from Sherlock and what he finds out is that Sherlock is perturbed on how to write a best man speech for the wedding...really? That's all well and good for light comedy, but the wedding itself takes up more than half the episode. 

Here's to Season 3 not sucking as much as it appears to be.

The rest is the actual investigation, which is also a bit dull to say the least. I was not impressed. And granted, I haven't yet seen the third and final episode in the series but all in all I'm not to excited about it. I keep turning it on before I hit the hay and end up falling asleep. I have never fallen asleep on a Sherlock episode, not ever, doesn't matter if I just put in the hardest day of my life, it's usually that engrossing. So perhaps I'm going a bit hard on this series as it is now. Because I expect more from it. To me, it's been the best show not only of its genre, but of anything we've seen in a long time. It was big news when it was announced that McGuigan would not return to direct Season 3, and it shows. Maybe they can redeem themselves with season 4, but we'll have to wait a while to see about that. I really hope they rehire McGuigan and pump life into something that's seemingly dead in the water as it were.

'That Ain't Fair' - Rape in Hollywood

Jodie Foster minutes before her attack in The Accused (1988)

There's a film I like to show to most of my friends, it's a flawed documentary called Girl 27 (2007) about a rape case that was kept quiet by the Hollywood studios, mainly MGM for over 70 years. The story goes that in the early 30's a young teenager who worked as an extra for the studio was lured to the Hal Roach Ranch (a place where a lot of MGM films were shot) under false pretenses to be 'entertainment' for the MGM sales team, basically the people who sell the studio's films to theaters. Champagne and whiskey was flowing like ground water, and eventually this 17 year old named Patricia Douglas was dragged out into a parked car and brutally assaulted and raped by one of the salesmen, a man named David Ross. He was never served, never charged, and never had to pay for what he did. The studio heads snapped into action and made sure that even though Pat Douglas brought a class action law suit against him at the age of 17, they paid everyone including the only witness to the crime and even her own mother a substantial amount of hush money, and the whole thing stayed buried until a documentary filmmaker accidentally chanced on the headline while working on his book on Jean Harlow.

Pat Douglas and her mother outside the courtroom in a picture from the headlines in 1932. The mother was later paid to keep quiet about the whole thing. She took it and didn't ask any questions.

It's been a long time since then but have things really changed? In the documentary, the victim, Pat Douglas brings up the 1988 film The Accused. In which Jodie Foster stars as a rape victim with Kelly McGillis as her attorney, who later came out in People magazine admitting she was raped. Jodie won the Academy Award that year, and everything seemed sealed up with a nice little bow. As if Hollywood was saying ok now we know the gravity of the issue and look, we addressed it so let it go away now. If only it was that easy.

There's a scene early on in The Accused where McGillis visits Foster and asks her about all of her 'bad habits'. As in, was she dressed provocatively, does she go to bars alone, and when she does does she get drunk? Even if she's had sex with multiple partners and when she does have sex if a man hits her does she enjoy it? Foster rightfully is unhinged by these terrifying questions and gets irate while McGillis explains herself saying that 'these are the questions they are going to ask you on the stand', to which Foster replies 'That ain't fair'. If that isn't the biggest understatement of our century. 

'That ain't fair'.

No it isn't fair, and to this day that's what women have to endure. Just like what happened to Pat Douglas over 70 years ago, when they immediately labeled her a 'tart' and a 'tramp' because back then a tramp couldn't get raped. We see it happen again and again. It's what I like to call the 'double rape standard'. A woman gets attacked physically, and then she gets raped again on the witness stand when she is brave enough to fight for her dignity, her rights, and her life. In The Accused Foster is a self-described 'white trash bimbo' who works in a diner, drinks during the day, and goes to bars alone. And at first all of that is used against her even by her own lawyer. What hasn't changed at all is women being afraid of a predominately male-dominated world to speak out against injustice. In Girl 27, it was Pat's mother, in The Accused it's the best friend who actually witnesses what happens and once one of the male onlookers turns to her and says 'you're next' she runs off. 

Pat Douglas in a Vanity Fair photo shoot when she finally revealed her story, about a year or so before she died.

Since that film, this ugly subject matter has rarely been brought up because Hollywood daintily thought well we addressed it (because Foster does get her comeuppance in the end)  and that's that. Let's close the book on that forever now. It's not that easy Hollywood. I bring up these two examples to illustrate how little has changed. And even though the outcome for Patricia Douglas was different than that for Jodie Foster's character, it's the hardship in between is something that continues to go unaddressed. In a world that is still highly dominated by the male perspective and male filmmakers, it's not going to be easy to get a woman's point of view, the exact point of view across. This is far from over, and until this stops happening basically every single day, we need to keep putting a mirror to it. Especially when we have (albeit inexplicable) public figures like Melissa Gorga from Real Housewives for New Jersey fame advocating marital rape in fucking 2014. It just goes to show that little has changed. It's never ok, and it's never the woman's fault. It's really not that hard folks. What I've been talking about is basically an archaic version of 'slut shaming' and we all know that that leads no where good. It's not ok either, and it's time to stop.