Why does Sherlock Holmes need to be a drug addict?
During my recent excursion to Southern Illinois Sherlockian climes, a paper was presented by my friend Bill Cochran on the most recent episode of CBS's Elementary. I shan't steal Bill's thunder, should he ever get his blog going and want to reprint it himself, but would like to just spin off one particular point he made, starting with: "I am incensed by the constant references to Holmes's addiction as if it were a prominent theme in the Canon." Bill then went on to explain while out of the sixty original stories of Sherlock Holmes, only two mention drug use. Not addiction. Just recreational use.
Elementary, on the other hand, plays upon its main character's addiction problem with every single episode. He shouldn't go to bars, because he might drink. He needs to push his old dealer friend, a decent-seeming enough fellow, out of his life, because he makes him think of drugs. During the end of the last episode he was seen gluing a phrenological bust back together -- shouldn't Joan Watson have been freaking out that he was sniffing glue during that process? It's how the show usually over-indulges its addiction focus.
Mr. Elementary has his Watson because of his addiction. He lives in New York because of his addiction. The death of Irene Adler was key to his addiction. Why does this show even have crimes every week, when it could just spend more time on Mr. Elementary's beloved addictions? It seems more important to his character than his detective skills, hunting down Moriarty (remember him?), or any of those other things that the real Sherlock Holmes was based around.
Heck, Elementary even gets the drug of choice wrong. Mr. Elementary is a heroin fan. An opiate. A numbing agent. The original Holmes is only ever seen to inject a mild solution of cocaine beneath the skin . . . not even into a vein. My friend Bill reminded us Friday night that Holmes's seven per cent solution of cocaine was actually half the amount they put in the original recipe for Coca-cola. And cocaine, of course, is a stimulant, which the real Holmes used when bored to death for lack of crimes to solve. (Yes, Watson mentions morphine when he calls Holmes out, but the good doctor was plainly pissed off at the time and tossing the additional drug in for effect. Holmes never speaks of, or is seen to use, morphine.) Sherlock's modern day version of Holmes with his liberal use of nicotine patches, is probably much closer to the true counterpart.
And we know Holmes liked his nicotine. That is an absolute fact.
Elementary is not the first to try to portray a drug-addicted Holmes. The Seven Per Cent Solution, from the 1970s was a very clever tour de force in that area, which kept enough of the original Holmes's traits intact to make it an enjoyable tale (and stuck with cocaine, of course). Less successful was a gawdawful TV movie called Case of Evil, where a young Sherlock Holmes who celebrates victories with three-way sex romps and is forced into heroin addiction by Professor Moriarty. And even in that movie, he didn't voluntarily start the heroin. Both movies, it must be admitted, played up the drugs to draw in the audience. Is that what Elementary's plan is?
If Elementary were as truly into the topic of addiction as it pretends to be, it would be a much grimmer, realistic show . . . and have no need of Sherlock Holmes. Its treatment of the subject is much like the way it tosses in serial killers and various naughty ladies . . . just one more cheap ploy to try to rouse the interest of sleepy viewers as they wind their way toward the evening news.
It used to be that Sherlock Holmes and his methods were enough to rouse our interest. In the last episode of Elementary, Mr. Elementary's friend Rhys suggests that Mr. Elementary was probably a better detective when he was on drugs, and from his performance on the case at hand, one wonders if Rhys was right. If that's the case, apparently the drugs were a part of this latest Holmes impersonator's methods.
Mr. Elementary might need to be a drug addict. But as over a century of addiction-free stories have proven, Sherlock Holmes doesn't need to be.
The ongoing investigation of Sherlock Holmes, reported from the Peoria, Illinois outpost of Baker Street's dirtiest half a dozen.
While Holmes’s drug use is not the vastly life-altering addiction that "Elementary" portrays, it is more prominent in the stories than Mr. Cochran suggests. It is mentioned in six or seven of the original stories, not two. And if one takes Watsons’s statement in MISS at face value, then Holmes’s drug use did become a problem for him—-at least for a time. Watson says, “For years I had gradually weaned him from that drug mania which had threatened once to check his remarkable career.” I hardly think that a “drug mania” which “threatened” his career was occasional, recreational use.
ReplyDeleteThe other mentions are—
SIGN – where Watson mentions that he had observed Holmes use cocaine “three times a day for many months.” The mention that the puncture marks are in his “sinewy forearm and wrist” suggests skin-popping, but does not completely preclude intravenous injections. Thus, to insist Holmes only injected subcutaneously is conjecture.
To say that Watson “tosses in” morphine “for effect” because he is “pissed off” at Holmes is more conjecture. The way Holmes answers Watson’s question seems to indicate that the query is a legitimate one.
SCAN – Watson mentions Holmes “alternating from week to week between cocaine and ambition.” When taken with the statement from MISS and the mention of cocaine use three times a day for many months in SCAN, the evidence seems to mount that Holmes’s use is not a minor vice. I’m not arguing that he is an addict, for I don’t believe that to be true, but while CBS overdoes the drug use, Mr. Cochran minimizes it.
YELL – Watson mentions Holmes’s cocaine use as his only vice.
FIVE – Holmes mentions that Watson’s characterization of him includes “self-poisoner by cocaine and tobacco.”
TWIS – After Watson finds Holmes in the opium den, Holmes imagines that Watson has probably added opium-smoking to “cocaine injections” on his list of Holmes’s weaknesses.
DYIN – (this one is arguable) – syringes are listed along with pipes and tobacco pouches among the debris on Holmes’s mantelpiece.
To recap, Doyle mentioned Holmes’s cocaine use in SIGN, SCAN, MISS, YELL, FIVE, and TWIS. There seems to be an oblique reference in DYIN. That’s the 6-7 stories.
Also, Mr. Cochran’s insistence that a seven percent solution injected would have a lesser effect than drinking the Coca-cola of the time is erroneous and shows he knows little of how the effects of drugs depend upon their method of ingestion. I have a close friend who understands this from personal experience, and he laughed when I read him Mr. Cochran’s statement. He said that even skin-popping would produce a much more intense effect than drinking it. Drinking it has very little effect at all. You need much less to get high through intravenous use—-whether administered subcutaneously or intravenously. He also said that once you are injecting it, rather than drinking it, you are a more serious user.
As I said above, I’m not arguing that Holmes was an addict. The cocaine use shows the nature of his mind--that he needs stimulation. When it wasn’t a case, it was cocaine. Doyle makes that pretty clear.
"The Missing Three-Quarter" does hint at a larger problem with addiction than perhaps Watson was willing to admit to earlier, when Holmes was in active practice. Jack Tracy in "Subcutaneously, My Dear Watson" lists a few more cases where drug use was implied. While the seriousness of Holmes' drug use has been argued over for decades, both Brad and you, Melissa, make very excellent points. Sherlock Holmes doesn't need to be depicted as a drug addict, as per Brad, but he doesn't need to be depicted as Aspergers-like, either. I find that screen adaptions need some sort of hook to differentiate their Holmes from previous ones. Doherty took Holmes' drug use and did a "what if"--what if Holmes' drug use became an addiction? Story possibilities and character arcs can be spun out. For some, it goes too far and makes "Elementary" not Sherlock Holmes.
DeleteWith heroin, Doherty is taking that modern day Holmes cliche--the curse of being able to see everything that Downey and Cumberbatch also suffer from--and using opiates to dull the senses. It is indeed unlike the Canon, but Doyle's Holmes never saw his gifts as a curse. I think that this hints at a larger issue, the evolution and re-purposing of Sherlock Holmes. Much like the image of Robin Hood has changed over the centuries to mirror the concerns of contemporary audiences, Holmes and Watson are mutating now in popular culture (and, it can be argued, have been since the 1970s). As Sherlockians, we keep the memory of the Master ever green and true to Doyle's vision. This why I don't see Brad as an "Elementary-hating psycho, driven by some unnknown psychological twist in childhood to obsess over my mental image of the Sherlock Holmes archetype." He is using his blog, in how own iconoclastic way, of keeping the memory green.
Mr. O'Leary, I understand your point in reference to Doherty's character in "Elementary" being part of a larger "evolution and re-purposing of Sherlock Holmes" in keeping with the zeitgeist of this age. However, there is a point at which evolution becomes transformation, and the entity you began with is no longer recognizable. I think this is true of Doherty's Holmes. If he had been named something like Damian Black and the occasional trapping like the singlestick left out, I would never recognize Sherlock Holmes in him.
DeleteI am not against taking classic characters like Holmes or Robin Hood and developing traits and tendencies that are hinted at in the originals. It's enjoyable. I've done it myself with Holmes. But if a writer begins inserting totally new characteristics or replacing old characteristics with their exact opposites, then that writer is no longer developing the character to match the current cultural climate, but, instead, creating a new character entirely. When I see a person calling himself Sherlock Holmes trying to dull his senses rather than stimulate them and exhibiting the hygiene of a teenage boy rather than a “cat-like love of personal cleanliness,” I say it doesn’t take an expert in observation and deduction to tell that he’s an imposter...and not a very good one.
As you know, I think "Elementary" is a credible take on the Canon and the changes wrought are as wide as those by the Downey films and "Sherlock"--my opinion and one that is a definite minority here. I wear my watermelon splat with pride. I disagree with your "exhibiting the hygiene of a teenage boy" because Miller is as unshaven as Downey but otherwise not unclean. The SHINO (Sherlock Holmes In Name Only) argument doesn't hold water with me, because it can be successfully turn against Downey and Cumberbatch. Again, that's my opinion. I don't hold "Elementary" on a pedestal or elect Miller into a pantheon containing Rathbone and Brett. I see Sherlockian worth and you don't and that's great. I like the diversity. Since I see "Elementary" smack in the middle of the transformation spectrum, I find it instructive to hear the criteria of others in what makes one re-imagining worthy and another, very similar re-imaging beyond the pale.
DeleteSeriously, you've got to get over that "he's no worse than Downey" argument. Not a single Sherlockian I know claims that Downey is a standard for Sherlocks. He's Downey doing Downey doing Sherlock, which is just plain fun. Jude Law's Watson, however, does a lot to help as well.
DeleteCumberbatch, however, I will completely elect into a pantheon with Rathbone and Brett, and not just to spite Miller. I would have put that performance there before Miller was even a gleam in Dougherty's eye.
For the record, I don't like Downey as Holmes either. I saw "A Game of Shadows" and wish I could get that two hours of my life back. He is too dirty and weird to be Holmes. There was some decent action, and I probably would have had a better opinion of the movie had it been a simple action flick instead of insisting it was a Sherlock Holmes adventure. BBC's "Sherlock" is slick and clever--a great adaptation because it does fall within the parameters of an "evolution and re-purposing" of the character to meet the times. Cumberbatch plays a colder, less gentlemanly Holmes, but Moffat simply highlights that tendency in Holmes and magnifies it to meet the cultural climate of the times.
DeleteBy the way, doesn't Jonny Lee Miller pull a shirt from the laundry and sniff it before putting it on in one episode? That's definitely teenage boy hygiene.
The shirt form the laundry was from the pilot. His clothing choices had improved over the course of the show--I think he even owns an iron now.
Delete"I am incensed by the constant references to Holmes's addiction as if it were a prominent theme in the Canon."
ReplyDeleteIt's good to know that others feel the same way as I do. CBS has managed to portray a strong character as mean and cheap. Hopefully this abomination will be seen as what it is by most true Sherlockians (may they be fans or devotees) and not be granted a place inside the pantheon of well done adaptations.
If Mr Elementary were truly a heroin addict, wouldn't he now be taking methadone? It's my understanding that heroin is one of those drugs which most people have to substitute something else for to get off of, and that it can take a really long time for people to get through the tapering process (up to a year, or even more). It seems to me more likely that if he were to be messing around with anything, it would be something like Ritalin, Adderall, or another one of the easy-to-obtain ADD drugs. It's not like he wouldn't be able to mimic the symptoms easily enough to get a prescription (or several, thanks to dr-shopping) and the reputation it has for stimulating thinking and increasing productivity would be really tempting.... And if the whole idea is that he's trying to get over Irene (and I don't know, as I stopped watching after they introduced the promising AA sponsor character and then didn't follow through), wouldn't he go for valium, or its ilk--also easy to get, also addictive, but not illegal, rather than straight for heroin? He looks really healthy for a heroin addict, too, just saying....
ReplyDeleteAs far as Holmes and cocaine go...I though Howard Merkel's Anatomy of Addiction did a wonderful job of showing how 19th century cocaine preparations and use affected individuals in different ways. Some people were an almost immediate mess, like William Halsted (who did access the vein, while experimenting with its anesthetic properties) while others, like Freud, took a long while to become dependent (but not exactly addicts), and others seemed to not even get that far (everyone who drank Vin Mariani, perhaps). Given my coca cola consumption levels, however, I suppose I should be glad that cocaine is no longer in the formula....
(Leah Guinn)
If Mr Elementary were truly a heroin addict, wouldn't he now be taking methadone? It's my understanding that heroin is one of those drugs which most people have to substitute something else for to get off of, and that it can take a really long time for people to get through the tapering process (up to a year, or even more). It seems to me more likely that if he were to be messing around with anything, it would be something like Ritalin, Adderall, or another one of the easy-to-obtain ADD drugs. It's not like he wouldn't be able to mimic the symptoms easily enough to get a prescription (or several, thanks to dr-shopping) and the reputation it has for stimulating thinking and increasing productivity would be really tempting.... And if the whole idea is that he's trying to get over Irene (and I don't know, as I stopped watching after they introduced the promising AA sponsor character and then didn't follow through), wouldn't he go for valium, or its ilk--also easy to get, also addictive, but not illegal, rather than straight for heroin? He looks really healthy for a heroin addict, too, just saying....
ReplyDeleteAs far as Holmes and cocaine go...I though Howard Merkel's Anatomy of Addiction did a wonderful job of showing how 19th century cocaine preparations and use affected individuals in different ways. Some people were an almost immediate mess, like William Halsted (who did access the vein, while experimenting with its anesthetic properties) while others, like Freud, took a long while to become dependent (but not exactly addicts), and others seemed to not even get that far (everyone who drank Vin Mariani, perhaps). Given my coca cola consumption levels, however, I suppose I should be glad that cocaine is no longer in the formula....