on almost every procedural,” Rob Doherty, the showrunner of Elementary, told a gathering of television critics in 2012. Occasionally, his reincarnations aren’t even detectives television’s surly, pill-popping master diagnostician House was based on Holmes, who was in turn based on Joseph Bell, a lecturer at the medical school of the University of Edinburgh, for whom Conan Doyle, a physician himself, clerked. Sherlock Holmes, of course, differs from Orpheus in that we remember where he came from, even as he mutates, disperses, and coalesces again and again, sometimes a drug addict and sometimes not (much), sometimes a master of disguise and sometimes not, sometimes celibate and sometimes, every so often, not. Creating new variations on classical motifs is not mere rebranding or rebooting it’s one of the things great artists do. ![]() When Jean Cocteau made Orphée as a lush black-and-white French art film in 1950, it was still Orpheus, and he wasn’t called derivative or accused of resorting to cultural hand-me-downs. Myths are stories that can be transformed significantly, depicted in any sort of medium, yet retain an identifiable essence. In a pair of short essays for The New York Times Book Review, two critics, James Parker and Pankaj Mishra, were prompted to respond to the question “James Bond, Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot: Why Do We Keep Resurrecting the Same Literary Characters?” Parker speculated that the “collective imagination” might be “caught in a diminishing loop of derivative creativity, some kind of stranglehold of the secondhand.” For his part, Mishra opined about the failure of the myriad Conan Doyle adaptations to engage “with the original myth of Holmes,” seeing the stories as, at heart, reassuring fantasies of the nineteenth century’s “ultrarational culture.” Take Holmes and Watson out of London in the 1890s and they lose their resonance, their local seasoning.īut isn’t it the retelling that makes a myth? Classical myths and fairy tales have passed through many hands and have no discernible original there’s no ur-version of, say, Orpheus or Cinderella, no pristine source without the fingerprints of Ovid or Charles Perrault (and who knows who else before them). This cornucopia does not delight everyone. ![]() and directed by Guy Ritchie as a two-fisted, action-packed steampunk extravaganza - would probably, despite its period trappings, look nearly as alien to Conan Doyle as would the present-day imaginings of Holmes on the small screen. The blockbuster Warner Bros. film series - starring Robert Downey Jr. Two popular current television series, Sherlock (jointly produced by the BBC and PBS) and CBS’s Elementary, transpose the late-Victorian sleuth to contemporary settings. ![]() Illustration by Frederic Dorr Steele of “The Adventure of the Norwood Builder,” 1903,įrom Collier’s © Eileen Tweedy/The Art Archive at Art Resource, New York CityĬan there be any doubt that Klinger is right? The world’s greatest consulting detective is arguably the most popular fictional character of the modern era - adapted, staged, radio-dramatized, filmed, pastiched, parodied, comic-booked, video-gamed, and performed by countless actors, several of whom have seen their public image indelibly merged with the role.
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