Una Stubbs complains in the form of a caricature of her role in Conan Doyle’s stories:
Within this moving remit, there are continual self-reflexive remarks about the events we are seeing, those remembered and those to come as written by Dr Watson, who is himself controlled (it seems) by an illustrator who has invented ludicrous hats and mustaches, as well as some inexorable material forcing him to keep Mrs Hudson to the margins of the text. Structurally this is a time-traveling film which begins in the past, then fast forwards to now, then reverts, and then fast forward, revert, fast forward with a final revert: at first the 1890s are the reality, and then the 1890s are a dream/nightmare endured by a 21st century Sherlock, then the 1890s erupt again (like some Jekyll), take over for a while, and then suddenly Sherlock awakens, and we are to take this crazed past as dream, only the camera moves so swiftly and blends the time capsules so that when we end in the 1890s the inference is the contemporary age is the dream. Or, as in the Pride and Prejudice and Zombies book, a send-up of quintessential heterosexual sexual customs? Is this an allusion to the Muslim burka? Or is it fear of brides.
This is not just an outbreak of male insecurity (alluded to it when people refer to the misogyny run wild of this episode)? This mad image reappears several times, and is matched by Amanda Abbington as Mrs Watson turning up in a bridal outfit as elaborate and detailed and lacy as Diana Spencer’s, only she’s in black and with her head and utterly covered. Remember Have Gun will Travel where Matt’s gun was all phallus? What an enormous one is here. The team outdoes The Bride of Frankenstein, and Natasha O’Keeffe is given a camp opera diva name: Emilia Ricoletti. As I think back I find the first season much better than that, and the second, especially actually having contemporary thematic relevance, though the obsessive repeating scenes of this and thus its overt central theme, hatred, fear, retreat, and paranoia have real purchase on what is displayed as news in public media this past year and enacted by the armies of many states.īut look at what that hatred is embodied in: an abominable bride herself, a dreadful creature, over-made-up, with dripping red lips, who appears to be a riff on one of the more memorable horror movies of the 1930s, sheerly on the basis of the bride’s appearance: Rather like Alice in Wonderland everything else has shrunk or grown impossibly large.įirst, as a retrospective on all we’ve had before (from A Study in Pink to The Reichenback Fall) this New Year’s special reduces the dazzling center of all of them to a drive to be super-clever, cleverer than any other costume drama on the block.
Sherlock the abominable bride movie version vs tv version series#
I suggest that at heart the series has all along had a gay sensibility, which, because the writers have now used up anything they had really to riff off of the original stories and films, faute de mieux came out very strongly in this coda. I explore some of these odd elements in this exhausted reprise/coda of the third season of Sherlock (many months after the previous three, Last Vow, “Camp becomes Sentiment”). What interests me in Anibundel is the word “oddest:” “this was quite possibly, the oddest episode of Sherlock I’ve ever seen.”
As Izzy says, the scenes were far too short, the lines ludicrously overproduced and action made over-melodramatic as movies and TV too are becoming more and more as a matter of course (or it would be not so oddly abruptly comic) aka script is crude. Once more on these Sherlocks: my general assessment and a recap have been ably set forth by both my daughters (general assessment by Miss Izzy perceptive recap by Anibundel). Cumberbatch in the 1890s costume (and the expression on his face in the contemporary scenes match)
0 kommentar(er)
