Sherlock originated when Moffat and Gatiss, who were working in Cardiff on Doctor Who, discovered a shared fondness for Doyle's detective on train journeys back to London. Their idea was to free Holmes from his heritage-industry prison. He would lose his deerstalker and tweeds, but gain a smartphone and nicotine patches. He wouldn't say: "Elementary, my dear Watson." He would be younger, and technologically cutting-edge – just as Doyle had written him."We wanted to bring him out of the faux-Victorian fog and see him for what he is. Sherlock Holmes is really that posh freak from a wealthy family, that scary boffin crime-solver who lives in your town. Then Watson the ex-soldier, invalided out of the war in Afghanistan, coming home a bit bored because he'd rather be back at the front. So solving crimes with a psychopath excites him.
The word psychopath, used many times in this interview, shocked many persons as Sherlock is explicitely depicted as a "sociopath" in the show, and because "psychopath" are, again in the show, the bad guys, the one Sherlock chases; so of course, putting him in the same bag as them would be quite a silly mistake to make, right? Wrong.
"Psychopath", from the greek "psyche", "mind", and "pathos", illness, is a word that can be used to refer to any kind of mental illness, sociopathy included. (NB: even if I use the conventional expression "mental illness" here, I do not agree with it).
I agree that using the word "psychopath" to refer to Sherlock is a clumsy thing to do, and truly disappointing for the fandom from part of one his creators, but it is, from a linguistic point of view, perfectly acceptable.
Here, Moffat is speaking of Sherlock's "sex life" exclusively; he seems to believe Sherlock is not interested in John sexually, but that doesn't mean he doesn't find him interesting, as some persons understood.But how did Moffat and Gatiss solve the most vexing mystery, Sherlock's sex life? "There's no indication in the original stories that he was asexual or gay. He actually says he declines the attention of women because he doesn't want the distraction. What does that tell you about him? Straightforward deduction. He wouldn't be living with a man if he thought men were interesting."
According to him, Sherlock doesn't want to get near women because their sexual appeal could distract him, whereas men could not, which would imply he's heterosexual.
Personnaly, I prefer my Sherlock asexual, thank you very much, but if Moffat likes his better as an average heterosexual man, I won't sue him.
Moffat is not saying that Sherlock, like Austin Powers, misplaced his mojo. "It's the choice of a monk, not the choice of an asexual. If he was asexual, there would be no tension in that, no fun in that – it's someone who abstains who's interesting. There's no guarantee that he'll stay that way in the end – maybe he marries Mrs Hudson. I don't know!"
"Misplaced his mojo"... gosh, language! And reporters... I'll let this aside, as we've clearly reached a major and more important focus of fan critic here.
Moffat pursues his saying of Sherlock being attracted to women but favouring his work over sexuality. He also says that makes him interesting because it would cause inner conflict between his mind and bodily urges. Of course, that's quite a classic move, having one's character be torn between different life choices. Having a dilemna is often quite interesting, and that works for those who like this interpretation of Sherlock's character (not me, but I don't disagree with it either).
The sentence that is heavily criticed here is the one concerning asexuals, and I think it's a very important issue to adress.
1) In this sentence, Moffat says that if Sherlock was asexual, he wouldn't be torned between his body and his mind ("no tension"), so he wouldn't be interesting as a character.
Of course, that's not true. I'm not saying it's enterely false either, mind you. The fact is, characters are way more interesting when they've got an internal fight, a struggle with themselves, but it doesn' t mean all struggles are to be linked with their sexuality. That would actually be pretty lame. Just take greek tragedies: often, heroes are torn between duty and desires, between honor and happiness, between freedom and loyalty: what's that for an interesting dilemna?
But of course, with a character like Sherlock, the main adress would be sentiments: love, fear... loss? While adressing love, Sherlock can be seen as an heterosexual "Virgin", still untouched. He "abstains": that means he feels the need or desire to have sex, but decides not to, in order to stay loyal to his work (he's married to it, remember?), which is an example of victory of the mind over the body and perfectly in character.
But he can be considered (and I certainly do) as a person enterely relying on his mind and absolutely oblivious of sexual urges -even though he is capable of entertaining an intellectual "romance" with Irene Adler and actual relashionships with those he deems worthy of it. He can be seen as a mind whose only hindrance is being trapped into a body of flesh and bones, and in this intrepretation of the Canon, that's in character too. In comparison with usual, average characters, it puts him on a whole other level, another dimension, and the interest in this resides in our exploration and discovering of a whole new way of seing life -isn't discovering at the very core of interesting?
So, even if Moffat is quite right when he says that a character whitout a dilemna isn't interesting, he might have to reconsider his saying that love or sex life are the sole motivator of dilemnas, and the fact that asexual characters can actually be very interesting. Personnaly, I think he just spoke his mind out in an interview without having thought much about the concept of asexuality -it's quite a shame, but very few people do. Plus, he was probably thinking about the "sexy" episode, the Adler episode there -but that's just an assumption.
2) The sentence can also mean that asexual persons are not interesting.
If you've read what I've written before, you'll know that I believe Moffat was speaking of asexuality in a fiction-building context, and saying asexual characters are boring because it means "no tension" to him. I also think he has given little thought to asexuality in general and might not even have realised (yet) that some persons are really, actually, asexuals. Just the way you know Earth is round but it just it hits you some day, that the Earth is so very round.
I won't make a long rant about this. Asexual persons are obviously interesting, but most people don't even know they exist, and if they do, they're not even aware of what it's really all about. So maybe, instead of raging against a person who's apparently very, very ignorant of asexuality, it could be an idea to take this as an opportunity to make asexuality known to the world. Comment on this interview, for instance, could be a nice way to share with the other Internauts (Moffat might not read the comments, sadly). I'll be making a rough assumption there, but if someone likes smart shows such as Sherlock, they might be just as open minded as to try to understand at least a bit what it's about. Plus, asexuality is such an interesting fact that it'll be a shame not to share.
In the latest series' first episode, Holmes was sexually discombobulated by a lesbian dominatrix who strips off in order to arouse Sherlock's sexuality from its dogmatic slumbers. I couldn't find any of this in Doyle's story A Scandal in Bohemia, from which the episode was adapted. Indeed, Moffat and Gatiss's treatment drove one critic, Jane Clare Jones writing in the Guardian, to suggest they had created a misogynistic throwback. In the original story, Irene Adler is an adventuress who outwits Holmes; in Sherlock, as Jones put it: "She's become a high-class dominatrix saved only from certain death by the dramatic intervention of our hero." She added: "While Doyle's original is hardly an exemplar of gender evolution, you've got to worry when a woman comes off worse in 2012 than in 1891."
Moffat, unsurprisingly, doesn't agree. "In the original, Irene Adler's victory over Sherlock Holmes was to move house and run away with her husband. That's not a feminist victory." He says he found Jones's argument "deeply offensive". "Everyone else gets it that Irene wins. When Sherlock turns up to save her at the end it's like Eliza Dolittle coming back to Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady: 'OK, I like you, now let me hack up these terrorists with a big sword.'"You could only draw conclusions about my personal sexual politics if you proceed from the assumption that I was presenting the characters as the way it is and the way it ought to be. But both are clearly defined as deranged – it's love among the mad. He's a psychopath, so is she. She's prepared to throw him to the dogs until he works out the code, he's prepared to let her nearly get executed. They're not really going to buy a house and a Volvo together. I'm not saying this is how people should date!"
Moffat was perceived as a misogynist in "Sherlock", and that's not the first time that happens (read the rest of the interview to learn more about this issue).
Here goes the reason why I won't say much on that: everyone has a personnal opinion of what being a
free woman is. I'll say it's about doing whatever you want without being
bothered or judged for it because you're a woman, and Adler certainly isn't judged for her
actions as a woman in this show, but as a criminal.
In "Sherlock", she does a job many people would disregard her for: she sleeps with people for fun and often gets little illegal extras through it. This life choice is regarded as criminal, due to her being a threath to the state, but never adressed as a moral issue: she does with her body as she pleases, and this is considered as absolutely normal (and of course it is, but in our society, which is still not that perfectly tolerant, it should be underlined).
However, had she chosen to marry and turn into an housewife because she really wanted to, she'd had made the feminist choice too, and the original Adler is not exactly an anti-feminist model in this context.
Adler's clever enough to outsmart Sherlock and Mycroft all along, and clearly wins in the end (I don't think Sherlock would have saved her if he'd not thought they were even; after all, he had lost to feelings at some point too), even though her crush on Sherlock turns out to be a weakness -but "A Scandal In Bohemia" is about Sherlock winning over love, so of course love itself, and its incarnation in Adler, had to be defeated, just has Sherlock defeats fear in "The Hound" and losing in the "Reichenbach Fall".
Of course, Irene Adler is also the sterotypical femme fatale, the lesbian who would sleep with a man if he's cool enough, the strong yet fragile beauty who eventually needs a (male) savior. This show is still about men investigating, and is been writen by men who have had access to much more movies made by men than by women -a sad reality we girls ought to change. So I'm not saying this show is feminist, I'm saying that it's not undermining women, and grants them a clearly wider place than in the Canon, with figures such as the Mrs Hudson (a motherly figure), Dollivan (an antagonist), Molly (a collegue and a friend), or even The Lady In Pink, who lead a very liberal love life and was smart and determined enough to frame her murderer.
About Moffat being a misogynist... well, the interview seems to indicate he's not perfectly understood what being a woman is, but I don't know the man and I distrust interviews, so I just hope he's not.
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That being said, don't hesitate to share your own views on the subject, but please be rational about it: I'm not planning on a barbecue, so keep your flaming down.
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