I have to say this now, because Sherlock Holmes is trending and I am celebrating more than I did this Christmas. I watched Knives Out and Glass Onion and it made me realise something crucial about Holmes. He is fundamentally a good person. Does he sometimes behave a little bit like he doesn't care? Yeah. And does he solve cases because he wants the thrill and the mystery? Yep. But I would argue that he mainly solves cases because he wants to help people. His first case was when he helped his friend. Later we see multiple instances of this happening again and again (him being a genuinely good person). I have said it once and I will say it a million times— Sherlock Holmes is interesting because he is a smart guy who is NOT an asshole. He is (mostly) considerate to people, and their feelings. He takes cases to help people. The prime example that springs to mind is Copper Beeches, where he didn't think Violet Hunter had anything interesting to say about her case. But he still agreed to hear her out. And many times, he has done things for people, solved their mysteries without any money. Now you could say that he is not concerned about money at all, except we have seen him squeeze the king of Bohemia. He takes high profile cases to pay the bills, normal cases to solve puzzles, and the really simple mysteries because he wants to help people. I may have talked about this in another post and used the example of Twisted Lip, and Blue Carbuncle to say how he let criminals (of a sort) go solely based on his moral judgement.
The reason why I bring this up in the same breath as the Knives Out films is because of Benoit Blanc's character. That man is very polite unless he absolutely needs to be rude or has been driven to the ends of his patience. You know, like a normal person? And I loved how it just completely avoided the trope most modern mysteries, crime thrillers, and detective stories fall into. I like to call the trope "The Genius Asshole Syndrome". And it just sort of stigmatises really really smart people for not having social skills by twisting them into something mean and uncaring. And so many modern adaptations of Sherlock Holmes fall into that. And yes, BBC is one of them. So do the Ritchie!verse movies. They make Sherlock Holmes act flippant towards other people, because such a genius cannot possibly care for the normal people. He cannot possibly appreciate other different versions of smart, because he is obviously a genius and a genius is always an asshole, and not empathetic at all. So it was really refreshing to see a detective who cared about his clients, and vulnerable people. It was nice to see a detective get angry on behalf of a defenceless person. And it was very nice to see a detective not wanting to fuck a female client who is maybe half his age. (Plus the gay thing worked out great). I really feel like we need more genuinely good, kind, and helpful people in fiction, and now that Sherlock Holmes is completely in public domain, we can hopefully get something that is faithful to his actual character instead of the two dimensional grim dark detective dynamic. And maybe modern media can give us other detectives who are actually human, and have all basic human emotions? Just a thought.
