#alienation effect

We tend to structure random things happening within a linear narration, thereby charging these happenings with meaning, embedding them within a reasoning of cause and effect. But this is an illusion. Life doesn’t work this way. Things just happen, sometimes simultaneously, mostly randomly; they don’t have to be connected. It’s us (western) humans, with our way of thinking in past, present and future, and by drawing a straight progressing line from these points, who impose this structure on life and stories. Because we need this to function in our modern societies, that are based on reasoning and predictability. We think critical and want explanations. This is the way we are used to tell stories and be told stories. So, when we fabricate stories, we mostly apply those narrative strucutres: cause and effect, connections, one thing leading to another.

Stories who evoke the impression of telling real happenings have therefore to follow those lines and rules to be believable. As @welovethebeekeeper wrote, they have to follow a certain learned cultural verisimilitude. If these rules are broken, we start to feel uneasy. Things seem strange, fucky, we become aware that something is changing. It kind of shocks us.

Of course, there are other ways of storytelling: magical realism, for exapmple, or ghost stories, who break down the barrier between what is probable and what is not. But even most of them follow the classic form of storytelling: beginning, climax, end.

This is especially true for ACD Holmes stories, in which the deduction process always followed the laws of logic. Furthermore, within the classic Sherlock Holmes stories, the reader always knew who the narrator was: mostly Watson and, in a few instances, Holmes himself. The narrator is always identified within the first paragraph. There might, additionally, be a second narrator within a story, for example the client outlining the case or the culprit telling what happened (for example, Jonathan Small in Sign of Four). But the reader always knew who was telling the story.

Now, when Holmes was tranferred to the screen, this slightly changed. Because the things that clients or culprits might have told in the written form could now be shown, to enhance the films excitment and make good use ot the new media’s ressources. Therefore, we get kind of prologues or flashbacks; we, as viewers, see things neither Holmes nor Watson have been privy to, thereby introducing a god-like narrator perspective, watching from above. Sometimes the visual adaptations even put a piece of paper at the beginning, to visualise that we are shown one of Watson’s stories, or put a voiceover at the beginning explaining that much (like BBC Sherlock did in TAB, for example).

Thereby, the visual adaptations blurred to role of the narrator. And they changed something esle: where, when we read the ACD stories, we get the official version, filtered mostly through Watson’s storytelling, most visual adaptations create the impression that we are watching raw footage. Usually, it’s only at the end of an episode/film that Watson sits down and starts to write the case up. So, some visual adaptations step back from the published accounts and seem to show us what truly happened, thereby fabricating a feeling of reality.

BBC Sherlock does the same. Even here, John writes his blog, that is shown and features from the beginning. But we are not shown the episodes from the perspective of the blog entries (or John’s perspective), we are shown the things that happen before and lead to the blog entries. The perspective has been subtly converted to some kind of behind the scenes footage. We are following John and Sherlock on their adventures as the happen.

I’ll explain further below what it means that this blog was abandoned for S4.

Now, of course, there are also written accounts that try to evoke this kind of authenticity. Sherlock Holmes was a phenomenon in that he was one of the first fictional characters that people thought was real. Even back in ACD’s time, people wrote to the detective. His death in FINA was mourned by people in the streets. The lines between fiction and reality started to blurr.

Those written accounts operate, for example, with lost manuscripts, the true diaries of Watson, found after his death etc. They all play with the notion that those ficitonal characters were real, and that there are true stories behind the published ones that can be unearthed and told.

BBC Sherlock does this as well: At Angelo’s, one fictional character asks the other: “What do real people have then, in their real lives?” - thus evoking the impression that this show is a portrayal of real life. But it isn’t. Sherlock has no girlfriends or boyfriends in BBC Sherlock - but he has in fact archenemies. The modern setting kind of conceals this at first for contemporary audiences, because the BBC adaption isn’t removed from our time, for example to Victorian London. These two seem to be modern men in modern London - but they aren’t. The series is playing with boundaries between fiction and reality as well as with the PoV of the narrator. It gets away with it, because it - as well as the audience - is aware of Holmes’s and Watsons’s legacy.

There has been lots of discussions from which perspective S4, TAB and - to a lesser extent - S3 has been told. From that stem theories like EMP, John’s mind bungalow, alibi theory. But I think this is all just scratching on the surface while pointing out nonetheless what most of us have sensed: something is strange with the perspective since S3. Something has changed.

When you start to follow through with these theories, you come to a point where you have to acknowledge that they fall short at one point or another. For example, when did EMP start? In HLV, after the Fall, at the pool, after the pilot? You could argue and proof any of it. 

Why? Because we are in a fictional story and have been from the start. How does ASiP start? With scenes neither John or Sherlock could have witnessed. They are not the narrators. It’s made plain from the start: John Watson is, unlike in canon, not the main narrator of BBC Sherlock. But still, the series follows most other adaptions in that John writes about the cases, and what happens is mostly shown from his or Sherlock’s perspective. And we, as Sherlock Holmes fans, are used to this form of storytelling and accept it. We know that we are in a story, watching an imaginated work of ficiton that is loosely based but not totally subjected to the rules of real life.

But who is telling this story?

Within the original Holmes stories, it seems to have been Watson (or Holmes). But, of course, there never was a Doctor Watson - it was all made up by Arthur Conan Doyle, who chose to tell his stories through a narrator within them, evoking the impression that said narrator witnessed the events and retold what really happened (in shaping this narrator after himself, ACD kind of started to break the fourth wall, though). And he did this so convincingly that people believed in Holmes and Watson.

Two posts I read recently gave me an idea. One is by @goodmythicalmail and explains the different PoV’s in S4 and their impossibility. The second was the already cited post by @welovethebeekeeper , explaining the trope of false documents.

Both posts refer to narrative strategies. The first one seems to call for a god-like narrator to explain all the different narrative angles we get in S4 (but which are, to a lesser extent, already present since S1). The second one describes the narrative trope of having a story told by producing an allegedly original, real manuscript within a fictional story.

This is how, for example, Nicholas Meyer tells the Holmes pastiche story The Canary Trainer. It takes the form of a lost manuscript of Dr John Watson, telling the story of Wilson, the canary trainer, mentioned in ACD’s Black Peter. The manuscript somehow finds its way to Meyer, who writes a prologue and epilogue to create the impression as if he’d edited this real story about real people.

This canary trainer is also mentioned at the beginning of TST, when Sherlock solves one case after another. Is it a clue? I think it is - a hint to the false document we’ll be watching.

Because, how does S4 end? With the hideous monologue narrated by Mary, mentioning the legend Holmes and Watson will become and the adventures they will have - as fictional characters. I ranted and hated that Mary got the last word - but it’s just a narrative technique or trope, she just tells a story, the surface narrative of classic Holmes and Watson. And so S4 is book-ended by false documents - to tell us by way of alienation that we are watching a story to which the rules of real life don’t apply.

At first, this feels totally odd and out of place, because what we’ve been watching since S3 was all about character development and the relationship of the two main protagonists: Sherlock Holmes and John Watson. Not about legends or adventures.

Now, in giving Mary the last word, throwing everything they developed over seven years prior overboard, Mofftiss either suddenly forgot how to write and tell their story... or it is on purpose.

Let’s go for the latter. I think it should show us that we are dealing with ficitonal characters, who somehow, however, have transgressed into our real world. But they are still protagonists in a story being told. Of course, we had elements of stroytelling within the story throughout the show: John’s blog, for example. All the writing on screen. The newspaper articles. But not to this extent, that makes it totally obvious that we are watching a pastiche.

There are numerous different versions of the Holmes/Watson story. ACD canon even ends with the words: ‘Someday the true story may be told’. But what is the true story of two ficitonal characters? Doesn’t every generation, every writer, interpret this truth differently? And perhaps that’s what Mofftiss wanted to do, that no one else had done before: Kill Holmes and Watson to free them. Liberty in death. To show how real Holmes and Watson can become, while still keeping them inside a story. A story that allows for different interpretations (like Johnlock, Adlock, Sherlolly, asexual genius + sidekick solving crimes) - but still, or because, speaks to many people on many levels. There is no truth. Every reading is valid.

Of course, this is on one hand frustrating in its vagueness - but it also opens up so many possibilities, especially for fans to engage with the original material and create their own. Like Mofftisson did.

Mofftiss are brilliant storytellers in this, for they show and don’t tell. Via all the things we don’t understand, that don’t make sense in a linear narrative, what we call fuckyness or emp or dream logic - they show us that we are watching a fictional story without telling us explicitly that this is fiction.

The oddity of S4 has been described in many ways: fake, fuckery, emp - you name it. All these explanations have in common that they don’t think S4 really happened. Which, of course, it didn’t - it’s a fictious story!

This is blatantly obvious since S3. Before that, Holmes and Watson inhabit the in-between realm of ficitonal characters people believe to be real. But then Sherlock Holmes dies. And it’s a legend that gets ressurrected. Because I’m sure that we are in a story within a story since TRF, a story told by fans to disguise Sherlock’s death or to deal with it an keep him alive in our stories.

I’d like to give you a few examples of why I think we are in a story within a story since the end of TRF before I explain where this all might lead. I argue that we don’t have these conglomerated callbacks to fiction in the prior episodes.

In TRF, there appear repeated hints at fairytales: the apple, the Grimm’s Brothers book, the gingerbread man.

Moriarty calls himself the villain needed for a good fairytale.

Moriarty calls himself the storyteller in the Sir Boast-A-Lot clip.

A story in a newspaper will reveal who Sherlock really is and expose him. Those articles are also called fairytales.

In MHR, Anderson tells us what Sherlock did during his time away. It is a fancy story about crimesolving around the globe. But it’s just a story, told in a pub.

Even Sherlock tells us a story - on the DVD Lestrade delivers to John. It’s simultaneously a glimpse in the past, a flashback... we’ll see more of those in the later series.

When S3 starts, we are again reminded that we must be in someone’s story, because a longhaired Sherlock is suddenly tortured in Serbia. There is no linear explanation how he got there.

There’s the added element of Mary. Some people have lamented that it became a romcom, following a different kind of storytelling than classic Holmes stories do. It shows increasing signs of being (fan)fiction.

The fourth wall is broken: Cumberbatch’s real parents play Sherlock’s parents. Martin Freeman’s partner plays his love interest. Mycroft is played by one of the writers (true, since S1).

We even get a false document in TEH: ‘How I did it by Jack the Ripper’. But it’s all fake, a story, set up again by the fan Anderson. Like the whole thing we are watching is set up by fans.

In the end, Sherlock nearly dies, another storyteller - media tycoon  Magnussen - presumably dies, and a third dead storyteller - Moriarty - appears again. We’ve been moving in circles.

TAB is a Victorian fantasy. The explanation for it - Sherlock solving a crime in his MP, set in another era to explain things going on in the present - is only a thin excuse for time travelling back to the original ACD Holmes setting. And the MP in TAB is totally different from the MP we saw in S2. This is a whole new world in Sherlock’s head. Yet, due to the interwoven modern scenes, we are even repeatedly reminded that we are in a Victorian story - inhabited by Sherlock, John and all the other fictional characters.

Moriarty even tells us: It’s not real. And we can deduce that because it doesn’t make sense. Like a lot in S3 - for example the Ripper case, or the increased time jumps, or Mary shooting Sherlock, or the whole leverage chain Magnussen spins and so forth.

Yet TAB has to be set in 1895 - because of the poem that circles around the everlasting presence of Sherlock Holmes - a man out of his time, for any time. Not real, yet not wholy fictional either. Poetry and truth.

At the end of TAB, John even calls himself a storyteller and declares that he knows when he’s in one. This is a fictional character stepping out of his role, acknowldeging that he plays one - a core feature of epic theatre and its alienating effect. This again changes the narrative perspective, in becoming truly meta, lifted onto an outer- or uber-textual level. It’s not John’s story. He doesn’t tell it - he’s just in it.

We get the impossible transition from Victorian Baker Street to modern Baker Street - like the transition of the Victorian fictional character Sherlock Holmes into a public figure that has left the realm of fiction and entered our reality.

Then again, with the beginning of S4, everything we thought we knew is altered. Apparently, Sherlock didn’t shoot Magnussen. There’s a new story told via a video.

Then we get the above mentioned canary trainer - from a false document story, telling us this might seem real but isn’t.

As if to point in that direction, documents feature in TAB/S4, but we never see what they contain... false documents: The list with drugs in TAB. John’s letter to Sherlock. Mary’s drugged piece of paper. Mary’s letter to John. The AGRA stick. this evokes a false sense of reality while simultaneously, in applying this trope, revelas what is happening.

Sherlock even starts to openly recite Shakespeare monologues: he’s not only talking about scenes from plays, he’s enacting them. A play within a play - a metaphore for what is going on.

Everything gets stranger and stranger during S4. Characters are there and not (Faith/Eurus). Characters act totally OOC (John beating Sherlock up). We even see a cameraman. Who is who? What is going on? People die - but it looks more and more like a farce. Because it is. It is not real - a play within a play. We see the characters act like actors (Mary dying, for example, and John’s reaction - badly acted to emphasise that it is acted).

And as every proper pastiche has the right to introduce one new character - we get Eurus. Who lives at Sherrinford - in a pastiche character! Omnipotent, allmighty Eurus. Like our storyteller. Only - of course - no one in the story can tell it like it is told. She is again a metaphore - for someone telling a story, creating a maze, making characters react to her whims. Like a puppet master. An allmighty storyteller.

As the story becomes less and less probable and and more and more illogical, we, as viewers, get hints as to question what we see: We see Saw, Shining, Shutter Island, Spectre and loads of other movies. TFP even starts with Mycroft watching a film like a fan. It becomes absurd.

We end with Mary’s voiceover. It’s all about the legend, the stories, the adventures. It’s always 1895.  Mofftiss put the storyteller’s words into Mary’s mouth - to show that this can’t be real, that it is someone else’s narrative, who tells us this version of Holmes and Watson. It’s not real, and it’s not their true story, it’s an interpretation.

It’s a story within a story, pure fiction detaching itself from fictional reality. Not like the comic books in the Geek Interpreter, where the comics started to become real. It’s the other way around now: The story becomes more and more artificial.

In that, the whole of S4, but especially TFP, reminds me of Brecht’s epic thearter that is based on the estrangement or alienation effect: “The purpose of this technique was to make the audience feel detached from the action of the play, so they do not become immersed in the fictional reality of the stage or become overly empathetic of the characters. Having actors play multiple characters, rearrange the set in full view of the audience, and "break the fourth wall" by speaking to the audience are all ways he used to achieve the alienation effect. Lighting can also be used to emulate the effect. For example, flooding the theatre with bright lights (not just the stage) and placing lighting equipment on stage can encourage the audience to understand that the production is merely a production instead of reality.” The aim of this form of theater was to “encourage playwrights to address issues related to "contemporary existence." This new subject matter would then be staged by means of documentary effects, audience interaction, and strategies to cultivate an objective response.”

In short, the audience should be aware of watching art, and shouldn’t be carried away by their emotions; instead, they should think, question not only the issues the play - or tv series - deals with, but their own circumsatnces in relation to its meaning as well. Rings a bell with lgbtq representation, for example?

In a 21st century tv show this is, however, not achievable by theatrical techniques applied in 20th century political theatre. BBC Sherlock used some of those techniques - breaking the fourth wall, characters mirroring other characters extensively and therefore actors kind of playing multiple characters - but the alienation effect was mostly achieved by continuously removing the story from the reign of verisimilitude.

It started with the end of S2, where something fundamentally changed at the end of TRF. There something happens that is totally different to ACD canon, and the first thing in the whole series that simply can’t be real, can’t be explained (and never is): Sherlock jumps of that roof - and survives. The trick in ACD’s FINA was that Holmes never went down the Reichenbach Fall. And, honestly, you can’t survive jumping off that roof. It’s impossible.

But we see Sherlock jump - therefore that’s what happened. And it’s never revealed how he survived. Sherlock Holmes is dead since TRF and what we’ve seen since then is a story told to us as a means to conceal this. It is kind of an alibi story - but not for John, for Sherlock.

Because you can’t kill an idea.

And therefore Sherlock Holmes isn’t dead. But he is. And becomes Schrödinger’s Holmes.

So, who is this narrator, who tells us this cover-up story? Mofftiss, who feature heavily in fan discourse and even got their own aconym? Or Arthur Conan Doyle, who invented Holmes and Watson?

There have been adaptions of Holmes in which ACD turns up and breaks the fourth wall (having the creator of the play step on stage is also a popular feature in epic theatre). The play ‘The Penultimate Problem of Sherlock Holmes’, for example. Remember all those penultimate tweets during setlock? ACD also figures in the German film ‘Der Mann, der Sherlock Holmes war’ - a film in which two frauds pretend to be Sherlock Holmes and John Watson, but solve a crime nonetheless and get ACD’s blessing in the end.

I am aware that after TAB, there were some metas arguing for John as the storyteller. But since S4 this can’t hold, because, as @goodmythicalmail has explained, we see stuff from a persepctive that can’t be John’s. For example, we see the flashback of John leaving Lauriston Gardens in ASiP - but not from John’s perspective, and neither from Sherlock’s. It is as if a superimposed god-like narrator looks down on the story and tells/shows it to us.

I doubt that Mofftiss would exhume ACD. And as much as they are prone to hubris - to write themselves into their own series - as writers/creators - sounds over the top even for their liking.

So, who continues to tell Sherlock’s and John’s story. The fans! Only, the more time elapses, the more our stories tend to depart from the characters we met in S1 and S2. The stories start to get increasingly fantastic. But it’s us fans who keep Sherlock and John alive. And even Mofftiss are ‘just’ fans.

I think we are watching a story, being told by fans, because the protagonist stepped off a roof and is dead, but his legend - the idea - lives on in numerous adaptations. This theory explains most things other theories struggle with: the changing PoV’s; the ever prolongued alleged coma/dream, that isn’t made explicit and therefore kind of fizzles out; the alibi theories; the fuckyness. It even incorporates things like an ARG - be it by the BBC or fanrun or imagined. Because it is created around the character of Sherlock Holmes and wouldn’t exist without the fans. We create our own ficitonal reality, our own canon.

I think everything we’ve been criticising since S4 aired was intentional. It’s a clue. For those who look deeper - us. We already ascended to meta level: we not only ask ‘Does this make sense for Sherlock as a character’ - but we start to question the storytelling itself, the writing, analyse the tropes. We are aware that we are watching a manufactured piece of art - we have stepped back in the true sense of the estrangement effect. We should now fully embrace this idea. Because imo, the increasing fuckyness, the dreamlike feeling, the plot holes, the bad writing, the adaption of other films - are all signs that this story moved from the realm of narrative verisimilitude, set in some form of fictional reality, towards a pure fairytale, a legend. Sherlock Holmes belongs to all of us. He is public domain.

And this is exactly adapting the Sherlock Holmes experience. He never lived and never died. He’s not real, we know that, yet we play the game as if he is. We believe in him. Sherlock Holmes has transcendet the border between fiction and reality - and so did the series.

Comparing the series to fan fiction is not saying btw that fan ficiton has to be badly written. On the contrary. I only think Mofftiss overplayed so heavily in S4, wrote in plot holes etc, for the inclined viewers to start to question what the hell they were watching?! In that, S4 took the concept even a step further than TAB - and that is brave storytelling. It needs courage to serve this ‘crap’ - to literally risk the alienation of the fan base by showing them that they now own the stories.

And Johnlock? Well, epic theatre is not a means in itself, not self-indulgent. It has a message. The audience shall look at what is happening, become aware of social injustice. Sherlock can be read as being about representation - not in giving answers but by asking questions in this regard and get people to think. It can be read as being about the influence of the media (fake news!). It can be read as being about the surveilance state. It can be read as fan empowerment. And, as @darlingtonsubstitution argued, John and Sherlock might very well become the narrators of their own story. I’d love to explore this angle, but at the moment I am sticking with us fans as storytellers.

And if we only take S1 and S2 as being ficitonally real, I’m sure you can very well show how Johnlock is embedded in the story. It’s set up in S1, while in S2 John stops denying, and they seem almost ‘married’. And to whom does Sherlock - like ACD Holmes - address his final note? To John. Not to Molly, or Irene, or even Mycroft. To me, this confirms Johnlock, but it ends tragic and still not explicit. Do I like that? Well, if it’s the greatest lovestory never told, I can see its appeal. It’s incredibly sad, a tragic love story - but it’s the writers decision. If Sherlock had ended after S2, I’d never accused them of queerbaiting. Because, in the end, it was made quite plain where Sherlock’s heart belonged. But by implying it heavily without making it canon, Mofftisson keep the door open for other ships to sail when we enter the realm of fan fiction in S3.