Film Adaptation Of Sherlock Holmes Essay Examples

He is mysterious and chameleonic; charismatic and restless; feared and appreciated, but most of all, he is a genius of solving crimes. Sherlock Holmes is one of the most known fictional detectives in the world, a charming character created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and transposed throughout the years in various mediums: cinema, TV series, comic strips, short stories, etc.
The various adaptations that were created for the character, and for Conan Doyle’s writings, transpose differently Sherlock Holmes. While some of the character’s features are maintained and transposed with accuracy, creating a faithful image of the original Sherlock Holmes, each adaptation introduces other features, which alter the initial traits that Conan Doyle invested in his fictional detective.
This essay analyses how Sherlock Holmes is transposed in the recent TV series broadcasted on BBC, created by Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss, starring Benedict Cumberbatc and Martin Freeman, as Sherlock Holmes and respectively Doctor Watson. The analysis intends to identify the common points between Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and the BBC’s version of the same character.
First of all, in the BBC series, “Sherlock”, there is featured a modern Sherlock Holmes, who transcends through time and space to resolve the mysteries and the crimes of the 21st century. Automatically, he is surrounded with all the modern technology of the nowadays era, acting as a programmer, as an IT genius or as a hacker, being fully up to date with everything that the technological revolution introduces at each step, and even ahead of those innovations.
This reflects a somehow geeky image of Sherlock Holmes, while the version of Conan Doyle was more focused on his classical traits of “sensing” the human nature, based on specific details that he would matched with his rich knowledge about everything. The classical Sherlock stayed a lot in the laboratory, for weeks, as his author sometimes expresses in his writings, until Watson would take him out from out of this activity with a crime to solve. The modern Sherlock also spends much of his time in laboratory, mixing chemical substances, analyzing everything through his microscope lens, so this is a common point between the two representations of Sherlock.
The character featured by BBC is young, in his 30s, while the original one is older, and seems to have more life experience. The original character works with Watson and always manages to mock the Scotland Yard, as he always moves faster and solves the crimes with style, precision and a clear mind, which the British detectives do not manage to do. The young Sherlock, transposed in the nowadays events finds a personal pleasure into mocking the detectives, or everybody else with whom he enters in contact, with his brilliant mind. This is vanity, a feeling that is not so acidly expressed in Conan Doyle’s writings, related to his main character.
In fact, the nowadays Sherlock, from the BBC series is very much passionate about himself, reflecting a narcissistic personality. He is the person who always tells everything directly, with no retention, with no diplomacy. He is not a pleasant person, but he transmits a certain charm, precisely because of his strong personality and brilliant mind. He manages in determining people around him to submit to him, dominating them with his sharp thinking and rapid connections.
He has the features of a modern hero, being completely associable, but capturing everybody’s admiration. He is apathetic and cynical, and it is not his intention to make himself pleasant. This seems to be a modern approach of “role models”, as these features are exposed in other 21st centuries TV series’ characters. As such, the totally sarcastic and unpleasant Doctor House is the typical modern hero, who seems to have inspired a cultural trend, followed by the producers of “Sherlock” in their interpretation of Conan Doyle’s character.
The original Sherlock, although he also has his own breaks from being sociable and acting as a man of society, is a classical gentleman, refined, even sympathetic about people around him. The selfishness with which the BBC series dresses its Sherlock is not so much expressed in Conan Doyle’s writing. Indeed, the original character is much more focused on satisfying his own curiosity and in solving mysteries, than in being sociable or than carrying for people around him. However, he does not lack humanity. In fact neither do the modern Sherlock lacks humanity, because he is very focused in saving people from dying, more focused than proving his own theories.
This reflects a duplicitous character, who down inside has real humanly feelings and the capacity of carrying about somebody else than himself, but he expresses another personality, cold, sarcastic, cynic, skeptic, associable. These can be interpreted as the characteristics of a somehow uncertain personality, who might be afraid of developing inter-human relationships. Again, this might be an adaptation of Sherlock Holmes to the 21st cultural typologies.
As such, the real life heroes, who are inspiring the nowadays generations are people like Steve Jobs (the iconic image and former CEO of Apple), Mark Zuckerberg (the founder of Facebook), or Bill Gates (the creator of Microsoft empire). They are all technological geniuses, the type of “smart guys”, or “geeks”, who were mocked in school, or during their adolescence, but who turned out highly successful adults, ruling the world with their sharp minds and creativity. However, they still seem to maintain the image of the associable teenagers, who could not interact normally with people their own age and this might have inspired the creators of the BBC Sherlock to provide him these traits that contour his personality.
Hence, while the BBC character of Sherlock still maintains some features of the original Sherlock, like acid intelligence, rapidity of creating associations and connections, curiosity or restlessness, he has other features too, which alter the image of the original detective, but transpose him to the socio – cultural realities of the 21st century.