Irene Adler, Steven Moffat’s Inability to Write Female Characters, & Sexuality in Sherlock
Okay, I know I am a week late to this party, but I was waiting to watch the first episode of Sherlock until both the roomie and I were back in the apartment and could watch it together (which was obviously the correct decision, because we fangirled out, let me tell you). We’re gonna watch the new episode today so then I will be caught up and don’t have to be afraid of the internet anymore, OH YEAH.
But I have Thoughts about Irene Adler, internet, and about Steven Moffat and his COMPLETE INABILITY TO WRITE FEMALE CHARACTERS, oh holy mother of god make it stop, along with the weird way that this show handles sexuality in general. It’s kind of a clusterfuck! I should say now that I actually enjoyed most of this episode very much, and that in certain ways Moffat is an incredibly gifted writer. I laughed a lot and was generally pretty delighted with how things went until the end. But it’s much more fun to rant about things that make you angry, and there were several! So, here we are. Buckle in, prepare yourselves, etc.
I should say that for the majority of the episode I enjoyed Irene a lot. She was a badass! She is a fucking smart lady and will fuck you up if you get in her way. I particularly enjoyed Sherlock’s inability to deduce anything about her when they first meet. This is all kind of part and parcel with the Conan Doyle Irene Adler, who is truly a badass motherfucker - and, in fact, winds up outwitting Holmes in the end. There are, needless to say, problems in her representation as well (he was, after all, writing in the nineteenth century) but for a character of that period she is quite impressive.
I didn’t have a problem with her being a dominatrix while I was watching the episode, and it’s still not my main area of concern, although I do want to quote Jane Clare Jones’ great article about the episode and its problem with women in the Guardian, where she writes:
However, even this ambiguous portrait of female power proved too much for Moffat to stomach. Granted, he allowed her to keep her smarts. But, at the same time, her acumen and agency were undermined every which way. Not-so-subtly channelling the spirit of the predatory femme fatal, Adler’s power became, in Moffat’s hands, less a matter of brains, and more a matter of knowing “what men like” and how to give it to them; of having them by the sexual short and curlies, or, perhaps more aptly, on a nice short leash. Her masterminding of a cunning criminal plan was, it was revealed late in the day, not her own doing, but dependent on the advice of Holmes’s arch nemesis, James Moriarty. A move that, blogger Stavvers noted, neatly reduced her from “an active force to a passive pawn in Moriarty and Holmes’s ongoing cock-duelling”.
I think she makes a number of very salient points here (she also makes a pretty damning comparison of the Conan Doyle and Moffat Irenes earlier in the article, which is really worth a read). Irene does have brains, smarts - consider how engaged she is when Sherlock talks about solving cases, which is an utterly unsexual activity. But Jones is right when she says that Irene’s real power - the power that gets her somewhere - is her ability to cater to men sexually. Think of all the information she has on her phone: all of it has been garnered from her sexual liaisons with men in powerful positions. Then there is the involvement of Moriarty, which Jones sums up pretty succinctly. She does in some sense become a pawn.
But I had, frankly, a lot more trouble with the way that her relationship (such as it was) with Sherlock progressed. Part of the problem here is that Sherlock has been pretty concretely established as an asexual character on the show, and more importantly a character who is possessed of virtually no sentimentality (except, really, when it comes to John Watson). For much of the episode, his fixation on Irene makes sense: he has finally met someone who is smart enough to make deduction difficult for him. This is a relationship he does not get anywhere else: even John and Mycroft provide fairly easy targets for his intellect. But then we get to the end of the episode and everything goes pear-shaped. Mycroft accuses Sherlock of sentimental attachment to Irene and argues that his deciphering the code for her was an attempt to impress a pretty lady, essentially, and Sherlock doesn’t have anything to say in response to this. This doesn’t ring true to me, based on what we’ve seen of him thus far. Not that he doesn’t make mistakes - he does - but that he would make this particular kind of mistake.
Of course, we later find out that during his one quasi-romantic moment with Irene, he was in fact taking her pulse and making a note of her eyes dilating. He later interprets these factors as evidence for her sentimental feeling for him, and uses this conclusion to finally unlock her phone, which has of course been thwarting him the entire episode (I am skeptical about the suggestion that that phone is as smart as everybody seemed to think, but that is neither here nor there). The password is, indeed, stupidly sentimental: I AM _ _ _ _ LOCKED, the screen reads; with the password it is I AM SHER LOCKED. My friend and I actually turned to look at each other with genuine bafflement at this point. As she said, if the lady were actually so sentimental that she had to have the letters be SHER, she would have had them encrypted, like, three times over, at least. It reminded me of nothing so much as as a twelve-year-old girl doodling her crush’s initials in her notebook. Irene Adler is not a sappy pre-adolescent girl.
Then we have that utterly bizarre moment at the end, when Irene texts Sherlock her farewell before being executed, and he - ludicrously - winds up being the man who is supposedly executing her, in god only knows where. Somewhere far away, where people apparently still use outrageously large machetes to behead people. (I suppose this kind of cultural caricature is very Conan Doyle, as was the unfortunate depiction of the Chinese mob last series, but it’s really something we could do without in this day and age.) This presents a host of purely logistical problems: how the hell did he get out there? How the hell did nobody notice that there is a super white guy in their midst? He would have had to infiltrate the whole society/organization in order to be in that position, one would imagine, and in that case I rather think John would have noticed his absence, don’t you? Even if he only vanished for a few days, John would know, because John is clearly, despite his protestations to the contrary, completely in love with him, to the degree that he basically worries about nothing else, and cannot even remember his own girlfriends. Yet neither John nor the all-seeing Mycroft seem to be aware of this sojourn. We honestly couldn’t decide whether it was a flashback or some kind of weird hallucination, but the evidence seems to point to flashback, in which case - I just don’t even know. I’ll go back to Jones once again, because she puts it better than I could:
All those troubled by female sexual power – or the persistent punctuation of orgasmic text alerts – were treated to the sight of the vamp laid low, down on her knees, about to have her block knocked off by a great big sword. And, at the same time, our hero miraculously appeared to save his damsel in distress. Medusa and Perseus, Rapunzel and her prince, all wrapped up in a potent little bundle.
In a word: yes. This.
Jones also singles out the way Moffat has written women on Doctor Who, which is something I have had problems with for a long time, to the point where I just threw my hands in the air and quit, because I didn’t want to deal with it anymore. As she points out, he tends to write pretty broad female archetypes, which is simply not very interesting, and has trouble with the emotional arcs and intensity that are supposed to characterize the show. But his favorite type of female character seems to be the feisty, supposedly strong woman who is ultimately undermined by either her love for a man or some other characteristic of her femininity. I am thinking, of course, of River Song, and in particular the infamous ending of “The Silence in the Library,” where - SPOILERS - the Doctor does not let her die but instead immortalizes her in a digital reality where she will spend the rest of time caring for two fake children, which of course she is thrilled about because she is a woman and all women want babies, didn’t you know. It doesn’t matter if you’ve written what seems to be a strong and interesting female character if you undercut her in this way. I’m not suggesting that women don’t get sentimental or don’t do stupid things for the people they love - some of whom, inevitably, will be men - but when that phenomenon is framed in this way it puts forth a vision of femininity that is dictated by interactions with men. I will remind you that Steven Moffat, though prodigiously talented in many ways, is the man who actually said the following to a reporter:
“There’s this issue you’re not allowed to discuss: that women are needy. Men can go for longer, more happily, without women. That’s the truth. We don’t, as little boys, play at being married - we try to avoid it for as long as possible. Meanwhile women are out there hunting for husbands. The world is vastly counted in favour of men at every level - except if you live in a civilised country and you’re sort of educated and middle-class, because then you’re almost certainly junior in your relationship and in a state of permanent, crippled apology. Your preferences are routinely mocked. There’s a huge, unfortunate lack of respect for anything male.”
I mean, need I really say any more? It is possible for somebody who has said stupid things about women to write great female characters - Lars Von Trier, anybody? - but Moffat is not, alas, that person.
So we have, here, problems with both Irene herself and with Sherlock’s response to her. Ultimately it comes down, I think, to the show’s deep discomfort with its own depiction of sexuality, which is really pretty contradictory. As we’ve been discussing recently, the press for this series has been extremely irritating in that it has focused on a sort of aggravated series of protestations that the characters aren’t gay. John says the same to Irene. But if we look at John’s statement in the context of his actions throughout the episode, it seems not to be an honest complaint but the protest of a man who is totally in denial about his relationship with his best friend. They act SUPER FUCKING GAY for each other, and John in particular. How about, for instance, the scene when Irene kisses Sherlock on the cheek, and we see it in slow-motion from John’s perspective? This is only one of many examples I could cite. Then there’s Irene’s sudden twist at the end of the episode into sentimentality.
It’s almost as though they have some pretty progressive ideas about sexuality and these characters, and then realize what they’re doing, get afraid, and veer off course back into a more predictable and conventional realm. It makes for fairly inconsistent viewing in a lot of ways, and I found it pretty aggravating. As I’ve said, I’m not suggesting Sherlock and John start making out all over the place. But part of the strength of the show is that Sherlock’s is such a thoroughly queer (in the academic sense of the term) character, in the sense that his sexuality and self-presentation deviates dramatically from the heterosexual norm. Instead of trying to shoehorn him, and the other characters, back into fairly conventional boxes, they should just let them go. It would be more honest and consistent storytelling, and would make for a more interesting show.
