The problems with “The JohnLock Conspiracy”
Anonymous: So... if TJLC is real, why on earth would the actors mention (so casually) in passing that a drunken scene in a gay bar was specifically cut from the show? Wouldn't it be important to keep something like that under wraps?
professorfangirl: [Februari 9, 2014]
(A moment of silence for the followers that may soon hate and leave me. I’ve loved you all.)
You mean “The JohnLock Conspiracy,” yes? Oh boy. Listen, I…I just really have a problem with conspiracy theories. A big problem. I love the view through slash goggles as much as the next person, but I also love how many meanings can coexist and enrich each other in any one text, and I’ve seen some JLC readings that feel brutally reductive to me. Not all of them, and none completely, but now and then I get a whiff of adamant certainty that puts me off.
(Note: I do not see all of these features in all speculations about the possibility of canon Johnlock. But these are the sorts of things I dread. And Note 2: I agree that s3 is a long love story in which Sherlock comes to understand the depth of his feelings for John, and perhaps the possibility of his own gay identity. This season is all about sexuality, Sherlock’s not least. I just don’t think sexuality is the end game, the definitive interpretation of the series.)
Conspiracy theories are by their very nature reductive. They fasten on one story—the CIA killed Kennedy, the Earl of Oxford wrote Shakespeare’s plays, vaccines are a plot by Big Pharma—and interpret every fact of the issue through the lens of that story. Conspiracy theories turn all evidence into support, even denial and counter-evidence. In fact, the latter can be the strongest evidence: “Look how hard they’re denying it! Why would they feel they have to come up with all this proof if it wasn’t true?” There’s a point at which a conspiracy theory is the opposite of critical thinking, for it reads all the facts through the theory, and only sees those aspects it can absorb into itself. For instance, some might answer your question above: well, they let it slip as another clue to where they’re really going, and they cut it out because they didn’t want to go there too fast. Yes, this could be true, and it’d be great, but I don’t think it is. (I don’t see this sort of argument happening a lot in speculations about canon Johnlock, but here and there it has cropped up and made people defensive.)
In such a theory, absurd complexity can coexist with gross oversimplification. An elaborate lie and cover-up is focused on a single goal, to wit: the showrunners of Sherlock have practiced a concerted deception for four years, with the sole purpose of suddenly revealing a gay relationship. They’ve not just hetero-baited their audience (I do love that term), they’ve either conscripted or deceived their actors, been complicit with or underhanded with their financers, and written five seasons of sleight-of-hand. The entire series is to some extent reduced to an extended practical joke. (I’m positing the most extreme expression of this idea, which I actually haven’t seen stated so baldly.)
So why are conspiracy theories so attractive? Why do they seem to do so much emotional work for people? More than anything, they give us a sense of control. They eliminate mystery, ambiguity, and uncertainty, and replace them a single Revealed Truth to which the enlightened are privy. They reduce the disturbing indeterminacy of the world to a comforting unity, governed by the intention of a monolithic Other. In regards to a text, they reduce the multiple possible meanings and effects to a singular definitive authorial intention. It clears up ambiguity by saying, Here’s the real story. People in general don’t like indeterminacy. It’s difficult to hold two meanings in your head at once, and allow that each may be true. (This is why people prefer Freud to someone like Gilles Deleuze, because Freud reduces everything to the same old dick-centered story, while Deleuze challenges us to allow, accept, and relish indeterminacy, multiplicity, and change.)
In a similar fashion, TJLC reduces the erotic possibilities between John and Sherlock to the one that’s most politically appealing: a committed gay relationship. WHICH WOULD BE A WONDERFUL MOTHERFUCKING THING. Do NOT get me wrong. I would love that. TJLC has an obvious, honorable motive: we want queer representation. We need queer representation. And all our demands have seemed to fall on deaf ears until now. Now there’s a conspiracy in our favor, and we few, we happy few, we get it.
I want that to be true. If it is, I will eat these words with gusto and ask for seconds. If that’s where this series is going, it will be the most joyfully wrong I have ever been. But I honestly don’t think that’s what’s happening. I think the show’s actually doing a different progressive thing: presenting two men who don’t fit the binary mold of gay/straight, in a love relationship that doesn’t fit the binary molds romantic/platonic or sexual/nonsexual. It’s enriching the definition of male friendship so that yes, it could go sexual (“I don’t mind”), but is no less tender or profound if it doesn’t. I like to think that they’re moving toward a new definition of masculinity that doesn’t require misogyny or homophobia to shore it up. But because we have so few representations of nontraditional masculinity, it’s going to be ambiguous, uncertain, and very very hard to define.
I think the story of Sherlock and John coming to understand the sexual nature of their love is a perfectly viable subtext of s3—that is, one unified reading of the text’s connotations, one possible throughline articulating a coherent theme. But it’s only one, and it coexists with other possibilities and other meanings, in productive tension with other themes. The cultural politics of sexuality are terrifically complicated, and I don’t think Sherlock is going to resolve them so easily. Instead, I think it represents that elusive, frustrating, provocative complexity in spades, and in doing so gives us an opportunity to work it through in new ways.
professorfangirl: [July 30, 2014]
[...] PFG reblog [...] : THIS IS NOT WANK-BAIT. It’s five months old, but I find that the whole conversation still perfectly sums up my opinions, so I’m reblogging it for reference. I also cleaned it up so that it’s easier to read; destinationtoast, intellectualfangirl, and mild-lunacy all had such great things to say that I’ve removed the Tumblr indents and put each person’s additions in sequence under their name. Wonderful info about Moffat’s interview statements and meditations on authorial intent. So good, and completely free of wank. But if points contrary to TJLC are going to upset you, please, just skip it. (And if you’re interested in the rest of the conversation, in which folks expanded and refined their positions, check the reblogs, because there’s a lot of great stuff I left off.)
mild-lunacy:
I’m very much on the same page as PFG here — though as I’ve said before, I love reading a lot of the metas from the folks who think Johnlock will become canon. But my perceptions are much more in line with this bit (as I’ve written before, but PFG puts it especially well):
"I think the show’s actually doing a different progressive thing: presenting two men who don’t fit the binary mold of gay/straight, in a love relationship that doesn’t fit the binary molds romantic/platonic or sexual/nonsexual. It’s enriching the definition of male friendship so that yes, it could go sexual (“I don’t mind”), but is no less tender or profound if it doesn’t. I like to think that they’re moving toward a new definition of masculinity that doesn’t require misogyny or homophobia to shore it up. But because we have so few representations of nontraditional masculinity, it’s going to be ambiguous, uncertain, and very very hard to define."
Yup. That’s very much what I’ve been admiring about the show for some time. Hooray for nontraditional portrayals of masculinity and love, and for ambiguities.
intellectualfangirl:
I agree that the show has created a nontraditional portrayal of masculinity and love, but I don’t think that’s what the creators originally intended. I think part of the issue is that we think of the actors, writers, directors, cinematographers, set designers, lighting designers, managers, producers, and other workers as some sort of monolithic structure that totally agrees on anything.
But that’s like assuming every member of a government agrees with everything the government as a whole does—it’s not really possible. It’s like assuming that an entire government has created some sort of secret plan (a conspiracy) that they’ve managed to keep hidden from all but those theorists who see through their lies. Guess what? Usually, it doesn’t work like that. Usually, even in the case of Sherlock, where a lot of the subtext and the complexities are intended, creating a collaborative work like this includes some time spent with everyone bumbling around in different directions.
So, we should actually expect cast members and directors and producers and cinematographers and set designers and all the wonderful people who work on this show to sometimes contradict each other. Each of them creates their own show. Each of them, just like each one of us, has their own headcanon. Some of these headcanons probably adhere to TJLC, but I don’t think the show started out with that as its intention (I think it started because two dudes and some of their closest friends wanted to create a modern adaptation of Sherlock), and I don’t think that’s what the group as a whole thinks is the end purpose of the show. If it were, they’d be following some sort of strategy, and someone would mess up.
But, as professorfangirl said,
"TJLC reduces the erotic possibilities between John and Sherlock to the one that’s most politically appealing: a committed gay relationship. WHICH WOULD BE A WONDERFUL MOTHERFUCKING THING. Do NOT get me wrong. I would love that. TJLC has an obvious, honorable motive: we want queer representation. We need queer representation.”
Although honestly, I’d prefer queer representation that didn’t include a character spending a good 2 seasons relentlessly denying any association with the queer community (yes, I operate under the assumption that if he is queer, John is bi/pan, but most bi/pan people I know who get misidentified as gay don’t get as upset about it as John does, and yes, maybe he’s just coming to realize it himself but…I’ll get to that).
In the end, I turn to my personal favorite form of analysis. Basically, stripping away any fancy titles, I’m going to try to determine the likelihood of TJLC based on what we know of the creators of Sherlock.
First, Moffat:
Moffat has repeatedly denied any suggestion that Sherlock is asexual (mostly saying some really painful things about his being asexual being “boring”):
“‘I never know quite what to say about this,’ Moffat said of the perceived sexification, or not, of his characters. ‘Because they’re both characters, and in my head they’re both people. My God, if that’s not sexualized, they’re not having a very good time, are they?’” (source)
And from the same interview:
"Sherlock Holmes, again, must have sexual impulses because human beings tend to — most human beings, not absolutely all, but that’s the majority. The fact is, he decides to put all that in an iron box to make his brain work better. Of course, the fact that that iron box bounces around and shakes and bangs from the inside is what makes the story interesting. He wants to rise above us like a snowcapped mountain, but he’s actually a volcano, and that’s where the story is. That’s where the story is. You know, you shove Irene Adler in front of him, and he just falls apart like most men would. [Laughs]”
So, we get that Sherlock is actually attracted to Irene in Moffat’s head. His statement, “most men,” most likely indicates that Moffat thinks Sherlock would be attracted to any woman who can hold his attention and whatnot. So, Sherlock can be attracted to women, according to Moffat.
(Benedict himself said that “[Sherlock] has a sexuality…There’s no doubt about that. It’s just that he subsumes it to do his work. But the idea that he doesn’t know or doesn’t experience sex I think is anathema, I really do.” Two members of the Sherlock creation team use the same sort of idea—that Sherlock basically bottles up his sexual energy and uses that on cases [you were right, Donovan!]. Most likely, they’ve discussed this, and this is an intended characterization. Of course, John is closely tied up with the cases, which is where Sherlock puts his energy, and his love. But not necessarily sexualized or romantic love.)
Moffat has also put out there that
“‘We’ve always known what we were going to do with that story from the very beginning,’ he said, indicating that there is a long-term game afoot.” (x)
Of course, he was focusing on the topic of Moriarty at the time. Actually, in most of the interviews of him I’ve seen, he talks about the non-romantic plot. Because, in the end, I don’t think Moffat wants to tell love stories, or to make a love story out of Sherlock.
But the creators do want to show character development:
"In the originals he’s a man who keeps his emotions tightly under control, because he wants his intellect to predominate that. That’s all he is. He’s not a freak of nature, he wasn’t born this way. He made himself this way. So yes, if he makes no emotional progress in the series, then we’ve failed, because I can’t stand it when you see a character who’s supposed to be a genius and they don’t learn.
"Geniuses are good at learning. Sherlock learns. Now, that doesn’t always make him nicer. He’s learned how to have a relationship with a girl… so he can break into an office, you know? He’s learned how to do all that. So it doesn’t always make him nicer or better, but the Sherlock Holmes in the first series simply couldn’t have dated Janine. Sherlock Holmes in the third series can date Janine. That’s not necessarily good news for Janine. [Laughs]…He’ll see her again. They’ll be pals. I loved Yasmine’s performance as Janine — she still likes him in the end. At some point, you know, if Sherlock Holmes has to go to a function and he needs a date, he’ll phone her up. Now, he’ll not expect her to say no. She’ll be very cross with him, but she’ll show up, and they’ll have a good time. They will, because he likes her.”
Okay, there’s a lot going on here, and I can’t say it all because 1) it makes me angry 2) I’m busy.
But here’s the most important part:
"There’s tremendous romance in Sherlock Holmes. He needs to be fighting crime and fighting bad guys. He doesn’t admit that to himself, but there are plenty of opportunities for him to go and think elsewhere, but this is what he chooses to do.”
I think this is the romance that Moffat sees.
And I think Moffat romanticizes male friendship. Specifically, because, in his words:
"Well, 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." (x)
I think that Moffat wants Sherlock to be a love letter to male-male friendships that don’t need women (even though both men are attracted to women and want sex, on some level).
But I don’t think Moffat intends to make these two men fall in love, because I think this would ruin his idea of the friendship being some sort of sacred bond that doesn’t include sex (because the “objects” of sexual attraction in much of his recent work are kind of, well “objects”).
And this idea of a John and Sherlock who love each other (in the most “manly” way possible) but aren’t interested in sex with each other is consistent with how Martin and Benedict describe Sherlock’s reaction to the (unaired) gay bar scene:
"There were lots of topless men going past, and [Sherlock and John] are just like, ‘Why are we here?’”
"Cumberbatch went on to expand on Sherlock’s reaction to the club-goers, remembering: “I [Sherlock] had no idea why they didn’t have their clothes on, and eventually it dawned on me, and my grounding shook.” (x)
Of course, Gatiss is much much much more complicated.
However, something I once read about his experience coming out. (ooh, look I found it!)
"I dreaded coming out to my dad, but it was taken out of my hands by my mum. I told her I was gay and was ready to tell my dad, but she said: ‘Don’t, you’ll kill him.’ So, I put it off for a bit, then about two weeks later she called me up and said mysteriously: ‘We’ve had snow! Oh, look, it’s only dad just come in the room,’ which I took to mean she had told him. A year later, I realised that they had dealt with it by not dealing with it at all. I had to go through it all again and confront them about my sexuality. There’s a lesson there, in terms of not putting things off.” (source)
I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t expect someone who says that to plan to create a show where the two main characters end up outing themselves and falling in love after a long period of it being super unclear. Especially because he said (and this is really fucking painful to quote):
"I had a girlfriend before I ever had a boyfriend, but it was just a phase. I think a lot of people who say they are bisexual aren’t. I loved her dearly and we had a very nice time, but on the Kinsey scale, I would say I was always predominantly gay.”
(attempts to continue breathing)
(fails)
Okay, I’m better now. Gatiss doesn’t thing bisexuality is something that happens a lot, which along with Moffat’s seeming disinterest with male bisexuality, sort of ruins the “John is bi” hypothesis. Yes, he might write a bisexual character, but it’s unlikely. (PFG edits to add: intellectualfangirl reconsidered this point when reminded that Gatiss had written a bisexual character. A nice example of intellectual honesty.)
However, he does say that despite being mostly gay, he loved her dearly.
Both Gatiss and Moffat show ambivalence, if not outright rejection, towards the idea that John and Sherlock will end up in a romantic and sexual relationship. While the two could be lying (with an unspecified number of other Sherlock creators involved), their doing so would be:
- Inconsistent with their stated views on what Sherlock itself is about
- Inconsistent with their personal views on what love and sex and romance are
- Inconsistent with other stated views (such as Moffat’s whole thing about male friendship and the awesomeness that is maleness getting ignored)
The biggest point I want to make here is that I don’t think Moffat or Gatiss intend for this to be about romance or sex or anything like that.
I believe they see Sherlock as a show about male friendship and solving crimes.
And quite honestly, the more I think about it, the more I realize that these are not the people I want to write a break-out same-sex romance, especially not one between Holmes and Watson.
Because from the way they’ve framed the show, and what they’ve said in their personal lives (and I know I focused more on Moffat, but again, this is meta, and I can’t hit every point I want to make), I don’t think they’d do it very well with these two characters.
Quite honestly, I think if TJLC ends up being true, I’d be happy for a while, but rapidly disappointed because so many fanfiction authors have done it better.
Yes, we need more queer representation.
We need openly queer representation.
We need queer representation that respects everyone, from creators who respect everyone.
And until we get that from mainstream media, we’ll get it elsewhere.
And when we get that from mainstream media, we’ll still turn to fanfiction and less mainstream media for more voices, more interpretations, more subtle variations of the human experience.
mild-lunacy:
I absolutely love this: this is what Authorial Intent analysis should be (well, it’s not academically polished or anything, but I mean in approach). Too many times, you get metas that talk about Moffat or Gatiss and their intentions merely by citing examples from their previous work (on Dr Who rather than Sherlock, without establishing a connection other than sharing one of the same creators). Alternatively, metas use an overtly critical (ie, biased) lens rather than using inductive reasoning from the evidence to predict or interpret their choices. People also tend to rely on structural (or even cinematographic!) evidence alone to predict future directions for the show. And it’s tricky, because technically you *should* be able to judge some sense of directionality from the text itself, of course; however, if you’re outright *predicting* outcomes that are contrary to the creators’ stated goals and much of the textual (rather than subtextual) evidence, the burden of proof definitely resides in a formal Authorial Intent analysis. Nothing else can substantiate predictive claims not firmly grounded in textual evidence, basically.
You know, this may seem obvious to some, but I’ve been around fandom for a long time, and I’ve seen Authorial Intent used and abused, dismissed and used as basis for sheer speculation. Most fans get upset talking about the creators, and most of the rigorously analytical, impartial meta therefore happens elsewhere, to the point where I genuinely forgot that it’s not the analytic lens that matters, but the general approach and its relevance to what you’re trying to prove. As slashers, we are proud of standing up to ‘the man’, and I’m behind that. That’s why it always feels weird to me that I somehow ended up in a fandom where we write heartfelt metas about how we’re due our revolution and takeover of the headquarters. It’s not that we’re not. But, basically, simply declaring it’s ‘about time’ doesn’t make it so. It’s been ‘about time’ for quite awhile, anyway.
Even in English classes, I feel Authorial Intent-based readings are used incorrectly, overused or simply thrown about like so much confetti. We so often go over the history and background of the author, but the relevance to the texts is assumed without being proven. I’m pretty ambiguous about the whole approach, really. But! But. When you rely *entirely* on symbolic/visual and structural readings, you end up lost at sea without a compass, especially if you’re doing predictive work on a WIP (which I generally stay away from, but alas).
It’s difficult ‘cause it’s too easy to get a sense of ‘ownership’ over a media text one feels especially close to. One feels one knows better than the creators what ‘should’ happen sometimes, and/or that one can do better. Sometimes it’s true (though I tend to not respect and/or follow stories that you can say that about— problem solved). The bottom line, to me, is that there’s nothing that ‘should’ happen, no matter what, as long as you can say what *does* happen feels satisfactory and fits the previous events without being too jarring. Note I didn’t say ‘logical’; I think that’s a high bar for most pop-cultural texts. Pssh, name a genre show that’s ‘logical’, except internally, and even that in a generally pieced-together fashion (surely a product at least in part of film and comics’ collaborative nature). I’d certainly *enjoy* logically consistent narratives with as few plot holes and inconsistencies as possible, but I feel it’s a product of our investment in fannish analysis that we *need* things to make sense, be consistent *and* to satisfy our varying emotional needs. That’s just not realistic in any media which has more than one or two creators (and here, actors and writers and directors and cinematographers are all ‘creators’).
Anyway. The contents of this argument aren’t revelatory to me, but they’re just so on-point and well-stated, and it really makes me happy to see well-done analysis. The bottom line, of course, is that predictive theories are fundamentally not very academically rigorous by their nature, I guess, being purely speculative. All in good fun! It’s only when you start believing the propaganda that it starts to impact people and threaten their emotional stability, etc (since we’re all invested in this show).
I personally *prefer* it this way; it’s not that I wouldn’t like a change, but the fact is that I like the creators’ intent and my reading to be firmly separate. Then I can ‘see’ Johnlock without feeling that sense of vertigo, where I’m no longer 100% certain I’m seeing what I think I’m seeing, etc. I love analysis, in other words, but I actually hate ‘reading into’ things (which is separate from consciously imagining, reinterpreting and speculating!), and the line is very thin.
I feel like knowing where Authorial Intent ends and I begin actually gives me more power, not less. This is why fandom appeals to me— not as a tool to try and impact any canon of any media, but as a way of playing with it. Here’s the media and here’s my sandbox! And I enjoy that separation. It’s actually what gives slash its power, really— that re-seeing, that re-contextualizing. The context that Moffat and Gatiss and the actors and everyone give the show— that is all there— but so is the subjective story playing out in my head and in everyone else’s! Both these narratives are real, but they are parallel and non-intersecting.
I guess what I want to say is, I don’t ‘see’ Johnlock any less strongly on-screen for not thinking it’s placed there for that purpose. All the emotions are actually still there, like ingredients in a stew or letters in an alphabet. Basically what we’re doing is a form of making anagrams, or perhaps ship acronyms— we’re taking the letters in ‘John’ and ‘Sherlock’, just as they appear on the show, and making ‘Johnlock’. And that is a powerful and real thing. And that’s how reality is— there are always multiple ways anything, any relationship or storyline *can* go, and only one way it *will* go in any given narrative. But just as with reality, there are infinite possible narrative progressions. Authorial Intent analysis just gives you clues where the originating biases lie, but it always seemed weak to me ‘cause I’ve never been interested in predicting the destination— it’s the journey that matters to me. The story *really* happens in the interaction between text and audience, so I’ve always been lukewarm about analyzing either our own needs and biases or the creators’. It’s in-between that the magic happens!
I’m just a bit disappointed at the very idea that any fanfic readers and writers really believe that Johnlock (or any canon-based slash ship) *has* to be be canon to be ‘justified’ or ‘real’, or that it *has* to happen in a certain way (a romantic way) in order to matter, to feel ‘valid’. As professorfangirl said, life and relationships are more complex than a ‘committed gay relationship’. People’s relationships and needs within those relationships are quirky— especially quirky when they’re Sherlock and John!— and I guess I happen to like that. And I liked it first Moffat and Gatiss’ way, after all, so I’m fond of it. They are clearly biased, but their stories continue to make me happy, and that’s really all I feel the need to reasonably ask.
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