The Johnlock ship is a political problem

 (By mid0nz)

Question: Hi, I understand if you don't want to elaborate on this since you've now several times stated that there's something personal that happened that changed how you feel about the show. But could you explain what political reasons you have for the ship being a problem? I feel like maybe I don't get a connotation here, not being a native speaker. Thanks!

Answer:

KISMET. 

I believe it was my soul’s fate to happen upon Sherlock post S1 and to become so obsessed with it that I did what I’d never done before which was join a fandom. I came to the show having studied film theory in grad school- film sound, the technology of filmmaking, film semiotics, the inner workings of film scores, the materialism of film production. I had studied narrative theory for years and years. I taught film and television narratives as a university literature instructor of undergraduates for over 15 years. I came to Sherlock prepared to recognize the show’s semantic nuances quite clearly and to delight in them until what was meant to happen for me happened. While I waited unawares I wrote meta.

I wrote Johnlock meta for fun. I found the ship (once I figured out what a ship IS) exciting, titillating. I wrote some mediocre fic. I meta’d like the pro I was. I got hung up on the cinematography, a topic I’d dabbled in but didn’t understand in any honest, practical depth until later. And I began to try to explain how shot selection and camera movement and light and color helped make meaning which I’ve always maintained is the work of the viewer ultimately. I used shipping as my case study. I waffled back and forth, argued with myself and others for the sake of fun and exercising my brain and trying out thoughts. (Wank happened but I’m not interested in talking about tjlc right now.)

So I’d written a lot of meta post S2 about my fave episodes and it turns out that they were lit by the same Director of Photography who also happened to have operated “A” camera on the eps. (Not all DoPs operate and if they do, they don’t always operate “A” camera.) I was meant to meet him. Kismet. Destiny. That was the point. I didn’t know it at the time– I just did what I was compelled to do which was to fangirl. And anyway I had no way to contact him until S3 production began and he began tweeting. I eventually asked him if he meant the real lost Vermeer of TGG to be visible in the cinematography. It was THERE but was it conscious? Yes, it turned out it was. I feel that I have been interested for years in the question of authorial “intentionality” and the transmission of a predetermined, transmitted/telegraphed meaning in narratives for the express reason that I was supposed to recognize this one person’s intelligence– the intelligence of that one person behind the camera. That was my destiny. Sherlock was just the conduit in the end for us to meet and for our acquaintanceship to grow into a cherished friendship.

We had many conversations over the years– both joking and philosophical– about Johnlock. I knew from the start that it was never consciously imprinted into the text in any way by him or the directors he worked with. The phenom kind of mystified and mildly amused him at first. Johnlock eventually grew and grew as a pop culture phenom after S3 so we did have some nuanced discussions about it from time to time- conversations about things like this, for example:



Johnlock was a topic that came up prominently in our final entanglement.

We were friends and have become estranged. But this was right, and we do not want to conceal and obscure it from ourselves as if we had reason to feel ashamed. We are two ships each of which has its goal and course; our paths may cross and we may celebrate a feast together, as we did - and then the good ships rested so quietly in one harbor and one sunshine that it may have looked as if they had reached their goal and as if they had one goal. But then the mighty force of our tasks drove us apart again into different seas and sunny zones, and perhaps we shall never see each other again; perhaps we shall meet again but fail to recognize each other: our exposure to different seas and suns has changed us. ― Roland Barthes

  

Looking back now it was inevitable I suppose. The context of our last musings on Johnlock and its consequences made it crystal clear to me that the ship is this dangerous kind of cosmic lightning rod. If there are concepts that have mythic-level powers then that ship is one of them. John and Sherlock are these other worldly archetypes with the ability to utterly entrance people, to blind them to sense and to make them fall into a deep obsession with the world of 221b. It’s been that way since “A Study in Scarlet” found its first audience. Imbue Sherlock and John’s story with sex and/or romance and what do you get? I have mainly experienced incredible turmoil and massive psychic destruction.

What do you see going around you now in the fandom after The Final Problem?



Our problem. The final problem. Have you figured it out yet?

 

Sherlock beguiles us. Johnlock entices us from our moorings.

THE FINAL PROBLEM IS FUCKING JOHNLOCK.

The bastard form of mass culture is humiliated repetition… always new books, new programs, new films, news items, but always the same meaning. -Roland Barthes

What is the meaning of Johnlock? How in rereading it might we disarm its power over us?

OH YEAH, THE POLITICAL PART! 

Here is one example of Johnlock at play in the wild. How many months were spent by how many people (most of them female let’s be honest) who were convinced that is would have been a Very Good Idea for Mofftiss (an imaginary entity) to HIDE the sexual attraction/romance between two men for YEARS until a grand reveal- a reveal that was, however, only anticipated, only visible to those in the know, with the secret keys to decode The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name?

 

Why the draw? It’s not just powerful adults brainwashing the queer youth as tumblr would have you believe. No. Johnlock is a vortex, a shorthand for every kind of power implied by the inner workings of its narrative. Sex, drugs, infidelity, secrecy, shame, hubris, ego, hedonism, desire, bodily fluids. Johnlock is inherently political.

Johnlock is the pattern formed when magnetic shavings collide on a table. It’s the phallus, the phalluses, in the steel dust.

How many problematic things come to fruition in The Final Problem? Sexism. The erasure of race (a non issue). The worship of the male genius, the pathologizing of the female, the fetish for the trappings of wealth, class difference as comedy, the unbearable romanticization of the Byronic…junkie, smackhead, who everyone serves. (How does Wiggins get by I wonder?)

I loved the episode– not because it wrapped everything up in a bow of domestic bliss and semantic certainty, but because it did quite the opposite. It blew apart– literally blew apart– the domestic petri dish that gave birth to Johnlock. And in the 221b explosion went the trappings of some twisted homonormative imperative marriage plot demanded by the show’s most obsessed, most rabid fans in the name of queer representation “a happy ending.” Those fans who degraded and damaged hundreds of real people in the name of fidelity to the coupling of TV show characters and the author-gods they made and worshiped like…dads.

Somehow The Final Problem broke the fucking spell. It derailed the fantasy and dismantled, in many permanent ways, the Johnlock “community.”

Moffat and Gatiss laid waste to Mofftiss.

We laid waste to us.