Sherlock Holmes and Philosophy Part 16

Chapter 30.

The Curious Case of the Dog in Prime Time.

Jonathan Clements.

At 7:00 P.M. on 26th March 1984, the j.a.panese channel TV Asahi broadcast the first of twenty-six episodes of its new cartoon series Meitantei Holmes ("Famous Detective Holmes") directed by Hayao Miyazaki and Kysuke Mikuriya.

A children's show broadcast in primetime for all the family, it featured Holmes and Watson thwarting crimes by the evil Moriarty. Cases included someone tampering with the newlyestablished airmail service and the disappearance of the bell of Big Ben, alongside more canonical tales such as "The Speckled Band." The show's most obvious distinguis.h.i.+ng feature is apparent in the t.i.tle used for its English-language broadcast. It is known as Sherlock Hound, as all the parts are played by talking dogs.

The ancient Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi once asked if he was a man dreaming of a being b.u.t.terfly, or a b.u.t.terfly dreaming of being a man. In Sherlock Hound, we're not watching humans who behave like dogs (zoomorphism), we are watching dogs who behave like humans (anthropomorphism). Their reasons for doing so are buried in the long history of talking animals in j.a.pan, in particular over the last century.

The process by which an Edwardian English detective can somehow find himself transformed into a j.a.panese cartoon canine is not as unlikely as it first seems. If we approach it through the context of detective fiction in j.a.pan, the history of television in j.a.pan, and the transnational aims of many animation studios, we can soon perceive the multiple influences that bring us to our mysterious case of the talking dog detective.

Sari Kawana's Murder Most Modern: Detective Fiction and j.a.panese Culture locates Holmesian sleuths as central icons in twentieth-century j.a.pan's sense of modernity. Detectives became symbols of the onrush of change: its interpreters and guardians in an era when modern meant Western, even if the Western world did not live up to expectations.

The j.a.panese author Natsume Sseki spent a miserable period as a student in Britain from 1900 to 1901, where he soon tired of boorish London locals. In his letters home, Sseki even sourly observed "the j.a.panese, thanks to their diligent studies, now knew more about England than the average Englishman" (Donald Keene, Dawn to the West, p. 311). Sseki's London sojourn coincided with the serialisation of The Hound of the Baskervilles, whose twelfth chapter mentions Holmes's "catlike love of personal cleanliness."

It was felines that would make Sseki's name, on his return to j.a.pan, when he published a satire on modern att.i.tudes, as seen through the eyes of a disapproving pet in I Am a Cat (1905). He did so, however, at a time when many j.a.panese were ardent readers of detective fiction, both foreign and domestic.

The first Holmes story to be translated into j.a.panese was A Study in Scarlet in 1899, which was serialised in a radically altered form as "Chizo no Kabe" ("The Bloodstained Wall") in the newspaper Mainichi s.h.i.+nbun. The translator remained anonymous, perhaps understandably, since Holmes and Watson were renamed as the j.a.panese investigators Homma and Wada, and the locale was s.h.i.+fted to contemporary Berlin. A legal translation of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes commenced in the same year, serialised in the rival newspaper Ch s.h.i.+nbun.

Translations of Holmes continued throughout the early years of the twentieth century, with the character names changed variously to Holimi and Wada (1906) or Honda and Watanabe (1910), on the a.s.sumption that the protagonists needed to be "localized" into j.a.panese. However, there was an accurate, threevolume translation of Holmes stories available in j.a.pan by 1916, maintaining the original ill.u.s.trations from the Strand magazine along with the original nationalities and setting. Some, however, were still altered for j.a.panese readers, most notably "The Red-Headed League," refas.h.i.+oned as "The Bald-Headed League" for a country without redheads (Keith E. Webb, Sherlock Holmes in j.a.pan, pp. 1819).

Pastiches of Holmes were also common in the juvenile detective magazines of the period. Jza Unno, the "father of j.a.panese science fiction" wrote a number of stories featuring the j.a.panese detective "Sroku Homura" beginning in 1928 with "Denkifuro no Kais.h.i.+ Jiken" ("The Case of the Mysterious Death in the Electric Bath"), serialised in the magazine s.h.i.+nseinen. "A Soldier's Death" (1930), by Atsus.h.i.+ Watanabe in the same magazine, includes an unlicensed cameo by Sherlock Holmes as a baffled investigator, admitting that he has been defeated by the lack of evidence pertaining to the t.i.tular corpse. Holmes cannot work out how the lead character has died, allowing the readers, who have witnessed the whole death, a sense of smug satisfaction that they know something that he does not (Robert Matthew, j.a.panese Science Fiction, p. 21).

By 1933, the complete canon of Holmes stories was available in j.a.panese. A second "complete" translation was released in 195152, including in its first edition the apocryphal posthumous work "The Man Who Was Wanted," dropped from subsequent editions after it was discovered not to be the work of Conan Doyle. Some Holmes stories were also retold for younger audiences, leading to dilution of their content. Most infamously, a juvenile adaptation in 1958 replaced Holmes's addiction to cocaine with a penchant for coffee, and turned Watson into a small boy.

Cartoon Animals There were other means of a.s.signing more palatable, cuter aspects to foreign icons. Shaarokku Hmuzu was named, of course, in the j.a.panese katakana syllabary, an alphabet used largely for foreign words and the noises made by beasts. Non-j.a.panese were not animals, but in a linguistic sense the use of katakana could imply that they were like animals, whatever that meant: unpredictable, perhaps? Potentially dangerous? Ultimately possible to master? Rendering foreign icons as animals could also render them subordinate, powerless, even cuter-an inadvertent by-product of the penchant for talking-animal cartoons, both already in existence in j.a.panese animation, and arriving from the West.

The use of anthropomorphism in cartoons masks more technical and cultural concerns than simply entertaining children. Animating realistic humans is expensive. Although Walt Disney experimented with complex fairy tales in the 1920s, he returned to simpler, animal-based narratives in the 1930s because too many fairytales required "plausible human characters at their core" (Barrier, Hollywood Cartoons, p. 90). The Disney studio eventually acquired realistic human motion by rotoscoping-in other words, filming human actors and using the material generated as a basis for tracing the movements of their animated counterparts. For a young animation industry, realistic human movement is a struggle, likely to lead storylines to skew towards something in which the capabilities of cartooning are a benefit rather than a hindrance. The j.a.panese animation business did not embrace rotoscoping, and was sure to use inanimate objects, fantasy creatures or animal figures as a means of reducing the number of naturalistic human figures required.

The burgeoning medium of cartoon animation established high levels of anthropomorphism in which animals did not merely interact with humans with a degree of intelligence, but actually spoke. On its release in j.a.panese cinemas in 1956, Disney's Lady and the Tramp was renamed Wanwan Monogatari ("Woof-Woof Story"). In an apparent attempt to cash in, Deputy Dawg was soon broadcast on j.a.panese television as Wanwan Hoankan (1959, "Woof-Woof Sheriff "). j.a.panese viewers were similarly a.s.sailed by a talking canine when The Huckleberry Hound Show was broadcast as c.h.i.n.ken Huckle (1959, "Curious Dog Huckle"). j.a.panese imitations were not far behind, including the cartoon feature Wanwan Chs.h.i.+ngura ("Woof-Woof Treasury of Loyal Retainers," 1963), a samurai epic in which all the main parts were played by dogs. The animators' decision was a cunning synergy of ideas, incorporating not only cartoon animals, but also a subtle historical reference. The original Treasury of Loyal Retainers kabuki play, perhaps better known as The Story of the Forty-Seven Rnin, was set during the reign of the Shgun Tsunayos.h.i.+ (16491709). A real-life figure, born in the Year of the Dog, Tsunayos.h.i.+ decreed that all canines were sacrosanct. As a result, the city now known as Tokyo was over-run with untouchable strays in an insane period now remembered as the "reign of the Dog Shgun" (Clements, A Brief History of the Samurai, pp. 24647).

j.a.panese cartoonists favored animal subjects themselves in children's works, at least in part because of the ease with which animals could be localized in other countries. The surreal or fantastic qualities of cartoons can often make them far easier to transfer between cultures than live-action footage. As long as the setting or plot is not incontrovertibly ethnocentric (and Wanwan Chs.h.i.+ngura certainly fails this test), a cartoon has the chance to make money for its maker in many foreign markets. Talking animal characters can even subtly sneak past certain viewers' prejudices, an idea certainly on the mind of j.a.panese animators in the selection of the Chinese story Hakujaden ("Legend of the White Snake") as the first feature-length animated film to be released by the Tei studio in 1958, and intended to appeal across Asian markets.

"Famous" Animals Meanwhile, in the world of live-action television, as TV owners.h.i.+p expanded beyond the Tokyo metropolitan area, viewers in outlying regions complained about the foreign dramas that were being fed to them. In particular, it was suggested that the humor of foreign comedies was unintelligible, the politics of cowboy shows incomprehensible, and Caucasian actors indistinguishable (Youichi Ito, "The Trade Winds Change"; Jonathan Clements and Tamamuro Motoko, The Dorama Encyclopedia, p. xvi). The nascent domestic television production industry began to generate its own materials, but the fact remains that j.a.panese TV in the 1950s, and j.a.panese color TV in the 1960s were each dominated in their early periods by a flood of mainly American programming-in 1957, ten percent of all broadcasting (Makiko Takahas.h.i.+, The Development of j.a.panese Television Broadcasting and Imported Television Programs, p. 30).

Since foreign shows often began with an unintelligible logo in their native language which frequently failed to summarise the subject matter, the practice soon developed of adding a descriptive prefix or suffix in j.a.panese: a "foreground name and a background qualifier" (Clements and Tamamuro, p. xvi). This ensured, even in TV listings that only contained a programme's katakana t.i.tle (denoted below by CAPITALS), that the t.i.tle still provided an indicator of content. And so, in j.a.panese, familiar serials were rebranded as Great Battle in s.p.a.ce STAR TREK, or Detective KOJAK. Although less common, this tradition persists today, with examples as Burn Notice (broadcast in j.a.pan as Erased Spy BURN NOTICE) and The s.h.i.+eld (Futile Police Badge s.h.i.+ELD).

If one kind of show proved popular, j.a.panese programmers were not above ret.i.tling other serials to imply similarities that were not originally there, or even to accentuate a particular character. One of the first television import successes in j.a.pan was The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin (1954) also a Western, but with a focus on a dog rather than any of the inscrutable cowboys. Broadcast as Meiken RIN TIN TIN ("Famous Dog Rin Tin Tin") on the commercial network NTV in November 1956, it achieved a peak 65.9-percent rating the following year, becoming the fourth most-watched programme on j.a.panese television in 1957.

Before long, Sergeant Preston of the Yukon was transformed into Police Dog KING in j.a.panese, and The Pursuers into Police Dog IVAN-it was, it seems, the dog that made the difference. The subtext was that the animals were the true stars and the humans merely an unwelcome supporting cast. Moreover, the a.s.sertion that Rin Tin Tin is already "famous" seems designed to suggest that j.a.panese viewers were missing out if they did not tune in. In order to imply a relations.h.i.+p, however tenuous, similar American shows were ret.i.tled: La.s.sie, as Meiken La.s.sIE ("Famous Dog La.s.sie," 1957), Run, Joe, Run as Ganbare Meiken JOE ("Keep It Up, Famous Dog Joe," 1977) and The Littlest Hobo as Meiken ROCKY ("Famous Dog Rocky," 1980).

The experience of emphasising animal images in selling to the j.a.panese did not escape the j.a.panese in considerations of selling animal images back to foreigners. If a locally made production was too ethnocentric, it was harder to sell in foreign markets. Ever since 1963, when Osamu Tezuka sold Astro Boy to the American network NBC, j.a.panese animators had actively searched for themes and characters that would be easier to sell to foreign markets because they were mukokuseiteki-"denationalized" (Chun, A Nation of a Hundred Million Idiots?, p. 279). An exotic setting was fine for local color, and a new audio track could remove the language barrier, but if characters were still demonstrably Asian or white, each was likely to cause dissonance in the other's market. Animal protagonists avoided this problem, as they were not racially distinctive. Tezuka, however, discovered a new problem: fourlegged animals were more expensive to animate than humanoid figures. Anthropomorphic animals, on the other hand, were both transnationally appealing and technically simpler to animate.

Famous Animal Detectives Perhaps we can already see the potential for a "Sherlock Hound" in such tensions-a foreign detective, "denationalized" through the use of talking-animal imagery, and de-fanged through adaptation for the children's market. It helps, too, if he is "famous", like Rin Tin Tin or La.s.sie. Best of all if he is a "famous detective".

Several foreign TV show t.i.tles gained the prefix Tantei ("Detective") or s.h.i.+ritsu Tantei ("Private Eye") on j.a.panese broadcast, but a handful acquired the conjoined prefix Meitantei beginning with Diamond / Call Mr D, broadcast in j.a.pan as Meitantei DIAMOND ("Famous Detective Diamond"). This practice persists, with ret.i.tlings such as Barnaby Jones as Meitantei JONES ("Famous Detective Jones"), and Poirot as Meitantei POIROT ("Famous Detective Poirot").

By 1978, the media strands of anthropomorphic animals and "famous" detectives had joined to create a genre of animal sleuths. A rising star of detective fiction, Jir Akagawa, began the genre with his novel Mikeneko HOLMES no Suiri (1978, "The Case of Holmes the Tortoisesh.e.l.l Cat"), in which a bereaved pet investigates the murder of his detective owner. The story has sp.a.w.ned thirty-two sequels to date, along with fourteen compilations of short stories, and several other spin-offs, including a cat-autobiography and a TV movie. Determined to cash in, the novelist and anime screenwriter Masaki Tsuji published a pastiche in a similar vein: Meiken LUPIN no Meisuiri (1983, "The Famous Case of Lupin the Famous Dog"). Albeit less successful than Akagawa's stories, the cases solved by Lupin the mongrel still ran to twelve volumes in the 1980s.

But Tsuji was not the only figure to attempt to capitalize on the bestselling Mikeneko HOLMES series. The beginning of the 1980s was a fertile environment for pitches that mixed family pets and famous detectives. The cartoon world, where animals would not need to be trained, would seem like a logical place to achieve the best synergy.

In November 1980, the animator Hayao Miyazaki attempted to gain the animation remake rights for the American anthropomorphic comic series Rowlf by Richard Corben, submitting a proposal for a feature-length cartoon in November 1980. Although nothing came of this, Miyazaki was instead soon working on a j.a.panese-Italian Sherlock Holmes coproduction that re-cast the characters as talking dogs.

Considering the timing of the production, it seems likely that both j.a.panese and Italian collaborators first a.s.sumed that the works of Arthur Conan Doyle would be out of copyright, as Doyle had died in 1930, and j.a.panese law allowed, and still allows, for works to come out of copyright fifty years after the death of their originator. This does not appear to have troubled the producers in the early stages, and they were perhaps given a false confidence by the previous transnational success of a science fiction remake of Homer's Odyssey.

Producer Keis.h.i.+ Yamazaki reported that Ulysses 31, a Franco-j.a.panese coproduction, had been well received in Europe, and that his only complaint was that j.a.panese crew names were left off the credits. He does not appear to have considered that the Odyssey was conveniently out of copyright and hence unlikely to invite lawsuits from its original creator's heirs. He may have also been spurred on by the recent success of the Spanish-j.a.panese coproduction Dogtanian and the Three Muskethounds (1981, Wanwan Sanjs.h.i.+, literally "Woof-Woof Three Musketeers"), although this, too, faced no copyright issues, being based on a book long in the public domain.

Initial plans for a direct cartoon remake of The Hound of the Baskervilles were over-ruled, because the Italians feared it was too close to horror. Instead, writers were encouraged to keep to stories of simple larceny. Theft, however, was the issue at hand when the Conan Doyle estate protested at the use of material still in copyright. The estate appears to have first noticed j.a.panese infringements in 1981, with the broadcast of an unrelated cartoon, Lupin vs Holmes. It seems that the existence and potential illegality of Sherlock Hound only arose in the aftermath of the Lupin vs Holmes case, causing the production to be suspended when several episodes were already completed. A prolonged wrangle over owners.h.i.+p was patched up by the renaming of the characters in some territories, in particular in a feature edit of two early episodes, released in 1984. Miyazaki left the production during the hiatus, and instead directed his first feature anime, Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind (1984). Sherlock Hound's later episodes were completed by a new director, Kysuke Mikuriya, and the series was subsequently broadcast around the world.

Although most scripts were written by anime regulars, one episode was written by Tos.h.i.+r Is.h.i.+d, a crime author and prominent j.a.panese Holmes expert, who pitched an idea in which Moriarty would steal the Rosetta Stone from the British Museum, and the canine Holmes would seek the help of a famous j.a.panese author known to have been living in Edwardian London: Natsume Sseki, famous in j.a.pan as the author of I Am a Cat. It was a proposal that neatly brought the story of eminent, anthropomorphic Victorians full circle, although it faced opposition from partic.i.p.ants who had never heard of Sseki. The Italian producer Luciano Scafa resisted the idea until the j.a.panese producer Keis.h.i.+ Yamazaki suggested that he was only objecting because Holmes sought the help of an Asian. Scafa backed down, and the story went ahead as episode #19 (Terebi Anime Damas.h.i.+, pp. 185-6).

In the episode as broadcast outside j.a.pan, however, the plot element is garbled: Sseki's name is misp.r.o.nounced, and his knowledge of the j.a.panese parallels, to an infamous theft at Nagoya Castle by the samurai master-thief Is.h.i.+kawa Goemon, is glossed over. European characters and themes can be sold to the j.a.panese if they are transformed into dogs, but there are still numerous linguistic and cultural difficulties in selling the j.a.panese to Europeans, whether as dogs or otherwise.

Dreams of Dogs and b.u.t.terflies In a final coda, Jeremy Brett, who played the definitive Holmes for BBC television in 198494, was dubbed into j.a.panese on NHK by the actor s.h.i.+geru Tsuyuguchi. When Studio Ghibli required an actor to portray the tweedy, magisterial talking cat Baron in the anime Whisper of the Heart (1995), Tsuyuguchi was hired to provide the voice. Hence, in Whisper of the Heart in the original j.a.panese, the anthropomorphic cat Baron speaks with the voice of Sherlock Holmes. It is yet another strand in the odd alternate history of a foreign icon in j.a.pan, in which a famous British detective has been slowly transformed, over decades of cross-media survival, from a magisterial, maverick London sleuth into a cartoon canine on primetime.

Zhuangzi's philosophical question on dreams and reality remains unanswerable, although his "b.u.t.terfly" has undergone the oddest of transformations in j.a.pan, emerging from its transnational chrysalis as an altogether different animal.

Chapter 31.

A Study in Simulacra.

Jef Burnham.

A waste collector, retrieving a bin of discarded books from an alley one morning, tripped over the remains of a reality disfigured beyond recognition. It was the reality of a single fact rendered mercilessly untrue by some long-since fled a.s.sailant. Next to the remains, the word "simulacra" was scrawled on the pavement in the reality's blood as the desperate, final act of one whose authenticity is quickly fading.

The scene was cordoned off by the responding officers and a Detective Inspector from Scotland Yard (whose name has been omitted at the request of my editor) was brought in to investigate. No eyewitnesses were found and those living in the tenements overlooking the alley swore to having heard no screams as they had all been inside watching television. Unable to determine the reality's ident.i.ty and with no clues to go on save for that curious word, simulacra, the DI turned to an expert on the term simulacra: the late French philosopher, Jean Baudrillard.

Baudrillard's postmodern philosophical text, Simulacra and Simulation, seemed the most logical starting point, but the DI reached an impa.s.se in this line of inquiry when he found himself unable to apply Baudrillard's theories practically.

Thereafter, upon the urging of his wife, the DI attempted to enlist the services of legendary detective, Sherlock Holmes, in the solution of this beguiling case. Neither Holmes nor Watson were to be found in any directory of persons living or deceased and he concluded that their whereabouts must have been withheld by certain government ent.i.ties to ensure the privacy of the detective and his biographer. Much to his embarra.s.sment, the DI subsequently learned that Sherlock Holmes was in fact a fictional character created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Faced with a seemingly impossible case, the DI desperately turned to media representations of Sherlock Holmes for inspiration. He encountered Holmes outside of Doyle's writings in numerous works of film and television. However, many of the texts in which Doyle's characters were featured, especially those produced for television, did not focus exclusively on the great detective's exploits. For instance, he discovered Holmes, Watson, or Moriarty appearing in such television programs as Sat.u.r.day Night Live, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Animaniacs, Batman: The Brave and the Bold, Muppets Tonight, and Remington Steele to name a diverse few.

As a result, during the final stages of his investigation, the DI became fixated on a single episode of a 1980s children's cartoon series, The Real Ghostbusters: "Elementary My Dear Winston." With the aid of this unlikeliest of texts, he at last understood the practical applications of Baudrillard's theories and came face-to-face with the true destructive nature of the media and the images it perpetuates. Through his a.s.sociation with "Elementary My Dear Winston," the DI was finally able to solve the case, but not before being driven mad by what I can only describe as a paradox of perception. The murderer, he discovered, was none other than Sherlock Holmes himself, having transcended his fictional limitations through the process of hyperrealization. His ascendance would result in untold devastation.

I will attempt to reconstruct the case as presented by the DI in his final report to Scotland Yard. And as you will see, our intrepid DI discovered that the world's greatest detective has in fact perpetrated the world's greatest crime: the murder of the whole of reality!

I Ain't 'Fraid of No Holmes "Elementary My Dear Winston" opens on the waters off the isle of Manhattan. An ominous, glowing orb rockets through the water at surface level toward two elderly fishermen who have cast their lines off the end of a dock. When the orb reaches them, the skeletal "remains" of Professor Moriarty burst from the water. Upon learning that he has arrived in New York City, Moriarty calls forth his flesh and clothing as the fishermen flee in terror. Moriarty then summons the Hound of the Baskervilles to inform the beast that his trip from England has left him hungry for evil-a hunger which sends him on a rampage through New York City. The scene cuts to Holmes and Watson traveling down the wrong side of a busy New York street in a turn-of-the-nineteenth-century automobile. Holmes enjoys a pipe in the pa.s.senger seat as Watson weaves the vehicle in and out of traffic precariously before pa.s.sing ethereally through a large truck.

The viewer initially interprets this sequence to signify the arrival of Holmes, Watson, and Moriarty's ghosts in Manhattan. This interpretation is contradicted, however, when it's revealed that even in the world of The Real Ghostbusters, these characters originated as fictional creations of Arthur Conan Doyle. Therefore, it's impossible for them to have become traditional ghosts, having never been alive. But if they're not ghosts and they don't possess corporeal forms, what are they? A clue to the solution of this particular puzzle lies in the animators' depiction of Sherlock Holmes. Here, as in so many media texts, Holmes is characterized as tall and thin, with a deerstalker cap and an Inverness cape. While this is indeed the prevailing image of Holmes in the media, it is not in keeping with the character as originally depicted in the stories of Arthur Conan Doyle.

To understand the nature of this false image, we turn to Baudrillard's definitions of simulation and simulacra. In Baudrillard's writing, simulation is the selective imitation of a reality. Given that the perfect representation of one thing for another is a theoretical impossibility, simulations are at best partial representations, and are therefore separate from the realities they simulate. In this way, they are realities unto themselves yet falsehoods, in that they bear little or no resemblance to the realities they purportedly refer to. An excellent example of the non-referentiality of simulations is found in the close comparison of a painting to the prints of said painting found in a museum gift shop. Prints inevitably fail to represent every physical characteristic of the painting, including the artist's individual brushstrokes, the three-dimensionality of successive layers of paint, the texture and composition of the original canvas, the precise shades of colors, and so on. Since the print does not accurately embody all physical traits of the original painting, the print is therefore a reality unto itself-albeit a false reality in that it does not accurately capture the painting it is intended to represent.

When subsequent simulations reference previous simulations rather than the original reality, simulacra are created. Baudrillard described simulacra as...o...b..tally recurring models. This would be like making prints of prints of a painting, or Xeroxes of Xeroxes. Each subsequent simulation is further from the truth and supports only the reality of the simulation. In this way, the Holmes depicted by the animators of The Real Ghostbusters-tall, thin, wearing a deerstalker cap and an Inverness cape, with a calabash pipe hanging from his mouth-is part of the Holmes simulacrum. After all, it is a reflection of the media's...o...b..tal simulation of Holmes, which is separate from the "real" Holmes of Doyle's texts.

Maybe Winston's onto Something To begin with, the Holmes of Doyle's stories did not wear a deerstalker cap, nor did he routinely wear a cape. These were inventions of Sidney Paget, ill.u.s.trator of the Holmes stories for The Strand Magazine. The calabash pipe was an invention of those earliest performers to portray Holmes on stage and screen, because it seems a calabash pipe is easier for actors to hold in their mouths than other pipes while performing stage business, due to its low center of gravity. In addition, most visual media texts featuring Holmes ignore the written character's drug addiction completely, while a widespread, false perception persists that Holmes's methods of sleuthing inspired the creation of forensic science, when precisely the opposite is true-a fact that Laura Snyder discusses at length in her essay, "Sherlock Holmes: Scientific Detective." Furthermore, Doyle's Holmes never uttered the phrase to which the t.i.tle of the Ghostbusters episode alludes ("Elementary, my dear Watson"). Therefore, the media's depiction of Sherlock Holmes is a reality unto itself, separate from the works of Arthur Conan Doyle.

With this in mind, we return to the episode. Winston is the only member of the Ghostbusters to recognize the ent.i.ties as Holmes and Watson upon their first encounter with the great detective and his biographer. Before divulging his conclusion to his more scientifically-minded colleagues, Winston consults an ill.u.s.tration of Holmes from his personal library for confirmation. Unsurprisingly, the ill.u.s.tration of Holmes, too, is in keeping with the Holmes simulacrum that saturates the media. So why is it that Winston makes this connection and not the others? Baudrillard a.s.serts: "Everywhere socialization is measured by the exposure to media messages. Whoever is underexposed to the media is desocialized or virtually asocial" (p. 80).

Egon, Ray, and to a lesser extent, Peter, fall into the category of the desocialized, spending the bulk of their time in scientific research and experimentation rather than engaging with the media. Winston, on the other hand, is the everyman of the series-the only Ghostbuster who has not earned a doctorate and is not a scientist. (Although Winston does obtain a PhD at some point between the two films and the 2009 crossplatform video game from Atari, he is not a doctor at this point in the Ghostbusters timeline.) Recall in the original film that it was not a pa.s.sion for the paranormal that compelled Winston to respond to the Ghostbusters' help wanted ad. When asked during his interview if he believed in "UFOs, astral projections, mental telepathy, ESP, clairvoyance, spirit photography, telekinetic movement, full trance mediums, the Loch Ness monster, and the theory of Atlantis," Winston diplomatically responded, "If there's a steady paycheck in it, I'll believe anything you say." Winston is willing to work a job for which he has no pa.s.sion simply for the monetary gain, and despite being a religious man, is reluctant to believe anything outside of his sensory experience or that which the media maintains to be truth. He's an average member of the modern social order and is therefore the most attuned to the media and the simulacra it perpetuates. Thus it is Winston who necessarily identifies the ent.i.ties so in fitting with media-saturated simulacra.

Stepping outside of the text, we see that the Holmes simulacrum present in "Elementary My Dear Winston" is indeed the prevailing depiction of the character in the media at large. As a result, the ma.s.ses have come to accept the simulacrum as the referent for the reality of Holmes. Thus, the simulacrum has taken precedence over the reality of Doyle's writings. When this occurs and simulacra become "more real than the real" in the public eye, reality is replaced by an order of the hyperreal.

I Have a Radical Idea The theory of hyperreality is rooted in one of the fundamental concepts of postmodern philosophy, which a.s.serts that universal truth is an impossibility. According to most postmodern thinkers, including Baudrillard, one of the key factors in this is the power of the media, which deals solely in simulations, to subjectively shape society's perceptions through indoctrination.

Consider once more the Holmes simulacrum: a distinguished gentleman and self-made sleuth, and again, tall, thin, with deerstalker cap, Inverness cape, and calabash pipe. Within media texts such as "Elementary My Dear Winston," these are but the signs of Holmes, perpetually referring back to previous mediated texts' simulations of Holmes rather than Doyle's writing. And it is this media saturation that allows the simulacrum to subsist. Furthermore, consider how often Holmes and other canon characters appear on television alone, compared to how often the average person picks up a volume of Doyle's original works. The Guinness Book of World Records cites Holmes as the single most-portrayed character on screen. As such, modern society's increased reliance on visual media over print has allowed the simulacrum to become the prevailing representation of the character, creating a hyperreality.

Likewise, in "Elementary My Dear Winston," when the enigma of the simulacral ent.i.ties' existence is posed to Egon, he proposes the theory that they are in fact "belief made manifest." Pursuing this theory further, Egon speculates that because so many millions of people believe in the simulacral forms of Holmes, Watson, Moriarty, and the Hound of the Baskervilles, they have achieved a "quasi-reality."

Replace Egon's chosen prefix of "quasi-" with "hyper-" and the concept is the same. These simulacra, empowered by the belief of the media-saturated ma.s.ses, have murdered the reality that they were fiction and replaced that reality with their own existence. "Murder" is the term predominantly employed by Baudrillard when referring to the process of a simulacrum usurping a reality as referent. It personifies the simulacrum violently overthrowing the order of the real, emphasizing the way in which simulacra can quite literally take on lives of their own. However, the ramifications of this murder are far more devastating than the destruction of their fictional standing.

Here we must take a leap of faith with Egon's theory, for it is a stretch to believe that millions believe in Moriarty or the Hound, neither of which is defined by an identifiable simulacrum. The Watson in this episode does adhere to a Dr. Watson simulacrum, which depicts him as being shorter than Holmes, often round, and always with a mustache and a bowler hat-the perfect foil to the Holmes simulcarum. But there is no Professor Moriarty or Hound of the Baskervilles simulacrum as such.

Although the inspiration for the Hound came to Doyle from British folktales of black, phantom hounds, it has failed to evolve into a simulacrum. The Hound usually appears as a dog with a dark coat of fur, but it alternates between black and brown, with the breed of dog also fluctuating between the average hunting hound and something more akin to a wolf. However, in "Elementary My Dear Watson," the animators took major artistic liberties with this already extremely loose model, depicting the Hound as a bright yellow, lizard-like beast with an exposed rib cage; a spiked, red collar; and additional spikes protruding from its shoulders and forehead.

As for Holmes's arch-nemesis, Moriarty is very rarely depicted the same way twice. In fact, the lack of a Moriarty model is so prevalent that the writers of Animaniacs lampooned the villain for being model-less by depicting him as a kilted Scotsman in a sombrero piloting a flying machine. Moriarty is depicted in yet another unique form in "Elementary My Dear Winston," looking curiously like Batman's Solomon Grundy in a top hat. Later in the episode, a woman refers to this Moriarty as "Dr. Jekyll over there. Or was it Mr. Hyde?", indicating that even Robert Louis Stevenson's creations are more consistently simulated than Moriarty.

Murder with a Side of Hyperreal Using "Elementary My Dear Winston" as a case study in the effects of hyperreality, let's a.s.sume that everything within the world of The Real Ghostbusters is real at the outset of the episode, save for the hyperrealizations of Holmes, Watson, Moriarty, and the Hound. Again, the reality murdered by these simulacra is the reality that they were fictional characters. As a result, they take on forms that are at once insubstantial yet "more real than real" as they can s.h.i.+ft their molecular consistency from wholly insubstantial to completely solid at will, preventing the real from harming them. As such, the Ghostbusters' proton packs have no effect on the hyperreal specters, ill.u.s.trating that once a hyperreality comes to be, the real is rendered powerless against it. After all, recall, hyperreality is the result of simulacra transcending reality-taking precedence over the real.

With but a single hyperreality identified, a flaw becomes apparent in our initial a.s.sumption about the Ghostbusters' universe. It's impossible, given the existence of the hyperrealities, to presuppose the presence of any definable realities within the world of The Real Ghostbusters. According to Baudrillard, when one simulacrum achieves hyperreal status, destroying the line between fact and fiction, the realistic standing of all other orders becomes indeterminable. True and false are rendered dubious distinctions; for once an order of the hyperreal is established, anything can become truth, no matter how unlikely or fantastic, so long as the ma.s.ses believe in it. Thus, the cla.s.sification of realities is contingent on the most fickle of authorities: human perception. The problem that faces those living in an order of the hyperreal is that anything they perceive to be a reality may in fact be a hyperreality. This creates a paradox wherein, although this person may be able to identify any number of hyperrealities, they can never be completely certain that the truths they invest in are not in fact hyperrealities facilitated by their own beliefs. As we'll see, this paradox of perception plagues our own society in no small part thanks to Sherlock Holmes.

From a distanced a.n.a.lytical vantage point, "Elementary My Dear Winston" appears to be a harmless exercise in realizing the catastrophic possibilities of simulation through Sat.u.r.day morning cartoons. However, it would be more prudent to view the text as reflexive of the world at large, representing all of reality in today's media-driven society. Even in this "age of information," a quick Google search reveals that a constant debate persists surrounding Holmes's fictional standing. But this is no new trend, for further research reveals that Holmes achieved hyperreal status shortly after his creation. Accounts tell of numerous Britons in Doyle's time attempting to employ the services of Holmes and Watson (just as our ill-informed DI did in the opening of this text); and upon the publication of Holmes's death at the Reichenbach Falls in "The Adventure of the Final Problem," many Britons were seen wearing black mourning bands to work the next day in honor of the fallen detective (Sian Ellis, "On the Trail of Sherlock Holmes").

The prominence of the Holmes simulacrum in the media has continued to grow ever since. Shockingly, its hyperrealistic proportions have come to mirror those of the simulacral Holmes in "Elementary My Dear Winston." In 2008, a poll commissioned by UKTV Gold revealed that the speculative ascendancy of Sherlock Holmes detailed in "Elementary My Dear Winston" has indeed occurred in our own universe. The results of this poll, based on a series of questions posed to three thousand Britons regarding their perception of persons both real and fictional, showed that a staggering fifty-eight percent of the sample group believed Holmes to have been a real person. More people were found to believe in Holmes, in fact, than the real-life Twelfth Century figure, King Richard the Lionheart (forty-seven percent believed him to have been mythical), showing conversely how the reality of an actual person's existence may be murdered, rendering them fictional. Thus, the Holmes of our universe has become hyperreal as a result of media-saturated simulacra in an identical fas.h.i.+on to the Holmes of the Ghostbusters' universe.

Recall that, according to Baudrillard's theories, it takes but a single breach of reality for the whole of reality to be called into question. Such is the "murderous power of images" discussed by Baudrillard, which necessarily invalidates all of reality (p. 5). And certainly the ascendancy of the Holmes simulacrum in our universe represents a grievous breach of the order of the real. This is not to say that the Holmes simulacrum was the earliest simulacrum. Baudrillard cited capital as the earliest example. However, as Baudrillard a.s.serted, since an order of the hyperreal is one without facts, it is also, by proxy, without causality. It then follows that within such an order, effects are not necessarily preceded by causes, making the historical precedence of capital irrelevant. Therefore, regardless of which simulacra achieved hyperreal status first, all simulacra are equally responsible for the murder of reality, including Sherlock Holmes.

Case Closed This lack of a universal truth is a fundamental aspect of the postmodern condition. But how do we function in such a world? What we need, ironically, is a good detective. After all, the archetype of the detective is that of the a.n.a.lytic mind that discovers a reality hidden beneath a surface reality. In terms of this chapter, the detective is a philosopher-Detective Baudrillard, who solved the case of the hyperreal and discovered that at the heart of what we call reality is a series of potential simulacra undermining the very foundation of our reality. Whilst this appears vital to our comprehension of the world around us, it honestly doesn't do us a fat lot of good, for the question remains, how are we to operate in light of this information?

Certainly we cannot continue living as though everything we believe is empirical fact. However, we cannot simply adopt an att.i.tude of universal skepticism either; nor can we live out our lives in despair. Surely there is a reasonable way to acclimate ourselves to this postmodern reality, and to this end we must enlist the services of a great detective, someone who can find a truth beneath our very lack of it. Until then, it's important to remain humble about that which we individually define as reality. Everything we think we know was potentially negated over a century ago by a make-believe drug addict in an earflapped traveling cap.

Thus our mystery is solved, and the truth of reality's demise is revealed. In a shocking twist that might have concluded a dimestore pulp novel, the murderer was in fact the very detective who may have otherwise been charged with solving the case. Unfortunately, the Sherlock Holmes simulacrum, along with its accomplice, the Dr. Watson simulacrum, are still at large in the hyperreal, moving from one media text to another. They appear often with different visages, but their distinctive attire and builds render these disguises transparent.

Chapter 32.

The Game Is Still Afoot!

Sean C. Duncan.

"But what's the game, Mr. Holmes-what's the game?"

"Ay, what's the game?" my friend repeated thoughtfully.

-The Valley of Fear, Chapter 5.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes Canon comprises fifty-six stories and four novels that have proven to be both durable and surprisingly malleable over the past century. Holmes and Dr. John H. Watson have thrived across a number of media, from faithful renditions by creators who have striven for verisimilitude with Doyle's works (say, the now-cla.s.sic Granada series starring Jeremy Brett or the Soviet productions starring Vasily Livanov) to radical re-envisionings of the events and settings of Doyle's stories (Nicholas Meyer's The Seven-Per-Cent Solution or BBC's Sherlock, set in the modern day). Through these many versions and pastiches, there remains a recurring tension-that the Holmes Canon is at once both cla.s.sic and modern, fixed and changing, created by Doyle and expanded by others through the playful exploration of the Canon that has come to be known as "The Game."

Living and Breathing.

The Game is one of the defining activities of a century's worth of interest in Sherlock Holmes, and can be described as a communal and compet.i.tive intellectual exercise based on the conceit that Holmes and Watson were actual, real people, living, breathing, and solving mysteries in the London of the late Victorian and Edwardian era. Perhaps not such a strange idea today, in the era of Twilight fan fiction and enormous Wikis devoted to Lost, but in the early decades of the twentieth century, The Game was a unique way for fans of the Holmes stories to express their love for the material, flex their intellectual "muscles" on problems of interpretation, and to collaborate on making meaning of the worlds Doyle created in his fiction.

Fans and scholars of Holmes have played The Game for many reasons, including to reconcile the Canon's many inconsistencies-why, pray tell, does Watson's wife calls him "James" rather than John in "The Man with the Twisted Lip"? Or, who in the world might a real "King of Bohemia" have been, in "A Scandal in Bohemia"? Taking as an a.s.sumption that Holmes and Watson were real people, proponents of The Game have striven to flesh out answers to questions such as these, laboring long and hard to make sense of both the Canon's conflicting moments, as well as meaningfully tying the stories' narratives to actual events of the era (say, the Jack the Ripper murders, or early developments in forensic science). The Game, you might be able to tell, is as much about linking the Canon to what people do, know, and believe outside of Holmes fandom as it is an engagement with Doyle's stories and novels.

The Game has shaped the experiences of entire generations of readers of Holmes, with some of the most prominent Game-players identified within the notes in the best annotated editions (Baring-Gould's cla.s.sic 1968 annotated editions, Leslie Klinger's recent New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, and Klinger's more exhaustive Sherlock Holmes Reference Library editions). And, though explicitly a "game" and an overt intellectual exercise regardless of how serious it may seem (or how dryly its players may describe it), The Game's influence has shaped the current resurgence of interest in Holmes. Modern Holmes variations ill.u.s.trate the subtle ways Doyle's creation is still being amended, challenged, and expanded, even in recent Holmes adaptations, say, Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes films (such as when Watson's disappearing "bull pup" mentioned in A Study in Scarlet is addressed), and Sherlock's "A Study in Pink" (which gives us an explanation of what happened to poor James Phillimore, who disappeared after returning home to retrieve a forgotten umbrella, first mentioned but not explained in "The Problem of Thor Bridge").

That The Game has been influential and an important part of being a Holmes scholar, aficionado, and fan seems to be incontrovertible on one level-we're still talking about it a century after its inception, after all.

Yet, we're still left making sense of Game-players, why they do what they do, and what it all means. How can investigating The Game ill.u.s.trate the ways in which the active involvement of dedicated readers has fundamentally changed the ways that fans of many media make meaning of texts? Can The Game serve as a key example of changing epistemological stances toward media, and give us insight into theories of knowledge? And, what might The Game tell us about games and the role of ident.i.ty play in everyday interaction with these stories?

The . . . Game . . . Is . . .

First, to unpack The Game, we need to address the notion of the term "game" itself, and think a bit about how an understanding of games might give us insight into its Sherlockian namesake. Most likely building off the famous "The game is afoot!" line from "The Abbey Grange," itself a reference to Shakespeare's King Henry IV Part I, Sherlockians quickly adopted the terminology of a "game" to describe their intellectual enterprise. As it was speculative, recreational, and, well, fun, why not? The playful exploration of the Holmes Canon was one for which the term "game" served to both clarify as well as deepen the meaning of interaction with Doyle's texts.

But, what is a game, exactly? Why this particular term to describe an activity that, on first blush, might appear like a form of playful scholars.h.i.+p? Are "games" and "work" necessarily that different from one another?

. . . Afoot!

Many of us have some implicit understanding of the term "game," one that often comes from our experiences in childhood, and the often conflicting relations.h.i.+ps of "play" versus "work" that permeate our lives. Baseball, chess, Team Fortress 2, canasta, The Settlers of Catan, bingo, Bejeweled, lacrosse, Super Smash Bros. Melee, Texas Hold'em, xiangqi, Halo: Reach, soccer, Munchkin, cricket, go, and c.r.a.ps-all of these are commonly cla.s.sified as games, all commonly considered fun, playful diversions. But, for some players, each of these has become a serious devotion, worthy of hundreds or even thousands of hours of play and study, much thought, and consideration. And, in some cases, developing expertise within them has become the project of a lifetime, worthy of devotion much like Holmes to his method. Historically, this has been more often seen with chess than with Super Smash Bros., but times are changing. Like the world of Holmesian scholars.h.i.+p, games in general are simultaneously entertaining, diverting, and fun while also containing the potential for intense, driven study, and a.n.a.lysis. That games are entertaining by no means indicates that games are necessarily frivolous or without significance for those who play them.

The blurry boundaries of the term have long been a point of serious study by philosophers, game designers, and others who study knowledge and culture. In his cla.s.sic Philosophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein famously ill.u.s.trated the difficulty in defining the very notion of a "game." As a part of his larger project of language-games, formal definitions of concepts such as "games" were not insignificant. Rather, the notion of a "game" was extraordinarily important for ill.u.s.trating his notion of family resemblances. For Wittgenstein, games presented an interesting case where no clear definition of the term was feasible, yet there were a number of overlapping similarities between many games that could be used to cla.s.sify them as an intelligible, meaningful category. That is, rather than looking for a common feature present within all games that can describe them as a unified "thing," Wittgenstein argued that there was no such feature, only sets of similarities.

So, let's take Wittgenstein for granted for a moment and explore this notion's implications for our understanding of how the world of "games" might inform our thoughts on the Holmesian "Game"-if Wittgenstein is right, how do we understand the legitimacy of using the term "game" to describe an activity that many would find at least somewhat similar to the interpretive, argumentative "work" of academics?

Games are, for Wittgenstein, connected by their similarities to one another. What might work to link them are similarities in structure and intent of the players-an understanding of games as rules-based, as involving goals that can be achieved by players, and that serves to pull players out of their everyday concerns.

This leads to another interesting set of connections with the emerging field of "Game Studies." While used loosely and playfully by the Sherlockian scholars who play The Game, the term "game" itself has been the font of much thought and exploration over the last century, through a variety of fields of intellectual inquiry beyond philosophy. How do we conceive of a "game" separate from related concepts such as ritual, play, or even toys? Why might games and the use of games permeate human societies (as David Parlett so effectively cataloged in his cla.s.sic Oxford History of Board Games)? Was Wittgenstein correct in describing the folly of attempting to discern the features that characterize a term that is used today so widely as to be applicable to fantasy football, The Legend of Zelda, and sharpshooting?

. . . Play.