In the original Sherlock Holmes stories, there are a few scattered references to the "Baker Street Irregulars," street urchins that Holmes occasionally hires to gather information. The hundreds of movie and tv adaptions of the stories have barely mentioned the Irregulars, so I was pleasantly surprised to see a Netflix tv series centering on them.
Scene 1: Jesse, a teenage girl in a Victorian-style nightgown, wanders through the woods encountering skeletons and monsters. Suddenly she wakes up -- just a dream! She awakens Bea, the girl she is sleeping with, and asks "Am I losing it?" The anacrhonistic slang is annoying, but two teenage girls sleeping together, one white, one Asian -- they must be girlfriends!
Whoops, no. In the morning, Jesse, knowing that Bea is "desperate to find a boyfriend," gifts her with some French perfume. "Just two sprays, and any man will want to make sweet love to you." More anachronistis slang, and the heteronormative assumption that no gay men exist. Ugh!
Noticing that Billy and Spike are missing, Bea rushes out into the horrible Dickensian slums that lie just beyond the glamorous world of St. Paul's Cathedral and Kensington Palace. She pauses to sneer at 221B Baker Street, and r ushes into an underground fight club, where Billy (JoJo Macari) is making money by getting pummelled by bruisers. Spike (McKell David) complains "I'm too pretty to be here. My handsomeness makes me a target/" For rape? Is he worried about sexual assault because he's homophobic, or because he's gay?
Scene 2: A feminine young man (Harrison Osterfield) stands in a palatial bedroom. Maybe he's gay, one of Oscar Wilde's green carnation crowd? He looks out onto the lawn, where a cricket game is going on, and sees a man and a woman kissing and a lady adjusting her garter. Hetero-horniness! I'm getting tired of this!
Turns out that he's Prince Leopold, Queen Victoria's youngest son (born 1853), kept inside all the time because of his hemophilia (in the show it's because of a "turned ankle"). For his birthday present, all he wants is to be allowed to leave the palace for a day.
Cut to Leopold and his valet, Daimier (Edward Hogg), in a carriage going through the city. This isn't what he meant!
Scene 3: Bea yelling at Billy about his street fighting, while staring lustfully at his bare chest. He was just trying to make money: they're two months overdue with the rent, and Jesse needs a psychiatrist (nope, not invented yet).
Spike tells about a dream where he's in the bath with an eel, which finds its way into his...more anxiety over anal sex. Maybe he's gay.
Meanwhile Jesse wanders out into the street. The others follow, and save her from being trampled by Prince Leopold's carriage. Daimier the Vallet rushes out to yell at her for almost inconveniencing the Prince and not respecting "her betters." This causes a row-- these kids are from the future, and don't accept the class distinctions that everyone accepted without question 150 years ago. The Prince is mesmerized.
Scene 4: Bea at her mother's grave, discussing Jesse's dreams and sleepwalking. What if she's going crazy, like their mum? Suddenly a well-dressed man approaches. Bea runs away, but he follows her all the way home. His name is Watson (Royce Pierreson), and he "wants something" from her, for which he will pay.
Scene 5: He brings Bea to a rented room, and says "What happens here will remain between us." If I didn't know the character already, I'd assume that he wants to pay her for sex. Why doesn't she think so?
Actually, he and his "business associate" Sherlock Holmes want to hire her to investigate a case.
Business associate? Ok, you want us to know that you and Holmes aren't romantic partners. You're both heterosexual. That leaves Spike, with his visions of anal intrusion.
Four newborn babies have been stolen from locked rooms in the middle of the night. The latest had a teenage sister sleeping in the same room. The sister has since run away. Since Watson and Holmes are not familiar with the haunts of teenage runaways, they need Bea to find her.
Scene 6: The gang starts working on the case. Spike appears in a lavender suit -- ok, definitely gay -- and announces that he knows where the girl is. He got the intel from his friend Pete, who owes him because he found his lost dog.
Billy: "Pete didn't lose his dog. You stole it when you were trying to impress that girl who loves animals."
Spike is hetero, too? I'm outta here.
Beefcake: Billy takes his shirt off. Some of the bruisers at the fight club are hot.
Other sights: Just an elaborate sound stage.
Anachronisms: The street kids act and talk like it's 2021. I keep expecting them to whip out their cell phones.
Gay teases: Lots.
Gay characters: No!
To be fair, men can rape lesbians, and a lot of rape involves drugs. So we can interpret "no man will be able to resist" more darkly, right?
ReplyDeleteAnal sex would be an anachronism then. Oral and mutual masturbation were more popular, anal was derided in the gay community, but heterosexual academics writing about gay sex wrote about nothing else, mostly because they were doing everything else and didn't see themselves as odd or effeminate or mad or diseased, because, you know, 99th century. But expecting historical accuracy from this mess?
I'm sure they knew about anal sex. "THe abominable crime against nature" was defined as "per os or anum," and there are picures of demons with their lower halfs turned around, so you can enter their butt from the front. But this show is not at all worried about anachronisms; it seems to revel in them.
DeleteI was more thinking of how gay men at the time thought of it, which was as I said. Sure, they knew of it, but they viewed it negatively, it was only central to gay sex among heterosexual academics.
Delete*19th century. I'm going to kill the inventor of autocorrect.
ReplyDeleteYet the big reveal towards the end of the series is that Watson is and has always been in love with Holmes.
ReplyDelete