I had called upon my friend Sherlock Holmes upon the second morning after Christmas, with the intention of wishing him the compliments of the season. He was lounging upon the sofa in a purple dressing-gown, a pipe-rack within his reach upon the right, and a pile of crumpled morning papers, evidently newly studied, near at hand. Beside the couch was a wooden chair, and on the angle of the back hung a very seedy and disreputable hard-felt hat, much the worse for wear, and cracked in several places…

“I suppose,” I remarked, “that, homely as it looks, this thing has some deadly story linked on to it—that it is the clue which will guide you in the solution of some mystery and the punishment of some crime.”

“No, no. No crime,” said Sherlock Holmes, laughing. “Only one of those whimsical little incidents which will happen when you have four million human beings all jostling each other within the space of a few square miles.”

So begins Conan Doyle’s 1892 Sherlock Holmes story, The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle (1892). It opens with this apparently trivial mystery: who owns this hat, recovered in the aftermath of a street brawl. But this apparently meaningless thread turns out to be one end of a tangled skein which leads, finally, to the solution of a crime that has stunned all of London: the theft of the Duchess of Morcar’s ‘Blue Carbuncle’, a giant gemstone.

The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle is the only Sherlock Holmes story that is properly Christmassy. (As well as being set at Christmas, the story leads us through the guts of at least two geese, both of whom end up as seasonal dinners.) This is the last essay in our Sherlock Holmes season, and it’s nearly Christmas, so focusing on The Blue Carbuncle struck me as being a neat solution. But, like Holmes with his apparently innocuous hat, this choice has led me to solve a far greater mystery: the mystery of what makes a truly great Holmes adaptation.

Sherlock Holmes is, as we saw at the outset of this season, roughly coeval with cinema. This is not at all a coincidence; both were the products of a technological revolution, and the cultural and social revolutions that ensued from it. The Industrial Revolution led to massive demographic changes in Britain. By the latter half of the nineteenth century, over 50% of the population lived in cities. As this increasingly urbanised populace became more literate, it created a new mass market for print, as well as for new forms of media: the telegraph, radio, photography and cinema.

Sherlock Holmes was a creation of and for this new mass media: fundamentally democratic, available and comprehensible to all. And he was the perfect hero for the times: an urban bourgeois professional, distinguished by talent and training rather than birth. Such figures stand for the rule of law, not rule by aristocrats. They are fundamentally democratic, binding together and equalising the diversity of urban life.

And Conan Doyle positioned his characters perfectly for this new Imperial city. Part of his genius was to take the neurasthenic aesthetes of Edgar Allen Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin stories -- shut up in their dim, smoky boudoirs languidly turning the leaves of abstruse philosophies -- and turn them into approachable, bourgeois, British figures. Watson is a square-shouldered, rugby-playing ex-army doctor, bluff and approachable; Holmes is an egalitarian autodidact, so patriotic that he shoots the Queen’s initials into the wall of his sitting room. This makes Holmes the perfect detective for the newly mobile, ambitious and fervid Victorian London.

The detective story was structurally well suited to the new mass media, being easily comprehensible and endlessly reusable. The inherent touchpoints -- set up, development, resolution -- lend themselves to almost any theme, and can take all kinds of shapes. The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle, for example, gives us a series of strange vignettes: first the hat (which proves inconsequential), then the gemstone, then a goose, then a chance encounter, and finally a confession. At the end Holmes, in a fit of seasonal charity, lets the villain run free -- apart, that is, from his burden of guilt.

This episodic structure echoes Conan Doyle’s approach to the Holmes universe. The original stories are, for the most part, episodic; each is a self-contained story, and aside from recurring characters each is largely unrelated to the others. This makes them highly suited to adaptation into single, coherent movies, items of mass entertainment that can be picked up and put down as the audience requires, easily disposable and always on hand.

For the same reasons, the stories are well suited to television. There are three basic forms of fiction on television: the single play or TV movie; the endlessly evolving serialised drama; and the episodic show. As we have seen, Holmes can be fitted into all of these structures. Sherlock (2010) attempted to make Holmes the hero of a serialised drama; the 2002 TV movie Hound of the Baskervilles featured an excellent Watson from Ian Hart. Episodic drama, however, is Holmes’s natural home, partly because of its urban setting. It mimics the experience of everyday life in the city, relying as it does on encounters with a stream of starkly drawn strangers; unpredictable little stories that we come into long after they’ve begun, and leave long before they’re finished.

So as well as choosing Holmes’s most Christmassy story, I’m ending this series of essays with a look at my favourite Holmes adaptations: Granada TV’s ‘80s series, and the BBC Radio Four adaptations of the ‘90s. The Granada series was a serious undertaking. Not only did the producers build a whole Victorian street set in Manchester; they also adapted over forty of the original stories before the untimely death of the star, Jeremy Brett. The Radio Four series, meanwhile, is the only adaptation to have covered all of the stories using the same actors as Holmes and Watson (Clive Merrison and Michael Williams), and is a masterpiece of audio drama.

Both are faithful period adaptations, but both have to do a little work to squeeze Blue Carbuncle into the episodic structure. Conan Doyle could get away with his strange shaggy dog construction in print, using Watson’s narration to paper over the gaps, but broadcast drama needs something more predictable. Both adaptations have to rearrange it into a more conventional mystery shape: crime first, then detection. In the unerring hands of lead writer Bert Coules the Radio 4 version deftly introduces the core mystery and the main characters without giving away anything that might spoil the rest of the story.

Where the Granada TV version succeeds, however, is in casting. Jeremy Brett twinkles and dances, as befits a complicated piece of Christmas decoration. His Holmes manages to combine cerebral asperity with a larky sense of drama that perfectly matches the detective of the stories, as well as perfectly fitting the Christmas atmosphere; japes and jollity in the midwinter darkness.

But it’s in the cameo casting that the Granada version really shines. Rosalind Knight might overplay it as the Duchess of Morcar, but she is set off by that great Discordian of British theatre, Ken Campbell, who is utterly delightful as the capering, quavering villain Ryder.

The best performance, though, is a tiny little appearance by Frank Middlemass as the pitiful Henry Baker, the down-at-heel owner of the mysterious hat with which the story opens. Sat in the firelight of 221b Baker Street, trying to understand what’s happening to him, he delivers a perfect depiction of an educated but impecunious man who has, as Holmes puts it, ‘fallen on evil days’. He captures not just the spirit of the character but the spirit of the story, the way it manages to be both tragic and comic, criminal and trivial. He is, personified, ‘one of those whimsical little incidents’.

And this, it seems to me, is truly key to the successful adaptation of the Holmes stories. In themselves they are decent little plots: murder mysteries, cunning heists, locked-room puzzles. But the plots are not the true delight of the stories, and nor are the characters of Holmes and Watson. Indeed, you could argue that a great deal of the success of the stories is down to how sparingly Conan Doyle draws them, keeping them as iconic as possible.

Instead, what distinguishes Conan Doyle is his use of odd little details on which Holmes fixates. Sometimes these are key to the plot: the smearing of the Hound of the Baskervilles with phosphorous, the strange little drawings in The Adventure of the Dancing Men. Sometimes they’re frankly peculiar, and in the man who is forced to copy out the Encyclopaedia Britannica by hand in The Red-Headed League. And sometimes they’re intriguing, like finding an abandoned hat and a goose on Tottenham Court Road.

Any adaptation of Sherlock Holmes must find a way to maintain this weird, sinister, slightly comic note; the odd behaviour and unexpected actions that one discovers among ‘four million human beings all jostling each other within the space of a few square miles’. The life of a city, in all its venality, comedy and strangeness.

That, and Jeremy Brett in the lead role.

You can catch up with our all our pieces on Sherlock Holmes in our Seasons strand, starting here, right at the beginning. The beginning of the century, the beginning of cinema and the beginning of the Holmes myth entirely:

In which our season of Sherlock Holmes adaptation reaches the (other) one you’ve all been waiting for, Sherlock (2010—17), and we get so exercised about it we run out of space to discuss Elementary (2012—19) and, thankfully, Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes (2009). Although there’s little to be said about the latter other than to wonder at how a film so full of stuff could be so dull. Right, put the hat and coat on, here we go.

I blame Joss Whedon.

A lot of people blame Joss Whedon for a lot of things, but I specifically blame him for the disaster that was BBC’s Sherlock (2010—17), and how an inventive, spirited and breathless pulp-adventure became a self-indulgent, self-obsessed, self-sabotaging soap-opera.

Sherlock was an updating of the Sherlock Holmes stories. It was masterminded by the writers Stephen Moffat and Mark Gatiss, and starred Martin Freeman as Watson and Benedict Cumberbatch as Holmes. Freeman was already pretty well known from the original The Office (2001—03); but Sherlock arguably sealed both star’s careers, earning them places in Middle Earth and the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

The show was immensely successful; and it was successful, importantly, as a broadcast TV show, before streaming and binge-watching. People had to actively tune in, every week. And they did, largely because it was an energetic, inventive and sexy updating, full of contemporary technology and tropes and set in an energetic and compelling contemporary London.

So what are we blaming Whedon for? He is best known for Buffy The Vampire Slayer (1997-2003), a TV series (spun off from his 1992 film) about a high school student who discovers she is fated to fight and kill vampires. Buffy showcases a pattern that Whedon would go on to repeat: a Strong Female Lead™ blessed with Mystical Movie Martial Arts, who is nevertheless young and apparently innocuous, and must be schooled and moulded by an older man. You might think that this sounds like a fantasy about relationships between directors and ingénue actors; you might be reminded of the multiple allegations about Whedon’s abusive on-set behaviour. But Buffy, too, was extraordinarily popular.

Buffy reinvented Victorian gothic tropes for a modern audience. It reinvigorated traditional modes with its verbal and visual style and its treatment of the canon. Picking up on the horror lore approach of ‘80s vampire movies Lost Boys (1987) and the peerless Near Dark (1987), Buffy repositioned the gothic from Victorian to post-punk. It also understood what the monsters meant thematically, and how they are used to dramatise and symbolise adolescence.

It also reinvented the format. Traditional syndicated shows — including the sitcoms on which Whedon had cut his teeth — required standalone episodes that could be watched in any order. Buffy had a basic monster-of-the-week structure of the kind that worked for syndication, but it also had loose, season-long storylines that culminated in a season-finale confrontation with a ‘Big Bad’. Alongside shows like The X-Files (1993—2002) and J. Michael Straczynski’s sci-fi epic Babylon 5 (1993—97), Buffy helped to map out the transformation of narrative TV: from stories to sagas, from episodic to progressive, and from discrete weekly helpings to binge-watching.

Sherlock was made in a TV environment in which Buffy had been a massive hit, and it embraced both these approaches. It is full of sparky dialogue, modern characterisation and contemporary stories; and it introduces a ‘Big Bad’ in the form of Moriarty, and builds its own fictional lore.

These innovations make the first episode, ‘A Study in Pink’, thrilling. But the urge to be contemporary and to recraft the canon quickly overwhelms the show. Eventually it is buried alive, stifled by soap opera plot convolutions and a deadweight of lore.

Read more

Our season of Sherlock Holmes adaptations gets childish as we consider the mystery of why, in the mid-’80s, there were two animated versions of Holmes in which all the characters were anthropomorphic animals: Sherlock Hound (1984) and The Great Mouse Detective (1986).

At some point in the early ‘80s I had an audition for the role of Watson in the film The Young Sherlock Holmes. I did not get it. The part went to an actor called Alan Cox, who was (and presumably still is) the son of Brian Cox. Also appearing in the film was the daughter of Simon Ward. I think we can all agree these are amazing coincidences.

My lack of a famous parent -- or, to be more fair, my lack of talent -- aside, I was far too tall and skinny. What the casting people wanted was a short chubby boy; someone who might conceivably grow up to become Nigel Bruce’s Watson, the corpulent duffer of the later Rathbone films.

The Young Sherlock Holmes is full of these references. Like so many origin stories, it rapidly becomes a sort of supermarket sweep, careening about the canon snapping up a deerstalker here, an Inverness cape there; a beaker full of chemistry experiments, an explanation of why Holmes is not interested in women, and don’t forget the meerschaum pipe!

The thing is that most of these elements aren’t, strictly speaking, canon at all. The hat and cloak come from a single illustration by Sidney Paget; the pipe comes from the actor William Gillette (although I noted, on rereading Edgar Allen Poe, that C. Auguste Dupin, the inspiration for Holmes, is described as smoking a meerschaum). All of these things are really references to later portrayals of Holmes, mostly those by Basil Rathbone. They play on the legend, not the character.

The villain of the movie is Holmes’s fencing teacher, who turns out to also be the High Priest of a sect of Ancient Egyptian assassins. (It is not, as you might be beginning to suspect, a good movie. Produced by Stephen Spielberg, it came out the year after Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) and appears to have just reused parts of the plot, with almost as much cultural insensitivity.) Like all good pulp villains, the fencing master appears to die at the climax. But a post-credits sequence reveals him to have survived, and we see him checking into a Swiss pension under the name Moriarty.

Moriarty is a key figure in two other kid-friendly mid-‘80s adaptations of Sherlock Holmes. Both, interestingly, are anthropomorphic animations. The hero of Disney’s 1986 The Great Mouse Detective is called Basil, after Rathbone, who voices the part of Holmes, in whose cellar Basil the mouse detective lives. A criminal mastermind called ‘Professor Ratigan’ features as the villain, presumably because no one could quite bring themselves to use the name ‘Moriraty’.

In the Italian/Japanese animated TV series Sherlock Hound (1985), meanwhile, everyone is a dog of some sort, and they all live in an entirely canine steampunk Britain. (The female dogs’ ears emerge from Gibson Girl doughnuts of hair, which is deeply disconcerting.) Bizarrely, Sherlock Hound himself is a fox and not a hound at all (‘Slyfox Holmes’ was right there, gang), Moriarty is, inevitably, a wolf. Sherlock Hound raises Moriarty to the status of regular villain; the episodes generally revolve around Sherlock foiling his evil schemes.

The irony is that Moriarty was only introduced by Conan Doyle -- in ‘The Adventure of the Final Problem’ (1893) -- to kill Holmes, and he dies in the same story. He is referred to in some later stories (including some that predate ‘The Final Problem’ in the fictional timeline), but he is not a constant or recurrent villain.

In a way, Moriarty had to be introduced because he didn’t exist. The Holmes stories are, by and large, standalone mysteries. They have few recurring characters beside Holmes and Watson, Mrs Hudson, various representatives of Scotland Yard, and the occasional Baker Street Irregular. Each has a different setting, a different context, and a different villain. It is hard work to originate all those plots, all the motives and opportunities and means. Even though he was remarkably good at it, it is no wonder that Conan Doyle pretty quickly decided that he wanted to chuck Sherlock Holmes down a waterfall. The trouble was that he had gone to a lot of trouble to establish Holmes’s infallibility; now, he needed to create a character with even greater powers. Hence ‘the Napoleon of Crime’, Professor Moriarty.

It’s a shame he didn’t think of him sooner, because the archenemy is an all-purpose story engine. The villain comes up with a scheme, usually intended to fox the hero; the hero foils it; the villain escapes justice. ‘Curse you and your infernal meddling! I’ll have my revenge!’ And repeat. The two of them are locked in an endless Manichaean tug-of-war; each heave is a new episode, but the story remains the same. The hero and villain are forever tussling, but they never quite plunge down the cascade.

Part of the reason for Holmes’ longevity is precisely that fecundity of plot and character that the absence of a nemesis required of Conan Doyle. It meant he could use the Holmes cases to tell all kinds of stories. Although, strangely, never stories in which all the characters were inexplicably transformed into dogs.

Read more

We continue our season of Sherlock Holmes adaptations by getting all meta about it and watching three faintly satirical, faintly revisionist films from the ‘70s which deliberately fudge the difference between fact and fiction by pretending Sherlock Holmes was a real person and using him to create alternate histories of the nineteenth century.

Last month I mentioned Powell and Pressburger’s The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), set during the Boer War, in the protagonist Clive Wynne-Candy has a spirited chat with a senior officer about The Hound of the Baskervilles. What I carefully omitted from that reference is that that officer has never heard of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Colonel Betteridge was not alone in not being fully aware of Sherlock Holmes having a creator. Right from the beginning, Sherlock Holmes has existed in a liminal state between fiction and fact. People wore black armbands when ‘he’ ‘died’ in ‘The Final Problem’ (1893). The Abbey National, which occupied 221b Baker Street from the 1930s onwards, was the recipient of letters begging for his help. In one 2008 UK poll, 58% of respondents said they thought Sherlock Holmes was a real historical person.

Three films of the 1970s capitalise on this, lifting Holmes out of his stories and splicing him into the real late nineteenth century. The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970) throws the great detective into a cold war with the Kaiser. Murder by Decree (1979) pits him against that most iconic of Victorian villains, Jack the Ripper. And The Seven Per Cent Solution (1976) puts its pitch plainly on the poster: ‘Sherlock Holmes meets Sigmund Freud’.

It is customary for apologists for the British Empire to insist that it did at least confer upon its colonies the benefits of nineteenth century modernity: bureaucracy, law, railways. (Admittedly, the laws were used to constrain the colonised; the railways allowed the movement of troops; and the bureaucrats arranged for the latter to enforce the former.) And those three words also summarise a model Holmes story: ‘Hand me my case files, Watson’; ‘To Paddington, cabbie, and there’s a guinea in it if we make the Express’; “All yours, Inspector Lestrade.’ Files, trains and justice.

After the Second World War, as a wind of change blew away the former colonies and Britain’s own economy curdled and international standing dwindled, the imperial legacy was questioned. All of these films use a ‘real world’ setting to give the viewer a glimpse of the ‘real’ world of Holmes and Watson: the stories that Watson had supposedly left unwritten, the ‘truth’ behind the tales published in Strand magazine. But they also use Holmes as an emblematic Victorian -- the great brain of London -- to examine and criticise the Empire.

Read more

We continue our season of Sherlock Holmes adaptations with a look at two versions of The Hound of the Baskervilles, the first made in 1939 and the second made in 1959. You’ve almost certainly seen some version of this Holmes story (probably one of these films), but in case your memory needs prompting, here’s a quick summary of the plot.

Know this, then: the Baskerville family of Dartmoor is said to be haunted by a great demonic hound, the most recent victim being Sir Charles Baskerville, who was found dead of heart failure on the yew walk, his face contorted with horror and beside the body, the footprints of a gigantic dog! Now his distant relative Sir Henry is coming to take up the title, and family friend Dr Mortimer has enlisted Sherlock Holmes to keep him safe. Holmes instead sends Watson to Devon, only for Watson to discover, much to his chagrin, that Holmes has followed him in secret to conduct a parallel investigation. Together they discover that the villain is a local entomologist, Stapledon, who is a distant scion of the Baskerville line and who is trying to inherit by scaring all the other family members to death with a big dog.

In the cinema, the nineteenth century is the setting for tales of ‘mystery and imagination’. There is horror, from Frankenstein to Poe to the high Victorian gothic of Dracula; there is the invention of the detective story (Poe again); and scientific revolutions have their own terrors, like Mr Hyde or the Invisible Man.

The Hound of the Baskervilles, a tale of scientific detection packed with gothic atmosphere and monsters out on the misty moor, seems to fit perfectly into this genre. But, although set in 1889, the novel was a product (just) of the twentieth century, and its horror lies not out on the moor, but in the minds and hearts of men.

Read more

Sherlock Holmes is the human literary character most often portrayed in movies. In our new series for paid subscribers, Holmes Movies, we’re looking at how the portrayal of the great detective has changed over the last century and a quarter. For this first essay — available to all our subscribers — we begin at the beginning: the beginning of film, the beginning of a new century, and the beginning of Holmes on screen. The frames are afoot!

Let us begin at what appears to be the end, as so many of Holmes’s cases do; and also, as so many cases do, with a death. In 1893, in The Final Problem, Arthur Conan Doyle finally rid himself of Sherlock Holmes by throwing him into the roiling mists of the Reichenbach Falls. He hoped that by doing so, he could devote more of his time to writing historical novels, which he considered far more worthy of his talents than his silly detective.

The problem with The Final Problem wasn’t that it wasn’t final; the public did not agree about the value of Conan Doyle’s historical novels, and in 1903 he was forced to bring Holmes back1. (He did this by asserting that the detective had only pretended to be dead after toppling over the Falls.) After that he continued writing Holmes stories into the 1920s, although in the fictional universe Holmes’s last case takes place just before the outbreak of the First World War.

During that ten-year gap between The Final Problem and The Adventure of the Empty House (1903), a few things happened that would have an eternal impact on the future fame of Sherlock Holmes.

In 1896 a train pulled into the station at the Provençal town of La Ciotat. In itself this was unremarkable; what was remarkable was that the Lumière brothers filmed it, and then showed it to astonished audiences. The Lumières’ films were sensations; a whole new medium was being born.

Then, in 1899, the American actor-manager William Gillette produced his play Sherlock Holmes on Broadway. It was a massive hit, running in New York for 260 performances and in London for 200. The play was based on a script by Conan Doyle, but Gillette — who played Holmes himself — freely adapted, pulling bits and pieces in from many stories and inventing other stuff wherever he felt he needed to.

And then, in 1900, Sherlock Holmes finally appeared on film in a short called Sherlock Holmes Baffled. The film doesn’t really have much to do with the Sherlock Holmes of the stories; it is just a little sketch in which a detective is constantly thwarted by a villain who uses film trickery to evade him. The thief disappears from Holmes’s grasp through a series of jump cuts before leaping out of a window, leaving the detective bewildered and alone.

Finally, in 1916, all the elements came together when a movie was made of Gillette’s play. Here at least was a feature film of a Sherlock Holmes adventure: Sherlock Holmes. For a long time the film was thought lost, but in 2014, almost a hundred years later, a serialised version was found in France.

What’s remarkable about Gillette’s Sherlock Holmes is that it was a contemporary of the books. It was made as the fictional detective was still being written, and was released two years after 1914, the year in which the last story was set. When we watch it we are seeing Holmes in something close to his actual milieu, with reliably period-accurate scenery and costumes. Because when it was made, it wasn’t ‘period’; it was now.

Mind you, lot of that period scenery is theatrical flats. This is really just an ‘opened out’ play with a camera pointed at it. The characters frequently stand in a row as they talk to each other, as if making sure they can all be seen from the other side of the proscenium arch. Everyone waves their arms and pops their eyes to make sure every emotion can be read by the gallery.

But, to be fair, it also tries to do something beyond the stage. The Holmes stories are typically told in the first person by Dr Watson; we see what Watson sees and miss what he does not observe, to paraphrase the detective. The camera gives director Arthur Bertelet new ways to hide things from the audience: an unidentified hand knocks at a door, a character looks out of a window without revealing what they’re seeing.2

Equally interesting is what the camera reveals. In the stories we know little about the actions of the criminals until Holmes tells us about them in retrospect. In Sherlock Holmes the villains’ stories run concurrently to Holmes’s investigations, and the film cuts back and forth between the two. Indeed, the editing is used to create suspense or dramatic irony.

The new medium required the stories to be structured in a new way. It also required Holmes to have a new kind of character. The Holmes of the film does not do a great deal of detecting. There’s also no atonal sawing away at his violin as he sits before the fire in thought, and no gentle ribbing of Watson over the breakfast table. Gillette’s Holmes is a lot like of a traditional crime fighter in the pulp mode.

Cinema is, after all, a medium of action. In enabling us to capture movement, it demands it. And so Holmes becomes an action hero. Likewise the plot, which is very much an adventure serial. Conan Doyle’s stories are deeply pulpy, full of ludicrous contrivances and lurid details, but the plot of Sherlock Holmes is very much an adventure serial, especially in the surviving episodic version, which has plenty of cliffhangers, dastardly menacing of maidens, and the hideous threat of the ‘Stepney Gas Chamber’.

The Holmes of the books isn’t a stranger to action; he’s a formidable boxer and swordsman. But he is definitely a stranger to the ladies, a decided aromantic. As Watson puts it in A Scandal in Bohemia (1891) (one of the stories from which Sherlock Holmes draws some plot elements):

It was not that he felt any emotion akin to love for Irene Adler. All emotions, and that one particularly, were abhorrent to his cold, precise but admirably balanced mind. He was, I take it, the most perfect reasoning and observing machine that the world has seen, but as a lover he would have placed himself in a false position. He never spoke of the softer passions, save with a gibe and a sneer. They were admirable things for the observer—excellent for drawing the veil from men’s motives and actions.

And yet the Holmes of the film falls in love with the girl he saves. In a cable to Conan Doyle, Gillette asked: ‘May I marry Holmes?’ Characteristically, Conan Doyle was less interested in canon than his fans were. As with many professional writers, his first concern was for the money. He later remarked: ‘I was charmed both with the play, the acting, and the pecuniary result.’

But as well as defying the characterisation of the detective from the stories, the play and the subsequent film also defined it. Gillette introduced the curved calabash pipe, which is easier to talk around than a conventional pipe and whose shape allows the audience to see Holmes’s face clearly. And then, at the end of the film, what should Sherlock Holmes put on his head as he ventures out to face Moriarity but a deerstalker hat. There he is, at last: the cinematic Sherlock Holmes.3

This is a Holmes who no longer belongs to Conan Doyle, and is no longer defined by the stories. He has escaped the canon, and has become canonised as a secular saint. He has his defining symbols, his cap and pipe and magnifying glass; he has his unearthly powers of deduction; and he has his tutelary patronage: scientific detection.

You can see this in Sherlock Holmes Baffled, where the great detective’s name is used as a synecdoche for all detectives. You can see it in Sherlock Holmes, where he is depicted as already famous and feared by the underworld. And you can definitely see it in Buster Keaton’s Sherlock Jr (1924).4

In Sherlock Jr Keaton plays a young projectionist who has been unjustly accused of robbery. He falls asleep during a detective film and dreams he climbs into the screen to take charge of the mystery. It is, being a Keaton film, still delightful and hilarious a century later, and it is remarkable to see how the language and technology of film had developed in the eight years since Sherlock Holmes. Indeed, Sherlock Jr is a film head over heels (literally, in Keaton’s case) in love with film. It is a bravura example of using the medium to tell a story, capture insane stunts, and create magic (in this case, through camera trickery and the double exposure of the dream sequence). At one point the film itself turns on Keaton, jump cutting him from seaside to mountain top to busy street; you can see the inventive cinematic lunacy of Chuck Jones coming towards you with the velocity of an ACME anvil.

This love of technology is appropriate to Holmes. He was, after all, invented during the age of engineering, and inherited the technical approaches of Eugène-François Vidocq, who pioneered the application of science in criminology. Although we cannot help but see Holmes as Victorian, he was in his moment a modern man, at the centre of a web of train lines and telegraphs and newspapers, a contemporary of the emerging cinema.

Given that the character of Sherlock Jr features only in the film (within a dream) within the film, it is perhaps not very surprising that Sherlock Jr does not use any Holmesian iconography beyond a magnifying glass. Instead uses the name alone to evoke not just detection, but detective movies. The implication is that by 1924, Holmes was already the paradigmatic cinematic detective.

Which makes a lot of sense. Detective stories are extremely useful narrative structures; they contain their own inciting incidents, antagonistic characters, rising action and driving motives. They can be happily used as a skeleton for all kinds of stories and larger themes. Movies were always going to find the detective structure useful; and for writers and directors looking for a detective, Holmes was the most famous contemporary example of the genre.

You can also argue that the detective is the perfect twentieth century protagonist. They are the hero of legalistic democracy, an everyman figure who can shoulder the burden of public morality, walk through mean streets to pursue justice without fear or favour, and apply scientific method and modern technology to fight some of the oldest human failures.

With the beatification of Sherlock Holmes and the costume choices of William Gillette (and, to be fair, the original illustrator Sidney Paget), we now have a perfectly iconic detective: a figure who is immediately visually recognisable with his deerstalker and pipe, and whose meaning and purpose are universally understood. An ideal protagonist, in order words, for the new twentieth century storytelling media.

You know who else played Sherlock Holmes on screen? Tom Baker, better known as a completely different icon of British culture:

Here we are with the final part of our epic survey of the screen works of Aaron Sorkin. As with the first part, we’re making this one available to all subscribers; you can see links to the rest of the series (behind a paywall) here. For our esteemed paying subscribers, our next ludicrous-yet-exclusive endeavour will be a series of pieces about on-screen representations of Sherlock Holmes over the decades.

In this piece we look at Sorkin’s three most recent films, all written and directed by Sorkin himself:

Molly’s Game (2017) The real-life story of Molly Bloom, who ran underground celebrity poker games in LA and New York, which led to unwitting contact with the Russian mob and, shortly afterwards, Bloom’s arrest and trial.

The Trial of the Chicago 7 (2020) The real-life story of the protests/riots at the Democratic National Convention in 1968 and the subsequent trial of assorted liberals, radicals, surrealists and Black Power activists.

Being the Ricardos (2021) The real-life story of a troubled on-set week in the life of American celebrity sweethearts Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz.

So: the Sorkin-ness. What have we learned?

Sorkin benefits from directorial pushback.

Various directors have battled with Sorkin’s word counts over the years, in the same way a gardener battles with Japanese knotweed. Some were victorious (David Fincher with The Social Network); some made valiant but flawed attempts (Mike Nichols with Charlie Wilson’s War); some were absolutely flattened (Danny Boyle with Steve Jobs).

These days, Sorkin simply directs his own scripts. His move into direction has been paralleled recently by a few actors, including Greta Gerwig and Jordan Peele. Perhaps the easy democracy of visual tech, and the demonstrable success of neophyte YouTubers, has broken down some of the mystical patina that used to adhere to direction. Sure, you can be an auteur if you want to — and Gerwig and Peele both have a strong visual game — but it has been comprehensively demonstrated that 99% of viewers won’t really mind if you can barely centre a frame.

Sorkin is perfectly capable of centring a frame, but — recalling Woody Allen’s line about masturbation being sex with someone you love — his direction choices squarely centre his scripts. Much as I love his obsession with words and dialogue, his meat-and-potatoes approach to visual storytelling can be a bit deadening.

Take the opening sequence of Molly’s Game, a dramatic skiing accident that sets up the central character’s biography. In the script, the uninterrupted one-person voiceover that runs alongside this opening sequence takes up nine pages, pretty much exactly the same length of the bravura two-person sequence that opens The Social Network. It’s interesting that in the latter, Fincher responded to Sorkin’s verbiage by toning the visuals right down in this sequence: you get one establishing shot of Mark and Erica at a table, and from then on you see nothing but close-ups of their faces. Fincher looked at the wall of dialogue, realised how significant it was in setting up the film, and chose to strip everything else right back.

Sorkin — a man who has happily admitted many times that he doesn’t care about visuals — goes completely the other way. He stuffs the opening sequence of Molly’s Game with all kinds of visual pyrotechnics: archive sports footage, competitive skiing sequences, and the accident itself. As a result, the viewer struggles to fully digest either the dense, rapidly-delivered voiceover or the complicated visual story.

Sorkin is a charmingly open book.

Despite many of his films being based on real-life stories, most of Sorkin’s heroes are essentially the same person. Sorkin’s preoccupations and biographical vulnerabilities emerge repeatedly: the search for the perfect creative dyad (Studio 60, Being the Ricardos, The West Wing), struggles with addiction (The West Wing, Studio 60, Molly’s Game, Charlie Wilson’s War), and ambivalence about fatherhood (The West Wing, Steve Jobs, Being the Ricardos, Molly’s Game).

Most consistent of all is Sorkin’s idea of what it means to be ‘clever’: both how he defines and presents ‘cleverness’, and the innate, almost moral worth he attaches to it. From Tom Cruise in A Few Good Men in 1992 to Molly Bloom in 2017, almost all of Sorkin’s heroes are fast-talking, hyper-verbal oddities who can reel off obscure factoids and lists of statistics. So long as they are ‘clever’ in this very specific University Challenge sense, Sorkin confidently expects us to forgive their common faults (egotism, selfishness, and usually some form of addiction or compulsive behaviour).

And we do usually warm to his heroes; even Mark Zuckerberg, whom Sorkin wrote as an explicit anti-hero, wins our sympathetic involvement. But this isn’t because of their ‘cleverness’, which makes the viewer feel like they’re being stalked by a six-year-old who knows far too much about dinosaurs. It’s because Sorkin’s central characters tend to be courageous, funny and vulnerable, and because they make considerable sacrifices in the pursuit of normie liberal principles (democracy, honour, hard work, truth-telling). Similarly, we don’t dislike Sorkin’s ‘stupid’ characters because they don’t know the GDP of Portugal in the financial year 1994–5; we dislike them because in Sorkin’s world, ‘stupid’ people are usually also deeply unpleasant.

Now, people can use ‘cleverness’ as a defence against intimacy or criticism, and sometimes — as with his interpretation of Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network — Sorkin shows that this is what his characters are doing. But more frequently, you have to conclude that he adds this stuff in because he’s genuinely impressed by people who can casually list the top five Belgian exports, the exact wording of nineteenth-century statutes, or the precise number of qualified teachers in Alabama. It’s kind of sweet.

Structure is king.

Dialogue aside, Sorkin’s genius lies in the beauty of his narrative structures. He’s drawn to legal dramas: Molly’s Game and The Trial of the Chicago 7 are structured around legal processes, as are A Few Good Men and The Social Network. He has said that the legal format is a canny way to handle exposition and get lumps of information in front of the viewer. (In showing how people behave under pressure, it’s also good for character development.) The legal process is also one of persuasion, of using (or manipulating) information to lead people in a certain direction, and for a writer as didactic as Sorkin you can see the appeal.

There’s another reason, though: a trial has multiple points of structural tension.

I once read that tennis is a god-tier sport because of the way tension is built into the point-by-point scoring system. The drama is occasioned not only by the players’ talent or biographies, or by luck or circumstance; it is also structural. There are break points and game points and set points and match points, and there are also all the points before the ‘big’ points (and sometimes even the points before the points before the big points). Think of the strained silence in a tennis crowd when someone is serving to go 40-0 up (which is psychologically very different from 30-0 up), or is serving to avoid a break point. Even the dullest match is studded with multiple structural moments of tension and release.

Similarly, any trial has inherent structural tension that can be put to use by pretty much any decent screenwriter. Sorkin, though, goes one further. He uses the structural legal tension in parallel to a second narrative structure, which usually revolves around a personal psychological wound that is invisible to most of the other characters. In Molly’s Game, this is the cruel bad luck of the skiing accident; in The Social Network it’s Mark getting dumped by Erica; in The Trial of the Chicago 7 it’s what really happened between Tom Hayden and Rennie Davis during the Chicago riot. These secondary narratives are usually established in the opening scenes, and like Chekhov’s gun they lie on the mantelpiece throughout the drama. Lesser legal dramas culminate in the verdict; Sorkin’s culminate in the quiet, intimate resolution of this second narrative.

These enigmatic ‘Rosebud’-style mysteries book-end many of his non-legal scripts too. In Steve Jobs it’s Jobs’s relationship with his daughter Lisa; in Being the Ricardos it’s Lucille Ball’s longing for real-life domesticity. The message — that people are fundamentally unknowable, their strongest motivations often hidden — rings true. But this technique also produces a wonderful structural catharsis. It’s all about the symmetry.

Sorkin is no longer paralysed by attractive women.

Earlier in his career, Sorkin had a terrible habit of taking perfectly accomplished female characters and having them fall over (CJ in The West Wing), be robbed of the power of speech in professional settings (Demi Moore in A Few Good Men, Annette Bening in The American President), be embarrassingly under-dressed in public places (CJ and Ashley in The West Wing, Harriet in Studio 60, Annette Bening in The American President), or unwittingly leave their knickers on other people’s floors (poor old Donna in The West Wing). All fun and games in one sense, except that Sorkin rarely hands out this treatment to his male characters (unless you count that scene in The West Wing in which Josh has to hold a meeting while wearing a bright yellow bib and brace). Like Dickens, Sorkin could write believable, fully human females so long as they were old. The young, cute ones had to have a sharp edge of delirium, their cognitive functions occasionally buckling under the strain of possessing both brains and tits. I think we can agree that this was what psychologists call projection.

Maybe it’s the criticism he’s received; maybe it’s the passage of time (Toby is very fond of that Socrates quote likening the effect of the young male libido to ‘being chained to a lunatic’); maybe Sorkin has finally accepted some of the most basic premises of modern feminism. Whatever it is, there’s been a notable and welcome change in the way Sorkin writes attractive women. The transition began with Charlie Wilson’s War (2007), in which Julia Roberts’s Republican activist Joanne Herring is completely in charge of every single thing she does. Then we had The Social Network, in which Rooney Mara’s Erica is beautiful and also smart, thoughtful, dignified, brave and utterly consequential. Neither of them fell over, forgot how to talk, or left their lingerie behind in public places.

This new tendency is beautifully showcased in Molly’s Game. Jessica Chastain (a member of my personal ‘proper grown-up women actors’ club, along with Cate Blanchett and Keeley Hawes) puts in a fabulous performance as Bloom, as you would expect. But what’s really interesting is what Sorkin does with Bloom’s self-presentation.

The wardrobe and make-up people did a fantastic job here. Bloom wears clothes and cosmetics that position her as a woman who deploys her face and body in a very specific way, one that is a rebellion against her social class (Bloom was the daughter of toney college professors). She chooses to showcase a precisely calibrated degree of loose, slightly vulgar sexiness: the necklines are low and lacy, the skirts are short and shiny, and the cleavage is a deep V (very out of style these days, but everywhere in 2005). But all of this is frequently paired with unthreatening concessions to comfort or necessity: reading glasses, cheap chenille knitwear. She’s saying: I reject the class-based expectations of my oppressive family; I like annoying my dad; I’m a gorgeous symbol of the status of the men in this room; but I’m also in charge, and have a strong sense of my own autonomy and comfort. Unlike most on-screen representations of sexy women, this one feels utterly grounded (Chastain’s otherworldly beauty aside).

Bloom is the kind of woman to whom clothes, make-up and personal presentation really matter, but Sorkin doesn’t use this as a character note about silliness or ill-discipline. It is not intended to be read as a sign that she lacks intelligence, insight or power; if anything, it is communicating the opposite. It is telling us just how well Bloom understands her audiences: first, the celebs and sports stars and city boys who attend her poker games, and then the tabloid readers and TV viewers who will help to decide her fate. Both audiences like pretty, glamorous women, but neither audience likes women to be snotty, posh or intimidating. They don’t want an impossibly stylish glamazon, remote and unattainable; they want the beautiful girl-next-door, someone accessible, someone who makes a lot of effort but also looks good in an oversized cardigan from the bargain racks at the local mall.

Bloom understands how to project the right qualities in the right proportions, which is a very difficult thing to achieve. She understands these things much better than her otherwise highly competent lawyer Jaffey (Idris Elba), who is initially irritated that his young, bookish daughter idolises Bloom, and then over the course of the film comes to understand why.

The fact that Sorkin as a director was happy for this much care to be taken over the details of Bloom’s self-presentation feels like a real breakthrough to me. It's significant that he is getting interested in the semiotics of women’s presentation, the complex messages that women send with their clothes and cosmetics, or the absence of them. (There is a similar intra-female interrogation of weight, beauty and costume in Being The Ricardos, as Ball’s on-screen female sidekick struggles with her assigned ‘unattractiveness’.) We haven’t, as a sex, asked to be defined by these things, but if these are the weapons we’re given, we’ll use ‘em.

Spotting that Jaffey’s daughter is reading The Crucible, Bloom says: ‘You know they didn’t actually burn any witches in Salem? That’s a myth. They hanged them or drowned them. Sometimes they crushed them under heavy objects.’ Sorkin is finally working out that for some women, coping with other people’s expectations and prejudices is like being slowly crushed under a heavy object. And he is embracing the multiple dramatic possibilities that come from that.

Actors love working with Sorkin’s scripts, and they bring their A game.

Looking back over these pieces, it’s striking to note all the actors who have blown the bloody doors off in a Sorkin production. Some of them were relative unknowns who made their name (especially on The West Wing): some of them were global superstars playing against type, or turning up for a small cameo just so they didn’t miss their chance to deliver some Sorkin dialogue.

It’s not universally true, of course: Tom Cruise was somewhat defeated in A Few Good Men, Matthew Perry’s comic talents were criminally under-used in Studio 60, and everyone stank in The Newsroom. (Never getting that time back.) But most of the time, Sorkin’s scripts get the absolute best out of some already very talented performers. This is a classic example of making your own luck. Sorkin writes scripts that good actors want to perform, and in turn they deliver performances that make the scripts look even better than they did on the page.

His words draw out qualities that some actors find difficult to replicate elsewhere; with the best will in the world, Allison Janney, Bradley Whitford and Richard Schiff have never been as good again as they were in The West Wing, and Tom Hanks (much as we love him) has never been so un-Tom-Hanks-y as he was in Charlie Wilson’s War. As Lucille Ball in Being the Ricardos Nicole Kidman reminds us of the talent she displayed in her early films such as To Die For, long before she started churning out dull thrillers for Netflix; Julia Roberts does a wonderful character turn in Charlie Wilson’s War. Brad Pitt is quiet and unshowy in Moneyball; Javier Bardem is a revelation as the happy-go-lucky showman Desi Arnaz in Being the Ricardos. Jack Nicholson’s turn in A Few Good Men will form the second line of his obituary, as will Martin Sheen’s turn as President Bartlet in The West Wing. Chris O’Dowd has a wonderful tiny comic turn in Molly’s Game, and Sacha Baron Cohen makes a fabulous comic duo with a (literally) dopey Jeremy Strong in The Trial of the Chicago 7.

Sorkin is Gen X’s favourite earnest, well-intentioned Boomer.

Strong — who also appears briefly in Molly’s Game — of course made his name in Jesse Armstrong’s Succession, another set of scripts that actors found irresistible. There’s something in the comparison between Armstrong (or more properly, Armstrong’s writers’ room) and Sorkin: neither shy away from a sheer tonnage of dialogue, and both are great at mean jokes that turn on the love of language. (Shiv Roy’s description of her actual husband Tom Wambsgans as ‘a highly interchangeable modular part’ could have been written by Sorkin, if he were 20 years younger.) Both wrote long-running, cast-of-thousands, character-driven, critically-adored TV series that went behind the curtain in global power-centres. Both are as interested in interpersonal dynamics as they are in geopolitical forces. Both series had enormous impacts despite being watched by relatively small upmarket audiences. And both series, of course, deal in contemporary politics and the exercise of power, from the intimate to the international.

The big difference is that Sorkin is an American Boomer romantic, and Armstrong is a British Gen X cynic. Succession went right up to the edge of our current desperate moment in its plots about gaping nihilistic tech-bros and fascistic Presidents, but it always retained an ironic distance. Its sharp humour distracts us and soothes the horror. Sorkin, by contrast, draws a bright line between things that are fit for comedy and things that are deadly serious. He repeatedly sticks his head straight into the political wood-chipper, earnestly interrogating 9/11 and the Iraq War and the nature of media and the meaning of justice, and the general nitty-gritty difficulty of exercising power in an imperfect world. He does this with an entire, wholehearted sincerity that feels both courageous and old-fashioned; courageous in part because it’s old-fashioned, because his sincerity makes him such an easy target for snarky disparagement. Armstrong does a brilliant job of pointing out how shit everything is; Sorkin tries to tell us how, if we really try, we might be able to make things a little bit less shit. The second of these has always been a thankless task.

Armstrong has made no public comment on Sorkin (although it’s rumoured that Sorkin was a massive fan of Succession). But Sorkin’s good standing among the wider group of broadly liberal/lefty British Gen X cynics — including those in The Metropolitan household — is quite a feat, when you think about it. We grew up during the Cold War under the Reagan—Thatcher double-act; we spent our childhoods and teenage years disparaging the US and feeling furious that our government was holding the school bully’s coat. And yet Sorkin has persuaded millions of us to spend hours in the company of American people who valorise patriotism, nationalism, militarism, duty, the White House, the Marine Corps and boring old liberal Western democracy. You might call it witchcraft. I call it talent.

If you’re new to our Sorkin season, here’s where we started - in media res, as Sorkin himself so often does.

Steve Jobs shows us three moments in the life of the late tech entrepreneur and Apple legend Steve Jobs (played by Michael Fassbender). Each moment falls just before a product launch: for the Apple Mac in 1984, the NeXT computer in 1988, and the iMac in 1998. As he prepares for his big moment on stage at each event, Jobs wrangles with his marketing executive and foil Joanna Hoffman (Kate Winslet), his old friend and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak (Seth Rogan), the Apple corporation itself, his erstwhile CEO John Sculley (Jeff Daniels), and most of all his young daughter Lisa (Makenzie Moss/Ripley Sobo/Perla Haney-Jardine).

This piece has taken far too long to write given that we don’t have much to say. We’ve had unbearable Sorkin (Newsroom), and we’ve had stone-cold brilliant Sorkin (Season 2 of The West Wing, obvs). But we weren’t prepared for wholly unmemorable Sorkin. Steve Jobs feels like a Ron Howard film (and we don’t mean Apollo 13); it’s well made, well performed and just, well, fine.

Jobs ought to have worked. It was the third Sorkin film in a row to focus on a difficult man changing the world, and the previous two came out great. The Social Network is the story of a man who has a difficult relationship with relationships, and who changes the way we all relate to each other. Moneyball tells the story of a man with a difficult relationship with baseball, and who changes the way everyone plays baseball. Jobs is the story of a man who has a difficult relationship with his family, and who changes the way we use computers.

Wait, what?

Jobs asks which thing Steve Jobs loved more: his daughter, Lisa, or Apple Computers. Sorkin evidently chose the three product launches in the film to coincide with three key moments in Jobs’s relationship with Lisa. (They sure as hell aren’t the three most technologically significant Apple/Jobs launches; the iPhone was launched years after the film ends.)

• Act One has Jobs publicly denying paternity of six-year-old Lisa just before launching the Apple Mac. The Mac was the personal computer Jobs took over after he was booted from his pet project: a computer codenamed ‘Lisa’. Jobs maintains that the name is a coincidence.

• Act Two sees nine-year-old Lisa reconciled with her father after he has been fired from Apple.

• Act Three has Lisa in her early 20s, enduring a semi-hostile relationship with Jobs who is now back at Apple and about to launch the iMac.

Indeed, Sorkin called Lisa the ‘heroine of the film’.

So OK, at heart this film is about Jobs’s relationship with Lisa. That could be interesting, right?

Read more

Welcome back to February’s instalment of this ongoing and remarkably long series, in which we re-watch the complete works of Aaron Sorkin in timeline order. (You can find earlier entries here.)

One thing we’re beginning to understand about Sorkin is that he is incredibly inconsistent. He is equally capable of brilliance and blah, transcendence and toss, perfection and poopypants. So, as Aaron would say: what kind of a month has it been?

It’s been the kind of month that makes us question not only the worth of this enterprise but also the meanings of words, the directionality of time, and everything in our lives that led us to this point.

Anyway, let’s get this over with.

The Newsroom is about a team of TV news journalists working on a nightly news/magazine show. It was more successful than Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, but that’s not saying much. Each of its three seasons had fewer episodes and viewers than the one before.

As is the way with these shows in the US, the fictional show - called News Night — is highly editorialised and revolves around a blowhard anchor who hands down his personal opinions on tablets of stone. To Brits (and probably to most Europeans) these American news anchors seem to suffer from an absurd misunderstanding of their own significance, like a suburban Hohenzollern or a PE teacher. Sorkin, though, wants us to take their importance as read; the opening title sequence is a tasteful paean to Walter Cronkite and all those other American mid-century news-reading guys.

Sorkin, who exerted an iron control over a small writers’ room, used real news stories within his scripts. News Night’s fictional and deeply revisionist ‘coverage’ of big and often tragic events (such as the Boston Marathon bombing, the Deepwater Horizon disaster and the 2012 presidential election) is presented as being better, stronger and more courageous than the coverage that was produced in real life. Unsurprisingly, this infuriated every single person working in news journalism in the US. Well, we say ‘unsurprisingly’; Sorkin was surprised by it – which is a measure of how odd he is, frankly – and later said he regretted it.

At the beginning of The Newsroom, the News Night anchor Will McAvoy (Jeff Daniels) decides that everything is going to change. He no longer wants to sit in the big boy chair spouting pabulum and reading corporate press releases and giving politicians an easy ride. (This rather raises the question of why he’d been doing all of that in the first place, but whatever.) McAvoy resolves that he’s going to re-set News Night by simply – and you’re going to want to sit down for this, because it’s going to blow your mind – telling the truth and doing journalism.

His resolution is tested by scheming network execs, uncomprehending viewers, and most of all by the hiring of his complicated ex (Emily Mortimer) as producer. Supported by a superannuated executive gnome (Sam Waterson being weird) and a newsroom full of highly photogenic production staff, can News Night overcome the odds and make America righteous again?

Muuuuuum! Aaron Sorkin has made his TV show again!

So here’s an admission. This time, we didn’t watch all of Aaron Sorkin’s TV show. We’ve watched it once (The West Wing); we’ve watched it twice (Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip); but The Newsroom proved a show too far. Third time unlucky. We watched all of season one, skipped season two, got three episodes into season three, and bailed. So maybe the last three episodes were great! But we wouldn’t put any money on it. Any money at all.

Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip begins with the aging show runner having an on-air screaming fit. The Newsroom begins with anchorman Jeff Daniels yelling at a lecture theatre full of cowed teenagers. Both are blatant rip-offs of Network (1976), in which newsreader Howard Beale has a meltdown on air, railing against contemporary media and morals. In all three, the self-righteous tantrum turns the successful rich guy into an even bigger star. Because who doesn’t enjoy it when an ill-disciplined, powerful man loses his temper? Everyone loves that shit!

Network, however, is a dark satire; it ends with Beale being assassinated for ratings. The Newsroom is… not a satire. (Sorkin is capable of being satirical, but only about things such as ‘young people’ and ‘the internet’.) His ranting Boomer guys are intended to be inspiring, like a black-and-white photo of The Beatles on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine.

The Newsroom asks viewers to believe that a studio full of journalists will be inspired to new professional heights by angry dad McAvoy and his emotionally incontinent producer, MacKenzie McHale (Mortimer). (Who on Earth is called MacKenzie McHale? It sounds like pleurisy.) And maybe there is a universe in which we could have gone along with that premise. But in this universe, The Newsroom’s defects prove insurmountable.

Read more

Also worth noting, if you’re a fan of elegant and intelligent non-fiction: the film is a narrative adaptation of a book of the same title, which turned the author Michael Lewis into a publishing supernova.

Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) is the hard-luck manager of the failing baseball team The Oakland Athletics. Then he stumbles across Peter Brand (Jonah Hill) and discovers the concept of ‘sabermetrics’. Heart, vibes and mystique are out; marginal gains identified by hard data are in. This approach puts him in conflict with the team manager Art Howe (Philip Seymour Hoffman) but eventually it pays off, giving the Oakland As a record-winning streak of 20 games.

Coming onto Moneyball (2011), Aaron Sorkin was presented with a problem similar to the one Jane Austen gave herself in Persuasion: how can you, as a master of dialogue, write a character who refuses to talk?

Brad Pitt’s Billy Beane is a laconic man. Wounded and embattled, his response is to shut himself away, allowing no ingress to anyone else. ‘It’s a problem you think we need to explain ourselves,’ he says to his data nerd Peter Brand. ‘Don’t. To anyone.’ He insists on not talking to his players and starts all business meetings with the same bland reassurances. He tells no one anything. All of his advice to Brand is about shutting up and letting other people do the talking. ‘Once you get the answer you want, hang up.’

The film’s visual language picks up on this reticence and emphasises Beane’s solitude. Bennet Miller’s direction is full of empty rooms and empty frames: Brad Pitt alone in a deserted stadium, Brad Pitt driving alone at night through the deserted Californian hinterlands. It even shuts out baseball itself; Beane never watches the games, believing he will jinx them if he’s there, and the film shows us only a very little more. The space that would otherwise be occupied by actors pretending to play a game of professional baseball is instead a pixelated montage of grainy TV footage, accompanied by an abstract soundscape of commentary, punditry and call-in shows.

This reserve goes right to the heart of the film’s storytelling, its very structure. I am English and, as a result of my experiences at school, pathologically uninterested in sport. I care even less than I know about baseball. And yet Moneyball is one of my comfort movies, because the film isn’t really about baseball; at least, it’s not about how to win a baseball game. Similarly, the plot premise revolves around the crunching of statistics; this wouldn’t make a very interesting film, so Sorkin totally ignores it. We never have the ‘sabermetrics’ explained to us; we never have the strategy, tournament structure or anything about baseball explained to us. We are shown emotional truths, not obfuscatory facts.

There’s a great example of this in the crucial scene in which Beane first introduces his new method to his team of very traditional talent scouts. The scouts all use comprehensible language, speaking in holistic rather than specific terms: ‘he has a good body for baseball’. But Beane doesn’t care about any of that. All he cares about is whether the player ‘gets on base’. This is repeated over and over again. I have no idea what ‘getting on base’ is, or why it should be important, or why you might not usually worry about it, but it doesn’t matter. All that matters is that I understand the underlying dynamic: the battle between art and data, between tradition and innovation.

You could help The Metropolitan to recruit our own rag-tag band of unlikely heroes by acting as our scout and referring a friend.

Refer a friend

For a film about innovation, though, Moneyball is remarkably traditional. It follows a strict Hollywood three-act structure; the third act even begins with a training montage in which Beane finally loosens up and talks to his players. It is certainly not averse to a big clunking metaphor, either. As Peter Brand arrives at the club he walks past big posters of now-poached star players being taken down. The old world is falling as the new one shuffles in.

The film knows that it is following some well-established pathways and even plays it for laughs. Shots of scrolling spreadsheets are scored by the sort of triumphal music that might usually soundtrack a winning game, only to deflate into the banal office realities of sitting and staring at a screen. It has to do all this tradition, though, because it's dealing with some very weird, nerdy material. Just as ‘Jabberwocky’ makes complete sense even though half of the words are made up, the predictable format helps us understand why these strange details are important by slotting them into a familiar narrative shape.

That shape is what gets called ‘competence porn’, the satisfying vision of able people doing clever things competently. This is why this movie is one of my comfort watches. It tells a story of success that comes not through outrageous talent or fate or being The Chosen One, but through intelligence and a lot of hard work. It’s nice to have a dream.

But then, in many respects, the film, as a creative product is something of a piece of ‘competence porn’ itself.

Read more

And now our Sorkin watch-along moves from the TV Hollywood of Studio 60 back to the actual, film-making Hollywood for a bit, starting with Charlie Wilson’s War. The last Sorkin scripted film we covered was The American President - you better hope that this is better than that (spoiler: it very much is)

It’s the early 1980s, and ‘Good Time’ Charlie Wilson (Tom Hanks), a Democrat Congressman from Texas well known for his playboy lifestyle, is becoming obsessed with the dangers posed by the Russian invasion of Afghanistan. Encouraged by Christian socialite and campaigner Joanne Herring (Julia Roberts), he teams up with maverick CIA agent Gust Avrakotos (Philip Seymour Hoffman) to mount a campaign of funding and arms supplies that help the mujahideen to defeat the Red Army and hasten the collapse of the Soviet Union (and then, much later, drive some different and literally catastrophic outcomes for the US).

As Charlie Wilson’s War opens, Charlie Wilson (Tom Hanks) is sitting in a hot tub with a gaggle of strippers when he catches a glimpse of a TV news report about the Russian invasion of Afghanistan. It is this report that piques his interest and kicks off the plot. However, Wilson is not supposed to be watching TV; he is supposed to be paying attention to his companion, one-time Miss Georgia and Playboy cover model Liz Wickersham. Wickersham is the proposed lead in an as-yet uncommissioned TV soap series, and Wilson has been brought on board to help provide ballast for her meetings with producers. This proposed soap is described by one of its backers as ‘Dallas, but set in Washington DC’.

You'd be forgiven for suspecting that Aaron Sorkin had invented this detail, because it sounds like an elevator pitch for an ‘80s version of The West Wing. But it wasn't an invention: Wilson really had been involved in an (unsuccessful) effort to get this show off the ground. It was just another absolutely real thing that happened in the amazing, bizarre and highly consequential life of Charles Nesbitt Wilson (who died in 2010).

You too could be amazing, bizarre and highly consequential by giving someone a subscription to The Metropolitan

Give a gift subscription

It’s characteristic of Sorkin that he picked up on this detail and used it to colourise Charlie Wilson’s War, suffusing an unglamorous story – weapons, funding committees, congressional horse-trading, global war – with all the styling and affect of an ‘80s soap. The film is all big hair, big gestures and big people; playboy congressmen, international businessmen, millionaire socialites and colourful spies.

Mike Nichols, in his last film, handles the Dallas vibe with customary flair. One bravura scene centres around two competing high-level conversations in Wilson’s Congressional office; a bevy of young female aides rush in and out with new information, while CIA agent Gust Avrakotos (Philip Seymour Hoffman, brilliant as usual) rushes out and back in, contrary-wise, and Sorkin’s nimble, cross-cutting dialogue veers back and forth. It’s like a top-tier production of an Alan Ayckbourn farce. One of the great joys of this film is hearing Sorkin’s dialogue in the mouths of movie stars of the wattage of Hanks, Roberts and Hoffman. They have not gone through The West Wing training school and don’t fall into the rote Joshua Malina breathless patter. They all turn it to their own, deliberate ends; they reinterpret Sorkin’s familiar rhythms, and fashion them into something completely different. It’s a terrific script and the cast take all the opportunities they can to really make it dance.

Read more

After looking at sports broadcasting with Sports Night and presidential politics with The West Wing, in Studio 60 Sorkin takes us to another fabled…

Read more

Read more

Read more

Read more

We were moaning last time ab…

Read more

Read more

Read more

Instead, we’re going to introduce extra monthly emails for paid subscribers. Initially at least, these are going to be multi-part series that should lend themselves to watchalongs. The first series will look at the screen works of Aaron Sorkin in timeline order, beginning with the 1992 film A Few Good Men, carrying on through The American President, Sports Night, Moneyball and Charlie Wilson’s War, and bringing it up to date with The Trial of the Chicago 7 and Being The Ricardos. We’re not going to include The West Wing though, because honestly, it’s been done to death. (Funny joke! Of course we’ll be doing The West Wing!)

If you’re excited to pedeconference with us, please head to the buttons below to upgrade your subscription in time for the first paywalled email, which should hit in early April. If not, don’t worry: this email – like all our Saturday emails from now on! – is free for everyone.

The Social Network (2010)

At Harvard in 2003, a small group of nerds led by Mark Zuckerberg come up with the idea for a social networking site. Initially called ‘TheFacebook’, the site’s sudden global success exposes Mark’s flaws and opens him up to legal challenges from the people he left behind.

When The Social Network first came out a lot of commentary focused on its opening scene, a five-minute two-hander between the young Mark (Jesse Eisenberg) and his girlfriend Erica (Rooney Mara). It hurls us into the plot, establishes character notes, does some exposition and sets up the movie’s main themes. It uses about three camera angles, and the two actors barely move. It’s just eight pages of dialogue, compressed and heated and polished to a diamond finish. It says a lot about Aaron Sorkin — not all of it entirely positive — that when he wrote the opening scene of a movie about a tech company, he came up with this. 

These first few lines are heard while the Columbia Studios ident is still on the screen; for a couple of seconds, The Social Network is a radio play. It’s as though Sorkin is so desperate for the talking to start that he crashes the titles. Either that or the director, David Fincher, is visibly admitting defeat.

Then the photography fades up to accompany the dialogue, and the viewer is dropped abruptly into the middle of a conversation in a busy student bar. Mark Zuckerberg, a nineteen-year-old student at Harvard, is talking to his girlfriend Erica. They are talking really fast.

It’s become fairly unusual for movie screenwriters to be overwhelmingly famous for their writing alone. Charlie Kaufman aside, the other well-known contemporary screenwriters — Tarantino, Woody Allen, James Cameron, the Coen brothers, Paul Thomas Andersen, Taika Waititi, Wes Anderson, why are these all men? — tend also to direct.

The fact that Sorkin isn’t thought of as a director — despite directing his more recent films — is the inevitable result of his writing: both that his style is so distinctive, and that it doesn’t leave directors much to do. Sorkin himself has copped to this, admitting that he writes for a visual medium but tends to only use it aurally. I don’t care. I’m a very non-visual person, and I actively prefer films that prioritise dialogue. I’ve never understood why film buffs think this is illegitimate. You all wibble on about intensely boring films with two lines of dialogue per hour, and I don’t try to get you chucked out of the multiplex. 

If you like the opening scene of The Social Network you’re going to love the rest. If you don’t like it, switch it off right now and save yourself the irritation. They’re probably doing an Ozu season at the BFI.

This is typical of the dialogue style for which Sorkin has become famous: intense and overlapping, with lines that repeat and splinter until they create polyphonic harmonies, like a jacked-up mediaeval motet.

Because a lot of his dialogue sounds like this, Sorkin’s characters tend to merge into each other. All his major characters are high-functioning oddities with titanic egos. They all have a habit of dropping weird little factoids at will, as though they had memorised the contents of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, including the supplementary index volume. You could take any number of speeches from The West Wing and put them in a different character’s mouth; it would have no impact on the plot at all. (Toby and Josh are exactly the same person; it’s just that one of him is 20 years older than the other.)

Sorkin uses this scene to establish our understanding of Mark Zuckerberg. It tells us that Mark can’t listen to other people, that he is casually boorish, and that his narrow-focus intelligence makes it difficult for him to have functional human relationships. But 90% of these lines are signature Sorkin yak-yak that could work for any of his characters.

Sorkin has got better at delineating personality over the years, and the major characters in The Social Network are at least distinguishable from each other. But fundamentally, the shape and sound of the dialogue is always the same.

Isn’t it fabulous?

It would have been a lot more straightforward to have Erica say ‘yes’ here, so Sorkin has her say ‘no’ instead. He uses these little counterintuitive flicks a lot in his dialogue. They trip up the viewer, just a little bit; they feel spontaneous, like a real conversation rather than a script. They also refocus our attention, meaning he can use them to underscore character strokes. Suddenly we understand Erica as someone who speaks honestly as a way of building trusting relationships. Mark uses speech to dominate.

I want you to consider two possibilities here:

1. Aaron Sorkin has really met young women who fantasise about cowboys, an archetype dating from the first half of the twentieth century; or

2. Aaron Sorkin cannot do pop culture references to save his life.

Sorkin is catastrophically uncool. His signature putty-coloured slacks and boxy shirts make him look like a mid-level executive from 1998 who’s really excited to bring you up to speed on AOL’s new browser functionality. His music taste is straight outta the CD changer on a Vauxhall Corsa. He is probably the only person who could make it uncool to be arrested at Hollywood airport while carrying crack.

I kind of love him for this; it’s a sign that he instinctively resists external pressures. It’s hard to be a good writer if you give a lot of weight to other people’s opinions.

We Brits now need to take a short break to explain some things to ourselves. (In an ideal world we would have Donna for this bit.) 

Final clubs are, as far as I can make out, Harvard things; significantly, given the themes of this film, they are described by Harvard itself as ‘social organisations’. They seem to be a bit like the Bullingdon Club at Oxford (another context in which one might use the phrase ‘punch the pork’); highly prized, exclusive, single-sex clubs that revolve around privilege, status, and behaving like a wanker. They are subtly different from fraternities and sororities, but don’t ask me how because I don’t know what those are either. Whatever: in the hypoxic atmosphere of Harvard, final clubs are the deliberately-restricted means by which you distinguish yourself as the toppermost of the poppermost. 

I had to Google all that because Sorkin never really explains it, although later scenes in the film give you the general jist. The refusal to explain the basics is one of his signature moves. Viewers who can follow his insider references are flattered. This is an aspect of what some people perceive as Sorkin’s intellectual self-satisfaction, and it provokes a cellular level of irritation, like the urge to smack a humourless kid who keeps putting their hand up in class. He also stands accused of ponderously explaining that Good things are Good and Bad things are Bad, and expecting to get a medal for it. He is, essentially, the Bono of screenwriting.

If that’s how you experience him, fair enough; horses for courses. But the density of information, and the speed with which it arrives, is why his fans can rewatch Sorkin’s work many times before they exhaust its possibilities. When I first saw this scene I barely noticed that the conversation was about final clubs. All I really gleaned was that Mark got dumped by a smart, pretty girl. I only began to work out the rest of it out on subsequent viewings.

Also: he’s not humourless. That bit is just wrong. He writes good gags. There are lots of them in this film.

The Social Network was, I think, Sorkin’s first serious attempt to occasionally think about the world from a woman’s point of view. (We’ll discuss this more when we get onto The West Wing.) It’s not a woman-heavy film, to put it mildly, and it thoroughly fails the Bechdel test. But it signals a positional shift in Sorkin’s work, a willingness to let his female characters hold their own mic. The concern that Erica voices here — that the final clubs treat young women like meat — is later explicitly shown to be true. More proximally, as far as Erica is concerned, after this conversation Mark will try to exorcise his feelings by posting misogynist remarks about her online.

Sorkin proposes that Mark’s idea for Facebook is driven by a misogynist pathology, one that sees young women as fleshy symbols of male status, and infuriating sexual gatekeepers. Freshly dumped and furious, Mark spots the Web’s compulsive potential for widening sexual opportunities and exploiting sexual longing; he literally encodes the denaturing of human relationships.

The friendship and fall-out between Mark and Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield) is the emotional engine of The Social Network. It’s set up here in a few sentences that you barely notice because they slot so smoothly into the profile of the conversation. The money that Mark is talking about will provide crucial seed capital for Facebook. And (spoiler!) Mark’s assumption that Eduardo won’t be able to get into a final club is going to turn out to be wrong. This will have significant consequences. 

There is a lot of stuff in The Social Network about scarcity, status and value. All through this scene Mark makes explicit connections between scarcity and status, and between status and fulfilment. By initially restricting Facebook to students at the top US universities (and later, in the UK, to Oxbridge) he tries to build Facebook’s value by emphasising status and engineering scarcity. He is trying to render human relationships as algorithms. He recognises that popularity is rare, and tends to confer status; he mistakenly assumes that you must be able to run the equation backwards, and derive status and popularity from exclusivity.

At the same time, he’s continually misjudging value; he keeps dumping the wrong stock. He trashes things — Erica’s interest, Eduardo’s friendship — in ways that turn out to be very costly. Mark thinks that Eduardo is a big dumb lunk attached to a useful bag of cash. He attaches no value to the things that make Eduardo appealing to other people: friendliness, empathy, loyalty, good humour. He thinks of social status as a software engineering problem; he is looking for a way to hack the entry codes. He establishes an epoch-defining business because he thinks it will increase his social desirability. Instead, it chaotically instrumentalises and supercharges dynamics that he is peculiarly unable to comprehend. 

Now: is this a fair characterisation of Zuckerberg? Does it tell us anything genuinely interesting about how Facebook was founded? Probably not. I love Sorkin, but he has all the classic symptoms of a Boomer technophobe who wishes that Tim Berners-Lee had gone into banking, or under a bus. (He hates social media. There’s a dreadful West Wing subplot involving Josh’s abusively unhinged fan website, ‘Lemon Lyman’; it’s telling that Sorkin doesn’t know such a site would have had a much better name.)

Throughout The Social Network Sorkin is pointing at Mark Zuckerberg and shouting ‘Nobody likes you! You’re a weird nerd!’ (Public social shaming, ejection from the in-group, is the punishment that Sorkin reserves for the characters he dislikes most. Given the professed morality of this film, this is ironic.) There is also some really odd stuff in the film about the supposedly notable phenomenon of Asian-American women getting together with Jewish-American men, which is cringy and legitimately insulting to Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan.

Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s COO, stood up during a private pre-release screening and shouted ‘How can you do this to a kid?’ You kind of know what she means, even though — as Sorkin points out – Zuck was 26 at the time. The actual real-life Zuckerberg doesn’t come off like a sparkling conversationalist, sure, but he seems to have a settled senior team — which is not nothing, in the tech founder world — and a happy and stable marriage. These outcomes make no sense if you believe Sorkin’s account of him.

(If not Zuckerberg, who is Sorkin writing about? Who is this figure at the centre of A Social Network? A highly driven, talented man whose pursues his vision with monomaniacal intent until it goes global. A man who builds a career rooted in human communication while having a reputation for being a little difficult, inter-personally-wise. A man who tries to impose order on meat-space, and occasionally seeks sanctuary from it in intense brainwork, or perhaps mood-altering substances. A man who compulsively displays his own cleverness, but whose self-confidence seems to be brittle; who uses his facility with words to dominate; who has never been invited to the cool kids’ table. A man who is endlessly swatting away criticism from talentless nobodies on the internet (hi!). Whoever this guy is, I hope he’s OK, because Aaron Sorkin sure seems to want to kick him down a long flight of stairs.)

I don’t think The Social Network is literally about Facebook. This is perverse, because everything Sorkin has ever said about it indicates that he wrote it literally about Facebook. I don’t think Sorkin understands Mark Zuckerberg, and I don’t think he understands the internet. But he’s so goddamned talented, and so interested in social dynamics, that he’s written a different film altogether, perhaps by mistake: a fable about human nature and status and misunderstanding and youth and longing and unintended consequences, and the multiple meanings of the phrase ‘social network’.

‘Just because something’s trite, doesn’t make it any less true’. 

As the New York Times says, ‘Sorkin is a master of big speeches… of earnest mansplaining and liberal wishful thinking.’ (The word ‘earnest’ is important in that sentence.)  His writing is explicitly deployed as advocacy. He brings everything back to the big themes — Patriotism, Morality, Responsibility, Right ‘n’ Wrong, the State of the World and the Culture — and he wholeheartedly valorises liberal democracy.

Some people find this icky and embarrassing. But you know what? Liberal democracy is the only governmental model worth a damn in human history. Given the state of everything <gestures> maybe we need to say this stuff out loud more often. Democracy is good. The rule of law and the predictable operation of encoded restraints? Good. Being clever and competent and hard-working and responsible? Good. Treating other people, including your opponents, with respect? Good (although Mark Zuckerberg would be justified in rolling his eyes at this point.) Serious, consensual, incremental government by intelligent, grown-up people? Sign. Me. Up. 

Sorkin’s style is highly flavoured and not to everyone’s taste. He can be formulaic and syrupy, and inaccurate. Sometimes (see Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip) he misfires. You might prefer some of the thousands of writers who problematise liberal democracy and point out its flaws. (I too think that some of them are great, although I can’t resist pointing out that their work is only possible because we live in a liberal democracy.) All cool. And maybe you think liberal democracy doesn’t need a Poet Laureate. But I think maybe it does. And Sorkin is it. 

Rooney Mara is on screen for five minutes in this two-hour film, and she really packs a punch. But also, Sorkin’s decision to put this scene right upfront is, again, counterintuitive. The decision that Erica makes at the end of this scene sets the rest of the plot in motion, but this is (almost) the last time we see her face.

Sorkin’s screenplays orbit around such narrative difficulties, gaps or mysteries, like Welles’s ‘Rosebud’ in Citizen Kane. We’re dropped into The West Wing two years into Barlet’s first term of office, and find out nothing about the epic backstory until the second season. Any number of West Wing episodes turn on withheld pieces of information. There’s a compelling reason why defence attorney William Kunstler refuses to put the nice, clean, jury-friendly Tom Hayden on the stand in The Trial of the Chicago 7, but we don’t find out what it is until the very end. 

Mysteries are fairly standard mechanisms in screenplays, but you usually know there’s a mystery and you’re actively waiting for it to be resolved. Sorkin does something different: he establishes a core of dark matter, a gravitational tug on the viewer’s intuition, and then he waits for his moment. What’s astonishing about Sorkin is the delicacy with which he sets these things up, and the beautiful sudden symmetry that he reveals, almost always right at the end, leaving you pinned in your seat as the credits roll. The pay-offs are deliriously satisfying.

In The Social Network there’s a young lawyer (played by Rashida Jones) who keeps having apparently inane chats with Mark. Is she trying to seduce him? All through the film you think this is a cute little sub-plot. In the closing moments Sorkin uses it to tear the roof off, and take us right back to the beginning. 

Wait. Erica is supposed to be of indeterminate attractiveness? This Erica? This young woman with the ballerina bone structure and the glossy hair and the beautiful eyes? Hollywood really is a crazy-making place.

Pay-off.

For more social networking, why not try our piece on the weird conjunction between secondary fantasy worlds and online communities?

At some point in the summer of 1987, my girlfriend and I were trying to decide what film to go and see. One movie in particular had caught my eye but her father - who was a film critic for the Times - persuaded us that it wasn’t worth it. He recommended Spielberg’s adaptation of J. G.Ballard’s Empire of the Sun, which made for a very weird date.

I didn’t get to see the film I had wanted to see that afternoon until a year later, in 1988, which is when I found out just how wrong her father had been. But more on that later.

The Doctor Who story Remembrance of the Daleks was broadcast in October 1988, almost exactly 25 years after the very first episode had been broadcast in November 1963. And Remembrance of the Daleks returns to the setting of that first episode: Coal Hill School, in the East End of London, in 1963. (In the background of one scene, a TV set appears to be about to announce a new BBC sci-fi series before someone turns it off.)

1963 had been the year not only of the Beatles and sex but also, as Philip Larkin mysteriously failed to point out, Dalekmania. Doctor Who was a massive hit for the BBC, and as much part of the pop cultural explosion of the early ‘60s as ‘Love Me Do’ and allowing your servants to read filthy books.

In 1980 there was a sense that Britain might finally achieve escape velocity from the groovational pull of the Swinging Sixties, via Punk, synthesisers and New Romance. But it didn’t happen. Throughout the ‘80s the influence of the ‘60s was everywhere, from Marvin Gaye songs in jeans ads to films about the Vietnam War. Every year was some kind of Boomer twenty-year anniversary; the whole decade was one long midlife crisis. Gen X childhoods were full of reruns of Thunderbirds and The Monkees, and our adolescence haunted by reanimated rock dinosaurs. When Remembrance of the Daleks aired in 1988 The Hollies were number two in the charts with ‘He Ain’t Heavy (He’s My Brother)’. The cinemas were showing Buster, a film about the 1963 Great Train Robbery. (Apparently even the criminals had been better in the ‘60s.) 1988 also saw the publication of Mark Lewisohn’s exhaustive The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions, which details every single moment each of the Fab Four spent in a studio, what they recorded there, who playing mellotron on it, and what John and Paul were bickering about that day. I even subscribed, at one point, to a magazine called Idols, a journal of ‘60s pop culture, which dealt in profiles of Jim Morrison and exhaustive episode breakdowns of Linda Thorson-era Avengers.

This all culminated in 1988 with The Second Summer of Love, a cosplay 1968 but with house music and MDMA rather than Jefferson Airplane and LSD. Even the symbolism - ‘acid’ house and the smiley face logo, tie-die and floppy hats - was full of ‘60s references. The music might have been hypermodern cyberpunk, but the ‘60s myth was inescapable.

In the summer of 1988, I finally got to see that film.

I was working in London and living in squalor. The entire sink had gone rotten. There were things living in there. Matter. We were drifting into the arena of the unwell. One evening my friend returned with meat - the first solid thing to pass my lips in sixty hours - and announced that there was a film on that I had to see.

Some of you will already have figured out what it was.

Read more