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Having had time to digest, I’ll say that I like the episode even better now than I did on first viewing, and that I’m currently terrified about episode two.
But the thing that my attention has snagged on is, typical for me, something that has everything to do with language and transcultural flow. As some of you may know, I reblogged the lyrics that are circulating for the song that plays against the backdrop of the restaurant brawl, “Dónde estas, Yolanda.” If you haven’t seen them, they’re here; go look.
To my mind, this. was. brilliant. It takes one very small thing - a switch of the lyrics from Spanish to English - to make the song a wonderfully explicit reflection of everything the subtext of the show has always told us; in that sense, it’s Johnlock hiding in plain sight. Or not ‘sight’, and that’s really the core of its brilliance. In his book Subversive Pleasures: Bakhtin, Cultural Criticism, and Film, Robert Stam writes:
Many cultural commentators…have argued, in different ways, that the Western masculinist imagination is strongly “visualist,” positing cultural facts as things observed or seen rather than heard, transcribed, or invented in dialogue. The Bakhtinian predilection for aural and musical metaphors - voices, intonation, accent, polyphony - argues an overall shift in priority from the visually predominant logical space of modernity (perspective, evidence in empirical science, domination of the gaze) to a ‘postmodern’ space of the vocal (oral ethnography, people’s history, slave narratives), all as ways of restoring voice to the silenced. (p. 19)
Thinking of Gatiss for a moment not as Moffat-aligned fanboy, but as an openly gay writer working in a still-homophobic media industry, the use of this song seems to me a clear subversion of this masculinist visuality; the tempo and styling make it appropriate for an energetic and largely comical sequence, augmenting the image in such a way as to draw attention away from what’s being sung, and the Spanish lyrics further mask the song’s subversiveness. But make no mistake, this is Gatiss speaking loudly and clearly toanyone who is listening. The beauty of it is that it only speaks to those who are listening- the audience that’s already sitting on the margins of the visual, which is to say explicit, text; for the mainstream audience, it is both literally and figuratively invisible, and thus is a BBC prestige adaptation of a literary figure so closely aligned with national identity as to be one of its key cultural calling cards elegantly subverted.
But there’s a little more. Because, as we know, Sherlock is a globally circulating text, officially broadcast in multiple markets and streamed or downloaded in backchannel ways by fans around the world. According to Wikipedia (I know), the number of native Spanish speakers worldwide is greater than native speakers of English, and that’s a whole lot of people out there who are in a position to hear and understand both the lyrics and - if they’re familiar with it - the entirety of the song that plays in the background of the scene.
Imagine, again, how this scene would play were the lyrics in English…
**The music plays intermittently throughout restaurant sequence; the lyrics that are actually heard in the fight scene are these:
Where are you, where are you, Yolanda?
What happened, What happened, Yolanda?
I looked for you, I looked for you, Yolanda
And you’re not there, you’re not there, Yolanda.