“Crime is disease”: Contamination of Media in BBC Sherlock

Abstract

This paper takes as its starting point the conceptual metaphor “crime is disease” as suggested by George Lakoff in order to advance a new reading of the BBC crime drama television series Sherlock (2010- ) based on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes detective stories.

Among over 200 film versions of Sherlock Holmes, the 2010 Masterpiece version, created by Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss, remediated the Victorian detective stories visualising Sherlock’s deductive reasoning on screen. Defined as “flagrantly unfaithful to the original in some respects” and “wonderfully loyal to [the original]” (Sutcliffe 2010), Sherlock appears to be the perfect depiction of Holmes for our times. I intend to track through these references and look at the issues – the remediation of Victorian crime from page to screen, the metamorphosis of Holmes’s character, adapting techniques in crime scenes, etc – which they raise.

But my central purpose will be to re-read Sherlock from a subtitling perspective. I will analyse the linguistics of subtitling and text-reduction shifts from a cognitive perspective in order to demonstrate that crime may be conceptualised in subtitling and that Doyle’s detective stories are reproduced faithfully by audio-visual media. Through dialogues, I suggest, subtitling may be considered as a form of deduction in audio-visual crime fiction.