The Martian, Sherlock Holmes, and why we love competence porn
Clever characters who can weasel their way out of any situation go back to the earliest days of western literature, when ancient Greek hero Ulysses, star of the Odyssey, outsmarted the cyclops and figured out how to listen to the sirens’ song without killing himself. In the east, the character Sun Wukong (AKA the Monkey King) plays a similar role, using his trickster cunning to keep the bad guys down. Indeed, most competence porn heroes have an element of the Monkey King’s trickster ways—they may use logic to defeat death, but they’ll tell a few jokes and pull a few beards along the way.
Probably the most important figure in competence porn today is Sherlock Holmes, a character who was born during at the height of scientific industrialism in the nineteenth century. Like the heroes who came in his wake, Sherlock is a master of deduction, social engineering, and getting out of traps by using whatever random items happen to be at hand. He’s also a smartass. It’s tough to be the biggest nerd in the room, especially when you have answers to everything. So Sherlock develops a rather dry, sardonic sense of humor to cope—and to mess with his dimmer colleagues.
With Sherlock’s shadow looming large over the genre, it’s no wonder that many of competence porn’s greatest creations are also detectives or problem-solvers of various kinds. In the latter half of the twentieth century, we had a slew of them in Doctor Who, MacGyver, The Equalizer, Prime Suspect, Aliens and of course every James Bond movie ever made. And let’s not forget the 2010s masterpieceBurn Notice, which always had those incredibly cheesy-yet-satisfying voiceovers where Michael Westen explains how to use an old Commodore 64 to hack the traffic system, or a piece of gum to shut down a nuclear power plant. (OK I made those up, but you know what I mean.)
The point is, these are heroes who treat even action-packed fights as intellectual puzzles. And generally, they never miss a chance to deliver a good quip.
I may end up talking about Sherlock’s love life and the nature of the narrative in BBC Sherlock all the time, but this is actually what draws me to Sherlock Holmes as a character, haha. His squishy center is like the frosting, but the competence kink thing was the cake itself for Big Damn Nerd ten year-old me. I still like competent heroes the most, and I daresay so does Moffat, apparently (since Doctor Who is another variant according to this article). No matter the evidence to the contrary, I still believe Sherlock Holmes can solve anything. The badass competent hero thing combined with the squishy center is my kryptonite. In this too he’s not alone (see: Spock in particular), but BBC Sherlock is so addictive to me because it’s about the innate limitations and conflicts of the character as well as the huge transformative potential.
Essentially, to be a ‘competence porn’ star, you have to be a static character in some sense, because (as many of the entries in the genre, like the Hunger Games books, show), if they have too much growth, they start accumulating trauma. And once the character accumulates enough trauma (like Sherlock in Series 3), it becomes difficult for the audience to really believe they’re superhuman. Once that bubble pops, the allure fades for many of the people who were drawn in by the archetype in the first place (as we see with many Sherlock fans leaving).
What I really think is unique about BBC Sherlock, like I said, is that it explores this tension– and in my opinion, the existence of a character arc that serves to increase competence through a trial by fire, eventually integrating emotion into his facade of reason, makes this incarnation absolutely one of a kind. The character is not static, and so has the freedom to grow and reflect various aspects– both the inner conflict and the untapped potential– of the archetype. I always wanted to read stories like that about Spock, like the second to fourth Star Trek movie arc except more in-depth– because I always knew they were possible. I never accepted the idea that this heroic type was limited by their very strength.
I think the most interesting part is when the character who can know everything and do anything faces his limits, and then learns to transcend them. You can think of this character as the perfect human machine: the apotheosis of technophilic humanity. And learning– learning is the biggest thing that humans excel at, the thing that allows our most impressive leaps. Of course– of course I want to see competence porn, now with less character stasis and more learning. This is Sherlock Holmes going back to his roots as Ulysses: the man who was never content to be the smartest one in the room, but was always the most unexpected. Ulysses learned short-term, through a more meandering Hero’s Journey arc; Sherlock improves on this ancient model, and learns long-term tricks. This, then, is how you build a better human.