Why does Sherlock lie to himself about finding out John’s middle name? When he’s talking to MP Tessa, he has no reason to say “took him ages to confide in me” ( we as the viewers see him with the birth certificate, confirming John didn’t tell him.)
loudest-subtext-in-television-d:
Mostly I think it’s just that Sherlock doesn’t have any concept of John having privacy or being a separate person from him. Sherlock doesn’t know who he is anymore in series three once John doesn’t live with him: he doesn’t know what it means to be Sherlock Holmes, and he doesn’t remember what his international reputation was for. One of the Mayfly Man mirroring lines is the fact that the Mayfly Man moves into a man’s home and “steals his identity.” John lives in Sherlock’s head even when John leaves the flat; Sherlock keeps talking to him. It’s suggested in The Empty Hearse that Sherlock probably had John’s voice in his head the whole 2 years he was gone. Then Sherlock feels entitled to John’s laptop and guesses his passwords and reads his e-mails to his girlfriends and apparently checks his browsing history for porn.
In short, I think that some part of Sherlock really feels like John has willingly told him these things if he leaves all this stuff out where Sherlock can easily — for Sherlock — get to it. To someone like Sherlock, that’s as good as “confiding” something. And as far as Sherlock is concerned, John is a part of him.
I ended up partly addressing the same incident in this post, too, about why Sherlock says “years” when it couldn’t have been… here is the excerpt:
“In TSoT Sherlock says it took John “years to confide in me” about his middle name, but we already know this statement is heavily colored by Sherlock’s perception of the situation because John didn’t ‘confide’ in him at all: Sherlock had to get his birth certificate. What felt like years to Sherlock was in actuality between April 1st (Sherlock doesn’t get obsessed with John and start smoking until after TGG because of the pool scene, but before Irene Adler) and September 15th. Five and a half months felt like “years” to Sherlock because that’s how bad he had it for John. He looks back on the memory and thinks, ‘Oh my GOD I didn’t know FOREVER and EVER and like YEARS LATER I FINALLY found out it was Hamish!’ And duh, obviously Sherlock had it crazy-bad if he was obsessing over something as trivial as John’s middle name.”
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In the original shooting scene when Mary shoots Sherlock she then spins around and points her gun at Magnussen. It freezes like this for the rest of the mind palace section so we have plenty of opportunities to see that she is clearly like this:
Later, when Sherlock is…
I’m still not over HLV, so have some more meta
(Once again, I am certain I am far from the first to mention this, but never mind. Here are my thoughts)
I’ve been thinking about the framing of shots in Sherlock a lot lately, then I got thinking about this scene. Look at that for a sec.
John’s hilarious reactions and the just plain bizzare sight of Sherlock kissing a woman aside, check out the framing of the shots with Sherlock and Janine. Two different angles, and in both of them Janine is blocking out John. She is almost perfectly filling the space where he would otherwise be in those shots (meaning that in a two-dimensional sense Sherlock’s line of sight is matched to where John is).
In the first, she is obstructing him and filling in his space (yes, double meanings) plus bonus horns over her head.
In the second, not only is she doing this but she’s kissing Sherlock as well. Meanwhile Sherlock has his eyes closed (even screwed shut) and is barely responding. He doesn’t tilt his head or move it forwards/backwards aside from the force of Janine’s kiss moving him, so his and John’s head’s remain aligned. If Janine wasn’t there, John’s outline would be touching Sherlock’s. If John were in focus there would almost be a forced perspective whereby they would appear to be face to face (much like the shot in TEH where we are led to believe Sherlock and Mycroft are playing chess).
You may say this is unintentional but framing is super important and almost always deliberate (this is true in all visual art forms). I mean John doesn’t need to be there really. He could do what I imaging most people would do if their best friend started making out with someone which is leave, go make a cup of tea, pretend to be immersed in a magazine or something. They could have shot this from the other way around so that the camera was pointing towards the stairs, leading on to Janine’s immediate departure. But no, they shot it with John obstructed, with the audience made aware that he is there, but we can’t see him. With Sherlock (who we are led to believe has just bathed in front of this woman and was fine with her sitting in his lap) making the bare minimum effort to respond to her kissing him while his best friend is in the room.
In summary, Janine is in John’s place, physically and metaphorically, and Sherlock knows it.
Green With Envy: John & The Women in Sherlock’s Bedroom
I was working on my I’m going to watch Sherlock S3 in one sitting liveblogging when I noticed something in HLV: We all talk about the look on John’s face during the scene when he discovers Janine and she joins Sherlock in the bath and how it just screams jealousy. He’s shocked too, but there’s just so much raw jealousy there it’s hard to miss. In fact, I can’t not see jealousy when I watch these scenes and do you know why? It’s not just because of the look on John’s face. It’s because of all the fucking green in these shots.
