Rewatching "Scandal in Belgravia" after Rereading Hayles and Haraway

            The first episode of the second series of Sherlock (“A Scandal in Belgravia”) presents us with a fascinatingly complex character in “the Woman,” Irene Adler. Adler is a highly successful dominatrix in the sex trade, using her skills to attract a very powerful and well-known cliental. The nature of Adler’s cliental and her interactions with them often bring her into dangerous situations, and she takes a number of steps to protect herself from the possibilities, including using her smart phone to store information that might prove useful, including compromising photographs and other items that would allow her to negotiate with potential attempts to harm her.

            Adler is both visible and invisible, operating in a boundary area that both Katherine Hayles and Donna Haraway might find interesting as a sort of liminal identity that involves both real and virtual space, realized through the mediation of technology. She is “visible” in that she has a website which gives her persona a wider circulation among potential clients and curious onlookers. In both virtual and “real” space, Adler’s movements can be tracked; at certain points in the episode, people comment that she can always be found. Given her profession, this is a curious openness about her presence, and more often than not it is a presence that is projected through the digital technologies of websites, smart phone photos, and Twitter. Her “work” on several levels involves an obvious, conscious attempt to use digital visibility first to create a persona that will appeal to a certain cliental, but also to protect her from the potential dangers associated with that cliental.

            She is also invisible. So much of what is known about her is via a controlled and mediated visibility – a created avatar, or perhaps, more aptly, created avatars –and so much of the “real” Woman Adler is hidden. This is metaphorically projected by the shots of Adler constructing a version of herself as she prepares for her first meeting with Sherlock. The camera lingers on her applying makeup, deciding what to wear, essentially covering her “true” self (if there is such a thing) with layers of functional, second skins. These are our first glimpses of Adler in action, apart from a few digitally projected photos we see attendant to Mycroft’s description of her to Sherlock. From the beginning – as website media, as a construction in process -  we see Adler as a cyborg in many of the ways discussed by Haraway. As Adler prepares herself for Sherlock’s arrival, she employs the artificial so that creates a hybrid is created who is half natural, half unnatural. Ultimately she presents herself to Sherlock naked, without clothes. But this is hardly a gesture that projects the natural or the real. Instead, it questions the very reality and naturalness of our essential bodies in ways that resonate with several of Haraway’s points about cyborg identity. Adler’s body – her very skin, with its important tattoo – has a functionality about it, and it becomes one more arsenal in her tool box, complicating the concepts of unity and naturalness we tend to project on bodies, in a way that Haraway would find compelling in her search for the new cyborg-woman.

            Adler’s cell phone is a crucial element, not just in the plot of the episode, in which information contained on the phone is highly sought after by various individuals and groups, but more importantly, as a way of constituting Adler’s very being. The point is made repeatedly throughout the episode; the phone is Adler’s life in some essential way, both containing the information she needs to make the connections necessary in her busy professional life and as a way of limiting potential danger. But the episode’s subtext goes much deeper in its insistence that Adler feels that the phone actually is her life, and without it she will cease to exist. When she is separated from her phone, she is “dead,” though she comes miraculously back to life when she is reunited with it. And in a surprising twist towards the end of the episode, she has actually engraved her pulse – her life’s blood – onto the phone in the form of the unlocking password. The connection is insisted upon throughout the episode, as we are increasingly told that the phone goes far beyond acting as a functional tool. Instead, this is a woman who cannot exist accept through the mediation of the device and its digital technologies.

            For Hayles, the episode’s play with Adler’s absence and presence in real and virtual spaces both would point to the lack of stability surrounding a character who is so mediated through digital technology. The most central aspect of Sherlock as a character in both this series and in his multitude of other media incarnations is that he is obsessed with creating patterns. Hayles might argue that it is the seeming randomness of the myriad of problems presented by Adler that work to confute Sherlock and which create the bond that is formed between the two of them within the episode. The subjectivity – body connection is one that Hayles finds interesting and potent when exploring presence and absence, and in Adler’s multiplicitous “presences” using various faces, technologies, skins, etc., she is a constant roadblock to Sherlock’s obsessive search for meaning through pattern. Hayles might also focus on the issue of materiality with Adler, a point that causes tension within the episode; Adler’s power is in so many ways located in her body- what her body is and what her body does – and yet, through playing with a mediated availability, that body is both present and absent, depending on perspectives of virtual reality. In a more extended analysis, one might consider whether Adler is herself what Hayles might consider a “flickering signifier.” I’ll leave that for now, but certainly Hayles might point to her as a character that exhibits the lack of distinction between human and machine in her co-dependence with her phone,  the “biological organism and the informational circuits in which the organism is emeshed….the fascinating and troubling coupling of language (subjectivity?) and machine.” (35)

            For Haraway, it is Adler’s lack of essential unity, her hybrid existence somewhere between human and digital device, which forms the essence of her power. It is also because she exploits the unresolvable irony of a woman whose existence exploits the most public and most private sides of experience, available to the millions via her web and twitter presence, and yet its secrets locked inaccessibly away in the digital networks of her phone.  Haraway’s article validates the cyborg-like of Adler’s characteristics, particularly in her uses of technology to live a life of power on many levels, subverting traditional television and film stereotypes. In both her uses of technology and in her quest for power, Adler and the creators of this episode are willing to compromise a unified female character in the service of a character through whom explorations along the borders can occur. This is symbolically projected in the episode through Adler’s ultimate ability to enter into the virtual landscape by the river previously “owned” by Sherlock. Her penetration of that space reveals her access to that inner private space of Sherlock’s consciousness, and that very ability allows her to further exert her power over him.

            But it is also, in some ways her undoing, and possibly that of the episode as well. That encounter with Sherlock’s virtual world, represented by the landscape and the mysterious murder enacted in it, both augments her power and diminishes her power. It is no accident that in this scene we see a denuded, though not naked Adler, (she actually is wearing more clothes than she “normally” does) without the normal protective veneer we saw her self-consciously applying at the beginning of the episode. She appears vulnerable, though we are later meant to question if that was yet one more projected avatar or not. But this is the point at which the episode descends into the romantic, and seems at its very end to insist that we at least consider that vulnerability and the romantic attraction to be real. And if that is the case, then as Sherlock and Adler slip into a romantic relationship, Adler loses the power she has attained by her cyborg persona, ironically through the very power move, projected within the episode through the means of her penetrating his virtual space, that was meant to augment her power.