The Case Study of Sherlock Holmes (2009) - Scholarly Commons ...

albeit in Sherlock Holmes for Dummies (2010), that “maybe another golden age of
Sherlockian cinema is just around the corner. After 21 years, Holmes finally returned to
the big screen . . . Director Guy Ritchie brings a fresh interpretation . . . to a new
generation of fans” (p. 276).
Similarly, Sherlock Holmes (2009) highlights how the Sherlock Holmes franchise offers
audience variation and commercial diversity. Jenkins (1992) believes “fans tend to
focus their social and cultural activity around programs with the potential of being
accepted by sizeable numbers of other fans” (p. 91). Holmes offers products through
various mediums and in turn various age groups and commercial audiences. However,
and perhaps most importantly, the Holmes franchise reflects a class structure that often
divides the commercial fan from the scholarly, offering hierarchy and a representation
of Bourdieu‟s class theory (as cited in Hills, 2002). Gray et al. (2007) speaking in a
historical studies context, find fandom to be a “cultural practice tied to specific forms of
social and economic organization” (p. 9). Each of Bourdieu‟s classes (as cited in Hills,
2002), from working class to the dominating fraction, are discernible in Holmes fandom
and their views of each class are accessible through their own specified work and
publishing on the subject. This is yet another avenue that the Holmes franchise offers
through an instrumental and collective case study – the fandom‟s co-dependence on
official and fan created products. According to Jenkins (1992), “fans, like other
consumers of popular culture, read intertextually as well as textually and their pleasure
comes through the particular juxtapositions that they create between specific program
content and other cultural materials” (p. 37). Fans, through their use and understanding
of the original product‟s narrative, exercise their knowledge of the subject through
integrating and reimagining the narrative, and as a result perpetuate the cycle of
reinterpretation. Gray et al. (2007) find the examination of a fan‟s “object of
consumption” to be “one of the most underdeveloped aspects of Bourdieu‟s work” (p.
11). They suggest that “the object of consumption . . . due to our emphasis on audience
activity [has] hitherto remained largely neglected as a object of study” (Gray et al.,
2007, p. 11). I would have thought this an integral part of any audience or fan study, as
the objects in question often bear images and ideologies reflected in the viewer:
Whether a given fan object is found in a novel, a television program, or is a
popular icon, fan objects are read as texts on the level of the fan/reader. They all
constitute a set of signs and symbols that fans encounter in their frames of
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