It’s Sherlock’s Missing Lover Footage!
(YMMV so much on this one)
Abed: We’re doing Annie’s missing lover footage.
Annie: You know in movies when the hero’s wife or girlfriend is dead or missing, so he sits in the dark and he watches her on a home movie [or a hologram] over and over again […]?
I get it now. I finally understand why I first watched this part of MHR and my shipper brain erupted from its dormancy. I had never really thought about this trope before, but here it is.
This is a scenario that always gets depicted between romantic couples.
This isn’t a thing that happens in platonic bromances, at least not in fiction. Imagine two best male friends that you don’t ship engaged in this scenario, and see how strange it feels: Bro A is sitting stoically, his eyes half-misted-over as he watches Bro B on the screen. He drinks in every detail, willing himself to never forget. It hurts, but oh he just can’t turn it off; it’s a compulsion to take just one last look at his bro. And then Bro B looks through the lens and speaks to Bro A, as if he could break through the veil of death… Try that with, say, Harry Potter and Ron Weasley. (Sorry H/R shippers; YMMV). Or President Obama and Joe Biden. Hell, use Barney and Big Bird. No matter what you do, this is a one-way ticket to homoerotic angstville.
Why is this a romantic trope? What separates it from your garden variety mourning to speak to such passion? I think that (as Community points out) the compulsion to watch the missing lover is a way of objectifying them, which creates that erotic edge. After all, the person is now nothing more than a fantasy: static, stripped of all agency, the passive receiver of the gaze. In Community, Annie is acting out a parody of the trope girlfriends as “beautiful and full of love almost to the point of being stupid”, which they normally are, and it’s practically the beginning of a wet dream.
But not here, though. Sherlock isn’t acting at all like the typical Missing Lover, all doe-eyed and winsome and inviting. He’s self-conscious, wooden, and blunt. The lighting is terrible, to be honest, flattening his often gorgeous features. He is nothing more or less than himself, in his most natural and awkward state. I find this interesting, and I appreciate it for not playing into the gross part of the cliché (or for setting off all of the TJLC warning bells and giving the game away, because seriously). The scene doesn’t need it. It hardly matters anyway, for all that John is reacting to him, not to his beauty and passivity, but just to who he is…and still…
That is not a sad man. That is a man possessed.
The trope remains the same.
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