This article explores the construction of masculinities in Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes (2009) and Oliver Parker's Dorian Gray (2009) in the context of neo-Victorian adaptational strategies. Sherlock Holmes enacts a version of adaptation characterised by a recombination of citational fragments taken from Arthur Conan Doyle's stories. Character provides a unifying force, with Holmes and Watson acting as nodal points. Their latent homoeroticism negotiated via homosocial triangulations and the deferral of pleasure within male social bonds is a powerful means of ensuring consumer retention. In that it constitutes a reproduction of Wilde's novel with a difference, Parker's Dorian Gray lives up to a more traditional version of adaptation. It renders sex between men explicit, but tames Dorian's homosexuality in a psychodrama of childhood abuse and the ‘healing’ influence of the New Woman. Within different adaptational strategies, both films reconstruct late-Victorian masculinity by displaying the male characters' physicality, bodily sensuality, and libidinal energies.
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