Rewriting Rebecca in Another Genre

 

Coming at this story, which I had known since teenage years through the Hitchcock movie, as a middle-aged person, I have certain unexpected perspectives. For one, I have known for some years that "the third wheel" type of romantic construct, especially when the married (or pre-existing) couple are older while the newcomer into the relationship is much younger, is predominantly Oedipal. (Oedipus Complex can be applied to any parents-child triangle, regardless of gender.) The novel Rebecca is indeed a fairly obvious example. The nameless (significant) protagonist and narrator, whose unusual first name never shared with the reader, was given by her dead father (even more significant), is exactly half the age of her husband, Maxim DeWinter (42). Her lack of power in this marriage is near absolute, being disadvantaged in her gender, age, and experienece, and mostly in her economic status --- Mr. DeWinter's wealth as a landed gentleman is perhaps on par with Mr. Darcy of Pride and Prejudice. She is keenly aware of herself as the late-coming intruder in a (supposedly) perfect marriage.

Imagine my shock (not!) when I read, after reading the novel, that Daphne du Maurier's father, Gerald, was alleged to have an unhealthy obsession with Daphne that may have gone too far. Who could have guessed! Gerald was a famous actor and theater manager and (also alledgedly) a volatile alcoholic. 

Be that as it may, what makes the novel interesting is the violent and evil undertone in Mr. DeWinter, despite the narrator's protest (a tad too much) of her love and devotion to him. Indeed, his portrayal of Rebecca, his wife, is supposedly evil, because she ... well, it's never clearly explained, because, you know, the English never talk about sex even between spouses. According to DeWinter, Rebecca had a massively promiscuous lifestyle while pretending to be a perfect wife. On the surface, the reader is supposed to sympathize with Mr. DeWinter for his injured male pride and his necessity to kill his wife. We are supposed to overlook the how of the murder: He not only carefully avoided being seen but also covered it up as either an accident or suicide. If we stop and think about it though, he really IS a murderer who gets away with it. Underlying the narrator's joy for being the sole possessor of Mr. DeWinter's love (whatever that means) is the fear of his cold murderous nature.

Perhaps more curious though is the daughter's idealization of the mother, because the idealization of Rebecca is firmly established throughout the book, despite the ambiguous revelation of her villainy, which only makes her even more fascinating. It is difficult to measure whom the daughter loves more, the father or the mother. Rebecca is the archetypal "bad woman" throughout the history of literature that embodies the indomitable feminine sexuality that strikes fear in everyone's heart. Consciously or unconsciously, the author preserves her mystique by keeping her outside of our direct gaze, making her a goddess for worship and ... yes, fear. (Perhaps the fear is also rooted in the daughter's longing to become her mother and possess [what seems to be] a vast amount of power.) 

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Psychoanalysis aside, the story's perspective is not entirely satisfying, given the narrator's lowest position of power in this triangle. I imagine retelling the story from the viewpoint of another person. For example, if Maxim DeWinter narrates this story, it could be a James M. Cain-style noir, in which a perfect crime goes all kinds of wrong. That night, he meticulously constructed his alibi, so that none of the servants at Manderley knew he went out to the cabin with a gun and killed his wife and put her body in her boat and sank the boat. A few months later, a body was washed ashore, which he identified as his wife. It was the perfect crime. No one suspected anything. The entry county felt sorry for him. After a suitable period of "mourning," a year later he felt he was secure enough. He marries a very young woman with no experience in life and zero risk of suspecting him. Happily ever after, right? 

An entirely random event --- a shipwreck in the bay --- destroys the best-laid plot. The diver finds Rebecca's boat and, even worse, her body. With so much evidence suggesting foul play, suspicion obviously falls on the husband, especially if (when) the victim's cousin Favell reveals that the husband had ample motive. Nevertheless, his alibi is solid, and his social position protects him from legal peril. Local coroner, who is a drinking buddy of Mr. DeWinter (as pointed out in the novel), rules the death a suicide. He may not be as gossip-proof as he was a year ago, but there is no risk of criminal suspicion. 

The last bit of suspense on whether Rebecca was pregnant is, of course, necessary for the ending of a romance-driven story. In the noir genre, more things may surface ... to make DeWinter's life difficult, including but not limited to his new wife's suspicion and the need to kill a witness or two to keep the lid on the first crime. That would work quite well. 

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A different genre it could fit would be a detective story or thriller. I'm sure Agatha Christie would have made a beautifully convoluted plot out of this story. Mrs. Danvers is in the perfect position to want to investigate the suspicious circumstances of her, uh, lover's death. The only thing in the original setup that prevents her from become an amateur sleuth is the English class hierarchy and culture. Not unlike the narrator, Mrs. Danvers has always believed in DeWinter's devotion to Rebecca, which is the weakest part of the novel. This makes Mrs. Danvers look stupid and obtuse. Surely an intelligent servant, not to mention a possible lover of the mistress, is the first to know any disharmony between the lord and lady of the house. 

Only a small tweak is needed to let Mrs. Danvers suspect the conflict between Rebecca and DeWinter, thus leading her to quietly collect evidence of DeWinter's guilt. She may even exact revenge on the murderer after he gets away with it. Of course, the ending of the novel implies that the destruction of Manderley could be committed by Mrs. Danvers, but one would imagine that she may want to do more to the killer of Rebecca in a slightly more modern retelling.

Pippin: The Meaning of Life

 

A young man's search for the meaning of life --- an evergreen theme in storytelling. Is it to slay the dragon and rescue the princess? That is a whole genre onto itself. All other popular tropes are presented in the musical Pippin: 

1. To be a revolutionary and commit patricide. 
2. To become his father and possess his power and glory. 
3. To have sex as much as possible. 
4. To amass fame and fortune (basically the same as #2). 
5. To find creative outlet in art or enlightenment in religion (mentioned but glossed over). 
6. To live an ordinary life with a wife and a kid and do humble and repetitive work. 
7. To light youth on fire and go out with a bang.

Whether it was Stephen Schwartz, or Roger O. Hirson, or Bob Fosse who came up with this list I don't know, although I suspect #3 was probably Fosse's contribution. What I find amusing is how all-encompassing the list is in the human culture, at least in the modern, industrial and post-industrial society. Before the modern era, religion and spiritual enlightenment might have featured a more prominent place, along with the forever father-son succession drama. Isn't it funny that people's (men's?) imagination is so limited? How many stories have been told to repeat the same quest over and over and over again?

Perhaps Joseph Campbell's followers would say that such convergence is inevitable, because humans are fundamentally the same. Men collectively pursue the same few paths that give their lives meaning. It may or may not be true, but I simply lament the shortness of the list --- can't we even come up with at least 10 options? 

The same question is never debated by women, because for most of human history there were no options. Women are precious resources for making babies and making babies survive to adulthood, including young men who fret about the meaning of life. With the advent of birth control, however, women can no longer escape the same question. Whether our culture coalesces the meaning of a woman's life into a short list of options also, I don't know. I do hope, however, that our imagination is not limited to men's short list. 

It is almost hilarious that, even in this day and age, we are still inundated with the same story: A person cannot find happiness unless his life has meaning and/or purpose. What might this meaning or purpose be? All the self-help gurus, who have moved their butts from books and TV to social media, are giving out the same short list, including #3. I mean, really, is this the best we can do? 

Can I do better than mainstream society though? Can I come up with something outside of the list? 

Well, I don't know. All I can do is observe life. What interests me is how #6 is dismissed as boring and repetitive and intolerable. Maybe an ordinary working life with one wife and one child is intolerable to Bob Fosse. I look around, however, and do not see that much repetition. Take, for example, the daily work of a health care professional, such as a nurse or a physical therapist or a primary care physician or a psychotherapist. The nature of the work remains constant, but each patient is slightly different. Even if multiple patients have the same disease, they have different symptoms, different ways of expressing their discomfort and pain, different trajectory of recovery (or not), different comorbidities, different personalities, different abilities to cope, different communication styles, different motivation to comply with or reject treatment ... The variations go on. Moreover, new treatments and new research come out all the time. Yesterday metformin was the best option for type 2 diabetes, but now everyone is shooting themselves up with Ozempic or Zepbound. What does one tell the next patient? Can we find some meaning of life in the people whose infections resolve after a week or two, whose wound you suture, whose pain that got better or worse, or whose blood pressure that went up and down? 

That is just the work part. What about relationships? 

Can you find meaning of life is in the argument you have with your brother, even if you have both forgotten it a few months later? Or the love you make with your spouse, and the talk about both of your 401(K) accounts afterward? Or your kid's PTA meeting in Grade 3, which is not the same as the PTA meeting in Grade 4 or 5? 

In the past 6 months, I have been experimenting with recipes involving a kind of tofu skin product, a Taiwanese specialty that I first discovered on YouTube videos. It has the marvelous ability to soak up the sauce quickly in a wok. So far I have cooked it in different mushroom sauces, but I have plans for tomato sauce, braised meat sauce, and maybe seafood sauce. Could tofu skin recipes be one of my many meanings of life? 

Ah, but none of these trivialities are fulfilling, says Pippin. 

Let's look at the word fulfill. Full and fill. The primitive meaning is the feeling of being full, having food in the stomach, the relief of hunger. 

Maybe this is the universal meaning of human life at the bottom of it all. No feeling in the world is more real than the transition from hunger to satiety. I wonder if this is one of the sources of our confusion --- the constant satiation and lack of hunger. 

All the more reason to find the meaning of life --- at least some of it --- in tofu skin recipes. Once I get tired of it, I can move on to egg custard recipes and bean soup recipes. 

Frailty (2001) - Spoilers - a Family Interpretation

I just discovered that I have never written a review for this movie. How strange. I could have sworn that I did, some years ago, when I first watched this odd little horror movie that left a strong impression. 

In the late 1990s, after the massive successes of twist endings (perhaps more precisely called "flip" endings) in "The Usual Suspects" and "The Sixsense," this type of endings that mess with the audience's heads was quite common. "Frailty" came a little too late to the party to capitalize on the trend. It took me a while to work out the meaning of the ending upon my first viewing, and the horror of it did not hit me until that evening. The horror lies not in a seemingly normal and loving single father (Bill Paxton) who suddenly starts to ax people, but rather in this world in which God orders people to ax other people by handing them a list of names. The killer is a hero because he regards his targets as demons and therefore inhuman, although they appear to be humans who have murdered someone or bad in some other way ... maybe? It is never quite clear, because one of the sons, Fenton, is labeled as a demon many years before he supposedly has committed murders ... but that part is not clear, either. The list of victims in his house might well have been a list of demons handed to his brother Adam. The definition of demons is not well established in the movie, which actually adds to the terror. Indeed, the delayed horror I felt that evening, some years ago, was from the vivid immersion into a world where a wrathful, Old-Testament God's ax falls on humans who are judged as demons whenever and wherever, with no room for any mercy or mitigation or bargaining or defense in court. Nope. Who needs hell when God is handing down direct punishment every day on earth? 

This movie sat in my VOD queue for a few years before I finally rented and watched it again yesterday. The terror has faded, but I am no less disturbed than the first time, just from a different angle. 

The second viewing leaves no doubt that the screenwriter, Brent Hanley, meant no ambiguity. The God is the literal wrathful Old-Testament God. The father (Paxton) is a literal superhero who carries out God's mission to ax demons in the world. The people he axed are literal demons who have murdered their spouses, parents, or children. And the mission is literally passed onto Adam, who axes his brother Fenton (can't be named Abel I guess), among others, because he too is a demon. Everything should be taken literally, and the flip is a plot device but not a source of doubt. The writer's intention is spelled out in his DVD commentary, which I have not heard but is partially transcribed by a kind blogger here. 

Although I already had a gut feeling about the writer's family of origin while I was re-watching the movie, this comment confirmed my suspicion: "When people asked Hanley where the idea for the script came from, he likes to say that it's 100% autobiographical." In some sense, this is also indirectly confirmed by the fact that Hanley has not been able to get another screenplay made ever since. "Frailty" remains his only produced script. Usually everyone has at least one story to tell -- their own life story. Going beyond that requires something else: skills, imagination, insight into other people's psyche, etc. I have no doubt this story is 100% autobiographic for Hanley, particularly the conflicts between Fenton and the father and the most disturbing scene in the movie --- no, not the ax murders --- where the father locks the pre-teen boy Fenton in the underground bunker (which Fenton had dug) which no food and no toilet and one glass of water per day, poured through a hole by Adam. This feels real, and it is precisely where the horror lies on the second viewing. 

The wrathful, vindictive, punitive God portrayed in the movie is not a religious figure in the Bible but rather the boy's human father. He is flesh and blood; he is not an allegory, not a vision, not a concept, and nothing imaginary or symbolic. He is 100% real and can hack your head off any minute. 

I said "the boy" above, because I believe the writer is both Fenton and Adam, torn by both hatred and worship for his father. 

There are a few other interesting reflections on this family drama. For example, Hanley mentioned in the commentary that the bunker scene was originally even worse, as Fenton was supposed to be afraid of the dark and he pissed and shat during the imprisonment. Paxton took these details out because even he found it unbearable. Even without these details, some female audience members walked out of the screening during this scene, which highlights the lack of any femininity in this family. Revealing, isn't it? This is an all-male family and all the relationships reek the Old Testament-style masculinity. Even more interesting is that the original script defined Agent Wesley's sin as murdering his daughter, which is changed to his mother by Paxton, which slightly weakens Hanley's theme about patriarchy but still hints at the absence of a mother figure in this universe, I mean, family. 

Thus, all pieces of the puzzle fall perfectly into place. This is a story about a family in which the father is God. Definitely not the New Testament of God or Jesus, but the Old Testament God. He is the judge, jury, and executioner all in one. To the son he is almighty and death-giving to not only demons but also humans (ie, the Sheriff). 

With zero experience with a wrathful or violent father when I was going up, it is only recently that I realized that many people love punishment, either doling out punishment themselves or, perhaps better, watching a father figure punish other people. Apparently the massively popular reality TV show "Cops" has many imitators on YouTube nowadays, garnering millions of views. Reading the comments section can be quite illuminating. I see the same thrill between their watching mentally unstable miscreants being cuffed and dragged into police cars and Adam's for his father's heroic mission of killing demons, including his brother Fenton. That is what terrifies me the second time.

Hence, the most chilling part about the ending is Adam's day job as the sheriff in small town Texas, judging who is a good man and who is a demon through a handshake. Like his father, he inherits the position as God in his motherless world, which I cannot be sure does not overlap with my world. As much as Hanley lays out the vivid details of his father's relationship with him, in his heart, father remains a hero. This reminds me of the ending of 1984, the sincerity of which I can no longer doubt:

"He loved Big Brother."

Out of the Past (1947)

 

If I were 30 years younger, I might become obsessed with this movie. Now, though, my thought was more like, "Where have you been all my life?" An astounding movie that pushes the film noir genre to its logical extreme. I could not believe my eyes when I saw it for the first time last night. Never even heard of it -- can you believe it?! 

How extreme, you ask? When it comes to the femme fatale, this femme is most unapologetically and unrepentantly fatal. Jane Greer's character, Kathie, is not fundamentally different from other female villains of this type, but her depth of badness is almost unrivaled in all of English-language cinema, except perhaps Sharon Stone in "Basic Instinct." Her power comes as much from her beauty as from the purity of her evil. It's so delicious as to be revolutionary. (One of these days I have to write something about the importance of bad women.) 

And then the complex plot. The highly stylized dialog is faithful to the hard-boild pulp tradition but a tad more dense than average, perhaps even more so than "The Maltese Falcon" or "Double Indemnity." Plotwise it is more elegant and, although complex, more logical and believable than the aforementioned two classics. I felt a happy tingle down my spine when Robert Mitchum's Bailey muttered to himself in the taxi, "It's a frame." The merciless pacing nearly broke my neck. Plotting is a lost art in modern American cinema. I have not seen anything on par with this plot since "LA Confidential." (Sorry Rian Johnson. Your mysteries are but child's play in comparison.) 

Finally, there's the cinematography. I expected the typical shadows and lights, but I did not expect them to be toyed to this extent. The night scenes and the day scenes; the indoor scenes and the outdoor scenes. Every scene is ever so slightly more stylish and more intense than the best noir I have seen. I had to pause the streaming to check that it was indeed made in the 1940s, because it is so full of expressionist images that I thought surely it had to be a decade or two later. The images feel meta; they feel like a distillation of the very best techniques in all film noir, years after the entire treasure trove has been savored, digested, and transformed. 

I grew up on Raymond Chandler, who, despite his glorious prose, is too sentimental. This I have to admit at my crusty old age. "Out of the Past" is nearly entirely unsentimental about human lust and greed, but it does not work too hard to be performatively cynical, either. Nobody is a patsy, not really, which distinguishes itself from Dashiell Hammett's tendencies. Every time the plot appears to drift dangerously into a genre convention, the scene cuts away on the cusp of cliche. The only discordant note was Bailey's non-femme-fatale girlfriend Ann, who threatens to ruin the movie's realism with small-town American wholesomeness ... or so I thought. The ending, however, completely subverted my expectation and wrapped up the movie's ultimate perfection.

Fantasying versus Dreaming

DW Winnicott's paper, Dreaming, Fantasying, and Living  is collected in his seminal book Playing and Reality. I have zero confidence that I understand any of it. Nevertheless it seems to illuminate something in my own experience. Perhaps Winnicott was describing something entirely different, and yet somehow his words, which I have read closely, slowly, and with difficulty, ignite recognition. So I will just assume that he was talking about me as much as he was talking about his patient. 

I have a very simple example of fantasying. For 3 months DH has been telling me, gently and convincingly, that I should do pull downs and bench presses at least once a week, preferably twice. I wholeheartedly agree that it is the right thing to do and have thought about doing them several times a week. Vivid images of me doing pull downs and bench presses float around in my head. Nevertheless, I have actually done them no more than 5 times in 3 months. I can't even remember the actual number of times, because all the imagined workouts have blended into the memory of real action. This is fantasying. 

This is a real but low-stake example, but who doesn't know someone who has put their life on hold indefinitely because they are waiting for something to happen? They will get their act together and begin their life, for real, as soon as they meet their soulmate, or find their true passion, or land their dream job, or figure out what they really want. Before the monumental event happens, however, they can always fill the void with constant visualization of their dream life. 

Winnicott pointed out that fantasying not only does not nourish one's emotion life but stifles it. He did not describe, theorize, or explain how it does so. Perhaps it is not the point anyway. 

Ironically, popular self-help theories have made billions of dollars by promoting fantasying, ie, by encouraging people to imagine, in vivid details, their wish-fulfillment. It is usually packaged as the American Dream or The Secret. In fact, the word "dream" in today's culture means daydreaming much more often than night-dreaming. 

According to Winnicott, only night-dreaming is real dreaming and truly nourishes one's emotional health. Real dreams are full of symbols, which lead people into their deepest truths, including what they want. Subsequently, this path lead away from idle fantasying and true living. 

No Other Choice (2025) - Not a review

When I entered the workforce in 1999, Microsoft Word had already dominated the word-processing market and pushed Word Perfect into oblivion. At the time, I heard many colleagues in writing/publishing lament how much better Word Perfect is than Word and wondered how a superior product could not win the game of competition in the supposed free market. Nearly three decades later, a few days ago I heard the same sentiment from someone in the business of pharmaceutical regulatory publishing. Even now someone still remembers the superiority of the long-dead Word Perfect. It reminded me of Park Chan-wook's new movie, No Other Choice, because the answer is that this is a free market in which the surviving product or company wins not by being better but by murdering its competition.

Not having read Das Kapital, I have no idea whether any economists in history predicted the elegant ways of monopoly: First you kill all your competitors through bottom-barrel, negative-balance-sheet pricing. Once they are all dead, you raise the prices on consumers, who now have "no other choice" but buy from you. And the initial self-sabotaging strategy is funded by Wall Street and private equities, who can afford to wait until they reap obscene amounts of profit from captive consumers. Superior products are necessarily more expensive and therefore always lose out in this scheme. Whose fault is it? We consumers have no one to blame but ourselves, because the vast majority of people cannot help ourselves but to always reach toward the lowest price stickers like moths fly toward the flame. 

The idea of shirking responsibilities has been circling in the back of my mind since, at least consciously, I watched "The Sopranos," which was made in my formative years when I did not quite understand the culture around me --- a culture of absolutely no responsibilities. The title "No Other Choice" is in large part about the same theme, an ironic phrase behind which everyone hides while committing murder. Once again my mind is drawn back to the bright sunny morning in March 2003, when my friend and I sat outside of MCI Center and heard about the new of the invasion of Iraq. Nowadays every American involved in making that war happen would say they had no other choice, including those men and women who joined the military explicitly to take revenge on "those people over there" and, 20 years later, whine about wasting their time and youth in the military and Biden's decision to pull the last troops out of Afghanistan. Of course, nobody had any choice, it's all just a big weather system that came and killed millions of people and destroyed American wealth (but not the wealthy) for generations.

Before I watched the movie but after reading its synopsis, I thought it was going to be another sob story about how cruel and dehumanizing corporations are, how capitalistic greed sucks the soul out of hardworking average workers, blah blah blah. I thought it would be another "elegy" in line with Case and Deaton's Death of Despair theory, trailing behind droves of intellectuals who have cashed in on the plight of the virtuous American workers who lost their jobs to evil Chinese and Mexican workers. I was surprised, however, that the central character, Man-su, despairs in losing his middle-class social status, his elaborate hilltop house, two dogs fed on gourmet food, and a stay-at-home wife. His extreme measures to land the next job are not driven by poverty or starvation, but rather by the absolute refusal to change ... himself. The movie makes no demand for my sympathy. What a relief. Thank you.

Isn't it great? We're all leaves tossed in the wind, victims of evil whoevers, never having to take any responsibilities for any of our own decisions. Some years later, when aliens land on earth and wonder how the planet became uninhabitable, the electronic documentation of our images and chatters will explain to them that we annihilated our own home because we had "no other choice." After all, we can't do without cars because we already built the highways, we can't give up beef because it is the only food men should eat, we can't stop building data centers because it is our patriotic duty.

The ending of "No Other Choice" is beautiful. After chuckling ironically for 2 hours, I did not expect to be hit with such poignancy that tears came to my eyes.

The Mysteries of "The Final Problem" (and Attempted Explanations)

To this day, the public generally believes that the reason for the death of Sherlock Holmes in "The Final Problem" was that Arthur Conan Doyle was tired of writing these stories and wanted to stop, and the reason for its reversal in "The Empty House" was the unending pressure from fans on the author.

However, David Pirie (who wrote "Murder Rooms" starring our Dr. Doyle and his mentor Professor Bell) questioned this oft-repeated theory and pointed out that Doyle went on a Holmes hiatus for a long 8 years. If public pressure was the reason for his reversal, he would have done so in the first year or two, when the outcry was the loudest. It is hard to imagine that the public was still pressing him to revive Holmes 8 years after the death, so much so that he caved under the pressure to write one of the best entries in the collection, "The Hound of the Baskerville." Pirie also pointed out that Doyle wrote the story in 1893, about the same time his father died, which might have been a dark and painful event. 

I recently re-read "The Final Problem" and "The Empty House." There are many peculiar elements surrounding the death and resurrection of Sherlock Holmes, which convince me that the conventional wisdom is, if not entirely wrong, at least missing the point. I tend to agree with Pirie that the story is associated with some emotional clouds on Doyle's mind. If he wanted to stop writing Holmes stories, he can just stop writing them without killing Holmes. The death is about death, not merely a callous middle finger at his fans. 

Where Is the Body?

The first question is, if the Sherlock Holmes fanbase flooded the publisher's mailbox demanding that Doyle bring him back to life, whose fault is that? Can you blame them for thinking that Holmes was still alive, because there is no body? Naturally, one has to wonder, Why isn't there a body? Surely ("Don't call me Shirley!" to quote Leslie Nielsen), if Doyle really wanted to kill off Sherlock Holmes, he could have at least produced a body in the river, somewhere downstream from the Reichenbach Fall, and give Holmes a proper burial.

So, the only explanation is the simplest. Doyle did not truly intend to kill off Holmes. I doubt he consciously planned out the details of how to bring him back later, but a part of his mind must have left open a backdoor for the possibility of revival. 

In other words, the ending of The Final Problem is meant to be ambiguous. Even if he did not know whether he would write another Holmes story ever again, he did not want to give us, or himself, Holmes' corpse. I also suspect that he at least had a vague idea about the escape route, ie, scaling the cliff, just in case he wanted to bring Holmes back to life. Perhaps he didn't even expect to wait as long as 8 years. 

Why Do They Leave Britain? 

The general theory is that Doyle was impressed by the natural beauty of Meiringen during a vacation, also in 1893, and decided to place the climax to the story there. However, the way the story takes Holmes and Watson there is decidedly bizarre and uncharacteristically nonsensical. 

In the first half of the story, Dr. Watson (and hence the reader) was dragged by Holmes on a fast and furious trip from London to France, and from France to Belgium, and then onward to Switzerland, in order to escape the assassination attempts by Moriarty's criminal organization (as Holmes claimed). However, Holmes also told Watson that he needed only 3 days to stay alive and wait for the police to arrest everyone in the organization. Three days was all. 

"In three days--that is to say, on Monday next--matters will be ripe, and the Professor, with all the principal members of his gang, will be in the hands of the police."

When Holmes said the above lines to Watson, it was obviously Friday. They went to Victoria station the next morning, which must have been Saturday. So, he needed only to pass the weekend without being killed. 

To buy 2 days of safety, he had to run all the way to the continent? That makes no sense. I can think of a dozen solutions to Holmes' dilemma. For example, he could call in a favor with the Scotland Yard to assign a few policemen to him in a hotel across the street from the headquarters. Or he could use the incredible makeup and acting skills and hide out in an opium den, like "The Man with the Twisted Lip." Or he could hang out for 3 days inside the Diogenes Club, which was, supposedly, next door to Whitehall. He could even hide out in the Whitehall for 2 days, since it was the weekend anyway. Even if he had to play cat and mouse with Moriarty on the road, he could have gone anywhere on the British Isle, from Wales to Scotland. Why did he have to cross the Strait? Was Doyle too lazy to make up an excuse for the long journey? 

Despite the meticulous instructions for Watson to shake any tail, they were still followed at the train station toward ... presumably Dover, then boat, then Calais, then Paris. The destination is confirmed a couple of pages later:

"Moriarty will again do what I should do. He will get on to Paris, mark down our luggage, and wait for two days at the depot (emphasis mine)."

Why did he expect Moriarty to wait for 2 days in Paris? Two days later, ie, on Monday, if he were still in Paris, he would not be arrested "with all the principal members of his gang," would he? And, indeed, that was exactly what happened. On Monday, in Strasburg, Holmes telegraphed to the London police and received a response, to which he made a most unconvincing reaction: 

"They have secured the whole gang with the exception of him. He has given them the slip. Of course, when I had left the country there was no one to cope with him."

Right. So why did you leave the country in the first place? Besides, did Moriarty escape the police or was he still in Paris, waiting for the arrival of Holmes and Watson?

Again, the only explanation is the simplest. Holmes was not trying to escape Moriarty but rather lure him to the continent. The reason he left Britain was to make sure that Moriarty is not arrested on Monday with the rest of his gang.

Why Not Go Home? 

At this point, I'm sure you are wondering, why would he do that? Why go on this journey abroad just to cause Moriarty to unknowingly escape the British police?

But let's first look at another baffling choice here. Now that the arrests had happened and the gang was behind bars, Holmes decided to go on to Switzerland. Was he still trying to outrun Moriarty? (Even though he, obviously, never did try to outrun Moriarty in the first place.) No.  

"This man's occupation is gone. He is lost if he returns to London."

So, if Holmes wanted personal safety, he only needed to go home, since Moriarty could never return to Britain legally. He even suggested that Watson go home. Then why not go home together but rather head toward Meiringen? 

The narrative from Strasburg to Meiringen is even more transparent that Holmes was baiting Moriarty, leading him to a particular location. On the dead-end path by Reichenbach Fall, Holmes went as far as admitting that he knew the message to Watson was fake and devised by Moriarty to attack him. 

The simple explanation is that Holmes orchestrated the entire journey in order to get Moriarty to this place, alone, for a violent confrontation. In other words, Holmes had always planned to kill Moriarty here, far away from the British authority.

In many other stories, we have seen Holmes circumvent the law to let a criminal, even a murderer, go. He has shown at least a moderate degree of cynicism or distrust for the official legal system. I have no doubt the stories would have been much darker and more cynical, if Doyle had not tried to protect the public's sense of morality and belief in authority. Here, however, I am sure he knew that personal vigilantism was one step too far for his Victorian readers.

On the trip Holmes made a number of oblique remarks to Watson that sound like suicide notes, almost as if he had foreseen his own death together with Moriarty. However, if we read this part again, we can also interpret these as not biological but rather career suicide, and it sounds like protestation for his professional reputation:

"If my record were closed tonight I could still survey it with equanimity. ... In over a thousand cases I am not aware that I have ever used my powers upon the wrong side. ... Your memoirs will draw to an end, Watson, upon the day that I crown my career by the capture or extinction of the most dangerous and capable criminal in Europe (emphasis mine)."

Why Send Watson Away? 

This is never explicitly stated in the story, but the tone suggests (very vaguely, if I may say so) that Watson believed that Holmes knowingly sent him down the mountain in order to protect him from any risk of injury or harm by Moriarty. Or perhaps the Victorian readers assumed that Holmes adhered to the medieval battle code of duels, mano-a-mano. If Holmes were merely waiting for Moriarty to come at him so that he could arrest him alive, wouldn't it make sense to keep Watson around with his army revolver?  Holmes never let any medieval machismo prevent him from recruiting Watson's help on apprehending criminals on other cases before. 

When I presented this question to a generative AI, it replied that, besides protecting Watson, Holmes wanted the world to believe he was dead, implying that somehow Watson could not keep a secret. We saw him play a similarly cruel trick on his old friend. However, that story was written in 1913! In 1893, when Doyle wrote this story, Holmes was not supposed to pretend to be dead ... or was he? 

If Holmes really wanted to merely capture Moriarty, surely ("Don't call me Shirley!") a two-on-one confrontation is a much better bet. The only possible explanation for knowingly sending Watson away is to remove any witness of his illegal action next, which is ... more on that later. 

And, of course, removing Watson also serves the purpose of keeping Holmes' fate open-ended. Otherwise, Doyle could have written a scene in which Watson came back just a smidge too late, watching both Holmes and Moriarty plunge into the abyss ... but he did not.  

What Actually Happened? 

There is no way of knowing what Doyle actually intended to do with the duel between Holmes and Moriarty. However, as I argued above, he did not want to definitively kill Holmes. The situation is in fact very similar to the final problem of Hecule Poirot, where the detective did play the vigilanti and kill the bad guy. In that case, however, Poirot was driven to definitive suicide by his own conscience. This is certainly one possibility for Holmes ... maybe? The question is whether Doyle respects the standards of justice as much as Agatha Christie. I don't know the answer.

However, in 1903, Doyle gently soothed readers' sense of justice by portraying Holmes' survival and the killing of Moriarty as a fair fight in self-defense. This trick continues to be used in today's movies and thrillers. The good guy does not mean to kill the bad guy, but, oops, he killed the bad guy accidentally or unintentionally. All of our conscience is safe. 

Alternatively, since Doyle left the door open for himself, I can also imagine the final fight scene, in which the well-prepared Holmes pulled out a knife, maybe from his walking stick that got mentioned so many times, and stabbed Moriarty as soon as the latter got close enough, or perhaps pulled out his own revolver and shot the professor on sight. Then he calmly threw the body into the abyss. 

That would probably have lost him a bunch of fans, but I kind of like it.