The Singing Detective

A detailed Summary of The Singing Detective

P.D Marlowe's dreams, hallucinations and imaginings play an important role in The Singing Detective.

This is a six-episode film may be seen as a marking of the first time Dennis Potter dealt with illness in his work, although it is not as much an autobiography. "I felt myself being nudged into writing about the condition. Not what it's like to be ill, but what it's like to be a human being trying to understand the shape of your own life,"

The three main subplots are the Hospital Ward (1980s), the Forest of Dean (then later, London (1930s), and the Film Noir fantasy of the 1940s.

Phillip Marlowe is the link between these worlds, these subplots. As the three subplots are basically telling the same story they intermingle in Marlow's head. As Marlow hallucinates due to his illness the flashbacks and fantasy scenes have an anchor in reality and credibility for the viewer. "Even more than his beloved Forest of Dean, the landscape Potter occupies is the inside of the head". Seeing the story subjectively from Marlow's perspective forces us to associate with this unsympathetic character. In Marlow's head, where all the stories are based he is unravelling the plots to reach a resolution. By reworking

As he himself suggested in pre-transmission interviews of the time, given that The Singing Detective marked his return to original television writing after several years away, Dennis Potter had wanted to use it to play 'with the conventions - the musical convention - in order to see what TV drama can do'. The thoughts of the young Phillip are taken up on the soundtrack by the adult Marlow, reliving the confusion: 'Where we goo-ing? Mum?...round and round I reckon. Round and round'. "Round and round describes the whirl of Marlow's memories and fantasies in hospital but, given the historical backdrop of 1945, it also hints at a wider view of Britain in spiralling decline since the war. As we have seen, this sense has emerged particularly in The Singing Detective, where the world of the hospital ward has become a metaphor for Potter's condition.

In these hallucinations and illusions, the characters dance and sing as if they are merely toys. Although the characters are physically there, Marlowe manipulates them in his mind as if they are puppets, and the "puppets" are doing things they wouldn't ordinarily do, such as the religious evangelists. While they are imagined to be dancing in a cheery and patronising way, and are singing along the lines of something they would preach, ie, "bring gloom down to the minimum", these actions seem out of character, and there is some sense of irony played about here.

Although Phillip Marlow has a cynical, and a rather pessimistic view on life, The Singing Detective is not a pessimistic view on life. Instead, "it evinces a resilient spiritual optimism in which reviewing the past becomes a means of self-renewal, a way in which to cope more successfully with a hostile present." In The Singing Detective, memory and fantasy become means of self-renewal a way to cope with "a hostile present". Phillip Marlowe gains a sense of the shape of his own life, re-establishing touch with his lost childhood. With the help of the hallucinations and illusions, Marlowe succeeds in piecing together and understanding his own past, until, at the end of Episode Six, he is able to leave the hospital, "cured".

As if part of a theatrical setting, the characters come to life, both in reality and in Marlowe's illusion. The characters literally dance in Marlowe's illusions, and it is here that the audience begins to see the mechanics of Marlowe's brain, and understand how Marlowe could be a writer. Although Marlowe's paranoid delusions are a result of his psoriatic anthropy, writers, whether they are placed in a similar situation to Marlowe or not, tend to utilise the Marlowe's concept of imagination in order to create a story.

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Approximate Word count = 2256
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: Movies