Implication Without Choice: The Double Vision of The Singing Detective
[In the following essay, Bell elaborates a reading of The Singing Detective as the story of "a sick man's soul," "a pilgrim's progress from despair to redemption," and looks at the significance of Potter's contribution to the television mini-series.]
The Singing Detective, the six-episode film broadcast on BBC in 1986 and on PBS in 1988, is an extraordinary achievement for which its author, Dennis Potter, has been justly celebrated. Vincent Canby hails Potter for setting "a new standard for all films. He has also, single-handedly, restored the reputation of the screenwriter, at least in television." Uncommonly sensitive to what one character calls "langwidge," The Singing Detective is an equally impressive cinematic vision which exploits fully the potential of a television series to focus and refocus upon a complex subject. After the six hours and forty-two minutes of The Singing Detective, all those faces contorted by complicated extremes of feeling seem both weird and deeply familiar, while the tableaus of the forsaken father, the drowned woman, and the observer on the bridge remain as haunting as our own dreams. Directed by Jon Amiel, The Singing Detective is evocatively visual, compelling us long before it begins to come clear, but—notwithstanding many disorienting narrative strategies—it ultimately makes richly satisfying sense as the hero's psychological odyssey, the discovery of what it means to be a guilty viewer and auditor.
The protagonist of The Singing Detective must be one of film's most objectionable, least sentimentalized figures, and he is flamboyantly unreliable. He is depicted in relentless close-ups, and (as his Detective would say) it's not a pretty sight: his skin is so hideously scorched from psoriatic arthropathy that it shocks even the hospital orderly. Though fully aware of the psychosomatic component in his affliction, Marlow seems to revel in his heart of darkness, doing everything possible to repudiate sympathy and forestall assistance. He is a geyser of smut, hostility, profanity, and abuse. In one horrible scene, perhaps his nadir, he listens to his fellow-patient George recall the glory days of '45, when British soldiers occupying Hamburg could barter cigarettes for sex: "couple of fags it was for a shag." Just then, George is arrested by heart seizure, but Marlow reacts to George's obviously critical plight by taunting and mimicking him. As George expires, Marlow, figuratively arrested by his own version of heart seizure, pronounces sentence: "You can't say you haven't asked for it, George old son" (109).
The scene is characteristic of The Singing Detective in several ways. We view both George and Marlow in extreme close-up, not a place where anybody would choose to be: George is grotesquely lascivious and Marlow's feverish, blistered face appears demonic. George's account is punctuated by visual interpolations, connecting his Hamburg frauleins with the mysterious blonde Lili from Marlow's detective story. And the hero's reaction seems inexplicably cruel. The scene is characteristically off-putting and baffling, yet comprehensible once we have re-viewed the film. A hint is implicit in Marlow's curse, "You can't say you haven't asked for it … old son" (109). Here Marlow has a partial self-revelation, recognizing himself, an old son, in George. Moreover, Marlow is in this scene an audience, sensing his culpability in the story of another.
As the scene transpires, Marlow and we cannot fully comprehend the causes or implications of such connections, so this moment remains one piece of a puzzle, and of a character, not yet made whole. Marlow lives helter-skelter in four distinct but related worlds: the hospital or "real ward," the detective fiction he has written and is reworking in his mind, recollections (especially of his tenth year), and nightmare visions. Reality, imagination, memory, and hallucination merge and cross-pollinate. Though each world is rendered with remarkable detail, clarity and power, all are ultimately subordinate to a highly-determined psychic drama.
Marlow takes refuge in his novel The Singing Detective, visualized as film noir, a dimly-lit, smoky chiaroscuro world, and narrated by the tough, side-of-the-mouth Marlow, the singing detective. Here everything is B movie ominous: people cast suspicious glances, play both ends against the middle, and attract murderous secret agents. Camera angles are titled, as in The Third Man, to suggest a world off-balance. Stock characters, "strays from a bad film" (80), or allusions to great ones like Shoot the Piano Player, abound. This overly portentous and enigmatic thriller is wonderfully cooked up and parodically exaggerated, so that its tone is persistently "jocoserious," to borrow a Joycean portmanteau word. Odd occurrences are taken for granted: a taxi materializes at 3 a.m. or pistols fire a ridiculous number of shots.
One of the great tricks of The Singing Detective is to sustain our interest in this hackneyed detective story, though (unlike The Third Man) it doesn't really lead anywhere. The whole thriller plot is a MacGuffin, a Hitchcockian pretense, to grab and compel our attention while the real story, the psychodrama, is developing. We soon realize that action often takes place in the thriller because something is happening in the "real ward" to the author, such as when the feverish patient imagines his protagonist Binney "hot … burning up" (23), or when he metamorphoses pretty Nurse Mills into a torch singer at the Skinskapes Club. Though he sometimes seems to slip into his story of The Singing Detective, this world is usually one that Marlow, needing evasion and refuge, chooses to enter and controls. But Marlow is hardly in control: memory and hallucination are of course uncontainable, memory being at least partially shaped by what happened, and hallucination being by definition uncontrollable apparition.
Marlow (and, as we shall see, his surrogates) are far more disoriented yet much more culpable than the traditional innocent protagonist of a thriller, unknowingly enmeshed in a sinister plot, like the Joseph Cotton character in The Third Man or the Cary Grant character in North By Northwest. As in Psycho and other Hitchcock films, the viewer is drawn willy-nilly into the heart of darkness. The Singing Detective, for all its obfuscation, has a central and sustained strategy of implicating all of us without choice. Part of Marlow's plight is that he suffers from paranoid delusions and is haunted by ghosts, which the film forces the viewer to share, to piece together Marlow's condition.
Confusion is thus both a result and a primary theme of The Singing Detective. Potter's characters are very often puzzled, baffled, clueless—interlocutors are constantly asking, "What do you think you're doing? Where do you think you are" (84)? Though much of the film is set in such everyday places as a schoolroom or a hospital, reality is made strange, calling for a double take, including the primary and persistent question, is this "real?" The ordinary appears ludicrous or bizarre, and not just in the savagely hilarious musical number. The doctors inspecting Marlow's wretched body or the evangelical medics presenting Sunday morning hymns seem grotesque even before they are suddenly transformed into antic performers, bursting into songs by The Inkspots or Dick Haymes.
Though my analysis focuses upon Marlow's grim business, The Singing Detective is often mordantly uproarious, especially depicting the daily humiliations of being in a hospital, such as needing a bedpan or avoiding arousal during the greasing of private parts. Then Marlow desperately thinks of boring things, like Finnegans Wake, Yoko Ono, everything in Punch, and Ethiopian relief. Such distractions failing. Marlow tries to enter the story, where Binney is handing money to the detective as though to a prostitute, and draws a pistol from the drawer. The pistol is the wrong thing for the patient to think about, and, just when the detective is pausing to inspect Binney's picture of a Nicolalike model, the poor patient apparently climaxes. Potter's humor is always multiply linked to his themes. It's no accident that this occurs shortly after Marlow has recalled in detail the primal scene of his mother in the forest, or that the flustered nurse reproaches him like a mother toilet training a child: "I would have thought you had better control of yourself" (124)!
The joke resonates self-reflexively because the film makes a primary subject of its narrative control; much of it at first appears to be sporadic or random. The principal source of the viewer's confusion is the disjunction and multi-layering of narrative. Sounds are separated from their images; sequence is abandoned; characters lip-synch famous forties songs. While some intersections between reality and fantasy are immediately apprehensible, many other quick cuts initially appear arbitrary and cryptic. Throughout this long film, barely visible threads connect worlds and comprise thematic motifs, even when the action seems inexplicable, such as when the Russian whore Sonia startles Binney by eating his five-pound notes. "Is shit," she says. "Mon-ey is" (47). Much later, playing word associations with the therapist Gibbon, the patient links "Shit" to "Money" (175). This excremental imagery is pervasive and coherent: the boy who deposits a turd on the teacher's table is both bestowing a gift to a mother figure and fouling both of them, for reasons that come clear.
Many implicit associations emerge out of ordinary language and gather metaphoric momentum. George, the doddering patient who cannot remember his wife's name, insists she's called "Mum," a word which has talismanic potency to shape what Marlow now experiences and imagines. The pretty nurse hears George, then brings water to the dangerously feverish Marlow: "You must drink. Come on. There's a good boy," and she addresses him this once as Philip, as though she were his mother. Typically, they misunderstand one another. He says "Spring," and she replies, "No. Tap water" (73). He is remembering his mother's piano piece "Rustle of Spring," which flows into his more sinister sense of water, the river into which she flung herself. Such connotations are left implicit, rather than abruptly enacted or, worse, explicated.
Incomprehensible bits fit into an elaborate puzzle, which inexorably takes shape as we perceive that everything emerges from the consciousness of the patient Marlow: "In my head. Yes. In my head" (139). Marlow's detective story vision of the woman's body being hauled from the river yields to a forest scene: a woman, later identified as his wife Nicola, seen by the boy making love on the ground with an unidentified man, casually looks up to chastize him: "Don't be a spoilsport. Why don't you join us?" In retrospect we realize Marlow's psyche, his inexorable double vision, has simply substituted Nicola for his Mum, whom he actually observed in the same situation.
With the sly algebra of a dream and the uncanny logic of the unconscious, characters are regularly displaced, standing for other figures: if Mother can't be trusted, then no woman can be. Doubles crop up everywhere, appearing as pairs or opposites (two mysterious men, two Skinskapes hostesses, patient and therapist, client and detective). Actors play multiple roles: Michael Gambon is both the ailing writer and the suave hero, Patrick Malahide is the lover of both Philip's Mum and Marlow's wife Nicola, as well as the protagonist of the mystery story. Images are constantly superimposed, frequently reiterated, or repeated with variations, so that identity is fluid and ambiguous. Doubling is of course a convention of the thriller, with its double-crosses and split lives: Binney is a double agent, the hero both a singer and a detective, and girls (the Detective remarks) are never what they seem. Binney negotiates an evening with the "hostess" Amanda but inexplicably ends up with Sonia, which is an early hint of the way a character may play a role cast for someone else. Even the aggravating hospital idiom ("How are we today?") suggests doubling.
More subtle and provocative kinds of doubling pervade The Singing Detective and require continuous sorting out. At first the relationship between P.E. Marlow and his imagined story seems to be a simple case of compensation, the helpless patient casting himself as the adroit hero, which is how the sick author appears to understand it: "Don't you know who I am?" he gasps to himself. "I'm the Singing Detective—" (6-7). But a more revealing sort of bonding emerges between the real Philip Marlow and Binney. In the classroom sequence, the boy Philip eludes retribution at the hand of the schoolteacher by pointing the finger at Mark Binney, son of the man whom Philip spied copulating with his mother. Later the delirious and paranoid writer imagines Nicola plotting with a made-up lover Mark Finney to purloin Marlow's screenplay of The Singing Detective. In witnessing his mother making love, the boy simultaneously identifies with and is repulsed by the lover Binney, who, raising Mrs. Marlow's skirt, sighs, "I could look at that all the live-long day" (111). Fused in his disturbed imagination with this demonic double, both the boy and the actual lover deserve to be wiped out like the ladybug Philip squashes and smears on himself.
This connection between the boy's trauma and the adult's guilt helps explain some loose ends in the detective story, such as why the Two Mysterious Men are gunning for both Binney and Marlow. Eventually and comically, those trenchcoated characters in search of an author glean their own fictivity and resent the fact that they have never even been fleshed out enough to merit names: then they step out of the thriller world to pursue the patient Marlow in the hospital. And the link between the real Marlow and Binney accounts for some of the mystery character's strange behavior. Under his civilized demeanor is a rat's heart, exposed (though he won't undress) in his urge to abuse prostitutes. In a suggestive narrative dislocation we view one scene twice, with a difference: first Binney rolls off Sonia, insults her and contemplates the filth in the river; later the scene is re-enacted with Marlow standing in for Binney, apologizing for the names he's called Sonia, asking if her actions don't disgust her, and observing that the river is "full of filth" (182).
What is full of filth is the sick man's soul. Fortunately Marlow is aided in his struggle by Dr. Gibbon, the Scots psychiatrist, who is another disguised double: playing Gibbon's word game Marlow associates "You" and "Me" (175). In the elaborate mirroring of this film, the relationship between therapist and patient echoes and is echoed by the dialogue between the singing detective and Binney. Gibbon, having read The Singing Detective, quotes and even imitates Detective Marlow. Like a generic private eye, the therapist seeks clues and distrusts his client, with whom he is intimately connected and desperately struggling: "You don't have to like me, and I don't have to like you," remarks the suspicious detective. Binney, terrified that the murder of Sonia will be pinned on him, swears "on my mother's grave" that he isn't guilty. Marlow snarls, like a tough psychiatrist, "Dogshit by any other name smells just as foul, my friend. And it still sticks to the bottom of your shoe no matter what you call it. Be as mealy-mouthed as you like, but not around me, OK? You've stepped in something nasty, and you want me to clean it up" (61).
A clue which strikes Gibbon forcefully is a disgusting depiction of intercourse found in Marlow's novel and read aloud to the patient, who furiously comments, "Oink! Oink! Oink!" (58)! The passage Gibbon reads is another variation on doubling ("skin rubbing at skin") and a process, says the novel's narrator, in which "We are implicated without choice." The author acidly comments, "The Milk of Paradise," which cues the scene between Binney and Sonia. The connection between Milk and Mother, Paradise and Forest, is crucial, for it helps us perceive the terrible implications of what Philip saw and heard. This nine-year-old, on whom nothing is lost, knows more than is good for him: having witnessed his mother's fall, Marlow spends the rest of his life punishing Binney and himself. "After such knowledge, what forgiveness?" The question haunts not only the hero but the viewer, for we are all confused, transfixed voyeurs.
The main object of her son's intense, disconcerting gaze is Mrs. Marlow, another vividly rendered figure, seen from several points on the moral compass. Banished to the hinterlands of West Gloucestershire, near the Welsh border, far from her native London, she is cramped in a tiny cabin with her husband's parents. Her father-in-law, afflicted with miner's lungs, throws up gobs of spit during tea time, and her mother-in-law openly resents her dainty airs. Her husband, a miner and featured singer at the local pub, is a weak figure, whose farewell gesture is aptly juxtaposed with that of a scarecrow, for he is a straw man, rarely opening his mouth except to sing. Miserably estranged, Mrs. Marlow plays piano, applies lipstick, and indulges a romantic impulse with the local Romeo who sings with her husband. Her regrets are poignantly conveyed by her objections to Binney's "crude talk" (115) afterwards—"I ain't a sow," she complains, providing another connotation to Marlow's oinks. The tight shots of characters' suffering are affecting. She weeps desperate tears both on the ground and later on the train by which she leaves her husband and returns with Philip to her home in London. The one detail of Philip's story which doesn't come clear is what happened between his parents: whether the affair was discovered, or she left of her own volition, we can only guess, like the boy, who would not have access to this information.
In London Philip is miserable, missing "our Dad" and his beloved trees, bothering people with his strange dialect and that penetrating stare. He keeps asking when his father will join them, and when his mother finally admits he won't, Philip wants to know if it's because of what that bloke did to her in the woods. Stunned, she slaps him; he retaliates with the reproach, "Shagging!" (186), and runs through the underground tunnels. While the soundtrack mixes the echo of the boy's footfall and The Ink Spots' "You Always Hurt The One You Love," in a brilliant evocation of the past invading the present, the boy runs from the 1945 underground into the "real ward" of the 1986 hospital. (It is also in the underground confrontation with his mother that she and we see the first signs of Philip's affliction, a hideous lesion on his arm.)
The soundtrack also ties things together by making echoes of what we might call "binary" or double sounds: the clackety-clack of the train, the wheelchair, the boy's shoes, or Gibbon's footsteps. Voices float free of speakers, with ironic and pointed implication. Marlow's reverie of running from his Mum is interrupted by some disembodied voice, asking "Oo killed'er, then?"—the very question haunting and plaguing the patient, who keeps seeing a naked woman's body fished from the black Thames. It's Reginald from the ward, who has just learned that the author of the book he's painstakingly reading is also there, more or less—for he is a double man, both absent and present. Author and reader have a comical and pathetic conversation, which jocoseriously mirrors the relationship between film/text and viewer/reader. When Reg again asks (very simply) whodunit, Marlow replies (very truly, unhelpfully) "A swine" (188). Brooding upon his story, contemplating who might be the killer, Marlow mutters, "Well—it can't be me, that's for sure … I didn't do it" (143).
This stubborn protestation of innocence links the author Marlow to Binney and recalls another extraordinary sequence in the classroom. Implicated in something so fundamentally dirty, the model student and good boy behaves, as the outraged teacher says, like a pig by fouling her table, and spends the day, as it were, studying his own shit. Finally blaming his hapless classmate, he insists, "I saw him. I saw Mark, Miss. With my own eyes" (190). When he tells his distraught Mum that he saw them with his own eyes, he condemns her to an unendurable shame and ultimately suicide in the vile river. You always hurt the one you love, which of course includes oneself most of all, because, in the title of another tune Marlow croons, "I've got you under my skin." Thus P.E. Marlow's condition is a hysterical phenomenon, at least partly psychosomatic. "Chronic illness," says the doctor, "is an extremely good shelter" (97); psoriasis is the body's effort to replicate epidermis, and Binney's club is called "Skinskapes" (altered from the more emphatic "Skinscapes" in the text). Tortured by guilt, Marlow lacerates himself and lashes at women, who are always filthy sluts, lying on the ground with their legs spread. Trying, in Potter's phrase, "to be sovereign human beings," these characters are battlegrounds, sites of contending discourses, fields of unruly strife.
The Singing Detective derives some of its power from its clash of vituperative cynicism and profound optimism: one way to describe its narrative structure would be as a pilgrim's progress from despair to redemption. Though no television production has more vigorously rubbed our noses in offal—Marlow's leprous disfigurement and disablement, scatological imagery and an actual turd, the filthy Thames, profane language, and the primal scene of a man and woman humping on the ground—the film is aptly characterized by the Bishop of York as "classically Christian drama." Speculating sardonically on the name his mother bestowed upon him, the patient says he should have been christened Christopher, then recalls lines about Judgment Day from Dr. Faustus: "… where we are is Hell,/And where Hell is, there must we ever be—." Appropriately the patient's fever rises until he feels he's burning up, and the common salve for psoriasis is a sulphuric compound.
The patient is subjected to mortifying indignities, displayed to the callous scrutiny of the doctors with only a loincloth like some medieval saint. Exposure is his ultimate humiliation, a Dantesque retribution for the little boy whose unblinking stare unfixed everybody and unhinged his mother. His favorite oath is "Christ" or "Christ Almighty," by which he echoes his mother's "language," and indirectly implies that he cannot mend himself unaided. In panic he blurts out to the doctors, "And if I don't tell someone, if I don't admit it—I'll never never get out of it" (28). His condition seems unalterable, so long as he despairingly clings to it. He tells his fellow patient Ali that there's no place else to go and he likes it here, where Hell is: "I'm never going to leave" (30). What he believes in most of all, he proclaims, is "the one thing that can come out of people's mouths. Vomit" (40).
But other forces are at work in and on Marlow, though they come in disguise or are dimly perceived through a glass darkly. In this double vision apparently random events may be viewed as providential. Typically, Potter's spiritual theme is both parodied and enabled by rollicking slapstick; many moments are ominous and ridiculous, so that we are always unsure how to situate ourselves, never knowing how seriously to take it. Those gazing doctors burst into a raucous vaudeville version of "Dry Bones," which dramatizes Marlow's estrangement and their outrageous clinical detachment. Yet the hallucination also plants, antically but emphatically, the seed of regeneration. Shall these bones live? Or will Marlow stay imprisoned in his own hell? Ironically, Marlow castigates the evangelicals, but he will, as they urge, "Be In Time." Similarly, he contemptuously compares Dr. Gibbon, who indeed becomes the patient's savior, to Billy Graham. Like his namesake the historian, the psychiatrist has no illusions about human nature but sustains a tenacious faith in the light of reason to illuminate and perhaps dispel the powers of darkness. In this conviction the psychiatrist and the film are surprisingly optimistic. Dennis Potter has said that he depicts "characters that, until they work things out, are going to have the whole sting and stretch of human feelings" (my emphasis).
Though The Singing Detective explores the origins and elaborates the nature of the hero's plight comprehensively, some viewers may feel that Marlow's recovery is too abrupt and thoroughly affirmative for such a complex story. In some ways the final episode, "Who Done It," resolves almost like an old-fashioned thriller. Yet we might remember that Marlow the author proclaims a preference for stories with "Plenty of clues. No solutions" (140): The Singing Detective remains less emphatically closed and more engagingly problematic—more stubbornly double—than it first appears. Clearly, Marlow now confronts more directly his demons: in a terrifying sequence he is stalked by the scarecrow, singing à la Al Jolson "After You've Gone" ("you miss the bestest pal you ever had"), its blankeyed, distorted, snarling face blending into that of the teacher. Next day, though, the patient can analyze his nightmare with Gibbon, who asks if the face is Philip's mother and how she died. Directly Marlow makes the connection between the scarecrow specter and the old teacher; he insists, "I didn't kill my Mum. It wasn't my doing" (211) and confesses how he beshat the teacher's table and "implicated" poor Mark Binney. His angry outburst at the teacher suggests that she represents his mother. Then fury yields to shame that he himself was not punished severely for being "a filthy, wicked, horrible" boy. Marlow breaks down and stammers, "S-orry," embarrassed by his tears and finally acknowledging his grief and guilt, something he could never do for his teacher or his Mum.
It is here that the therapy revolves perhaps too simply around a single trauma, a kind of cankered "Rosebud," and Gibbon's powers appear rather too miraculous, for he successfully urges the patient to rise and walk. In some respects—but not quite—this resembles the conventional solution one expects from a miniseries, which is perfectly willing to show all hell breaking loose, as long as it solves it in six. What saves the scene from superficiality is that Marlow's recovery is not the end-all but only a step in the process. Marlow still has demons to exorcise, and he calls upon them with characteristically malicious relish. He imagines Nicola's humiliation at the hands of Mark, and her anguished exclamation, "You're a killer. My God, you're a killer!" which Marlow now understands to be apposite to himself. The link between Marlow and Mark is reinforced when Nicola proclaims, "you use your illness as a weapon against other people and as an excuse for not being properly human …" (218). In Marlow's fantasy, he creeps into Mark's flat to eavesdrop (just as he was surreptitiously present for his Mum's tryst), and as Nicola delivers these lines, her gaze shifts from Mark to Marlow, who acknowledges their pertinence by shifting his eyes. Yet even as The Singing Detective tends toward a tonic resolution, it continues to dramatize turmoil, for Marlow's purgation also involves violence, the imagined murder of the traitor Mark Binney, aka P.E. Marlow, by the hysterical Nicola. That her knife strikes his throat is a suitable execution for a con man and thief of words, as well as for his double, the speaker of hasty words he can't recall.
It is appropriate that Nicola (played by Janet Suzman) articulates Marlow's condition so lucidly, for she has borne the brunt of his raging paranoia and will be a primary agent of his regeneration. Like everybody in The Singing Detective, she is by turns baffled and inscrutable, by profession double, an actress capable of magisterial poise yet unnerved by Marlow's attacks. So skillful is the indeterminacy with which the narrative unfolds that it is possible to watch much of The Singing Detective under the illusion that Nicola is actually conspiring with a lover to defraud her husband. Marlow's febrile fantasies of Nicola elide with and are almost indistinguishable from her real appearances; her image blurs and blends into the erotic portrait on Binney's staircase, or becomes the face of the drowned woman. In one visit, Nicola exhorts the evasive Marlow, "It's up to you now. Look at me" (136). Speaking of his story, he insists, "it has nothing whatsoever to do with you" (136), which, like his other denials, reinforces the opposite possibility.
After such cathartic releases and piercing recognitions, the healing patient can remember more soothing memories, like his return to "Our Dad." Mr. Marlow picks up Philip at the station after his wife's suicide and, too poor to pay for a bus, walks his boy home. Holding his son's hand, he asks, tentatively and heart-rendingly, "Lovely, was her?" "Yes." "Peaceful, like?" "Yes." But all is not reconciliation and redemption, even in these apparently consoling memories. Already the boy has discovered the need for the saving lie, for his mother's end was neither lovely nor peaceful. Soon young Philip is hiding from everyone and expressing to the trees what he has really learned: "Don't trust anybody again! Don't give your love. Hide in yourself. Or else they'll die. They'll die. And they'll hurt you! Hide! Hide" (232)! The film's signals are mixed, its rapprochement only partial, its ultimate indicators consistently ambiguous. We see the boy descending the tree, a "slow and difficult climb down" (232), to witness his father's desperate wail. Running to grasp hands, the boy still resists his father's urgent expression of love, by saying that somebody might hear: that scarecrow will stalk him for a long time.
Another hallucination enables Marlow to confront his terror of love, loss, and pain. He envisions a policeman informing him that Nicola eluded the arresting officers and, of course, threw herself into the river. But daylight, which brings an actual policeman, releases him from this scenario, for the bobby is only visiting his mother. The climactic hallucination is the arrival of the Two Mysterious Men, projections of his guilt, gunning for Mark Binney and his alter ego (the chubby man might be a grown-up version of the slandered boy Mark). Like Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, the Two Mysterious Men resent their vague status and demand to know "Who we are. What we are" (246); denied any satisfaction, they torture and assail Marlow.
Detective Marlow to the rescue! Here it is tempting to see the detective as a boy's-eye reincarnation of his Dad: both are singers, and in one moment, Phil Marlow on the dais gestures like Mr. Marlow waving goodbye. He drills the two men, and pronounces, side-of-the-mouth, words that Dr. Gibbon might say of his patient: "I'd suppose you could say we'd been partners, him and me…. But, hell, this was one sick fellow, from way back when." With the bad guys dispatched, the real Marlow and Detective Marlow can reunite: "And I reckon," says the Detective, "I'm man enough to tie my own shoelaces now" (248).
The patient, able to stand "on my own two feet," rises and dresses himself, and announces to the arriving Nicola that he's "cracked this case" (248). Sporting a hat, the patient winks, as debonaire as his Singing Detective. Just then Reginald finishes his novel, which, true to formula, concludes with an embrace, to which the reader comments both aptly and naively, "Lucky devil" (249)! The exit of husband and wife is celebrated by Vera Lynn's rendition of "We'll Meet Again." The final shot depicts Philip in his tree, repeating that when he grows up he'll be a detective—and flashing his first grin. Philip's final grin implies an equanimity which of course the boy is far, far from attaining; we know he is doomed to a long, hellish struggle. And only hours before he and Nicola emerge together, the patient Marlow is caught in a desperate fantasy of violence and retribution. If his visions are cathartic, his consciousness still seems febrile, disoriented, and afflicted. For all the cascading recognitions and resounding affirmations, there are lacunae, or deliberate points of stress in the affirmative denouement. The vision of the film remains aptly double.
The Singing Detective requires such elaborate reconsideration because of its linkages, reversals, and revelations, and because of the complexity with which it shows itself regarding so many details. The obnoxious patient Mr. Hall might be seen as merely colorful, until we perceive him as a foil, a two-bit Gloucester to Marlow's Lear, in complaining that daily injustice "eats the insides out of you" (8) and makes life "Living hell" (9), and in veering from abject need to excoriating vituperation for the Nurses. So much discourse applies doubly that almost everything begins to seem multiply-pertinent, as when the old teacher, celebrating the impending collapse of Nazi Germany, exults, "But it won't be long now, the way things are going…. The big day is coming" (92)! Because the patient, like the Allied forces, has been probing "Deeper into the black heart of the Evil Land" (91), his soul, the big day of his triumphant exit is coming. Even minor characters we might be tempted to dismiss for their apparent double talk, like the hospital Registrar, offer meaningful insights: "You ask those questions as though someone else was responsible for your condition. But no one is or, at least, in the unlikely event that someone, anyone, is—then that someone cannot be anyone other than yourself" (39). Marlow doesn't yet want to hear this, but the film persuades us that we should be hearing and seeing everything.
I have made, and I hope justified, some vast claims for The Singing Detective. Part of my argument has been for the literary fecundity of Potter's screenplay, which has Harold Pinter's pungent idiom of confoundment and comedy of menace, and Tom Stoppard's ironic self-reflexivity and antic delight. The Singing Detective also resembles the "Circe" episode in Joyce's Ulysses: its mixture of dreamlike fluidity and transformation, burlesque or music hall extravagance, raunchy humor, uncanny possibilities, and unsparing psychodrama. The other part of my argument, fueling my enthusiasm for the film, is that it marks a coming of age for the television miniseries, realizing its potential for process, texture, felt life; the solution of the mystery, the whodunit rationale of the story, is in this sense subordinate, the meat thrown to distract the watchdog while the burglar goes about his business. This spirit runs counter to the fundamental tactic of thrillers, to sort through and differentiate the separate elements, and to achieve a sweeping closure. The Singing Detective heralds something new for television, the possibility of artworks themselves full of double takes which amply reward second looks, because they dramatize the vexed process of discovery for both the protagonist and the viewer, rather than delivering an illusory sense of scope and completion. Within the expansive format of The Singing Detective, character can be explored, not simply defined, situations elaborated, not merely reiterated. Narrative has an organic rhythm, emerging out of the material to complete a story, yet flaunts the artifice of story telling and insists on the problematics of viewing and knowing. Perspective may be panoramic, scanning a whole community, or deep-focused, rendering inner space. The camera has time for visions and revisions, inviting us—requiring us—to view events doubly, hear things polyphonically, and comprehend implications many-mindedly.
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