Dennis Potter and the Question of the Television Author
[In the following essay, Coward uses Potter's The Singing Detective to consider the role of the author in the medium of television and as a case study in recent theories of meaning and authorship in a text.]
The question of the author poses particularly difficult problems for any attempt to understand the mass media by reference to critical models drawn from literary studies. While 'authorship' may not be the only or indeed the most crucial factor in the academic study of literature, it would be hard to deny its significance as a way of organising the disparate elements that constitute the study of literature. As Stephen Heath said in the Nouveau Roman: 'the institutionalisation of "literary criticism" (in faculties, journals, newspaper reviews, etc.) … depends on and sustains the author (enshrined in syllabi and examinations, interviews and television portraits). The task of criticism has been precisely the construction of the author. It must read the author in texts grouped under his name. Style in this perspective is the result of the extraction of marks of individuality, and creation of the author and the area of his value.'
Conceived thus, the study of the author seems a peculiarly limiting way of approaching the mass media, encompassing as it does the popular, commercial and above all collective productions of film, radio and television. Such forms of production, requiring division of labour, disparate skills and shared responsibilities have more immediately in common with industrial production than with the literary image of the individual author or artist. However, although these forms of production seem to suggest that almost any criteria other than the study of the individual author might be more appropriate, it would be misleading to suggest that the question of the author has been irrelevant to the study of mass media. It is an interesting reflection on the interdependency on the idea of art and the idea of the individual artist, that the higher the valuation of the medium as an art, the more likely you are to find the quest to establish an author for a work. Indeed with the recent 'season' of Dennis Potter plays and films on television we can witness the simultaneous 'literary' commitment to the idea of an individual author, and the desire to elevate the status of television through the existence of 'great' television writers.
The author in film studies
This quest for the idea of the individual author has particularly marked the critical study of film. Apart from one or two isolated attempts to treat film as an art, such as Gilbert Seldes's 1937 book Movies for the Millions, film (and particularly Hollywood film) was regarded as not worthy of serious study before the 1950s. Much of this attitude derived, as in the case of television today, from an unwillingness to treat an industrial, collective and popular medium as likely to be worthy of serious critical attention, and again it is worth noting here the way in which criticism inscribes the creative individual as the crucial factor, differentiating art from mass entertainment. In the late 1950s and early 1960s the film journal, Cahiers du Cinéma, produced a manifesto arguing for what it called a politique des auteurs, which was regrettably mistranslated into English as 'auteur theory'. The motive behind the position of Cahiers du Cinéma was twofold. On the one hand there was a desire to challenge some of the snobbish hostility to American cinema, and on the other there was a move against studying film only for its sociological contents and themes without any regard to how a film might produce its effects.
The journal argued on behalf of the existence of distinctive auteurs in cinema who could be seen to stamp their work with marks of their own personality. The cinematic author was taken to be the director (or cinéaste) who, through the translation of the script and the overall arrangement of the disparate elements which make up film, could be seen to be determining the overall shape and meaning of the film. Clear examples could be found in the popular genre works of John Ford, Howard Hawks and Nicholas Ray. What this approach offered was a serious study of film technique, with attention to the codes of shooting, lighting, editing and how these were combined by individual directors to produce their distinctive styles. In paying attention to these factors, the writers for Cahiers drew attention to the particularities of cinematic language, and especially to the concept of mise-en-scène. Mise en scène was seen as the most usual method the director used to imprint his distinctive style on the film. Mise en scène was understood as the various elements that went into the staging of a shot, including the scene arrangement, the camera movement, details of dialogue and the style of its delivery and the transitions from shot to shot.
The limitations of the auteurist approach were considerable. Most serious was the fact that it introduced a whole new hierarchy in the critical study of film. Only those films, or groups of films, which could be demonstrated to bear the distinctive marks of an 'individual' author became worthy of serious study (even if the canon did now include some Hollywood directors). And as a concomitant it followed that the quest to establish the author also became a method of evaluation. Individual personality, or distinctive traits of personal style, became methods of establishing value.
The criticism which Roland Barthes levelled at the obsession with the idea of the individual author of the written text is just as relevant to cinema. Barthes challenged the obsession with the idea of the individual creative genius as the explanation for the meanings revealed in a text. For him, the idea of individual creativity blinded critics to the process of production and the characteristics of the material in which that production was accomplished, be it film or writing. In auteurist approaches to film, this elevation of the individual at the expense of understanding the processes by which meaning is arrived at took a particularly romantic turn. Given the collective and industrial nature of film production, it was regarded as all the more remarkable that individuality could be achieved against such odds. Just as in the study of literature, the pre-eminence given to the individual as the explanation for meaning acted as a closure on what could be said about a film in terms of the social forces in which it was produced.
The same tides which brought Barthes's criticisms to bear on the literary text and the enshrinement of the individual also turned against the auteurist approach to cinema. But it is generally recognised that the politique des auteurs did something for film studies which is rarely accomplished in literary studies when it focuses on the individual author as a means of understanding that text. What auteurism accomplished in film was in fact the beginnings of an elaboration of film language. In attending to how the individual auteur transformed the elements of the raw material into a meaning and a style which was distinctive, this approach to film did in fact bring critics into a close textual analysis of the visual image. Perhaps for the first time, the idea of the transparency of the photographic image was effectively challenged. (By this I refer to the prevailing 'common-sense' belief that the camera simply records what is there and is therefore the medium most likely to accurately record reality.) In studying the elements which are arranged in a shot to produce its particular meaning, in studying the codes of lighting, of how shot follows shot, of the positioning of figures and objects within a shot, and the general composition of the image, what began to emerge were the tools of material analysis of film which deals with codes, ideologies, orders of discourse (the social factors in determining meaning rather than the life or personality of an individual). To some extent auteurist approaches to film laid the groundwork for the approaches which superceded it, approaches influenced by semiology which insisted on studying how meaning comes about in a filmic text, in the combination of all its signifying elements or codes—including as a minor, but rather privileged code, the 'auteurist' interpretation, relating one film to others 'by' a particular director.
Television authorship
The situation with television is peculiarly pointed. The history of broadcast television certainly shows an institutional sympathy to the idea of the author, perhaps even greater than that of film. Probably deriving its direct descent from radio, television carries with it a firm belief in the value of the written word, and with that come the inevitable ideologies about the significance of the individual author. The history of BBC radio is marked not only by an extreme reverence to the great authors of the literary establishment, but also by 'episodes' where significant literary figures were courted by the new mass medium. What is more, much of radio's history is marked by a denial of the essential characteristics of the medium of radio and an insistence that radio was simply a spoken 'version' of the written text, involving very little technical interference between the written word and its delivery to the audience. Even if it may not have appeared so to the average listener, the author, both in the form of literary figures and in the form of the individual scriptwriter, was enormously important in radio's self-perception.
Television at its inception acquired wholesale a series of values from radio in which the 'writer' is privileged above any of the 'technical' tasks such as direction and production. Yet in spite of this willingness to found its more 'serious' productions on the idea of authorship, this has proved a relatively intractable task. For the average consumers such as ourselves, television is virtually an anonymous medium. The bulk of its output—news, documentaries, soap-operas, serials, adverts, come to us without any obvious 'organising consciousness'. Indeed, very often quite other criteria apply in what we consider to be the most important factor in an individual programme. Even in programmes such as sitcoms where the cognoscenti might recognise authorship in the form of scriptwriters, the significance of character actors is often thought to at least equal, if not outweigh, the significance of the scriptwriter in determining the meaning of a production. Here television shares some of the same problems as film in terms of ascribing authorship. For film critics often felt that the 'star' of a film was perhaps finally the crucial factor in the film's meaning. For example, we are far more likely to think of a Garbo film than know the name of Clarence Brown, who in fact directed seven of Garbo's films.
In fact, many of the constraints on an easy recognition of television authorship are similar to those of film. Radio can inspire the illusion of very little technical intervention between the written words of the author and the audience's reception of these words. But film and television both present us with a complexity of production, and division of labour within that, which makes the image of the transparent communication between one author and his or her audience, hard to credit. But in spite of this, television itself and television critics do struggle hard to retain a regime of individuality. Indeed it is a fundamental value of television. At moments this regime of individuality is quite different from that of literature, as in the inscription of the idea of the television personality attaching to frivolous and serious alike, encompassing presenters like Wogan at one end, and a 'personality' reporter like John Pilger at the other. At other moments, however, the idea of the individual author derived directly from literary models reigns supreme. First, much of television's quality output is based on 'dramatisations' of authors—Dickens and Shakespeare are favourites but there are many others, like the Brontes, Jane Austen or more modern writers like Malcolm Bradbury. These productions reinforce the idea of the text (and create the idea of the programme) as the emanation of one individual mind. The History Man is far more likely to be remembered as a dramatisation of Malcolm Bradbury's novel than by any specifically televisual attribute it might have acquired in the process of dramatisation. These productions are much more common than a second relation which television has to the literary author, which is the commissioning of original works by 'quality' writers. There is surprisingly little traffic between, say, the Booker Prize shortlist writers and television. Fay Weldon's successful incursion on to TV with The Heart of the Country and Alan Bennett's TV plays are the exception rather than the rule.
It is rare for something originating from within television itself to be regarded as 'quality' entertainment in the same way. In fact that notion of quality seems curiously parasitic on the literary establishment. The only hope which television offers itself for claiming an intrinsic cultural quality is through the notion of the playwright. And this notion of the playwright owes nothing to specific skills within the medium of television, and everything to the institution of literature. The playwright is the lure held up to television. If the playwright is good enough, television too might become an art.
Dennis Potter and The Singing Detective
The example of Dennis Potter is both timely and relevant. Critics are claiming that with the success of his last production. The Singing Detective, he has established himself as the first 'great' television writer. Television itself was fast to respond to the critical success which The Singing Detective accomplished in the press. Firstly, Dennis Potter became the subject of an Arena programme, which has previously expressed a clear commitment to a highly traditional notion of the Arts. Secondly, and more recently, there has been a Dennis Potter retrospective, showing work, of rather variable quality, dating from the 1960s. Both of these are indeed high accolades for a writer who has worked almost exclusively within the medium of television. In so far as television does reflect on itself, it has been (especially recently) the presentation of television as social history, and with little claim for 'cultural achievement'.
The elevation of Dennis Potter to television auteur is not without a hidden agenda. The retrospective of his plays has allowed inclusion of Brimstone and Treacle, a play banned under the previous BBC regime of Alisdair Milne (in 1972). By constructing Potter as the first great television playwright, the new regime at the BBC can mark its distance from the previous one, but without having to defend the play itself. It simply becomes an important example of the oeuvre of Dennis Potter. But long before the retrospective, the Arena programme made it quite clear that Potter had already been claimed by the ideologies surrounding the individual author in literary criticism. Potter was interviewed by Alan Yentob, Head of Arts Programmes for the BBC, whose questions emphasised the importance of Dennis Potter's life as the way of understanding his work. The questions sought to establish recurrent themes in Potter's output and, in particular, they revealed the desire to relate those themes to the individual's autobiography. Much of the programme was geared to understanding Dennis Potter's previous output, in the light of The Singing Detective, as if The Singing Detective was the laying bare of the themes and obsessions which previous works began to explore.
In criticising this approach to The Singing Detective, I am in no way trying to lessen its significance. Far from it. Watched by eight million people, (and source of offence to a sizeable minority) it was certainly an important cultural event, putting forward extremely complex, perhaps even radical, ideas about male sexuality, fantasy and history in a highly entertaining way. Indeed, it could be argued that the series was far more important and searching than anything which has appeared on these subjects in the literary text over the last decade. However, far from 'authorship' being necessary to guarantee this significance, the concept, if anything, seems to get in the way, and block recognition of some of the truly radical aspects of the series.
The Singing Detective
The reception of The Singing Detective shows up the inadequacies which the search for authorship imposes on a medium like television. The Arena programme attempted to construct the television auteur, with snippets of previous productions, with questions designed to tell the story of his own life, and then an attempt to find the points of contact between these two. The retrospective series has offered a number of disparate programmes, linked by the author, in which we are invited to find recurrent themes, and distinctive stylistic traits. Both these approaches limit what can be said about texts. They attempt to impose one meaning on Dennis Potter's work, either a meaning which can be explained by his life (themes) or by his character and distinctiveness (style). By this operation, his most important series, The Singing Detective, can be understood as the apotheosis of these themes. But just like the attempts to establish the author in early auteur writing about the cinema, even these questions open up onto another, more important approach to television. For in attempting even to talk about the author's style in relation to The Singing Detective, we are forced into questions about the nature of the medium of television itself. The questions which present themselves here are about how the meaning is produced in a text which is using visual, verbal and musical language, which moves complexly between fantasy and 'reality', and which self-consciously refers to the conventions and styles of television and film.
What is striking about The Singing Detective, is the mixing of televisual or film genres. Scenes of intense, almost documentary realism set in the hospital are quickly replaced by perfect parodies of film noir, or give way to musical numbers. A perfect example of this occurs in the first episode. During the consultant's ward round, the stark, alienating reality of the hospital is suddenly transformed into a smoky where the entire hospital staff perform the musical number 'Dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones'. The sequence returns with surprising ease to the painful 'reality' of Marlow embarrassing the doctors by weeping bitterly about his condition. Although Marlow's head is the point which we gradually learn unifies the disparate fragments of memory, fantasy and experience, there is no hierarchy of discourses, where for example the scenes of hospital realism are given greater significance than other scenes. The first episode starts firmly located in the fantasy thriller genre, and it is only some time into the episode that we are given a 'realistic' location, the hospital ward where Philip Marlowe, writer of second-rate detective fiction is incapacitated with a horrific skin complaint. The juxtaposition marks a series of significant oppositions (between fantasy and reality, between 'art' and life) which dominate the series in the very process of their breaking down.
In attempting to analyse the style and effect of these passages, the links to be made with 'previous Dennis Potter productions' and with 'the life of Dennis Potter' are rather limiting. Much more important is an attention to the text which reveals very precisely the culminative impression of meaning formed by the juxtaposition of known film and television genres with each other. There is no clear unilinear narrative development; scenes are juxtaposed rather than being connected in any linear 'cause' and 'effect' sequence. Throughout the series, the genres shift as the scenes shift; often 'scenes' are played out in a mixture of genres. In conventional TV production, a programme either stays within one genre for its duration or makes clear how we can evaluate a hierarchy of genres, that is, it observes the conventions of television realism, unless it clearly marks its departure into dream or day-dream (even then, the fantasy insert often remains in the same style as the so-called reality sequences). In The Singing Detective the switch between genres is crucial to exploring the themes of reality and fantasy; often the distinction between the two is only marked by quite subtle changes in television style.
Episode five provided a particularly good example of the intercutting between genres, both marking and blurring the distinction between fantasy and reality, and used for cumulative effect. The sequence starts as a ward scene with a strong connotation of hospital realism, signalled by the loud soundtrack of hospital noises. The scene continues with a move into close-up and focus on the dialogue of Philip Marlowe and his girlfriend Nicola. The predominating style is that of TV drama, with an emphasis on acting and witty repartee between the protagonists. Very quickly the scene moves to fantasy; at first this is clearly marked, but gradually the distinctions become harder and harder to maintain. The distinction between Philip and Nicola's 'real' exchange in the hospital, and Philip's fantasy of her involvement with Mark Finney, is at first easy to maintain. However, the distinction becomes increasingly untenable. Nicola does indeed seem to be trying to 'cheat' on Marlowe just as his fantasy suggests, and the Mark Finney figure starts appearing in the hospital setting. At one point, two figures who had previously clearly inhabited Marlowe's fantasy world as writer, signified by their heavy (heavy-handed) connotations of film noir, merge into the hospital realism, culminating in a strange and inexplicable chase from the hospital (again whose unreality is only signified by knowledge of the American TV thriller drama). At moments the rapid shift from genre to genre, from fantasy to reality, is foregrounded, as in one moment where Nicola and Mark Finney are interrupted by the sound of Nicola's voice in the hospital and turn towards the interruption as disgruntled actors.
There is no guiding or explanatory voice through sequences like this. Meaning arrives only through the culmination of juxtaposed scenes. Over the six episodes there are repetitions. Certain scenes begin to appear in shorthand, such as the scene of the woman's body being brought out of the river, or the scene of his mother making love to an unknown soldier in the woods. These scenes, or parts of these scenes, are repeated, set first against one scene then against another, beginning to transfer meaning from the first scene to the third. At first the woman's body appears closely in relation to Marlowe's fantasies, in particular his thriller and detective fantasies. Gradually the scene begins to reappear more and more in relation to other more personal memories, of his childhood and of his mother's 'betrayal'. Only at certain moments in the entire six episodes is there any definitive linking and locating of the various memories and fantasies. This occurs in a scene where Marlowe is dragged into an unwilling word game with a psychotherapist which leads at increasing pace to 'shit', 'women', 'sex', 'death'. And as those words arrive, so too do the various recurrent visual themes. This scene foregrounds one of the important aspects of The Singing Detective—precisely this use of repetition and rhythm. The only overall comprehension which is possible for the series derives from recognising the pattern of repetition and recognising the build-up of rhythm to the significant moments where memories and fantasies are linked together.
What is important about this approach to the series is that it emphatically reveals the importance of the viewer as the place where the meaning of the text ultimately (if anywhere) resides. What we need to recognise is that viewers of this series are being called on to recognise (and use) television genres and codes in order to recognise the differences between fantasies, and between fantasy and reality. No text could more vividly illustrate Barthes's description of what makes up all texts, 'the text is a tissue of quotations drawn from innumerable centres of culture' (S/Z). Each element is a trace of what has previously gone before, a reworking of previous cultural usages; the programme is 'an intertextual space' (Kristeva). But unlike most television and popular entertainment, which simply repeats previous cultural usages in worn stereotypes, The Singing Detective takes up these 'quotations', and by juxtaposition and repetition, uses them to explore themes of memory, repression, the past and the present. And what is revealed by Dennis Potter's particular exploration of these themes through the medium of television is how complex and sophisticated is the ability of the average television audience to 'read' the codes of television. Nothing could more dramatically reveal the continued disregard of the television audience's intelligence than the fact that such a 'complex' programme (in the aesthetic terms of television management) could be so popular. None of these things can be said from a form of criticism which is determined to explain The Singing Detective by reference only to the author Dennis Potter.
In a sense The Singing Detective is 'about authorship'—about a writer, Philip Marlowe, his need to fantasise to assuage his personal pain, and his desire to impose (or at least present) his fantasies on others. But if we see the series as simply governed by the central character's consciousness (a central character, as the press kept telling us, who is very like Potter), then we miss the point—the final episode where the petty gangsters come in search of their author, and Nicola has apparently murdered Finney. These cannot be seen as simply emanations of the author, Philip Marlowe. The characters have gained a life of their own—and only the inadequacies of that life are the author's responsibility. Perhaps then, Potter himself, doyen of TV 'authors' is telling us that authorship is a relatively unimportant, if ego-inflating, critical question. Or, as he put it in the Arena programme: 'Nowhere but nowhere in the script did I mention the Forest of Dean' (Potter's own birthplace). So who set the series there? It must have been the producer Kenith Trodd—a great promoter of Potter as author. Such are the tangles that the hunt for the television will snare us in…. The 'author' is an external and uncomfortable import in television criticism. Nevertheless the existence of the author is being made a condition of television being taken seriously as a cultural product. I hope to have shown that neither film nor television can usefully be forced into that particular obsession, which only serves to hide knowledge of the media from us and therefore make us complicit in the belief that film and television are not in fact constructs but are instruments of personal expression.
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