Down these mean streets an academic must go, an academic
who is not himself mean. It had been a fortnight since the Sternwood case, and I
was getting restless, vamping till the next case began. I strolled the dirty
streets at night, and the more I strolled, the more they seemed like sewers,
with everything on them trash. Including the people. Especially the people. The
rain lashed down and seeped into cracks. I knew I wanted to tear this city
apart.
The rain lashed me to my office. There were already bars on the window.
If only my next client would arrive. Then and only then could I define myself.
There was a small pitter patter at the door, and Potter walked in. ‘I
want you to find The Singing Detective’, he said.
The Singing Detective was a television series written by
Dennis Potter. It was first broadcast on BBC1 during the November and December
of 1986. It is the tale of Philip Marlow, a writer who suffers from
psoriatic naturopathy, or psoriasis, a devastating skin disease, which, as
various characters comment throughout the series, make him look as though
boiling oil has been poured upon him. Whilst he is in hospital, he begins to
suffer from series of hallucinations, with some use of analipsis
(flashbacks) to reveal his past, and the fictional world of The Singing
Detective, a pulp novel that Marlow had written ten years earlier.
‘Technology, power and pleasure, sexuality and the
body, the family and other forms of confinement, prisons and hospitals,
psychoanalysis — what other historian or philospher has put together and spoken
of things that so directly affect cinema?’ is something that De Lauretis writes
of Jacques Foucault in her analysis of Bad Timing. Dennis Potter also writes
about such institutions and discourses - for instance, although no actual
prisons appear, the theme of imprisonment is conveyed through a variety of
metaphors - ‘I’m a prisoner within my own skin and bones’, Marlow says at one
point. One would almost have to say that the discourses in The Singing
Detective are so Foucauldian that one could almost imagine Potter curled up
over his copy of The History of Sexuality or Discipline and Punish. The only thing
that appears to be missing is a dramatisation of the discipline of military,
although there are plenty of examples of this in Potter’s later work, Lipstick
on Your Collar.
2
I knew there had to be a link between Potter and
Roeg. I’d seen them hanging around together. They were a double act, like
Fortnum and Mason, or Alcock and Brown. Adam Barker ratted on them and
confirmed what I’d already known. I went to the window and racked the mare for
a while. Different coloured neon flashed on my forehead, red, amber, and green.
Where was I going with this part of the investigation? Should I leave it, mull
it over until something happened, or act upon it straight away?
Confession, or rather, the lack of confession is
prevalent throughout The Singing Detective. The character of the Singing
Detective tells us little, although he sings like a bird. He just takes part in
some kind of noirish Freudian melodrama. Some say he plays the role of
Superego! But Philip Marlow has yet another alter ego in his dreams, the rather
sinister, but ultimately pathetic, Mark Binney, victim extraordinaire -
perhaps Marlow’s ego at that. Marlow’s hysterical, misogynistic ego.
The manual says, Never trust your client. I knew
Potter knew more than he was letting on, but I wasn’t going to let him know
that I knew that. I was going to give him just enough rope to hang himself, for
if he was economical with truth, I was just as economical with other things.
Potter was dying to spill his guts.
One of the great controversies surrounding The
Singing Detective is the extent to which it is autobiographical. Or, one could
almost say, confessional. There is the Forest of Dean, birthplace of Potter and
the fictional Marlow. Hammersmith Bridge also crops up a lot in his work, along
with the neighbouring Craven Cottage, home of Fulham football club.
‘Who’s the dame?’ I asked Potter. ‘There’s always
a dame’. But he said nothing. I decided to ask Dora, but she said nothing as
usual. It didn’t matter, Leigh Gilmore had plenty to say about her.
I knew Marlow was a bit of a one with the ladies,
but I was surprised to see three of them breezing through my door. They had
plenty to tell about Potter’s story, but none of them were E. Lucy Dation.
Still Coward, Kauffman, and Wilson did their best,
Ken Worpole could also warble a pretty tune. He told me all I needed to know
about how the Singing Detective operated, Joost Hunningher gave me a list of
his accomplices. The case was ticking along in my brain nicely. But so was time
- was it running out on me?
3
This was turning into a very English sort of
murder. There was I the Detective, standing in the parlour, with all the
suspects before me, waiting for the solution. I felt like I was being examined,
to see if I was a regular kind of Joe. But there was no solution, only clues.
But I did have some evidence to show...
There are many scenes in the Singing Detective
which are related to Foucault. In this one, Marlow is being examined by a party
of doctors (some of whom are being examined themselves). Marlow is
individualised by the written report, so much so that he doesn’t have to answer
the Consultant’s questions) however much he wants to. The Consultant displaces
the Houseman for not being precise. There is also a Biblical discourse - in the
script, Marlow is likened to Lazarus. And it is present within the song, As if
to prove that the Author is not all-powerful, Hunninger relates how that scene
was devised by Jim Clay and his Design team, who said that they decided to ‘use
neon for bars on the windows; it would become partly a prison, partly a club.
The club was his escape, the hospital his prison’.
The people I dealt with were lucky if they ended
up in jail. And yet, as I wandered around the library, surrounded by clues, I
suddenly felt lost. I felt like the fictional detective, Baskerville in Umberto
Eco’s The Name of the Rose, as Worpole said - ‘having found his way into the
library which contains the answers to the problems he has been trying to solve,
he cannot find his way out’. If Baskerville was not real, then maybe Marlow
wasn’t real either, and if Marlow wasn’t real. .. I realised with a surge of
panic that I didn’t even have a handle. Could it be that I was the victim of a
student, postmodern joke, about the fiction of subjectivity? Maybe it wasn’t
even a joke, perhaps the student was just using me. I had to find Potter. Maybe
he knew the way out...
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