The Singing Detective was produced by the BBC in 1986. It was written by Dennis Potter, and starred Michael Gambon as a writer who is thrown into a personal crisis by the latest manifestation of the disease that has plagued his life, psoriatic arthropathy. The hero, Philip Marlow, tries to makes sense of his life by use of analepsis and fantasies related to his own pulp novel, The Singing Detective. From the first perspective, it would seem that The Singing Detective is overwhelmingly psychoanalytical, as Adam Barker writes, ‘Potter is. . . explicitly Freudian in The Singing Detective’ (1). However, there is also evidence that the dilemma which Marlow faces is a peculiarly Foucauldian kind. Potter would seem to share many of Foucault’s themes: the regulation of childhood sexuality, psychoanalysis, confession, discipline, punishment, the subjectivity discourse, and institutions such as prisons, hospitals, schools, and the army. Yet one would have to question whether Potter’s work is really so postmodern, when one considers his publicly declared assault on the discourse:
It is no news that there is a contemptuous, hard-eyed
hatred of humanistic culture all around us. . . the long, grey, ebb tide of
so-named Post-Modernism, pseudo-totalitarian, illiberal and dehumanizing
theories and practices lie on top of cold waters like a huge and especially
filthy oil slick. . . The Academic critic reigns, intimidatingly’ (2).
In the light of this statement, made in 1984, one would
have
2
to question whether Potter articulates his opposition
within the pages of The Singing Detective. Since the debate over subjectivity
seems to be the point of contention, a discussion will be needed about Potter’s
autobiographical (or confessional), tendencies.
The Singing Detective begins with a very Film Noir
premise. The sinister Mark Binney (played by Patrick Malahide), passes
information on to a busker in the middle of a deserted street. Immediately, the
audience is thrown into a world of spies and seedy nightclubs. ‘It still
strikes me as strange’, wrote Freud, ‘that the case histories should read like
short stories and that, as one might say, they lack the serious stamp of
science’ (3). Doctor Gibbon, Marlow’s psychotherapist, uses the pulp novel, The
Singing Detective, as a way of analysing his patient. ‘I know the clues are
supposed to point in the direction of the murderer’, Gibbon says. ‘But what if
they also reveal the victim a little more clearly?’ (4). Thus the narrative of
Philip Marlow begins to unravel. Here is one of the many uncanny echoes between
Potter’s drama and Nick Roeg’s Bad Timing:
For Alex knows that ‘through the gratification of
curiousity, one acquires knowledge, ‘as he tells his students, backed by
screen-size projections of ‘some famous spies, which include ‘the first spy’ (a
male child) and ‘the first to be spied on’ (a couple making love, the child’s
‘primal scene’ (5).
The main reason for Marlow's trauma is initiated by such
a
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primal scene, witnessing his mother engaged in
intercourse with a man in the woods. As Potter writes in the screenplay, ‘From the
boy’s incredulous point-of-view, the love-making seems akin to violence, or
physical attack’ (6). The only character in the play who physically attacks
women on screen is Mark Binney. He slaps the face of Sonia, the Russian
prostitute, and threatens to burn her skin. Binney also appears as Finney, the
film producer who is trying to purloin Marlow’s script and wife in 1986. Marlow
has an obvious alter ego in the film noir episodes, as Phil Marlow, the Singing
Detective. With Gambon playing both parts, Phil Marlow tends to overshadow the
other alter ego, Mark Binney. Binney is explicitly identified with Marlow the
writer in the first episode, when he starts sweating in Skinscapes, the
nightclub. It may very well be that F/Binney is the personification of Maclow’s
hysteria: ‘And some unconscious, nervous gesture, like a tic, makes his hand go
to his throat’ (7). F/Binney has a tendency to convey feelings of paranoia. He
thinks the two mysterious men, or Marlow the writer, are out to entrap him. His
physical or verbal misogynism are his only weapons. ‘A densely encoded body
language, hysteria signifies a disease in the body of the family expressed
through symptoms in the hysteric’s body, in this case, through her loss of
voice’ (8). Marlow is explicitly compared with his mother: both conduct public
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displays of sobbing, and have suicidal tendencies. What
Potter does is to reverse the genders, by revealing that men can suffer from
hysteria too. Thus, in the Freudian resolution, Marlow is restored to health when
his two weapons, his disease and his voice, are destroyed by the device of
murder. F/Binney, appropriately enough, gets it in the throat. As the second
mysterious man says, ‘I thought his voice sounded funny -‘ (9).
By embracing psychoanalysis so whole heartedly,
Potter would seem to be defying Foucault:
Like Foucault, the anti-psychiatrists glossed over the
rather concrete point that the censure of madness was gendered, both in its
willingness to target women and in the construction of madness as part of the
world of unreason (10).
Yet Foucault did argue that psychoanalysis, at least in
its early stages, was gendered, ‘in the process of the hysterization of women’
(11). Such gendering may also be an unavoidable presence in modern
psychoanalysis too - recall that the first spy was conveyed in such a way as to
suggest that it could only be a boy. It almost seems at times though, that
Potter has actually read, and indeed, dramatised, Foucault:
It is often said that we have been incapable of imagining
any new pleasures. We have at least invented a different kind of pleasure:
pleasure in the truth of pleasure, the pleasure of knowing that truth, of
discovering and exposing it, the fascination of seeing it and telling it, of
captivating and capturing others by it - the specific pleasure of the true
discourse on pleasure (12). This may be why Marlow is able to recover, to walk
again. Although one would have to say that much of what we see of Marlow is due
to an overwhelming distress, there is ultimately pleasure at the successful
rehabilitation - on both Marlow’s and the audience’s part. And indeed, there is
a great deal of pleasure to be had from watching The Singing Detective itself.
The series is a visual and musical delight. Potter
employs music as an anti-naturalistic device. Characters can burst into song at
any given moment. They are popular songs too, the recognition of which serving
to integrate the audience more warmly into the plot. As Melvyn Bragg writes,
there have been elements of my own life and experience
and imagined worlds in his work. As there has been, I am sure, for so many
others, which is one of the reason for the resonance his writing has (13).
We have all faced that nightmare of being sent to the
front of the class as an example, or so we like to think. Potter, or Marlow,
explicitly uses this device, when he tells Nurse Mills that she’s the girl in
all the songs: ‘When you’re a child. When you are supposed to be asleep. Those
songs’ (14). This is quite an explicit acknowledgement of one of Foucault’s
themes: the regulation of childhood sexuality. Throughout The Singing
Detective, Mrs.Marlow tries to restrict Philip’s knowledge of sex. For
instance, in the
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fourth episode, Philip’s Uncle John makes an explicit
sexual metaphor regarding the hole in the centre of a gramophone record. Mrs.
Marlow clearly disapproves, and the Granddad, who has already been admonished
for saying ‘Tart’ acts quickly to stop metaphor extending any further.
Unfortunately, it is part of her tragedy that it is she herself who delivers
Philip’s first, and most harmful, view of sexuality. Individuals are thus
specified:
since sexuality was a medical and medicalizing object,
one had to try and detect it - as a lesion, a dysfunction, or as a symptom - in
the depths of the organism, or on the surface of the skin, or among all the
signs of behaviour (15).
Thus, it is in the underground station that Philip
reveals just how much he knows about sex - and just how much his mother has
unwittingly taught him. ‘He rolls up his sleeve. On his forearm is a big red
and silvery white patch. She is astonished, not knowing what it is. (In fact, a
first psoriatic lesion)’ (16). Philip runs away and his mother attempts to
follow him, but ‘not so much like someone trying to catch up, as in a sudden,
overwhelming panic: a snapping of all the nerves’ (17).
Throughout The Singing Detective, there is a
metaphorical exploration of prison. Marlow the patient is first introduced to
us via the apt I’ve Got You Under My Skin. He is paralysed by arthritis. As
Marlow himself says, ‘I’m a prisoner inside my oooh own skin and bones -' (18).
It could
7
even be that, due to the promise he made when he returned
home after his mother’s death, that Marlow has entered the Cycle of Prohibition:
thou shalt not go near, thou shalt not touch, thou shalt
not consume, thou shalt not experience pleasure, thou shalt not speak, thou
shalt not show thyself; ultimately thou shalt not exist, except in darkness and
secrecy. To deal with sex, power employs nothing more than a law of
prohibition. Its objective: that sex renounce itself. Its instrument: the
threat of a punishment that is nothing other than the suppression of sex (19).
Philip says almost the exact same words to himself in the
last episode, when he hides from his grieving father in the forest. Philip
literally punishes himself for the death of his mother. ‘“Thrown into solitude,
the convict reflects. Placed alone in the presence of his crime, he learns to
hate it’’ (20). Dr. Gibbon further elaborates on the comparison: ‘Chronic
illness is an extremely good shelter. Have you ever seen it in those terms? A
cave in the rocks into which one can safely crawl?’ (21).
There could be a personal explanation for Marlow’s
misogynism, as revealed in the text. As part of the Freudian theme throughout,
there is a scene where Philip has defecated on his teacher’s table. Possibly,
this is a cry for help, by someone who is unable to articulate their feelings.
Nevertheless, a very Foucauldian exercise is then carried out, in which the
teacher, an old woman (hence
8
the misogynism), attempts to determine who has done this
thing. To do this, she wages psychological warfare on the class. In an
operation akin to torture, she waits to see who will crack first. Inevitably,
it is Philip who does so. However, he is not automatically punished. As Potter
had previously conveyed, Philip was the brightest in the class, and this does
aid him:
Through this micro-economy of’ a perpetual penality
operates a differentiation that is not one of acts, but of individuals
themselves, of their nature, their potentialities, their level of value (22).
Thus Philip is imprisoned within the cycle of knowledge
of individuals, throughout life. Indeed, Marlow is alarmed in the first episode
when he hears what sort of detail goes into his Report. He is individualized
throughout his hospital stay: we first see his name on his chart, when he is
visited by the Consultant and his entourage, literally by the closing of his
curtains, and by the individual drugs he receives. Philip escapes by naming the
son of the man who had committed adultery with his mother. Indeed, the whole
class corroborates Philip’s lie, and even Mark Binney himself comes to believe
that he did it:
His body, displayed, exhibited in procession, tortured,
served as the public support of a procedure that had hitherto remained in the
shade; in him, on him, the sentence had to be legible for all (23).
Thus are we all in the Carceral Network, ‘the society of
the
9
teacher-judge, the educator-judge, the social
worker-judge; it is on them that the universal reign of the normative is based’
(24).
Confession, or the inability to confess, is ever
present in The Singing Detective. Indeed, one could see the entire series as
being confessional, even in a metaphorical sense. There is the Box, the Screen,
and with the audience as priests. Confession is so prevalent that we see it
everywhere, even when it is not really there (24). For instance, much has been
made of Potter’s autobiographical background (25). One cannot help but notice
the prevalence given to the locations of Hammersmith and Fulham, and the Forest
of Dean, in The Singing Detective. As Potter himself has written though, ‘it’s
one of the least autobiographical pieces of work that I’ve ever attempted’
(26). The question to be asked would seem to be whether The Singing Detective
is wholly fictional or wholly autobiographical. Elizabeth Wilson would argue
that that is a false distinction:
For not only is much fiction autobiographical; all
autobiography is in some sense fictional the remembrance or the searching again
for the ‘lost times’ is never just an act of memory or research, but is
inevitably a re-creation, something new (27).
This is something which occurs to Marlow himself. In a
disturbing moment, Marlow postulates the postmodern crisis of identity:
10
When she gets out, supposing she were to walk off the
page? Suppose - Supposing she disappears back into the alphabet? A collection
of letters that has other uses - Suppose I am- a-a collection of. . . (28).
Marlow is fictional, of course, but he asks the very
important question: how real is anyone? If one were to take what Potter wrote
about Postmodernism seriously, then one would have to examine The Singing
Detective for points of resistance. If Foucault’s argument is that we are all
bound by Culture, one possible deviation would be to make a case for Nature.
Indeed, Nature is portrayed in a vast number of ways in The Singing Detective.
When Gibbon questions Marlow on his use of personal traumas in his writing,
Marlow replies by saying ‘You don’t know writers.. .They’ll use anything and
anybody. They’ll eat their own young’ (29). Gibbon compares this to the
behaviour of ‘disturbed’ rabbits. The school teacher constructs the most
rigorous division between humans and animals (30); yet she never considers why
somebody would have defecated on her table. The Singing Detective himself
compares Binney to an animal in a cage (31). Perhaps Potter wished to convey
that all the characters behaved naturally, rather than culturally. Potter’s
argument would seem to be that when we are on our own, away from the vigilance
of the Panopticon,we have only ourselves to define us - the Sovereign Self, as
he calls it. He divulged this in an Arena interview in 1987:
11
So there was a sense in which I could do anything, and
say anything and dare anything, as long as there were no witnesses, as the
witness would have immediately translated it into their terms, terms which I
was already uncomfortable about (32).
If you are your own master, you can avoid the Foucauldian
postmodernist joke - which would seem to be what Potter is postulating. As one
of the soldiers on the train jokes, ‘It’s doing what we’re told as makes us free’
(33). If Potter is correct, then one could avoid the rather dehumanizing
prospect of describing Nicola as an ‘auxiliary institution’ (34) for aiding
Maclow’s recovery in her role as wife. Yet Potter cannot seem to escape using
Foucauldian terms, i.e. 'Sovereignty’ (35). Indeed, there is the contrary
argument, which says that, far from criticizing Postmodernism, Potter embraces
it wholeheartedly in The Singing Detective. As Foucault himself writes
We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of
power in negative terms: it ‘excludes’, it ‘represses’, it ‘censors’, it
‘abstracts’, it ‘masks’, it ‘conceals’. In fact, power produces; it produces
reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth (36).
It may even be that power ‘produced’ The Singing
Detective, and this essay.
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NOTES
1). A. Barker, ‘What the Detective Saw’, in Monthly Film
Bulletin, Vol.55, no.654, July 1988, p.193.
2). J. Hunningher, ‘The Singing Detective: Who done it?’,
in G.W.Brandt, ed. British Television Drama in the 1980s, Cambridge University
Press, 1993, p.234.
3). D. Stafford-Clark, What Freud Really Said, Pelican,
1967, p.28.
4). D. Potter, The Singing Detective, Faber and Faber,
1986, p. 52.
5). T. De Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics,
Cinema, MacMillan, 1984, p.91.
6). Potter, Detective, p.113.
7). Potter, Detective, p.179.
8). De Lauretis, op. cit. p.57.
9). Potter, Detective, p.228.
10). C. Sumner, The Sociology of Deviance: An Obituary, Open
University Press, 1994, p.274.
11). M. Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume One,
Penguin, 1990, p.153.
12). Foucault, Sexuality p.71.
13). D, Potter, Seeing the Blossom, Faber and Faber,
1994, p. xii.
14). Potter, Detective, p.220.
15). Foucault, Sexuality p.44
16). Potter, Detective, p.185.
17). Potter, Detective, p.208.
18). Potter, Detective, p.28.
19). Foucault, Sexuality, p.84
13
20). M. Foucault, Discipline and Punish The Birth of the
Prison, Penguin, 1991, p.237.
21). Potter, Detective, p.97.
22). Foucault, Discipline p.181.
23). Foucault, Discipline, p.43.
24). R. Coward, ‘Dennis Potter and the Question of the
Television Author’, in Critical Quarterly, Vol. 29, no. 4, p.84.
25). P. Purser, ‘Dennis Potter’, in G. W. Brandt, ed.
British Television Drama, Cambridge University Press, 1981, p. 169—70.
26). Potter, Blossom, p.70.
27). F. Wilson, ‘Tell it Like it is: Women and
Confessional Writing’, in S. Radstone, ed. Sweet Dreams: Sexuality Gender and Popular
Fiction, Lawrence and Wishart, 1988, p.23.
28). Potter, Detective, p.227.
29). Potter, Detective, p. 211.
30). Potter, Detective, p.138.
31). Potter, Detective, p.100.
32). Potter, Blossom, p.62/69.
33). Potter, Detective, p.93.
34). Foucault, Discipline p.270.
35). Foucault, Discipline line, p.35-6.
36). Foucault, Discipline p.195.
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