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
Phillip Marlowe gains a sense of the shape of his own life, re-establishing touch with his lost childhood. Therefore it is possible to see the process by which Potter added bits in to his original hospital scenes, seeking to give his writer character a past, to explain through flashback the events that led to his illness. In Episode Six, during Marlowe's shootdown hallucination, certain patients are shot in the place on their body that ails them. Without the hallucinations, illusions and imaginings, the audience would have little insight into Marlowe's past, and only a select knowledge of his personality. This persona is literally embodied in dramatised fantasy scenes (ostensibly from the old detective novel the main character is re-writing in his head) in which he is shown as the detective hero of his own fiction, The Singing Detective. Therefore there is much symbology evident in Marlowe's childhood dreams. Here, memory and imagination are shown to be the tools by which the middle-aged Marlow re-achieves a sense of harmony and integration between himself and the wider world. This changed world, more and more within the drama, comes to parallel the paranoid, conspirational atmosphere of Marlowe's noir detective thriller. his novel he assimilates his childhood memories and so comes to terms with his reality. From the first episode, Marlowe begins to twist the seemingly ordinary characters of the hospital within his real, and hallucinatory webs, and through experiencing Phillip Marlowe's dreams and hallucinations, it is not long before the audience begins to question what is real, and which character belongs to which story. The child stares out of the tree and straight to camera, as he delivers the last line of the drama: 'When I grow up I be going to be a detective. Considering that Marlowe is in search of self-knowledge and a way out of illness, he may be seen as a detective, casting his private eye inwards. 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. Marlowe's exasperation and frustration is further highlighted by the song that he imagines them singing; "knees and bones".
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Acceptance Essays
