Subjects:
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
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The role of musical numbers in The Singing Detective are not expressions of mute longings, and are instead, evocative period pieces for the performers', Marlowe and the Singing Detective, to deliver the proper flavour, or else they are Marlowe's hallucinations. This changed world, more and more within the drama, comes to parallel the paranoid, conspirational atmosphere of Marlowe's noir detective thriller. 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.
In these hallucinations and illusions, the characters dance and sing as if they are merely toys. 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. his novel he assimilates his childhood memories and so comes to terms with his reality. At the beginning, an external reality seemed to reside in hospital scenes, while fantasy does in the 1945 thriller strand, and by the end of the Singing Detective, the two realms become thoroughly blurred. As Marlow walks away down a long corridor on Nicola's arm, bird sounds from the Forest of Dean are heard; past and present are again combined, if, typically, not reconciled.
The question The Singing Detective raises through the hospital scenes - a world of bed, bodies and death - is whether there is anything beyond what Potter labelled ' the suffocating materiality' of things.
The illusions also ask the question, is Marlowe going mad?, just as is ex-wife seems to ponder. To find out and to attempt to uncover the roots of his own illness, Marlowe confronts his own predicament by paradoxically escaping it from inside his head. The pseudo-musical format placed the play as the middle part of a trilogy, preceded by Pennies from Heaven(1978) and succeeded by Lipstick on Your Collar(1993), which heavily featured the music of the 30's, 40's and 50's respectively. As well ass Marlow's character, other characters would also seem unresolved.
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