09 Dec The Singing Detective (1986)

Boundaries, Skin, Akroyd

I have been without a TeeVee for thirty years. It is a standing challenge to my friends to show me something that is produced for TeeVee that does less harm than good in working with the viewer’s mind.

I finally have it here. Lynch’s ‘Twin Peaks’ experiment came close, but turned into a comment on the empty soul of TeeVee as the basic material was passed from one director to another, each trapped by different restrictions in the medium. Lynch finally had to’fix’ it by making a wrapper film that brilliantly references those bounds.

What we have here is something that spreads out and takes time to percolate. It is designed to coherently be delivered in small discrete parts. I saw it on DVD but can imagine it not being destroyed by those pesky interruptions and the delay between broadcasts.

The idea is pretty complex for TeeVee: five levels of narrative, three in story, one in reference and one in a particularly strong use of song as narrative. This last is so novel and different from the conventions of artificial reality we’ve come to expect in musicals that it alone makes it interesting.

The nominal base level is Marlow the writer in a hospital. He has a story that was written, is being written and rewritten and adapted. It is also what we see.

Above these two levels is the explicit recognition that Potter, the `real’ writer is Marlow, the fictional writer. This is wisely not introduced in any meaningful way until the 4th episode, including the notion that the characters at all levels are in control.

Below these three levels is the story of his ‘murder’ of his mother, his own ‘detection’ and the ghosts of character.

Permeating all is that fifth level, narrative assembled and saturated by popular song. Some characters and actors, even gestures and props (like that one shoe) appear in all five levels.

Redheads are used in a particular clever way. (A project with similar tone and aspirations was “Draughtsman’s Contract” which inspired Potter and which also features Janet Suzman.)

But as time goes on, we can see that each level struggles to be the generator of the others. Particularly sweet is the notion that the singing detective can sing and think at the same time and what we see at all levels is what he thinks. Over time it becomes more viable to see the situation in any one layer as written (or imagined) in any other. Along the way he provides clear tools for doing so.

The interesting thing here is that Potter uses the time of the miniseries format wisely. He introduces a new layer or idea or narrative folding in each half hour. Only so fast as we can adapt. He uses the same material over and over, but always in a new context. It is exactly anti-TeeVee in this way as TeeVee depends on a consistency of context as frame. Here, the frame shifts, and the whole point of the context is to provide levers for that shifting.

That’s what the detective story is all about: starting with events and locating a frame. And why it revolutionised literature. Too bad the appearance of this didn’t revolutionise TeeVee.

I haven’t yet seen the 2003 film version, with the amazing Downey as Marlow. But it seems that this exploration in causal frames needs time to stretch, because one of Potter’s tricks is to use the fact that his scope exceeds that we normally swallow in a 90 minute film experience.

Posted in 2003

Ted’s Evaluation — 4 of 3: Every cineliterate person should experience this.

IMDB