The Singing Detective, Peg O' My Heart

"You've got to spread joy up to the maximum 

Bring gloom down to the minimum

Have faith or pandemonium's 

Liable to walk upon the scene ... "

- Johnny Mercer

It used to be that when a character turned her body and tilted her head just so, the song that came out was not a post-modern questioning of the audience’s semi-conscious acknowledgment of their – or her own – cinematic dreamstate. The simple beauty of the American musical was – sorry, is – the use of music, voice and dance to further a story.

That was the idea, any way. In practice, musical songs were – are – often stuck to the character like word balloons: reveries, wishes, fears, wheres-I-come-from and whats-I-want points of view. It’s easy to keep the faith in the simple beauty of the musical theater idea: taking an ancient and profound instinct for dramatic song and dance and jazzing it up in genial, wiseguy American talk.

Which of course is not at all the point with Dennis Potter’s The Singing Detective (1986). Even though it's a substantial modernist meme he's given us, the way characters burst out of their edgy millennial time and space to sing old-fashioned pop songs from eras gone by. It’s a tactic so irony-laced, so Brechtian in its aggressive distancing of audience from story, so very very post-modern; and when I say post-modern, I mean old-fashioned.

But he can’t help it. Coming of age creatively in the ‘60s, achieving greatness in the ‘70s and ‘80s, the 2-pop of post-modernism, I understand Potter as a man of his time, especially if he didn’t like his time at all. That he wrote for television, building one disenfranchised, sexually combative, culturally undermining script after another for the BBC to be watched by pepperpots and coalminers during the exhausted liberalism of the 70s and raggedy Thatcherism of the 80s, only burnishes his po-mo cred. But antagonizing the audience, ala Godard, Waters, or Potter, still seems tired today. Very far from retro appeal.

What isn’t tired, in fact what leaps with fanciful energy, is the mixing of genres, taking the rules of one and applying them onto another. Also an intrinsically post-modern thing to do. The operative difference being our choice of verb: today we mash genres, like children or mad scientists, rather than undermining them, like Patty Hearst or the Red Brigade.

But when it comes to Dennis Potter, at least with The Singing Detective and his  director Jon Amiel, I get the feeling 25 years later that antagonizing the audience was a practiced flourish, like jazz hands. It gives the audience what it came to expect, and could be artfully distracted by. That way, they have room to maneuver for three other, more challenging tricks: playing gently with genre mixing; foisting a healing, and dare I even reach for this, sanguine story onto an audience primed for antipathy; and lastly, indulging in the deadliest, eye-gougingest of all narratives: the imperial author at work.

The sometimes lurid, never truly sentimental breaking into song is only one aspect of the The Singing Detective – and before I step one letter further you’ll have to accept that the story is not possible without evoking the caustic British flair for derision; because, it turns out, The Singing Detective’s narrative path is the crawling out from under self-derision.

Michael Gambon plays Philip Marlow, laid up in a National Health hospital on a metal gurney bed with horrifying psoriasis, passing the time reworking plotlines and mediating on his life. He is a writer and in the first instance of derision, from author to character, he is a writer of detective fiction, assuredly bad and assuredly aware of 1) his given namesake, 2) his failing to live up to that namesake and 3) the fate dispensed to him of 1 and 2. This is before anything else happens.

The meta-whatness of just this name extends further, upward and outward, as most of the story concerns the authorial play – or is it childish torture? – between a writer and his characters. Dennis Potter the writer suffered from horrible psoriasis in a National Health hospital’s metal gurney bed, no doubt passing the time dreaming and meditating on his life, his plots, and the prismatic intersection of the two which turns people into characters. And at some point was struck by inspiration. Examining this artistic mechanism, analyzing from what real-life event a character is born, is given a name and sometimes dies, is the mystery genre that underwrites The Singing Detective.

There are three and finally four storylines whose checkerboard intersections make up the movie. One: Philip Marlow, pulp detective writer, suffers from full body psoriatic anthropathy, rendering him virtually immobile. Tender, inflamed, scaly with white dead skin begging to jump off, his very self is so hateful and lowdown it wants to burst itself from the body of the man it’s crippled. The goings on in the open ward hospital, overhearing other patients gurgle, chortle, argue and die; being handled carelessly and carefully by nurses; and examined like a thoughtless specimen by roving teams of doctors, make up the daily routine of Mr. Marlow.

Incidentally, it’s in this level that Joanne Whalley (“An arresting, dark-haired stunner of 1980s and 1990s continental filming,” says her IMDB profile) and Imelda Staunton (so oppositely merciful 18 years later in “Vera Drake”) play through Good Nurse v. Bad Nurse turns, and in their own skillful ways undermine their author’s stereotypes.

Suffering from his own, possibly self-inflicted, grotesqueness – the brave image of Michael Gambon, naked, except for Gunga Din white swaddling around his crotch, laid out on his open bed for a leering examination by a group of doctors – he begs to be listened to .... “Just listen, please just listen,” he whimpers to the doctors and when they finally bend an ear, he proceeds to say nothing but a thin murmuring of helplessness. Oh, and don’t let me forget: this agonizing trial of embarrassment is delivered with a cakewalking ensemble piece of doctors and nurses lipsynching “Dry Bones.”

But his warbling plea is enough for the doctors to suggest he see a psychiatrist. Which he does, in an area we might refer to as Level 1A, The Psychiatrist, set in what looks like an empty school room. It is the one place in his world Marlow finds compassion, assistance, and intellectual honesty.

Two: “The Singing Detective” itself, a creaky detective story featuring Marlow, the Singing Detective, played with the clean skin and pencil mustache of Michael Gambon and his creaky American accent. There is no room here for pshawing the amateurish elements that abound – the hardboiled cliches (trenchcoats, cigarettes and dames = trouble), the Third Man dutch angles, wet streets and raking light, Nazi (or are they Russian?) spies, a pair of lurking thugs and murder most foul: Am I right or am I right?

By night, white-tuxed Marlow sings in a nightclub and after hours is, I suppose, a famous detective. He’s hired by Finney, or Binney (Patrick Malahide), a decorous thin man with something to hide who, after visiting the nightclub and picking up one of the ladies employed there, finds himself in the crosshairs when the lady is later found dead in the river. Finney is not to be trusted, nor are the ladies, nor is the plotline, even though one of the hospital patients later on reads “The Singing Detective” with lipmoving relish.

Level Two is not to be trusted, not only because of the hackneyed tawdriness, but because it’s here the cross-sectional movements of the past, the present, and the artistic, traverse. Languishing with boredom, Level 1 Marlow spends his time mentally tinkering with his novel in Level Two, half-amused, half-distracted until the possibility arrives, up in Level One, that the novel may be optioned by a Hollywood producer. This comes with a visit from his ex-wife, Nicola (Janet Suzman) who, aided with authorial guilt and anxiety, travels throughout Level Two (and into Level Four), with the same freedom as his beautiful, tragic mother.

With nothing but time and pain on his hands, the tinkering in Level Two turns into a quest and a reckoning, seeking the plausible truth of the detective story and then the truth of the elements that made the author what he is. Put another way, Level Two, the detective story, is the inquisitive mystery tale as metaphor for the psychic healing going on in Level One, but you knew that already, didn’t you?

Level Three is the most gorgeous, though often terrifying, and emotionally rich of them all, The Past. A young boy sits on a tree limb, swaying with the wind in the Forest of Dean and we, in our one hundred foot cherrypicker, look down on him like God. We visit him once, twice, three or four times for a little while, accepting right away this is a young Marlow, his memory image checked in on occasionally by his incapacitated adult self, but the wistful glimpses don’t go much further until later.

And then we learn he lives with his Mum and Dat, who live with Dat’s own mum and dat, barely more evolved than peasants. Mum (Alison Steadman) is really, obviously lovely and Dat (the sublime Jim Carter), is a quiet, unambitious but loving coalminer, and together they sing (maybe? actually?) with a third friend Raymond Binney at the local pub. Right: I said Binney.

Any way, Mum is a rose among thorns, or so she thinks and eventually takes young Philip with her to London to live with her family. The train ride to and fro involves ogling soldiers on leave from World War II, a scarecrow passing on a distant hillside, and the sad memory of leaving stoic Dat behind at the train station. Why she leaves isn’t fully explained, but here in the land of memory, nestled in the Forest of Dean, we return frequently, repeatedly, to the time young Philip discovers Mum unpleasantly laying with Raymond Binney. There on the dirty ground, under branches of the trees, dry humped by the oafish Binney, Mum and Nicola occasionally transverse.

Also here, in Level Three we drop in at the pub several times for mostly serene, until they’re not, reminiscences of Dat and Raymond, cuckold and friend, lipsyncing songs like “Paper Doll” for the crowd to Mum’s piano playing. Faces from that formerly happy crowd pop up as bystanders and onlookers throughout the other levels.

Whether his mother’s infidelity is the cause for relocating to London isn’t exactly said, but her evident sense of guilt is picked up by the boy. His backward rurality does not fit in the big city, with its boisterous relatives and loud, always just emerging subway cars roaring in tunnels. He yearns for his father, learns to distrust his painfully guilty mother and in the underground, asking for his father as the train approaches, we see the first blemishes of the psoriasis. As the train continues to approach, he leaves her, runs away, up out of the tunnels, never to see her alive again. The prostitute fished out of the river in Level Two is a Russian spy, is Nicola, Marlow’s wife, is Philip's abandoned mother, a suicide, and the levels blur and confuse.

As do the other events and people found in Level Three, such as those from his school. Where we meet the plummy voiced, swatch wielding harpy for a teacher, Miss –– , played by Janet Henfry, whose performance, and indelible face, must be seen. Called forward by the teacher out of suspicion for having shat on her desk after school, Philip, the Defecator, lies and denies it. Which the teacher accepts, since he’s a smart boy. Still, under threat of a terrible beating to name names, he tearfully fingers Mark Binney, son of Raymond, heir to adultery. Who, Marlowe tells us in the psychiatrist’s office, was so beset by the tyranny of the teacher and Marlow’s deceitful scapegoating that he eventually believed he did shit on teacher’s desk and went mad. Is it the scarecrow, or the teacher or is it Hitler who waves from the passing hillside at the train carrying Philip away from and back to his Dat?

I said there were ultimately four levels and here is the final one, with its quasi-relief from self-derision. As Marlow’s condition slowly heals itself and his guilty mind creeps toward absolution, so improves his bedside manner, even though his flippant playing with the characters of his novel and the people of his life loosens and emboldens them to run amok and reemerge during bed-confined night terrors.

Here – or are we in Level One? – estranged wife Nicola may or may not have news that a fly by night Hollywood producer wants to buy the option on "The Singing Detective." Having spent years indulging in guilty vindictiveness, Marlow can’t help stretching out the plot of "The Singing Detective" to include a new twist: a duplicitous set up by Nicola to steal the rights to his novel and go off with screenwriting partner the sniveling Mark Finney – is it Binney? – and reap millions in success.

Added to the paranoia of bedside visits by Nicola are the lurking thugs, free agents from the novel now skulking in the edges of reality. When their author wasn’t looking, they awakened as trenchcoated Rosencranz and Gildenstern, having realized they are characters without names, caught up in a plot they have no control over. And they want answers. So does a policeman who appears bedside at night with menacing suspicions that it was he, Marlow, who killed his mother and dumped her in the river.

But it’s the thugs who break through and collar Marlow in the hospital one night, demanding their due. Weak and unable to restrain them, he is mugged, roughed up, a pitiful scrape in the hands of his characters. What would a hack do but summon the help of his hero, the Singing Detective himself, who comes to the hospital room, readily armed, and shooting far beyond the six rounds a real pistol would allow. Down goes one thug and finally, aiming at the second, the fat babyish Thug No. 2, unarmed and asking for mercy, the Detective  takes aim with the bedridden appeals of petrified, authorial Marlow, and kills him, Marlow, with one clean shot to the head. The author, the conjuror, the rememberer, the lying embellisher, the shitter, the self-hater, dead by a free hand. Kill the cowardly derision.

So what do the songs mean? What of the elaborate show stopping numbers? And please, don’t think for a moment Potter chose musical hall numbers and American standards from the ‘30s and ‘40s as a way to be creepy. He loves these songs. ‘80s Britain, and the people who don’t like these songs, are the creeps.

There are two show stoppers: one is the “Dry Bones” cakewalk and the other comes at the threshold of his cure, in episode 5, I believe. Marlow arranges it to play mischief with a sunshiney band of Christians visiting the ward so as to uplift spirits and get the patients to sing to Jesus. That an evangelical group, hardly barely threatening except to those who can’t ignore them in their beds, would matter a whit to Thatcher-whipped Britain seems, after what we’ve been through, startling and dear. In fact, Marlow’s/Potter’s acidy atheism would quickly dispatch them if they didn’t do themselves in by appealing to the ward to cheer up and sing along to a doleful, foursquare hymn, “Be In Time.”

Life at best is very brief,
Like the falling of a leaf,
Like the binding of a sheaf,
Be in time!

We can jump over the memory of a scene earlier, in the school, when the presbyterian teacher gives lessons on the life and structure of the leaf to her grubby young students, as well as the fire and brimstone prayer she leads them through asking for God to tell the class who was the shatter. Classroom truths and reckonings are left to the psychiatrist’s area in Level One-A.

But in the ward, where the physical healing works in tandem with the psychic, Potter and Marlow, with Amiel’s realization, want a generous message, a hopeful message – and its forgiveness and gentleness and love – yet can’t do anything with the unrecognizable thing stultified by the Christians and the teacher. Instead, Potter and Marlow take it, rework it and set it free to the lively, carefree seeming delight of Bing and his backup singers: “Ac-cent-tchu-ate the positive, e-lim-in-ate the negative, latch on to the affirmative, don’t mess with Mr. In-between.”

The song itself, with its almost glib, applecheeked American optimism veers dangerously close to the creepiness some other calculating writer and director might reach for by setting old tunes to bad new times. In fact, I wouldn’t blame you for expecting Marlow and Potter to rail against the banal reductivism of “Accentuate the Positive.” But remember: Potter (and Marlow) like these songs. The glibness miraculously loses to Bing’s jauntiness, and we’ll take jaunty over silly old hope any time. Which is why Marlow suddenly awakens to the real quality of Nurse Mills (our lovely Joanne Whalley) whose primary role, beyond that of eye candy, had been administering the greasy, curative balm on his skin: “You’re the girl in the songs.”

“What songs?”

“The songs you hear coming up the stairs when you’re supposed to be asleep.”

/End

"The Singing Detective, Peg O' My Heart," © CMartin, 2011