Auteur / Genre

The thematic consistencies and use of his own life strengthens Potter’s role as ‘auteur’. But Graham Fuller points out, in Potter on Potter, “the word ‘auteur’ … is clearly unhelpful”. In Dennis Potter and the Question of the Television Author, Rosalind Coward argues that The Singing Detective undermines this by its use of genre, calling for a more textual analysis. She says, in analysing the series, “the links to be made with ‘previous Dennis Potter productions’ and with ‘the life of Dennis Potter’ are rather limiting. Much more important is an attention to the text which reveals very precisely the culminative impression of meaning formed by the juxtaposition of known film and television genres with each other”. She goes on to say that genre marks the distinctions between fantasy and reality and that they become “harder and harder to maintain”, and therefore, the meaning of the text lies mostly within the viewer’s ability to recognise genre.

I disagree with this on two counts. Firstly, the use of genre is not simply for effect, it is an expression of the way Marlow thinks. All his fantasies are defined by noir stylistics, including the scenes with Finney and Nicola, these distinguish them from reality and flashback. It is not the viewer’s interpretations of genre convention but the character’s. Episode 1 begins in the noir fantasy and so establishes the conventions the viewer is to use, it doesn’t rely on the viewer’s learned experience. Any misinterpretation is not of the text but of the character.

Second is Potter’s intentionality, the lack of ambiguity in The Singing Detective. In the early episodes the viewer is mislead, suspicious of Binney, but at the denouement there is only one possible interpretation, Marlow is the ‘murderer’, Binney is falsely accused and the body in the river represents his mother. Similarly the line between fantasy and reality is very clearly signposted. Marlow’s reality is simplified by never leaving the confines of the hospital, therefore we can tell instantly that a rural setting indicates a childhood flashback or noir stylistics indicate fantasy. The detective story is such an exaggeration of film-noir convention that it is impossible to mistake it for reality. This is why the crossover of worlds works so effectively, if they weren’t so clearly defined the clash would be subtler and less arresting to the viewer. The scenes between Nicola and Finney are initially ambiguous but the reality is quickly stripped from them by having the characters speak with punctuation (“comma”, “full-stop”). Also the stylistics of the scenes have film-noir overtones locating them within the detective novelist’s imagination. Compare this to Secret Friends (the film based on Potter’s novel Ticket To Ride which was written between rewrites of The Singing Detective) where the distinction between the multiple narratives is purposely confused encouraging multiple interpretations of the text.

Peter Stead, in Dennis Potter, contradicts this second point by offering an interpretation of The Singing Detective that differs from mine. He says “the writer Marlow deconstructs his life and comes to terms with the fact that it was Nicola he killed off in his book and that in childhood he betrayed another child in school and inadvertently revealed information that lead to what might have been his mother’s suicide”. Here he has the body representing Marlow’s wife and places doubt on his mother’s suicide, I believe this to be an error in interpretation. During the course of the six episodes the corpse appears as Sonia (episode 2), his mother (episode 5) and then Nicola (episode 5). But it is stated that the screenplay of the novel, and hence the novel itself, was written before Marlow met Nicola. Also, the corpse is dragged up from beneath Hammersmith bridge. The only time a character from the childhood flashbacks appears to intrude on the film-noir fantasy (apart from Marlow’s casting of Mark Binney) is when his mother appears as a prostitute in Episode 3. In one scene she appears on Hammersmith bridge, this scene transpires not to be a crossover but the point in the 1930’s story just before his mother threw herself off that same bridge. This also ties in with Potter’s sex/death association. When the corpse appears as Nicola this is a sign that Marlow is gaining control over his hallucinations, it is prompted by Reg, the reader meeting the author, who says “I bet you just lie there all day thinking about murdering people”. In the last two episodes it is evident that Marlow can control his fantasies to a certain extent, he enters one of the Finney/Nicola scenes and puts words into Finney’s mouth attacking Nicola before losing control again and the fantasy Nicola accuses him of using his illness as a weapon. Marlow reworks the novel in the ward to kill his wife, as part of his paranoid fantasy about Finney, but in the novel itself the body irrefutably represents his mother.