After doing some preliminary detective work of my own on The Singing Detective, (thank you Wikipedia) I’ve found that some interesting factoids about the series. According to creator Dennis Potter, the hospital segments were originally designated to be shot on video, whereas the Detective scenes were to be shot on film, and the flashbacks of Marlowe’s life were to appear in black and white. Although ultimately the entire show was shot on film, there are still aesthetic qualities which work to build and distinguish the various levels of story-world. Some scenes are intentionally left ambiguous (such as the shots of the girl’s dead body, or the woman screaming Philip in the subway) which help to build the overall air of mystery and suspense that pervades the episode.
In the hospital world, although Marlowe is incapacitated, he is ultimately an authorial figure. He controls Ali’s behavior to a certain extent, having him get up to get his cigarettes, and then later inadvertently causing his death by accepting the offer for a sweetie. But the powerlessness of his position, highlighted in the scene with the man harassing him in the middle of the night, also provides the secondary fantasy world of the hospital, with singing nurses, musical number extravaganzas with choreographed dances, and harmonizing doctors as a more immediate escape than the creative interweaving of the detective world. It is not a clear-cut distinction of “this is real” and “this is not” – the detective world could be Marlowe’s creation, it could be real, or some combination of both. But the layer of fantasy in the time zero zone of the hospital complicates that distinction.
This conflation of the real and the imaginary set up the possibility for inter-textuality and dialogue between the storyworlds. Marlowe is a prisoner of his body, and the result is an incredibly claustrophobic environment in the hospital world, which creates forays into the detective scenes to be a visual relief. This reprieve also causes the viewer to see these fantasy scenes as other worldy, heightened, in stark contrast to the drab and aesthetic of the hospital. It is not only the content but the visual representation of the various storyworlds that define our experience of them.
The second episode delves into the psychology of our protagonist, providing much more time to Marlowe’s childhood in proportion with his visits to a shrink. Th childhood world has an aethetic all its own, a visual landscape of a vast backyard and a tense house hold, the wooden interior of the bar, and the lush greenery of escapism as the young Philip sits at the top of a tree praying to God that one day everything will be ok. Although the detective world is somewhat advanced in terms of the crime committed and the relationship of the victim and the detective, the narrative action in the second episode moves primarily backward, delving more deeply into Marlowe’s past than advancing his future. The introduction of his parents and himself as young child serves the narrative by substantiating what has already been established in the present. The episodic narrative has a distinct ability to weave and withhold information in a very calculating way, while maintaining the episodic structure of each individual episode.
The most interesting twist was the introduction of Marlowe’s literary personality, the singing detective himself, who proves to be the wise council to the suspicious young detective. The visual contrast of the actor who plays in the hospital and the detective story is quite Marlowe visually arresting. It also further confuses the reality of the story-world, and brings into question its basis in any kind of reality. The process of continuous guessing on the part of the viewer is also part of the experience of an episodic narrative, and works to enhance the suspense and various levels of narrative in the text. Although each segment isn’t physically shot in different mediums, the worlds remain distinct in terms of visual and narrative choices.