Truly Dreadful Film

I was totally surprised at how great this film.You could feel your paranoia rise as the film went on and as you gradually learned the details of the real situation.

It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

There are moments that feel comical, some horrific, and some downright inspiring but the tonal shifts hardly matter as the end results come to a film that's perfect for this time.

It is Dennis Potter's imaginative and intelligent use of the technical possibilities provided by television - combined, of course, with the deep humanity of his vision - that marks The Singing Detective as a uniquely brilliant work.His ground-breaking technique is the moving between separate levels: the present of the patient Philip in the ward, the past of his childhood experiences that is so ever-present in his memory and so influential on him as an adult, and the world of his imaginary detective story that in turn derives its own inspiration and motivation from those problems of the past. The result is a breadth and depth of analysis of a man's life, including the impulses of the creative process itself, that has never been matched on television, at least to my knowledge.And it is beautifully, hauntingly, filmed and soundtracked.

Apparently this is a "cult" movie (OK, miniseries) like Rocky Horror or Repo Man. There's a small group of people who love it and think it's the greatest thing ever, while most of the world is blissfully unaware of its existence. A friend lent me a copy, and I really couldn't get into it. It's just too oblique. There's tons of stuff going on, on all sorts of levels, but somehow I didn't care. The production quality is mediocre at best, and the main character, Marlow, is not all that likable. There are some great moments -- like when the hospital doctors burst into a rousing rendition of "Dem Bones" -- but mostly it just meanders along, zig-zagging between past and present, reality and fantasy. If you want to watch a surreal movie, I recommend "Brazil" over this, any day!

Anyone who thinks television is only for the brain-dead should see this drama. Written by Dennis Potter,the most exciting writer to ever work for television, it is a multi-layered story of a writer hospitalised with a disabling skin disease, who retells the story of his most famous book (which is coincidentally being read by another patient), relives incidents from his childhood, imagines contemporary events and the people around him bursting into song. It is hard to describe, but it is sharp, funny, superbly intelligent and challenging - among the best six hours ever made for television.

Spoilers herein.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 revolutionized literature. Too bad the appearance of this didn't revolutionize 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.Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.