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Psychoanalysis has never been depicted realistically in film or video but the television production, The Singing Detective, a six-part series written by Dennis Potter has been considered one of the most successful attempts in creating an “analytic movie.” Potter, the well-known British author and playwright, first achieved notoriety in the United States with his television production, Pennies from Heaven. The Singing Detective, which appeared on British and American television in the mid-'80s, accrued both interest and praise by psychoanalysts and was a topic of a special presentation at the 1990 Annual Meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association. This paper will examine factors in The Singing Detective's success.
As in many an analytic session the first words in The Singing Detective reveal the major theme. The scene is night on a foggy London street in 1945 and a voice-over comments, “The doorman of a night club can always pretend it's lipstick and not blood on his hand. But how did it get there? Let's be economical, nothing fancy. If he'd smacked some dame across her shining mouth then he has both answers in one.”
The plot begins in the typical style of a hard-boiled detective story. The villain, Mark Binney (played by Patrick Malahide), slips a message to a man disguised as a busker, then Mark Binney enters a seamy nightclub, Skinscapes, and the audience prepares to enter the realm of the traditional whodunit. The viewer anticipates using skills in discovering and utilizing clues to unravel a mystery — a task similar to that of a psychoanalyst. But the scene shifts abruptly to a