Admirers of the work of Dennis Potter, who is best known in the United States as the author of Steve Martin's Pennies from Heaven and the miniseries The Singing Detective, enjoyed a surfeit of riches last year when New York City's Museum of Television and Radio hosted a retrospective showing of all of his television productions. Those familiar with Potter are aware that he achieved fame in British television prior to becoming known on this side of the Atlantic, but probably do not realize that his career extends over twenty-five years and, in addition to screenplays, a stage play, and novels, encompasses thirty-five productions for the small screen.
The six-part series The Singing Detective (1986) is considered by some psychoanalysts to be the best popular analytic exposition extant. Although it does not depict psychoanalysis per se, its structure forces the audience into the role of psychoanalyst-detective, as the viewer must sort clues in order to understand the mind of the protagonist, Philip Marlow, a writer of pulp detective fiction.
To fully summarize the intricate plot of the series would take pages. Briefly, however, Marlow is hospitalized for severe psoriatic arthritis. As he reflects on the plot of his novel, The Singing Detective, the story of undercover agents in World War II London, actors lip-synch popular songs of the forties, a device that not only lends an ironic counterpoint to grim reality (as in Pennies from Heaven) but forms a dynamic link to Marlow's father, a miner who once sang to the applause of fellow townsfolk in the local pub. Fantasy and reality, past and present intertwine as Marlow recovers memories of traumas from when he was ten: the betrayal of a schoolmate, the discovery of his mother and a family friend engaged in intercourse, the separation of his parents, the suicide of his mother. Through Marlow's behavior, memories, fiction, dreams, daydreams, and delusions we are able to understand how childhood conflict and trauma have shaped the adult Marlow. With affective remembering, his illness improves, he gains understanding and closeness to his parents (especially his father), and reconciles with his ex-wife. The amount and depth of detail allows the analyst to make a strong case for not only an unconscious organizing fantasy involving a positive oedipus complex but also a deeper negative oedipal configuration.
Potter is noted for using his life experiences in an overt manner in his productions. Like Marlow, Potter was born and raised in the Forest of Dean, had a father who worked in the coal mines, became an educated author, and suffered severely from psoriatic arthritis. The retrospective provides opportunity to examine how Potter integrates this material into his work, to understand better the dynamic meaning of recurrent themes, and to trace the threads that become part of the fabric of The Singing Detective.
Potter gained recognition very early in his television career with two programs that appeared in 1965. In Stand Up, Nigel Barton deals with the issue of bridging social classes. Like Potter, Barton comes to Oxford from a miner's family. The overt psychological conflict is that of the outsider becoming an insider. In a television interview, Barton is condescending about his background. He believes his father is jealous of his success. However, Barton's triumph results in guilt and inhibition with women, a fact reflecting deeper oedipal conflict over surpassing the father.
One scene involves an event from Barton's childhood in which he destroys a teacher's plant and falsely accuses a bullying classmate. Other children join in the accusation, and the bully is punished, a scene repeated twenty years later in The Singing Detective (with the same actress playing the teacher). In the later work, however, the young Marlow had defecated on the teacher's desk. The early parallel of the Barton version adds to the probability that on one level this “triumph” is a displacement from oedipal issues.
In Vote, Vote, Vote for Nigel Barton, the hero runs for office on the Labour ticket in a Conservative stronghold and is defeated, as was Potter in a similar, real-life attempt. Barton's cynical campaign manager, Jack Hay (an early prototype of the wisecracking Marlow), exemplifies the pandering of politics but also reveals that he once was an idealist. The most powerful scene in Vote, Vote, Vote occurs in a hospital ward when, in order to secure his vote, a demented man is promised by politicians that the return of his amputated leg will be looked into. In The Singing Detective, Marlow and the other male patients on the ward struggle not only against the threat of figurative castration, but against a regressive passivity. Potter's illness began in 1962, and in Vote, Vote, Vote can be sensed the threat of chronic illness and dependency on uncaring authorities.
The theme of idealism disguising sexuality recurs in Moonlight on the Highway (1969). Here David Peters, the inhibited publisher of a newsletter dedicated to Al Bowlby, a crooner who died during World War II, has just lost his mother. Flashes of a man threatening a boy occur repeatedly. From Peters's psychiatrist (a sharp thinker like the psychiatrist in The Singing Detective) it is learned that during childhood Peters was the victim of homosexual rape. The assault occurred around the time of his father's death, which subsequently became linked with the death of Al Bowlby. Peters's idealization of the singer conceals his homosexual desire toward his father. His fascination with Bowlby's songs of romance is an attempt to mask carnal sexual conflicts, a stratagem to be noted in the later series. When Peters becomes drunk at a Bowlby celebration, he decompensates and confesses his involvement with prostitutes, in a seeming defense against homosexuality. Interestingly, Potter revealed in 1984 that he was a victim of homosexual abuse when he was ten, surely the reason for his recurrent focus on the conflicts of children at that age. It was indeed the crucial age in Marlow's life, which is not the most appropriate age for the oedipal issues dealt with in The Singing Detective.
Lay Down Your Arms (1970) traces the brief military career of Bob Hawk. The protagonist, another workingman's son who plans to attend Oxford, is drafted and because of his knowledge of Russian is assigned to military intelligence. The time is 1956, the year of the Suez Crisis and the Hungarian Revolution. Class issues are a major theme, and Potter brutally parodies the British upper classes, who act like children playing games, unable to appreciate the terrible effects of their imperialist policies. Hawk sympathizes with Egypt's Nasser, identifying with his estranged father's political attitudes. Awkward and sexually inhibited, Hawk begins to lie about his romantic achievements, claiming to have girlfriends but actually frequenting prostitutes. After reading a purloined letter from a Russian soldier to his coalminer father, Hawk realizes the worth of his own father. Again the theme of a paternal reconciliation appears, though one is left with a sense that aggressive oedipal feelings have been displaced
onto the upper-class officers. Hawk's lying exemplifies the use of fantasy to ward off unpleasant realities; unlike Marlow, however, Hawk fails to discover the basis of his estrangement and need to lie.
Here again Potter was drawing from experience. Upon graduation from Oxford, Potter became a Russian-language clerk in the British War Office. The plot of Marlow's novel, The Singing Detective, involves Russian and English spies and counterspies, and the deceit and betrayal of these characters are an attempt by Marlow to deal with rage over his mother's infidelity and oedipal betrayal.
Follow the Yellow Brick Road (1972) is an overtly psychological exploration. The main character, Jack, who consults with an overworked and indifferent British health service psychiatrist, has become paranoid after finding his wife in bed with another man. Jack believes that everyone's life is scripted and that he is acting in front of TV cameras. He forces his wife to confess that she has also slept with his agent. Jack meets with the agent's wife and either fails or refuses to recognize her sexual interest in him. Jack's paranoia can be accounted for by repressed homosexuality, the very issues seen in Marlow's delusions, paranoid fantasies, and longing for his father. The notion that one's words are scripted is reprised also, and quite marvelously, in The Singing Detective. In a scene between Marlow's wife and her agent, the latter begins to feel that his words are scripted. They are, as we discover that the scene is in fact a fantasy of revenge in Marlow's mind.
Brimstone and Treacle was made in 1976 but because of its content was not shown on the BBC until 1987. It is a disturbing production in which Martin, the devil, pretends he is a former boyfriend of Pattie Bates, a brain-damaged girl who repeatedly is seen writhing on her sickbed, sticking her fingers into her mouth, and tugging at bedclothes. Martin is an outsider who, over the objections of the girl's father, charms her mother to gain access to the home. He then has sexual intercourse with the disabled girl, upon which she recovers. Her illness is revealed to be psychogenic hysteria caused by having witnessed her father having sex with her girlfriend. This rather simplistic psychological aspect serves as a plot device whereby political, religious, and philosophical ideas are explored, but it may be noted that Potter has written several other “visitation” teleplays in which the outsider theme clearly conveys oedipal dynamics (indeed, one of these productions is entitled Schmedipus). The visitation theme is not overt in The Singing Detective, although Marlow, a writer of detective stories, is presented as outside the literary establishment. In any case, the oedipal outsider is crucial to that work also: the child Marlow is witness to his mother's infidelity.
In Double Dare, also from 1976, Potter's dramatic use of the interpenetration of reality and fantasy is at its peak. A screenwriter, Martin, arranges to meet an actress in the hope that talking to her will cure his writer's block. He discusses with her the role of a prostitute who is murdered by a client. Parallel to this plot, a client meets with an actual prostitute. The production ends when Martin appears to overhear the client murder the prostitute, but it is in fact Martin who has murdered the actress. We are then faced with the disorienting experience of reconsidering the “reality” of all the previous scenes. Murder of a prostitute is in the plot too of Marlow's The Singing Detective, where the theme serves as a partial sublimation to his intense hatred toward women. In both productions, Potter forces the audience into an active role, but in the later one the rewards are greater, as one gains insight into Marlow.
Blue Remembered Hills (1979) is the story of prepubescent children who live in the Forest of Dean during World War II. Now, Potter knows that childhood does not truly resemble its nostalgic depiction by A.E. Housman, source of the phrase “blue remembered hills,” but rather is a time in which aggressive and sexual drives are ever present and poorly tamed. This is the childhood of The Singing Detective. The rapidly shifting competition and alliances, the cruelty and the caring of childhood, are marvelously depicted. A disturbed playmate, Donald, is cruelly teased. His father may be a prisoner of the Japanese, who, the children think, would torture him by tying him down on an anthill (a torture mentioned also in the later work). There are hints that Donald is a victim of child abuse. He deliberately sets a barn afire, and his comrades, unknowing, lock him in. When he panics and dies, the children invent lies to avoid punishment and alleviate guilt. This is the same theme of scapegoating a classmate seen in both Stand Up and The Singing Detective. The children here fear an escaped Italian prisoner-of-war. In Hide and Seek, the first of Potter's novels, an Italian prisoner-of-war entices a young boy out of an oak tree (the young Marlow climbs an oak as a refuge) and sodomizes him.
Cream in My Coffee (1980) explores the pernicious effects of female betrayal. In 1980 an elderly bickering couple, Bernard and Jean Wilsher, return to the hotel at which they had a liaison in 1934. Through flashbacks we learn that at that time Bernard was called away because of his father's death. Although his mother pressured him to renounce his love for Jean, he refused and married her. However, while he was away, Jean had been seduced by a bandleader, an affair that though unrevealed appears to have blighted the marriage. The story concludes when Bernard collapses and dies on the ballroom floor, possibly having developed some conscious awareness of the tryst. Thus, like Marlow's, Bernard's youthful idealism ends in cynicism, a trajectory again occasioned by the sexual infidelity of an idealized woman.
All of Potter's television works plus several interviews are available for viewing at the Museum of Television and Radio, 25 West 52nd Street, New York, NY. In addition, a new series by Potter, Lipstick on Your Collar, will appear on public television this fall.