The Singing Detective (1986)
When mystery writer Philip Marlow (Michael Gambon) is hospitalized with debilitating psoriatic arthritis, a fever sends him into a delirium inspired by his novel The Singing Detective. As his condition deteriorates, he loses the ability to distinguish between his delirium, his memories, and his current life. Characters from his fictional mystery interact with characters from his past and the people in the hospital.
The result is an often disorienting, but fascinating look into Marlow’s inner thoughts as he works through feelings of guilt caused by his mother’s suicide and his part in framing an innocent boy for an incident at his boarding school.
The inventive, collapsing screenplay foreshadows work by people like Michael Gondry and Spike Jonze, but what sets the movie apart is its unique musical approach. Throughout the series, characters lip synch 1940s songs, reinterpreting them to match the emotional context of the scene.
This technique approximates how many of us experience popular music, reinterpreting a song to fit our situation. It doesn’t matter what the artist of our favorite song intended, what matters is our memory of the song, and the context we heard it. We remember the song playing when we had our first kiss and invent a connection between the two.
Creator Dennis Potter used a similar approach in his 1978 television series Pennies from Heaven which was later adapted for American audiences with Steve Martin in his first dramatic role. While critically acclaimed, the film version was a box office disaster and Martin’s career as a serious actor never materialized.
This miniseries is well-regarded and highly influential, raising valuable questions about the reliability of memory and the therapeutic value of art. Steven Bochco claims The Singing Detective inspired him to develop the notorious flop Cop Rock and it was given the Hollywood treatment with Robert Downey Jr., Mel Gibson, and Katie Holmes.
I like the concept, but by the sixth episode the inventiveness wore thin; it would have benefited from a little brevity. Also, I didn’t appreciate the excessive ambiguity. Movies with neat answers often come across as disingenuous, but there’s a difference between ambiguity and lack of resolution.
In the end, it tried so hard to be daring and different it fell apart. It’s one thing to play with audience expectations, it’s another to ignore them.