twin peaks - postmodern tv crime

8/2/2019 Twin Peaks - Postmodern TV Crime

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Eckart Voigts-Virchow

"Goodbye suspense goodbye"?

Postmodern TV Crime in The SingingDetective(1986) and Twin Peaks (1990-91)

Originally published by Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier: Raimund Borgmeier, PeterWenzel, Eds. Spannung. Studien zur englischsprachigen Literatur. Trier: WVT, 2001.132-148. Used with permission.

PHILIP: When I grow up, I be going to be a detective.

And then, unexpectedly, he grins.Dennis Potter, The Singing Detective (249)

1. Serial Postmodern Crime on TV

In 1990, Dennis Potter wrote a draft version of a screenplay based on D.M.Thomas's novel The White Hotelfor director David Lynch. Even if the screenplay wasnever produced (there seem to be current plans of an Emir Kusturica version), there isa professional connection between the two leading 1980s and 1990s postmodern TV'authors' of audiovisual culture. Although there is much debate whether television is,or is not, a quintessentially postmodern medium,1 whether Lynch or Potter may

justifiably be addressed as TV authors,2 and, in the case of Potter, to what extent heembraced the postmodernist aesthetic,3 there is a clear case for comparing theirinfluential series as epitomes of the postmodernist revision of crime and detectiveformulae on the small screen.


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Within their various national TV environments (TSD: BBC-Britain/Twin Peaks:ABC-USA),4 there are a number of surface similarities: Both series offered adeliberately fragmented and convoluted plot which shaped initial public response as:"[incomprehensible] as the Peking bus timetable" or "strewing enigmas like pineneedles".5 Both series are saturated in pastiche and/or parody of TV genres, such ashospital soap in The Singing Detective and the mise en abyme of the Invitation to

Love soap inTwin Peaks, or film noir and hard-boiled detective fiction, as epitomizedin the meaning-laden vice locales "Skinscape's" and "One-Eyed Jack's". Both seriesare focused on an investigator (Philip E. Marlow/Dale Cooper) who re-enactsestablished genre formulae, P.E. Marlow, the Singing Detective, is Chandler's PrivateEye Marlowe with a reordered 'e' and with the archetypal first-person narrativevoice. Twin Peaks's Cooper is an adolescent American frontier hero, who combinesthe capacity for ratiocination of a Poe detective with a naive mysticism into anobviously stylized compound of all sorts of investigative ideals.6 Both detectives

parade their artifice, as Potter's Marlow is aware of his clichd appearance andLynch's Cooper is natural, rational, and mystical to the point of absurdity, e.g. whenhe spots the reflection of a suspect's motorcycle in the eye of Laura Palmer on avideotape or when he suggests that a 'Tibetan' coupling of enunciated names andgunshots will help in solving the mystery. At the same time, Marlow and Cooper, who

both adopt the Chandlerian code of virginity, might be read psychoanalytically asdetectives investigating the past and their own psychological make-up.7 It can beargued that both series deal with the abject male body (Lippard 1994: 5-6),

psychoanalytically formulated crimes and the psychopathology of family life. Bothseries useDoppelgngerand dream sequences to interiorize and focalize the outer

camera narration, and both experiment with dislocations of sound and image andfunctional music, disorientating received notions of diegetic vs. non-diegeticsound.8 Their camera preying on beautiful young women victimized by pathologicalmale violence, both works have been attacked for alleged misogyny and the failure totranscend the male white perspective. Toying around with metafiction, intertextualityand autobiography, both works are echo chambers of self-reference (as testified to byPotter's re-enactment of scenes from his 1965 play Stand Up, Nigel Barton and hisnovel Hide and Seek, the famous Mary Whitehouse court case, Potter's public

breakdown after watchingTSD, Lynch's signature Lynchisms, his cameo as GordonCole, the FBI supervisor, his daughter Jennifer Lynch's Secret Diary of Laura

Palmer). Finally, both series were projected as major works by TV auteurs,expensively produced on film rather than videotape and aired on major channel's prime time slots to enhance the public profile and appeal to a fashionable youngaudience.

This paper seeks to assess both series as postmodernist TV contributions to thedetective genre, which has been an obvious target for leading postmodernists such as


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Alain Robbe-Grillet ( Les gommes1953) and Michel Butor of the nouveauroman variety with its failing detectives, Italo Calvino (Se una notte d'inverno unviaggiatore 1979) and Umberto Eco (Il nome della rosa 1980), Jorge Luis Borges (Lamuerte y la brjula) or Thomas Pynchon (The Crying of Lot 49).9 As Tani (1984: 40,43) argues, the "anti-detective novel" (a) frustrates the reader, (b) refuses closure andsolution, (c) expresses an avant-garde sensibility of chaos. Consequently, theconventional idea of suspense effects owing to a careful ordering and structuring onthe story level of narratives have been a prime target for the postmodernist literatureof exhaustion, as John Barth's classic story "Title" (103, 109-10) makes explicit:

Do you want to go on, or shall we end it right now? Suspense. I don't care for thiseither. It'll be over soon enough in any case.[...]I'm going, too late now, one more step and we're done, you and I. Suspense. [...]One more step. Goodbye suspense goodbye.Blank.

Introducing the classic "either/or" suspense in his initial question, Barthinstantaneously diagnoses and dismisses the effect he seemed to have been strivingfor. Tani (47) similarly argues that the essential category of suspense is subverted by

postmodernist crime and detective fiction:

What also connects innovative, deconstructive, and metafictional anti-detectivenovels is a teasing, puzzle-like relation between text and reader, [...]. The relationreplaces and changes the function of the conventional suspense, since the reader getsinvolved in the mystery and in the detection to be only partially or not at all rewarded

by a plausible denouement.

One might equally argue that, vice versa, input of conventional suspense also tendsto change deconstructive and metafictional novels. Tani goes on to identify aninventory of devices which mark postmodern detection:

- the labyrinth (a mysterious irretrievable past)

- the mirror (a distorted, changed, removed present version of the past, alsodeception through the narrative process)

- the map (the solution)

As all of these elements are almost invariably to be found in any detection narrative,Tani insists that in postmodernist detection, mirrors and labyrinths reign supreme overthe map-making process which does not yield the orientation it is supposed to bring.Should a suspense narrative, therefore, deny to the spectator or reader the reassuring


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pleasure of reinstating order by mapping the ground and solving the mystery, itviolates one of the standard lures of crime fiction, that of verifying Aufklrungboth asa way out of the narrative labyrinth, and as the rational teleology of modernity and theEnlightenment, the project of rendering the world knowable (see Schulz-Buschhaus(1998: 534). Postmodernists take to detection narratives, because it can be taken tostand metonymically and transgenerically for the hermeneutic process (Knight andMcKnight 1997: 123-24).

A "Who's who?" map from Twin Peaks. (Gabriel Jones, 1998)

Probably the most postmodern genres are parody and pastiche, their idiom is ironyand the double coding of 'both having the cake and eating it'. 10 In terms of the relation

between a postmodern aesthetic and the theory of suspense, this may be translated as'deconstructing intertextually the popular surfaces of thriller and detective narratives(modernism) but at the same time, polysemically participating in its lure and attraction(post-)'. While suspense may be unnecessary for the first trajectory, it is absolutelyessential for the second. Schulz-Buschhaus (1998: 526) has noted that the contributionof suspense is paramount in post-avantgardist appropriations of crime novels.11 Schulz-Buschhaus names the resulting effect a "generalised suspense" (my translation), or, asI would prefer to call it, a "meta-suspense", the combination of suspenseful effects onthe recipient and a foregrounding of the conditions on which these effects ultimatelyrest.

Both Staiger (1956: 143) and Pfister (1977: 142) think that suspense is moreessential to dramatic than to narrative writing. Suspense is created on the story-levelof texts owing to the temporal ordering of narrative segments. A given text (words,images, sound) creates a partial knowledge about the story, both cataphorically by"pointing to subsequent information in the text"12 and by withholding information fromthe viewer through editing etc. Suspense works bi-directionally along a linear axis ofnarrative segments, that is, the viewer is kept in suspense about both what has alreadyhappened and what is still to happen in a story (see Tan and Diteweg 1996: 152-53).The viewer must form hypotheses as to what is going to happen in the course of a


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given narrative which would be impossible without narrative anchoring andsuperfluous if all riddles had been solved to start with (Pfister 1977: 143, Wulff callsthis process "narrativization"; 1996: 12). According to Bordwell (1985: 38), this"accords well with the Constructivist notion that schemata coax us to anticipate andextrapolate".

As Marie-Laure Ryan (1991: 174) has underlined, the anticipating recipient isessential to any narrative, which may be reflected by suspense created throughsuperior information on part of the viewer from situations of relative lack ofknowledge about the story or even the case of irritating textual traps. It seemsabsolutely essential that any given narrative builds a narrative cosmos whichincorporates an abundance of possible story developments so that the recipient findsample opportunity to build hypotheses from (fulfilled or unfulfilled) textualindications. Mieke Bal (1994: 114) and Edward Branigan (1992: 75) have created atypology of possible informational relations in narratives:

BAL BRANIGAN

(1) reader character spectator = character mystery(riddle, detective story, search)

(2) reader + character (threat) spectator > character suspense

(3) reader character + (secret) spectator < character surprise

(4) reader + character + (no suspense)

A narrow meaning of suspense, such as forwarded by Suerbaum (1984: 26)highlights the intentional temporality in distributing information in suspense fictionand insists that a cornerstone of suspense effects is the fact that it reinforces theguarantee of closure and solution. Hitchcock's famous 'bomb plot' example holds thatsuspense (rather than surprise) is dependent on letting the audience know there is a

bomb planted under the table and that it won't go off eventually (see Goetsch 1997:142-43). It is of paramount importance that the reader/spectator is made to want toknow things about the narrative, by getting involved in the narrative and by

participating in the control of the narrative. The sense of 'having been cheated', whichwould be the result of a bomb going off, illustrates that thriller conventions contributeto a sense of 'being partially in control' on the part of the audience. If, on the otherhand, it were clear from the start that there will be no satisfactory closure, that theclues given will not resolve the mystery, then there would not be any suspense.


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Many interpreters of suspense have described it as a sequence from order to disorderand back (see e.g. Borringo 1980: 41). The viewer realizes the anticipatory capacity ofthe information given, both in the micro- and macrostructures of a text. The text needsto raise expectations but withhold immediate satisfaction on this need. It seems to beimportant that the number of possible plot resolutions is low so that the viewer is notconfused by unanticipated outcomes (see Prieto-Pablos 1998: 101). Cupchick (1996:195) has confronted the affective stimuli involved in the creation of narrative suspensewith the cognitive disorientation which is the hallmark of modernist literature. Theviewer needs both to look for order and symmetry and to anticipate that order andsymmetry are feasible. It is clear that sign-saturated postmodernist narratives try tofrustrate the conventional desires of the viewers by refusing to furnish narrativeclosure, but in order to work properly they need to raise anticipatory hypotheses forsubsequent destruction.

Crime fiction is not only a staple of postmodernist revisions of modernism, it is alsoone of the standard genres of TV programming, and therefore the natural habitat of

post-avantgardism. The police and detective series is alive and well all over the TVworld, especially in characteristically hybrid versions, cross-cutting between thrillers,comedies, hospital and horror series, soaps and drama. Reviewing recent British crimefiction (and acknowledging the influence of the US entertainment industry), CharlotteBrunsdon (2000: 216) recognized a "medicalization of crime" and, in the "later 1990-s[...] a move away from an address to the social in genre". It is particularly intriguing,therefore, to compare two works by acknowledged postmodernist auteurs which shareaspects of the format (TV series/miniseries) and the genre (hybrid "medicalized", "de-socialized" thriller, crime and detective fiction) as well as an aesthetic which isfounded on the postmodernist revision of the detective and crime novel.

Wolfgang Iser has drawn on the work of Siegfried Kracauer in order to illustratehow the ellipses of trailers activate viewer imagination by providing vision- andsoundbites of the shape of films to come (see Iser 1997: 298). Arguably the recurrentself-reference of postmodern television constitutes an autopoietic system in the senseof Niklas Luhmann, creating the Boorstinian pseudo-events which have through theontological destabilisation of the possible media worlds lost the humanist confidenceof the 'pseudo'-affix. Luhmann (1996: 28) terms this the "public recursiveness" of the

mass media. Discussing the structural "selectors" of the news media, Luhmann goeson to explain that the violation of norms, moral deviation and conflict are the sine quanon of the mass media and that conflict entails the deferred promise of resolution. 13

Luhmann's tenet might be termed a universal rule of mass-media suspense. It equalsthe suspense requirements for narratives outlined above: Even if the fulfilment ofraised audience expectations has to be suspended or deferred, it is based on theimplication that one day closure is at least potentially feasible.


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2. Ratiocination vs. the Ghostwood Enigma: TwinPeaks

We have seen that suspense fiction moves from equilibrium to imbalance and then

back to a sense of order restored. We have also seen that both the mass media and thepostmodernist aesthetic favour perpetual or at least lasting imbalances, but in addition,we have noted the importance of the anticipated equilibrium. One of the most radicalcases of shattered anticipation in Hollywood is David Lynch's commerciallydisastrousLost Highway (1997): the protagonist Fred Madison receives a note ("DickLaurent is dead") which triggers off the murder of his wife, his subsequenttransformation into the car mechanic Peter Dayton and a return to his initial persona inthe desert, followed by the death of Mister Eddy/Dick Laurent, enabling Fred to speakthe initial message into his own intercom. For Todd McGowan (2000),Lost

Highway is a deconstruction of fantasy as "a secure world replete with meaning" (52)

and, in its arbitrariness and incoherence, a rejection of "the phantasmic illusion ofdepth" (69). Arguably the commercial disaster was due to (1) the denial of clues bothas to how the imbalance was brought about and how it may be set right, and (2) the

problematic habitualization of the postmodern gesture which accounts for the reducedanticipatory value of deconstructed detective narratives (and led Lynch to ostentatiouslinearity in The Straight Story [1999]). Having been familiarized with Lynch et al.,viewers simply do not expect to be offered explanations or solutions. Familiarizationis therefore detrimental to suspense effects,14 but, on the contrary, essential to theacceptance of a TV series.

On the one hand, it is absolutely indispensable for any kind of TV series, whether itis a hospital soap, a sitcom or a cop show, to suspend narrative closure in order tomaintain a potential for newly devised narrative segments at a later point. On the otherhand, it is paramount to provide narrative anchors which may be recognised by theaudience as partial fulfilment of their expectations, from the reappearance of stockcharacters to recurrent narrative elements. John Caughie is, of course, right inclaiming that after "a few episodes, the bizarre is routine in Twin Peaks" (2000: 130),

but this serial conventionalising of the unconventional is essential for making theaudience switch on. As Dennis Potter's producer Kenith Trodd (91) recently quipped:"[...] who buys a tin of beans wanting to be surprised?" Plot and characters as well as

transmission times and serialisation gaps have to be tailored to fit the audience routinein order to keep audience interest. Fortunately (or otherwise), in broadcast TV,viewers cannot flip to the final page in order to solve the mystery, and even if theycould, they would not succeed inLost Highway orTwin Peaks.

On surface level, Twin Peaks conforms to established formulae of crime anddetective narratives. Up to episode 16, it exhibits all the essential features of a


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detective narrative (according to Broich 1998: 97): an initial murder mystery (a younggirl, Laura Palmer has been raped and killed), a relatively closed location with anumber of suspects (the rural surface idyll of the American small town Twin Peaks,situated close to the Canadian border), an analytic structure focused on recovering

past events, the main interest of searching for the murderer, and finally the solution ofthe murder mystery.

Putting the pieces together: Twin Peaks (Lynch Entertainment / Worldvision,

1990)

One major difference between Twin Peaks and The Singing Detective, namely theattitude towards character, may also be covered by the conventional genre formula ofcrime fiction. Whereas Carrin (1993: 243) convincingly argues that Twin Peaks is a"pure analytic detective story" with little interest in character and a penchant forcaricature, Potter clearly aims at "rounding" Marlow and his family network beyondthe genre stereotypy. In Twin Peaks, Gothic horror and fantasy elements increasinglyinfiltrate and subvert the murder mystery. Both, Twin Peaks and the borderingGhostwood National Forest may justifiably be read as a Borgesian labyrinth whichfrustrates the readers' attempts to decode the signs (Carrin 1993). As Hague (1995:133) put it: "Readers of 'The Garden of Forking Paths' recognized where they were,and it was not Sherlock Holmes' apartment in Baker Street." "The owls are not whatthey seem", is one of the memorable mysterious phrases Cooper is confronted with inhis visions, and the viewer never finds out exactly what they are. Huskey (1993: 248)

blames the "suspenseful anxiety [Twin Peaks] inflicted on its readers" on its rewriting

of the sensation novel for TV, in the very fact that contrary to The Singing Detective,it leaves the crimes supernatural and insoluble by the apparatus of either ratiocinationor psychoanalysis. In Twin Peaks, Cooper's visions provide access to the veritablefantasy world of Twin Peaks, but not to the detection of the detective's psychology.The sense of threatening disorder is certainly increased by supernatural andinexplicable puzzling events and characters, such as lost rings, premonitory dreams,theDoppelgnger, BOB and MIKE,15 the mysterious One Armed Man, Giant, Man


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from Another Place, Log Lady and Major Briggs. Twin Peakscontinuously increasesthe threat to morality from a relatively isolated and potentially explicable murder to adiabolically destructive, inaccessible and unknowable force or principle withinhumanity (Black Lodge vs. White Lodge). The narrative increasingly subverts thoseelements which might function as an indicator of anticipation fulfilment. Dolan (1995:41) convincingly challenges the view thatTwin Peaks lost its viewers because the plot

became too convoluted. Arguing that, on the contrary, it is much easier to separatefive more stringently structured episodes within the second series, he notes that theseries moves rather suddenly from "terrestrial, forensic territory" to "theextraterrestrial dimension" (Dolan 1995: 40).

Both of our examples come in the most televisual of formats, as a serial/series,which is anchored in the medial framework of broadcast TV. The reception of boththe series Twin Peaks and the miniseries The Singing Detective provide evidence ofhow the series or serial format is embedded within the narrative strategies of theworks. The series, Twin Peaks, is based on "increasing familiarity with the maincharacters, with the setting, and with background story lines" (Corner 1999: 57). Aserial, on the other hand, such as the six-part Singing Detective, may be usefullydescribed as an extended play which does not so much depend on the habitualacceptance into household routines. Television, of course, favours the series (and to alesser extent serials) economically as they offer the potential of reliable and recurrentratings and, increasingly, the chance to test the promise of a given series by producinga pilot drama followed by a string of seasonal offerings.

One of the most important devices for stabilising viewer acceptance and keeping therecipients involved are the cliffhanging "super lacunae" (Jurga 1998: 476). WolfgangIser has described how important editing and "cliffhanging", the creation of narrativegaps or lacunae are:

[The serial novel] generally breaks off just at a point of suspense where one wouldlike to know the outcome of a meeting, a situation etc. The interruption andconsequent prolongation of tension is the basic function of the cut. The result is thatwe try to imagine how the story will unfold, and in this way we heighten our own

participation in the course of events.16

Twin Peaks made ample use of this super-lacuna, ending its (short, almost serial-like) first season of eight episodes without revealing the murderer, thus "filling thesummer with anticipation and suspense on the part of the viewers of the show" (Birns1993: 281) and creating via remediation in Internet newsgroups and tie-inmerchandise a cult following of amateur detectives (Jenkins 1995). At the same time,however, it may be read as making the generic conventions of TV transparent. Telotte(1995: 165) argues that the shooting of Cooper by an unknown gunman which ends


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the first season (episode 8) is not just generic soap opera suspense, but also one in aseries of self-conscious gestures. Twin Peaks, in fact, until its premature end (dictated

by flailing ratings) remains true to the logic of the deferred closure of serial TVsuspense. Melynda Huskey (1993: 254) argues that "Lynch skillfully avoids the

banality of the closure the plot seems to demand by interrupting the storypermanently." For the (smaller) poststructuralist part of the viewing community, theguarantee of closure is less important than the habitualized suspense of the puzzlinginstalment, as a paradigmatic reaction from the Internet discussion group suggests: "Idon't care who killed Laura Palmer. I just love the puzzle" (qtd. in Jenkins 1995: 55).

"Who killed Laura Palmer?" Twin Peaks (Lynch Entertainment / Worldvision,

1990)

For the majority of viewers, however, the suspense structure of Twin Peaks seems tohave become increasingly problematic after Leland Palmer has been identified as themurderer who is possessed with BOB, and has subsequently died. Catherine

Nickerson (1993: 274) argues that "Twin Peaks becomes increasingly removed fromthe double structure of a detective novel and closer to a purely forward-moving serialnarrative." This would mean that after the super-lacuna of the Palmer murder has beensolved, Twin Peaks loses most of the suspense directed towards the past murdermysteries, which is only very inadequately compensated by the riddle of Cooper'sown conduct at the FBI. The loss of suspense is aggravated progressively by the

diminishing anticipation that the status of BOB and MIKE will be hermeneuticallyuseful. As Dolan (1995: 38-39) correctly argues, viewers enjoyed the multi-codedplay ofTwin Peaks as long as it seemed to offer a detective resolution, a final closureto the suspense. With this anticipation lost, with a plot that "appears to be resolutelylinear but ends up proving aimless, audiences feel rightly cheated" (Dolan 1995: 38).BOB may have possessed the killer Leland Palmer, but he dispossessed the series of alot of its detection suspense.


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3. Leaving Marks and Planting Clues: Focalization andSuspense inThe Singing Detective

Apart from the micro-suspense created through elliptic visual information which

both of these postmodernist series command admirably,17

the overarching macro-mystery one needs to solve in The Singing Detective is built on disgust at and empathywith the suffering protagonist Philip E. Marlow. This suspense is generated andsustained above all by splitting up the diegetic narrative world and by internalfocalization. Fragments of past tragedies are audiovisually rendered as virulentmemories and hallucinations, making the audience beg to see the real picture throughMarlow's mind. In my thesis on Dennis Potter, I argued that The Singing

Detectiveprovides an intriguing example of internal focalization. To make this clearer,it is useful to forward Branigan's definition of focalization in audiovisual narratives:

Focalization (reflection) involves a character neither speaking (narrating, reporting,communicating) nor acting (focusing, focused by), but rather experiencing somethingthrough seeing or hearing it. Focalization also extends to more complex experiencingof objects: thinking, remembering, interpreting, wondering, fearing, believing,desiring, understanding, feeling guilt. [...] In internalfocalization, story world andscreen are meant to collapse into each other, forming a perfect identity in the name ofa character. [...] Internal focalization is more fully private and subjective than externalfocalization. No character can witness these experiences in another character. Internalfocalization ranges from simple perception (e.g., the point-of-view shot), toimpressions (e.g., the out-of-focus point of view shot depicting a character who is

drunk, dizzy, or drugged), to "deeper thoughts" (e.g. dreams, hallucinations, andmemories); (Branigan 1992: 101-3).

Branigan goes on to show, with respect to Ingmar Bergmans Wild Strawberries, thecomplex narrational structure of even a single shot, and the same could be done with afocalized sequence from The Singing Detective. In the course of the six parts, theviewer is often left in doubt about the source and status of what he sees. The seriesstarts off as a film noir thriller with a conventional first-person narrator detective whois present as an actor in his story and tells this story both on and off screen. We see awet mean street at night, bathed in blue neon lights and dominated by diagonals. The

scene is visually marked as belonging to the thrillerish world of the hard-boileddetective we are soon to meet. Everything is foregrounded as a generic convention:characters, place, time, and narration. Merging Chandleresque pastiche with the spynovel, the narrative world of London in 1945 denotes the dark secrecy andimpenetrability of post-war identities.


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The Singing Detective (BBC, 1986)

Soon we learn that this narrative level uses the film noir convention as part of aninternal focalization, a frame narrative: What we have seen derives from theconsciousness of the hospital patient Philip Marlow immobilized and sociallyostracized in hospital with severe psoriatic arthropathy. "Who? Who was it? Who?"(TSD: 137) continually asks the memorized, threatening teacher in the 1945 classroomabout the culprit who defecated on her desk (Philip, who committed the deed, blamedit on his classmate Mark). The question is echoed by various characters. Across therange of discourses this suspense question may be extended to the responsibility forMarlow's psychosomatic leprosy, the spy thriller identity of Mark Binney, Lili, Soniaetc., the plot to cheat Marlow out of his screenplay rights (Mark Finney, Nicola), theresponsibility for his mother's affair with Raymond and her subsequent death. The realscenario, which has been clothed in genre fictions in Marlow's mind, graduallyemerges. Whereas the detective ceases to investigate the identity of the Mysterious

Men in the spy thriller (which makes them visit their 'author' and complain of lackingidentity),18 the identity of Marlow's "Marks" comes into focus.

The narrative continues to intermingle narrative levels hospital soap, memory play and thriller up to a point which makes it difficult to delimit the variousnarrative strands. Marlow freely states the postmodernist angle on detective fictionoutlined above:

All solution, and no clues. That's what the dumbheads want. That's the bloodyNovel. He said, she said, and descriptions of the sky I'd rather it was the other wayaround. All clues. No solutions. That's the way things are. Plenty of clues. Nosolutions. (TSD: 140)

One begins to suspect that the audience will soon be in for further hallucinationswhich move effortlessly between non-focalized narration and internal focalization.19

Focalization, of course, has to be visually or aurally encoded, and The SingingDetective sometimes chooses to foreground the focalization process (e.g. in musical


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hallucinations, in dislocated characters, visual and aural effects such as camera tiltingor echoing voices from the OFF, read-out punctuation). It is, of course, important forthe audience to decide whether they are faced with a hallucination, a memory, or ascene. A crime, for instance, might be encoded to be witnessed by the spectators, to beremembered by a character or to be hallucinated by a character. In The Singing

Detective, for instance, a policeman appears on the ward and tells Marlow that hiswife was found murdered. Visually encoded through non-focalization or externalfocalization to operate in a non-hallucinated narrative present, this is subsequently byan variant repetition discovered to have been a proleptic hallucination. Reassuringly,the spectator notices that Marlow's wife is still alive and will be able to lead him outof the hospital, after a climactic shoot-out which appropriates standardsuspense/surprise clichs. (The detective ego preserves the final bullet for his hospitalego instead of the second Mysterious Man). Earlier, the detective ego Marlow hadlooked at Nicola's painting and commented: "I think I know this dame. Her name is E.Lucy Dation. (TSD: 124) a foreshadowing of this re-integrative (albeit ironic)ending. The Singing Detective retains both the suspense about solving the riddles ofthe Marlow identity and the generalised "meta-suspense" which addresses theepistemological function of narratives in a chaotic and fragmented world. Similarly tothe owls ofTwin Peaks, the intimidating scarecrow in The Singing Detective is notwhat it seems, but after all we learn about its psycho-emotional function for Marlow.True, after the young Marlow, hiding in a tree-top, announces that he is going to be adetective, he addresses this declaration ironically in direct address and supplements itwith an ironic (postmodern) grin. In the final analysis, however, Potter's genericlabyrinth supports the act of detection orAufklrungand provides a kind of closure as

well as a validation of the quest for a unified self by means of artistic orpsychoanalytic processes. Adam Barker (1988: 194) refers to precisely this criterion,the fact that "Potter uses the fragmented narrative ofThe Singing Detective as a wayof constructing a unified character [...]", to distinguish his aesthetics from the rathermore Lynch-esque rejection of character in Nicholas Roeg'sBad Timing(1980). Theresolution achieves the reintegration of the fragmented narrative worlds by attributingthe generic detective trademarks, trench coat and trilby to the patient Marlow,"veritably the Singing Detective" (my emphasis), as Potter's screenplay reveals (TSD:248). He remains, therefore, at least in part the generic convention his namesuggests.20 The suspense is heightened in The Singing Detective because through

permanent focalization the audience invests their emotion in the plight and the past ofthe sick and incapacitated writer, whereas we never form an affective allegiance to thecognitive generic surface playgrounds ofThe Singing Detective orTwin Peaks.

We have seen that the postmodernists attacked the detective story both because it ispopular and because it reinforces the expectation of a plot resolution and, on a more philosophical plane, the idea ofAufklrung. Both The Singing Detective and Twin


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Peaks participate in the conventional mise-en-scne of the film noir thriller and crimeTV, thus creating a suspense which is, however, foregrounded and partially destroyedin the narrative. In terms of suspense, this works as long as as (1) the subversion ofthe promise of closure comes at the very end of the narrative, or (2) the viewers do notseek this kind of suspense in the first place. Whereas both, The Singing

Detective and Twin Peaks therefore toy around with multiple encodings, threateningand subverting the suspense structure of traditional detection, Twin Peaks apparentlydid not sustain the suspense created from both the murder mystery and the anticipatedclosure as long as The Singing Detective. It is clear, then, that the anti-humanistic soapsuspense ofTwin Peaksundermines the philosophic grounding of the suspense createdfrom detection on TV more thoroughly than the fragmentary humanism of DennisPotter's focalized serial Singing Detective.

Bibliography

Antor, Heinz (2000): "Is There a Ship on the Horizon? Notes on the Ethics ofDennis Potter's New Humanist Postmodernism inSufficient Carbohydrate." In: Grasand Cook (2000): pp. 127-48.

Bal, Mieke (1994): Introduction to Narratology: Toronto, Buffalo, London:University of Toronto Press.

Barker, A (1988): "What the Detective Saw, or, a Case of MistakenIdentity."Monthly Film Bulletin 55: pp. 193-95.

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Footnotes

1 These arguments point out its ceaseless flow, fragmentary overabundance and self-reflexive hyperconsciousness. See for this standard assumption of the 1980s and1990s Goodwin (1993), who reviews interpretations of MTV as the pivotal

postmodern format, Collins ([1992] 2000), Connor (1989: 158-72), McHale (1987),

Nelson (1997: 111), and, of course, Thomas Pynchon'sVineland.

2 Joost Hunningher (1993) has highlighted Jon Amiel's immense contribution to TheSinging Detective, while John Cook (1998: 218), reviewing the production history,sees it as a Potter-Amiel co-production. Rosalind Coward (1987) was the first to voicedoubts about the concept of a "TV author" Dennis Potter, arguing that this is anideological construction. Similarly, Creeber (1998:18) has criticised biographical


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approaches, opining that Potter's work "deliberately calls into question the wholenotion of 'authorship'". In the case of Lynch, Lavery (1995: 5) has suggested along thelines of criteria forwarded by Eco that an authorial presence would have impingedon Twin Peak's"cult" status, while Rosenbaum (26) has marginalized Lynch'sauteurist input when compared to his first successEraserhead.

3 Heinz Antor (2000) has recently aligned Potter with a New Humanist aesthetics and,similarly, Vernon Gras (2000: 96) has argued that The Singing Detective is "a great

postmodern work" and an example of dialogical ethics. Chris Lippard (2000: 123) hasintroduced Hassan's term "posthuman" to denote the dramatisation of conflictingmemories. He concludes that Potter is a "Janus figure", both pre- and postmodern.Against the postmodernist thesis voiced by Ib Bondebjerg and Timothy Corrigan,Glen Creeber has argued, Potter's longing for "the vision of a better, holier and moreorganic world" is modernist rather than postmodernist (1998: 146). Paul Delany(1988: 518) points out that "The Singing Detective never declines into an exercise in

post-modern smoke and mirrors, because its central theme is such a painfully directexorcism of guilt, betrayal and sexual disability." Robin Nelson suggests that Potter'snarrative logic is modernist, but the 'multiple coding', his bridging the gap betweenmodernism and popular culture is post-modernist (1997: 200-7). I have myself pointedout that in spite of his adaptation of postmodernist techniques, Potter always kept hisanti-materialist teleology intact, countering the surface fragmentation with a drivetowards closure and interior re-centering (cf. Voigts-Virchow 1995: 281-83; 2000:76).

4 I will subsequently use the abbreviation TSD for references to the published script

ofThe Singing Detective.

5 John Russell's Sunday Express review ofTSD and Fredric Jameson, qtd. in Lavery(1995: 13).

6 See for this Michael Carroll (1993). Consider his name Cooper (Gary? JamesFennimore?) and his Watson character, Harry S. Truman, ironical both for hisPresident namesake, who was "mythically identified with small-town, Mid-WestAmerica" (Carroll 1993: 289), and the epistemological promise which is subverted inthe series. His tape reports to an absent narratee, secretary Diane (the goddess of

hunting?) performs the first-person narration of the detective, avoiding, however, thestandard device of the voice-over.

7 Seesslen (178-79) proposes the idea that Lynch's detective (as his KyleMaclachlan persona) is marked by an extra-uterine learning process after a premature

birth (expressed in his innocent navet, alienation, and stasis). In this reading,informed by psychoanalysis, Cooper revisits his paradisiac birthplace, the twin teats


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ofTwin Peaks, completing his birth until he is tainted by knowledge. This readingwould make Twin Peaks compatible with the old Marlow's re-enactment of thecoming of age of his youthful Marlow alter ego. Seesslen also holds that Lost

Highway, for all its narrative fragmentation and multiple coding has ceased to bepostmodern precisely because it lacks the characteristic postmodern irony.

8 A full analysis of narrative sound-image montage and lip-synchronization inPotter's work is still pending, but see Voigts-Virchow (1995: 112-23); for theinfluence of Potter's lipsynchronization on Alain Resnais et al. (one might add thehospital choreography of Woody Allen's musical Everyone Says I Love Youfrom1996 [see Marinov 2000: 203]). For sound and music in Twin Peaks see Drexler(1997) and Kalinak (1995).

9 See Schulz-Buschhaus, Wellershoff, Broich in Vogt (1998); Tani (1984).

10 See Hutcheon (1988), where she holds that the ironic/parodic 'repetition with adifference' signals the inescapable intertextual implication (ex-centric complicity) andavoids the impossible vantage point outside of culture. The rejection of "the politics ofirony" noted by Hutcheon (1994: 1) might indicate a move away from the postmodernaesthetic.

11 "Da der Kriminalroman in diesem Kontext vorrangig der Steigerung wie derVervielfltigung romanesker (und anderweitig ausgedrrter) Attraktivitt dient, istetwa dem Umstand abzulesen, da post-avantgardistische Autoren mehr alsirgendetwas anderes das Moment der Geheimnisspannung zu entlehnen pflegen, um

es dann sowohl in grorumigen wie in kleinrumigen Bogen von Suspenseeinzusetzen."

12 Wulff (1996: 2), who argues that suspense hinges on cataphorical extraploration,the anticipating activity of the reader.

13 "Bevorzugt werden Konflikte. Konflikte haben als Themen den Vorteil, auf eineselbsterzeugte Ungewiheit anzuspielen. Sie vertagen die erlsende Information berGewinner und Verlierer mit dem Hinweis auf die Zukunft. Das erzeugt Spannung und,auf der Verstehensseite der Kommunikation, guesswork" (Luhmann 1996: 59).

14 The re-reading takes away the element of surprise, but there remains, of course, arecidivist suspense of both experienced variation in the narrative and, in emotionallycharged reception processes, the paradoxically suspended knowledge of what willhappen in the face of the intensity of what we desire to happen (see Prieto-Pablos1998: 111).


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15 For the idea that MIKE and BOB might be viewed as future manifestations of thecharacters Bobby Briggs and Mike Nelson see Nickerson (1993: 274).

16 Iser (1980: 191). The German version does not differentiate between "suspense"and "tension": "[Der Fortsetzungsroman] unterbricht im allgemeinen dort, wo sich

eine Spannung gebildet hat, die nach einer Lsung drngt, oder wo man gerne etwasber den Ausgang des soeben Gelesenen erfahren mchte. Das Kappen bzw. dasVerschleppen der Spannung bildet eine Elementarbedingung fr den Schnitt. Einsolcher Suspens-Effekt aber bewirkt, da wir uns die im Augenblick nicht verfgbareInformation ber den Fortgang des Geschehens vorzustellen versuchen. Wie wird esweitergehen? Indem wir solche und hnliche Fragen stellen, erhhen wir unsereBeteiligung am Fortgang des Geschehens (Iser 1994: 297)."

17 For a few examples of the visual re-enactment of film noir suspense, see Voigts-Virchow (1995: 243-44).

18 Complaining "We don't know a bloody thing about our who or what or why or I mean, it's all blank, ennit?" (TSD: 230), the two Mysterious Men are clearlydescendants of Pirandello and the slapstick duos of the silent movie. They bicker "liketwo Beckett figures" (Corrigan 1992: 188), and they remain frustratingly marginallike Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.

19 For Marlow as focalizer, see Creeber (1998: 169-70); Voigts-Virchow (1995:103-5).

20 Consider also the multi-faceted irony of Vera Lynn's "We'll Meet Again" asextradiegetic musical accompaniment (noted in Voigts-Virchow 1994: 57).

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