Writing the Script.

There's an uneasy moment towards the end of the third episode of Cold Lazarus when, as Martina Matilda Masdon speaks across the Atlantic via autocube to Emma Porlock, the writing begins to seem profoundly awkward, uncharacteristic, forced, un-natural even:

Masdon: … register what I have to say.
Emma: I am registering, Ms Masdon.
Masdon's voice: First, why do you behave in a way that could lead an uncharitable person to conclude that you are a nasty two-faced, two-timing sewer rat?
Emma: Which uncharitable person would that be, Ms Masdon? I only know of one such. (2)

It may seem uncharitable of me to mention such a lapse, and indeed in so doing it might be seen as a progression down the slope towards the subjective 'nastiness' of Literary Criticism indicated by Philip Marlow with 'swine to the left of [me], swine to the right of [me], grunt grunt'.(3) But then that would be to assume, again uncharitably, that in making such a point I merely wanted to say that Potter 'didn't write this bit very well'. Although evidently a point of departure, this is not my intention.

Hamlet famously points out that the 'purpose of play[s]' is 'to show … the very age and body of the time his form and pressure' (4) and throughout this discussion it has been with regard to the tensions between 'form and pressure' that we have, in the main, been concerned. What I think we find here with this momentary lapse, this tailing off, in the 'quality' of Potter's writing reflects something of what Cook calls 'the most extreme tension of them all - that between living and dying'.(5) Forty days after completing the introduction to Karaoke/Cold Lazarus on the 28th of April 1994 Dennis Potter was dead. In February of that same year he had been diagnosed as having 'cancer of the pancreas, with secondaries already on the liver' (6) and it was this disease which finally took him away on the seventh of June, nine days after the death of his wife- 'the steadfast green-eyed one ever'(7) - Margaret.

In his 'Introduction' to Karaoke/Cold Lazarus Potter explains how, subsequent upon the 'matter-of-fact death sentence' given to him and following some remarkably clear-headed calculations involving varying prognoses and his own rate of production ('480 pages in fifty days'), he began work on his two final television dramas.(8) When he appeared on Channel Four Television on the 5th of April 1994 in interview with Melvyn Bragg, Potter, flask of morphine close at hand, speaking of the pain the disease was causing said, 'with the pain you sometimes just have to keep moving - I still have the pen in my hand to make sure I can put a sentence down when it eases'. Clearly these were incredibly difficult circumstances in which to be writing and at the same time as revealing that Potter still 'want[ed] to speak' it also demonstrates - by virtue of the old adage, paradoxical in this context, that 'actions speak louder than words' - that with regard to writing he did indeed have 'a vocation, a passion [and] a conviction'.(9) What I'm driving at here is that when reading (and that is all I am able to do regarding his final work - a viewing being to all practical intent and purpose impossible) Cold Lazarus it is very hard to dispel the image of a pain-wracked, terminally ill Potter pacing around a room pen in hand, and that it is with these entirely uncharacteristic, defamiliarized moments of lapse, of tailing off, that it seems to me 'the form and pressure' of his body and age are most clearly, though, as with Marlow's Singing Detective, unintentionally, revealed. Despite much having been made - mistakenly, as I hope to have gone someway towards showing - of the explicit autobiographical content of Potter's work, it is these moments which for me offer the most poignant, implicit, 'felt' instances of an actual, physical, 'felt', reality; that of impending death. If this is an implicit indication of a 'felt' reality operating within and upon the structures of Potter's writing I now want to move into a discussion regarding his more explicit indications.

As we have already discussed non-naturalism shows 'the frame in the picture' and one of the ways Potter achieves this effect is by highlighting the actual process of writing, exposing the mechanism inside the machine. We see this effect throughout The Singing Detective, two levels down so to speak, in the meta-fictive world created by Marlow:

Binney: I have this awful - I have this awful dash he stops himself comma and all but shudders full stop
Nicola: Darling dash question mark (10)

We have discussed how this effect removes the 'illusion' of reality and in so doing gets us past the 'illusion' and therefore closer to the 'real', to the stoneyness of the stone, the storyness of the story, and also how in using this process non-naturalism presents to the audience not a concealed representation of a deterministic universe where 'people are made' but instead a revealed representation of a universe where 'men and women make themselves'. According to Marxist thinking the potential for men and women to make themselves lies within their labour and it is in the capitalist extraction of labour from the worker, in objectifying the product whilst making the producer subject to the produced, that Marx's famous concept of the 'alienation of labour' is realised. Marx says that, '[t]he realization of labour appears in political economy as the ''making unreal'', or loss of reality of, the labourer, objectification as the loss of and slavery to the object, appropriation as estrangement, as alienation'.(11) This process, this making 'unreal', is closely related to the process that takes place for the viewer of the naturalist drama, whereby a total absorption into an objective world upon which no one can have any effect operates as a naturalised alienation; a similar, again related process is taking place with the television writer today.

In much the same way as a singer might be judged upon their ability to mime a song as though they were really singing (we can see the continuity here with the lip-synch technique), a skilful television presenter will nowadays oftentimes be judged upon an ability to read from autocue and yet appear, naturalistically, as though they weren't, to appear, in effect, as though no one had written their lines. In these cases there is clearly a degree of alienation taking place, both on the level of delivery - the singer from the song, the presenter from the presentation - but also at a more fundamental level, by a process of concealment, that of the writer from the written.

In television drama an increasing naturalist tendency towards the vernacular, towards the colloquial, rendering dialogue 'just like people talk', necessarily tends towards a further and further obliteration of the writer from the picture. Evidently naturalism has come a long way since the turn of the last century; even as late as the 1950s Alan Plater points out that 'the dialogue sounded more like writing than talking' - the point here being not that this was a non-naturalist technique but that it really wasn't supposed to sound like that at all.(12) With the advance of naturalism as the genre of choice in television of all modes and its increasingly slick, seamless, melding of life-as-lived with life-as-represented there is necessarily an increasing concealment of the primary, basic, task at the root of all organised thought-out drama - the actual writing. In using the technique of non-naturalism to combat this effect what Potter is effectively doing, in 'making strange' that which is already estranged, in alienating that which is already alienated, isn't so very far away, in its curious doubling, from Hegel's famous 'negating of the negation'.

One way of seeing aspects of Potter's work therefore, is as an active resistance against the increasing negative, market-driven, pressures in television towards a debasement and a concealment of the author with an attempt at negating these negative effects by explicitly reproducing what otherwise remains implicit. Marlow, with an example of this negation, gives us one of his characteristically acerbic takes on the status of the writer:

Marlow: … I am trying to do some work -
Registrar: Work? What do you mean?
Marlow: Are you one of the great majority who thinks that writing is not work?
Registrar: No of course not.
Marlow: (Severely) And do you by any chance labour under the delusion that it consists solely and entirely of the act of actually putting words on a page? Without thought? Without planning? As though I were a Sunday Times journalist, or something? (13)

Later Dr Gibbon suggests to Marlow that really he hadn't 'set out to write' pulp-fiction, to which Marlow replies, to my mind somewhat sarcastically - though Carpenter seems to take it both literally and explicitly autobiographically(14) - that 'I would have liked to have used my pen to praise a loving god and all his loving creation'. Aside from the obvious overtones regarding the cultural status of various genres there's also a deeper undertone here regarding the economics of the processes of cultural production. In reply to Gibbon (again I take it sarcastically) Marlow says, 'If I had the talent, do you mean?'(15) I don't think the issue here is anything to do with 'talent' but really rather more to do with what a writer actually has to write in order to make a living. Later, regarding a film company that wants to take 'some sort of option' on his novel, Marlow offers his own take on what that, in reality, means: 'Options. Options. That simply means they offer you a pittance now for the right to rip you off later. Like an election manifesto'.(16)

The oftentimes harsh economic realities and the resultant alienation of what Potter calls a 'very frail trade'(17) are constantly exposed in his work: Thomas Bates in Brimstone and Treacle(18) writes ditties for greeting cards, and this lineage extends all the way to Karaoke's Daniel Feeld who tells Sandra that he writes 'movies that hardly ever get made, books with paper covers, obituaries, greeting cards'.(19) But Feeld, like Potter, has 'for a long period … been exceptionally fortunate with [his] earning powers'(20) and as a result is in the luxurious position of being able to turn down a writing job on the script for a particularly numb sounding American animation called Baa Baa which, karaoke-like, would find him writing alienated words for a story already written.(21)

Although being relatively autonomous with regard to his financial status and therefore possessed with an implicit power to control his own stories, Daniel is still shown to be working in tension with the hard economic facts of the structures of his existence. The producer of Daniel's 'Karaoke', Nick Balmer, wants to insert 'Your Cheatin' Heart' in the opening scene, directly against Daniel's instruction that it be 'Why Must I be a Teenager in Love' (both songs, ironically, indicators of the two men's unconscious, uncontrolled, autobiographical psychological feelings). Feeld, clearly another of the 'uprooted and anxious' figures we have already discussed, resists Balmer and the class hierarchy, the loss of control, and by extension the threat of alienation, he represents:

[H]e's too arrogant! It's that twit-twit bray! … that class thing, cousin-or-something of the Queen thing … It's my work, my sweat, he's fucking up! I'm not going to be knocked down by his bloody Rolls-Royce! (22)

Later we learn that Nick does in fact '[own] the script' (with 'certain contractual restraints') and that as a result of his financial power it is ultimately down to him who works on the production and who doesn't. Ben Baglin points this out to the producer, Anna: '[he] appointed you and will make damned sure that in the last resort you-do-what-he-wants'.(23) Nick, we discover, has married into his financial situation. His wife, Lady Ruth Balmer, is the daughter of 'eccentric peer Lord Collingwoode' who 'left five million flippin' quid for cats [but] he left her five times as much'.(24) When it becomes clear, again ironically, that the script is in fact a little too close to reality (in more ways than one), apparently fictional figures appearing as concrete realities resulting from Daniel's unconscious, and therefore again uncontrolled, appropriation - in this case a newspaper article - of experiences from his 'lived life', the possibility of a reshoot is mooted. Lady Ruth - as hard capital, as old-money - is here revealed as the ultimate (though not, in contrast to orthodox Marxism, total) determining force and controller, in 'the last instance', of the means of cultural production; regarding a reshoot, she states: '(… very precise) No more money'. (25)

The Fourth Wall.

In 1974 Raymond Williams spoke of 'the metaphor of the fourth wall'. This 'fourth wall' was, he said, the wall removed from the set of the naturalist drama by which we could look in and observe people who 'waited for the knock on the door, the letter or the message, the shout from the street, to know what would happen to them'.(26) This wall he suggests has now become the television in our own rooms, a fourth wall we no longer look into but look out from to see what is 'happening 'out there''. 'We have never' he says, 'as a society acted so much or watched so many others acting' and that, 'the slice of life, once a project of naturalist drama, is now a voluntary, habitual, internal rhythm'.(27) What this implies is in effect an alienated society, a society that has actually internalised alienation with the absolute submission of the spectator to the naturalist illusion of a reality broadcast to seeming 'masses' who are in fact separated both from themselves and reality (the reality in this instance being that now the masses are in fact other people).

For Guy Debord, viewing separation as an implicitly manipulative political effect, this ensures 'the atomisation of workers dangerously [because in Marxist terms revolutionary] massed together'(28) whilst, in contrast, for Hoggart - taking a similar, though slightly more conservative, 'British', line - television might 'assist the emergence of a cultural group almost as large as all the sum of all other groups. But it would be a group only in the sense that its members shared a passivity'.(29) Potter, as we have repeatedly seen, was especially keen to avoid this kind of separation, this passivity, the surrender to the fourth wall, whilst at the same time remaining acutely aware of the 'potentially wondrous delights, that could slice through the tedious hierarchies of the printed word and help to emancipate us from many of the stifling tyrannies of class and status and gutter-press ignorance'.(30) In exposing the tensions at work, the struggles and the transformations, behind the means of producing representations he lays bare the processes of mediation upon representation that naturalism seeks to conceal. These processes, Potter maintains, extend all the way from so-called fiction to so-called fact:

'[d]ocumentary is simply naturalism, simply observing behaviour, with a voice-over telling you what you're supposed to think. Whereas fiction, drama, films, plays, all avoid that form of dishonesty - or can avoid it. (31)

If the separation between fiction and documentary, is, or had become, as blurred as Potter suggests then Raymond Williams pushes things further with his description of the overlap between advertising and drama where he says definitive breaks between the two forms are becoming '[hard] to discern'.(32) By the year 2368 in Potter's prophetic, satiric, and in many respects polemic, valediction, Cold Lazarus, the breaks between production, creation and consumption are no longer simply 'hard' to discern but, for the general population - the 'masses' - seemingly impossible. Significantly Cold Lazarus opens with a shot of a gigantic 'living' screen 'which in fact occupies a whole wall'(33) and it is upon this wall that the contest for the control of the representation of a 'felt' reality is played out.

David Siltz (undoubtedly a satirical dig at Rupert Murdoch), the president of Uniplanet Total Entertainment, tells Masdon, in a tedious brag relating his 'entertainment' empire to a larger consumer driven (and with regard to this discussion, consumer absorbing) industry, that he has 'eight hundred million subscribers … plus all the offshoot[s] … food and drink … virtual reality … '.(34) Masdon, the president of Masdon Science Inc., clearly linking culture with consumption, or at least as an agent of passive consumption rather than active production, wants to use Siltz's media empire to broadcast a show that will make people 'anxious' in order to sell tablets her organisation is developing which 'put up a road block' against 'angst'.(35) This is a clear-cut, although extreme, example of art-as-entertainment-as-advertisement creating what Herbert Marcuse described as 'false needs … superimposed upon the individual by particular social interests in his repression'(36) which, despite in one sense being clear-cut, differs in one specific aspect from Potter's presentation: there are no social interests in this repression, only individual interests. The advanced (in the sense of further down the road as opposed to further up the hill) free-market consumer world Potter depicts, a world where ''the 'private' is high-tech luxury and wealth, the 'public' shabby, soulless and dangerous'',(37) purposefully collides with Margaret Thatcher's infamous statement that 'there's no such thing as society',(38) in that here we find a world in which people are all entirely isolated individuals ('What amazes me - stupefies me - is the sound of the crowd … that must be hundreds upon hundreds of people all gathered together at the same place'(39)), isolated not only in what they see and believe is happening 'out there', passively absorbing their 'slice of life', but now rather more dangerously as 'admass-culture' reaches deep into the heart of dramatic entertainment, absorbed by an unconscious (therefore unwilling) suspension of disbelief regarding their own needs.

We mustn't neglect to consider here for a moment the limited effectiveness of non-naturalism as a form and as technique. On the one hand it cannot, under any circumstances, remain static. Once the technique is resolved into a fixed form (for example; children always played by adults) then the effect of making strange is lost. It is a form and a technique that must never be resolved, or naturalised, formally, into a fixed practice. Conversely, once the practices of non-naturalism are deemed to be a commercial success as a result, for example, of increased ratings then these techniques will inevitably find themselves appropriated and formally 'nailed' by other branches of our 'dramatised society'; an early 1990s series of ITV commercials for Allied Dunbar came complete with expressionist camera angles and, with a shameless lifting of Potter's technique, actors lip-synching to Fred Astaire's 'There May Be Trouble Ahead' and Nat King Cole's 'Let's Face the Music and Dance'.(40) This is the obverse side to the discussion we have been following - that of resisting alienated, alienating, narratives - in that here we can see a reverse process whereby successful strategies of resistance are reincorporated, recuperated even, by the dominant structures, in this case the structures of unbridled consumerism. Thus the attempt at a negation of the alienation realised in naturalism finds itself reified, and in effect re-alienated, as the 'frame in the picture' becomes naturalised and subsides back into the picture in the frame.

Convergence.

As it is said that 'all parallel lines meet in space' with Karaoke and Cold Lazarus we do seem to reach a point of seemingly infinite convergence as the two teleplays, Potter's life, Potter's work and Potter's world reach out of and into each other creating a veritable 'mass' of connections, tensions, significations and ambiguities.

As we began with a birth, now as we reach towards a conclusion it is fitting that we should be ending with death. But as we saw in Blue Remembered Hills there are 'ways of seeing' whereby 'the is child father to the man' and by seeing in this way we can see not only the man in the child but also the child in the man. The use of adult actors to play the parts of children can show us this (and Potter does attempt to pull it off again during the memory scenes in Cold Lazarus). This point of convergence, seen by Wordsworth as an 'intimation of immortality', is something that is signalled throughout Karaoke - the 'chalk of the hopscotch square' never too far away. Daniel, furtively smoking in the hospital, is 'in his school-boy-boy-behind-the-pavilion mode', Sandra 'rises, like a small child [then] looks at him, woman now, not child' and earlier a businessman tells his new secretary that: 'Any new job is rather like the first day at school'.(41)

This interconnection spills over into the language itself with Ben Baglin's continual lapsing into spoonerisms, Arthur 'Pig' Mailion's(42) comical confusion of the Italian numero uno, with 'Unero Numo',(43) The Forest of Nead (Feeld's home, a mirror image of Potter's Forest of Dean) and even the appearance of the 'impatient patient'. The sense that these words are infecting each other 'almost as a contagion might'(44) is deeply intertwined with the sense that larger groupings of words (stories, narratives) are also involved in a similar process. There's a constant preoccupation with 'lines', Potter himself relates how he used a line he was 'ready to use in my own dialogue' when speaking to his consultant: 'Tick one box'.(45) Siltz uses this line on several occasions as he does 'the biz no other biz is like', again used in Potter's introduction. Feeld always seems to have 'the right lines': 'Oh, you poor soul, have you had it like that for very long?' he enquires of the 'impatient patient' when he interrupts Daniel's illicit cigarette. Later he tells Ben: 'I need to be alone now for a while … I can already feel Ms Garbo whispering in my ear'.(46) Lines appear from previous of Potter's works; from The Singing Detective we have: 'I once knew a young woman who all the songs were about'; there's even a lip-synch of 'Pennies From Heaven'(47): the list is almost endless.

Daniel comes to believe that his own lines have somehow escaped from his fictional world into reality ('They are speaking my lines'(48)), that in effect his fiction is shaping the world-at-large. Anna dismisses this as 'paranoia'.(49) But as we have seen, fictional representations can and do seep out into the world 'like a contagion', not only 'showing the age its form and pressure', but also contributing to that very form and pressure: we need only recollect Hoggart's young men appearing to simulate Humphrey Bogart, who in turn was simulating Chandler's Marlowe. I think the picture is evident, as might be Baudrillard's 'vertigo of representation'(50) when we consider that Potter's Marlow takes the process even further. But, crucially, as I have been arguing, what we have been seeing is a process of what in this context we might, via assimilation, call 'asimulation' - an active process of reproduction that goes beyond a merely passive act of simulation.

Siltz's plan to appropriate Feeld's head - the ultimate biography - and broadcast his memories directly into other peoples' heads with the use of virtual reality technology relates back, I think, to the appropriation of non-naturalism as a tool, not to help people take a more active position as self-producers, but to reduce them to isolated totally 'self-alienated' consumers, a place where the only relief from the solitary 'death-by-privet-hedge' is to resort to the sheer nosiness of modern 'showbiz' which, in making a concealed pretence at showing us what 'life is really like', can, in the worst instance, divorce us from the potentiality that 'living life' might really offer. 'Showbiz' says Siltz (obviously Siltz equals the 'dregs'), in an eerie presentiment of the explosion of the 'reality TV' phenomenon, 'is looking over the next guy's hedge' (51):

At last, privacy has a true market value … haven't we always tried to get inside people's heads? Isn't that what the game is all about, showbiz and that part of it we call politics?(52) Owning people.(53)

Speaking to Graham Fuller in 1992 Potter, on the subject of non-naturalism, said that: 'it's around you, it's sensory, it's virtual reality, it's having a helmet on your head, it's cybernetic space - that's non-naturalism!'(54) I think it's fair to suggest that Potter got a little bit too enthusiastic here and perhaps in Cold Lazarus he goes someway towards redressing the point. Theoretically, virtual reality, in its most advanced form, could provide a seamless realism, seamlessness here inferring the simulated totality of the picture as well as the absolute absence of a frame to put in it; no longer a 'fourth wall' to look into or look out from, but an entire space in which to 'be'. Of course, just as Potter indicated with drama - that it could avoid dishonesty - in the case of virtual reality the same clause applies, with the necessary caveat that a seamless realism, if it so desired, could also provide the seamless lie. (55)

Cold Lazarus presents something of a worst-case scenario(56) with the autonomous individual's own memories under the threat of an ultimate alienation as yet another product to be offered up for faultless simulation and consumption. During the course of Cold Lazarus what we witness is Daniel's desperate struggle to retain control of his story, literally affecting his memories and rewriting his own past. There is, therefore, an especial significance to the moment Emma Porlock suggests her team of scientists bear in mind the fact that writers 'tell tales [and that] they make things up' after their discovery that Daniel is a writer.(57) What is intended here, I think, is that in being a writer, a producer, a user, of stories, Daniel is able to retain his autonomy even within a sea of otherwise determining narratives; the double significance is that we are also meant to take this implicitly (as we are with most things in Potter) as a metaphor for all of our lives - we must write our own stories. This position, I think, implicitly elevates the imagination to a central position in what I suppose one would want to call the dialectics of Potter's humanism - and Potter, I'm sure there can be no dispute, was undoubtedly a humanist.

Fyodor, the Reality or Nothing (RON) dissident, who seems on the verge of questioning Emma on her point regarding writers ('You mean - they are liars'(58)), still 'has a few shreds and tatters of hope in us as citizens rather than simply consumers' and for a while continues with the 'Lazarus Project' in the hope that the sheer non-naturalist unfamiliarity of history presented directly and not 'safely anaesthetised in the long, long ago' will show people that there are other ways to live; 'Let the past speak! Let it accuse!' he cries.(59) Ultimately Fyodor declines to follow this path, apparently for entirely humane reasons, electing instead to destroy Feeld's cryogenically preserved head. But I think there might be another, again implicit, motivation for Fyodor's actions and to find it we need to return - very much in keeping with structures of interconnectedness, beginnings related to ends, adults to children and so on - to the very beginning of Cold Lazarus. On considering the implications surrounding the successful accessing of Daniel's memories for the first time, Emma Porlock, against whom Fyodor is cast, says:

[I]f we wear our VR helmets we will live for hours at a time in the real past, the authentic past - and and - (Her voice, her expression change; a small shadow falls.) And perhaps escape.
(Fyodor in particular is watching her keenly.) (60)

If there was ever any doubt regarding the non-naturalist potential of virtual reality we find it here at this point, at the very beginning. For Fyodor the point at which passive, packaged, 'ready-made', unalterable, consumable representations come to exceed in desirability a reality that should be 'in the making' then it's time to start destroying the representations.

When Fyodor - as a RON he's almost a kind of Critical Theory terrorist - finally destroys Feeld we find ourselves at the apex of Potter's converging themes. As in The Singing Detective the series ends with the liberating death of an author. Marlow is freed from the determining narratives of his life by his fictional alter-ego, whilst Feeld, tragi-comically contained in a large jam-jar, is liberated from a purgatory of half-lived memories. As Daniel slips away, off the 'fourth wall' of the laboratory screen and into the tunnel of the afterlife we get brief snatches of his life, episodes recounted in Karaoke, and also episodes from the 'back-story' of which we only learn in Cold Lazarus. One image in particular lingers - not on the screen, but in my mind - it is that of 'young Daniel clinging to the top of an oak tree'.(61) With this image I find myself swept back to the final scene of The Singing Detective where:

Philip perches in the treetop … Abruptly, the song ends. Birdsong swells. The boy stares, stares, as a breeze stirs the trees, shush-a-shush-ashoosh.
Then -
Philip: When I grow up, I be going to be a detective.
And then, unexpectedly, he grins. (62)

And even as I am swept back to this beginning which is also an end, I find myself contemplating that moment of my son's birth which for us was also a beginning and has now become a part of the end. And as I do so I am sad for the passing of an individual who, in influencing the shape of the nation's cultural life also helped to shape mine. In turn I am also sad for the passing of a man I consider to have been one of the great British writers of the last century. I hope, in the course of this study, to have gone someway towards proving that. 'Am I right? Or am I right?' (63)

Afterword.

In a world in which the 'business' of representation has become literally everything, a world in which a simulated reality can transcended realism in seeming to become real, a world in which the means of representation are in the hands of the few, a world where representation is exploited for the immediate benefit of those same few and where the many become a 'mass' of passive consumers, 'fed on a wrong diet'(64) of stories they should make their own, that they believe are their own but which are really owned and manipulated by other people, then the task of cultural producers - the 'artists', the 'critics' - is to expose this alienating, exploitative sham by returning individuals to a collective world where in real lived reality 'men and women can make themselves'. The way to achieve this is in creating the space from which individuals can participate in collective activities that render them not mere consumers, but cultural producers - artists and critics. Dennis Potter went someway towards realising this goal.