MovieChat Forums > The Singing Detective (1986) Discussion > Need help with dialogue in episode 5

Need help with dialogue in episode 5

posted 15 years ago by banapaulo
4 replies | jump to latest

Hi, I've just finished watching this wonderful series on DVD. I think I got a good grasp of most of it. However, there was one exchange which went over my head a bit. In episode 5 we see a scene with a young(er) Marlow and a prostitute (played by the same actress as Sonya) in a London flat. They have sex and then afterwards there's some dialogue, and I don't get the meaning of this bit:

Marlow talks of his disgust for her profession, and then:

Prostitute: You expect me to do it for nothing?
Marlow: Course not
Prostitute: I mean... how long's it take?
Marlow: Do you really believe that?
Prostitute: Christ, that's what you wanted, isn't it?
Marlow: [cutting back to the hospital bed] Yeah

Could someone spell this out for me?

[–] McGonigle 15 years ago

Prostitute: You expect me to do it for nothing? (I.e. "Should I screw for free?")
Marlow: Course not
Prostitute: I mean... how long's it take? (I.e. "It's quick and it pays well.")
Marlow: Do you really believe that?
Prostitute: Christ, that's what you wanted, isn't it? (I.e. "You're the one who hired me, why are you giving me a hard time?")
Marlow: [cutting back to the hospital bed] Yeah

Hope this helps.

I know I'm shouting, I like to shout.

[–] finnegansword 14 years ago

The purpose of this scene is to show Marlow working through a childhood trauma. You remember the scene where he is sitting high up in an oak tree and spies his mother and Binney lying in the grass below? This highly painful episode in the life of a 10 year old boy is lurking in his subconscious. He imagines a scene where he and the beautiful Sonia meet in Binney's flat at Thameside and he goes through the dialogue that you quote. All this, remember, is pure fantasy - a kind of working out or purging of a painful childhood experience. None of it is real, it is all in Marlow's mind.

An afterthought: the word association episode that he plays with the psychiatrist earlier is probably the trigger that makes him go through the above scene.

"Am I right or am I right?"(!)

*******

This, I think, is what it is all about. A fine BBC production when budgets were not so tight.

[–] Igenlode Wordsmith 12 years ago

He imagines a scene where he and the beautiful Sonia meet in Binney's flat at Thameside and he goes through the dialogue that you quote.

Or is this a real memory from the adult Marlow's history (he looks younger and is dressed in what seems an earlier style in this scene) which he has subsequently transferred onto his protagonist in the book?

It is an exact mirror of what the fictional Binney says to the prostitute he in his turn has hired... it is a question of whether Marlow is projecting his own experience onto Binney or imagining a past in which he himself is acting out the events of the novel he has already written.

(What is confusing is that we are not clear how much of what we see on screen is the actual original novel "The Singing Detective" and how much is Marlow apparently doing a rewritten version in his hospital bed with substituted character names from his own history...)

~~Igenlode

Gather round, lads and lasses, gather round...

[–] jbaddock 11 years ago

I think it's a real memory that he's then used in the book (or in the rewrite that he's doing in his head) - there is a reference to his skin condition that tends to ground it in real life. There's also his comment to the psychiatrist that a writer will use anything in his experience or memories (as in the body fished out of the Thames at Hammersmith Bridge in the book, which is where his mother killed herself).