SOURCE: "Syncopated Thriller," in Artforum, Vol. XXVIII, No. 9, May, 1990, p. 168, 170-172.

In the following essay, Lichtenstein studies the complexities of The Singing Detective's plot and its devices of merging and superimposing different levels of fiction.

Oedipalized scenarios, traumatic psycho-sexual dynamics, and violence are the stuff that Dennis Potter's television plays and films are made of, moving across the taboo terrain of sexuality within the seemingly orderly nuclear family. The vehicle for these "perverse" scenarios is a dazzling montage of familiar dramatic genres, including the detective story, the musical, the psychological autobiography, and the bildungsroman, all intersecting in a series of interpenetrating narratives that deny any linear structure. Much of the language of "post-Modern" Western culture involves just this kind of self-conscious hybridization, a lifting and appropriating of different languages. Often such work reifies and estheticizes history, making it static, but Potter's complex reconfigurations of the past show...