The Singing Detective Written by Dennis Potter

Human beings are in a continuous pursuit of contentment. Ever since birth, individual's choices are based on a mechanical, self-governing opportunity-cost system. In theory, opportunity cost is the cost of sacrificing one product (the second best alternative) over another. When talking about human behaviour, opportunity-cost system in a simple way to capitalize on gratification. For this system to work, people need the knowledge to make pleasure-profitable decisions. The problem is that human beings are multifaceted and the knowledge they need can be deliberately manipulated; therefore, this system becomes deeper and polemic.

Throughout the life of a person, there is a clear evolution of knowledge. When humans are born, their knowledge is based on instinct and experience. The instinct is what they need to perform intentional actions. Experience in babies is more a trial-error method. In other words, they learn from errors. This paragraph and the first are intended to illustrate the fact that babies are more susceptible to a manipulation of knowledge.

Dennis Potter's screenplay entitled The Singing Detective, George Orwell's novel called Nineteen Eighty Four and Aldous Huxley's novel named Brave New World, are all texts portraying this vulnerability of children to knowledge manipulation (also known as ‘mind conditioning'). This essay is primarily going to deal with the consequences of the manipulation of knowledge present in the texts mention previously, and how they counteract the template argument, there is no such world as a perfect world. The essay is going to follow a defined structure, having three main objectives in the body. The first objective will be to describe briefly the different texts, the second will be to evaluate the different types of mind conditioning and the third will deal with the consequences of this mind conditioning.

The singing detective, written by Dennis Potter, is a screenplay based on the life of Philip Marlow. Philip Marlow is the central character and the plot gravitates around him. The screenplay describes how some dystopian events in Philip Marlow's youth, impacted his psychosomatic condition as an adult. As a child, Philip Marlow was a regular kid, attending a normal rural school and had a typical relation with his parents. As he grows so does his problems. Firstly, the relationship between his mother and his father parents is markedly deteriorated. As an illustration, Dennis Potter uses the stereotypic dinner fight were the irritated and intolerant mother struggles with everything. Soon, this started to weaken Marlow's parent's relationship. Take the case of young Marlow discovering by first hand, his mother being untrue to his father with a complete stranger. Eventually, his parents broke up and ended up with his mother in London. Emphatically enough, later on, his mother commits suicide. In addition, the childhood friend,