Drowning by Numbers

by Peter Greenaway

This story is like a story told by children to adults, and the adults are like the creations of children. A combination of innocence and experience and the first shocks of curiosity and comprehension.

118 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1988

About the author

Peter Greenaway, CBE is a British film director. He is currently professor of cinema studies at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland.

Reviews

[Jeff · Rating 4 out of 5]

Given that Peter Greenaway's film Drowning By Numbers is built around a series of games and a through line of simple number counting, there is an additional reward in reading the script after having viewed the movie. In this edition of the script, Greenaway has added on epilogue tracking "The Number Count", which is quite handy since some of the occurrences are not easy to pinpoint in the film itself.

Greenaway has always been fond of highly artificial scenarios, often focusing on visual appeal over story and character development. But with Drowning By Numbers, he developed a (somewhat) more naturalistic script, while allowing artifice to frame the narrative, as with an opening dialogue that introduces the first of the three Cissie Colpitts characters:

Cissie I: What are you doing up so late?
Skipping Girl: I'm counting the stars.
Cissie I: Do you really know all their names?
Skipping Girl: Yes I do.
Cissie I: How many did you count?
Skipping Girl: A hundred.
Cissie I: But there are more than a hundred.
Skipping Girl: I know.
Cissie I: Why did you stop?
Skipping Girl: A hundred is enough. Once you have counted one hundred, all other hundreds are the same.

This odd exchange establishes the story's basic premise, and introduces the reader to the numeric motifs that recur throughout. It's that emphasis on play throughout Drowning By Numbers that allows the tale of multiple murders to retain a wonderfully comic quality, even if there are darker threads mixed in with all of the gamesmanship.