MORE MORE FICTION DEAD

When we consider the CSI dead we discover that they are idealized dead. More than their necessary Hollywoodification, they also have a certain unexpected level of perfection. They are laid open in autopsies, shown covered in blood, subject to the most invasive investigative procedures, but they remain somehow pristine and untouched. What is always missing is the litter, the meaningless detritus that always accompanies sudden, violent death. Anyone who has seen the aftermath of a serious automobile accident knows that one of the most unnerving aspects of such scenes is the sad litter strewn on the highway and its shoulder. There are always fast food containers or tennis shoes or coloring books or backpacks, plus small items from glove boxes and seat tops - pens and combs and cell phones, the ordinary things that every car contains. Every crime scene is replete with such leftovers and the 9/11 site was virtually nothing but such detritus, now, though, usually shredded and melted into a uniform glop. Murder scenes are messy.

But the CSI scenes are never, ever that. One of the most striking things about these scenes is that the corpse always, after its first discovery, appears entirely out of context, safely stored in a pristine, low-lighted morgue. These sites have an almost religious aura, and certainly suggest a funeral home, with their indirect lighting and preternatural quiet. Again, anyone familiar with hospital and morgue settings knows that in both there is a lot of metal equipment, much of it with wheels, and such things cannot help but rattle and squeak and bang. Hospitals are also never quiet. There are endless announcements and calls and warnings and requests, plus intermittent patient noises and the steady hum of worker’s conversations and family discussions. Lights are bright and florescent.

But never in CSI. That world is one in which corpses are segregated from the ordinary noise and heat and light of hospitals, in which they occupy a privileged place and time, a space of silence and discreet movement and respect. It is almost as if the dealings with the dead in CSI have a memorial, honorific character, as if the tests that are run and the probing cuts that are made are forms of tribute rather than searches for evidence.

When we switch attention abruptly to the shows like Medium and Ghost Whisperer and others we find that the dead live in the logical space of justification. That is, the television dead in these series have always been mistreated in some way, and in their death need the living to set things right, or to help the dead set things right. Being dead always means needing justification, and help in this from the living. It never just means being dead. Death and moral action are coimplicative, and this more than any other factor has led me to speculate that these dead bear more meanings than meet the eye.