MORE MORE MORE DEAD

MOREMOREMOREDEAD

Reading about Holocaust spectres reminded me that in the case of the CSI dead the images we see on the screen are doubly removed from what I claim they represent. On the first level these are images, without tactile or olfactory properties. But this seems appropriate because the original 9/11 event was also entirely visual for most people. We saw what we did not see. We saw blurry, very brief clips, generally taken with minicams (cell phone cameras did not yet really exist), of spectral falling bodies, bodies without clear features, without names, who also disappeared from Being as soon as they fell out of camera range. These were completely visual events, and wholly lacking in detail, but they represent about all we have of images of the dead of 9/11. In some ways they are worse than no images at all because they are so fleetingly incomplete, like things half-seen from the corner of one’s eye, like momentary hallucinations that disassemble before one gets any kind of look at them. Were those really people jumping or falling from the Towers? Regular people, working people, like me? What would make me do something that terrible and terrifying? How bad must it have been? Why can’t I see how it was? Why can’t I see more, see through the impenetrable smoke and flames, see past the papers and tiles and other unidentifiable detritus falling, with the spectral bodies, from those buildings? This was bad enough without the imposed blindness, without the disappearance of those specters. 

So, what we get back, all we can get back, are replacement images that implicitly address the worst parts of those spectral visions. In place of genderless, indistinct, momentary images we get the steady camera, not hand-held, focusing, lingering, over the surface of the new substitute body. Here is a three dimensional stable body that stays in place and allows itself to be photographed and, as important, handled by the actors whose images we also see. We cannot ever touch these replacement bodies but they can be (virtually) touched, and what we see is the filmic record of the people playing  the bodies, or the wax/neoprene figures ‘playing’ them, being touched by the actors who play the crime scene technicians. Thus, we see real or putative bodies that are not ever really  corpses filmed as corpses and treated as such by people playing at being the kinds of people charged with examining and analysing corpses. And I am claiming, as an added layer of interpretation, that these sogenannt corpses, these seeable but only apparent corpses, are themselves replacements for the lost, spectral corpses of 9/11 which can never ever be seen or touched or loved again. A virtual corpse inserted in a filmed story to seem like a real(though filmed) corpse stands in for a real corpse or corpses briefly, unclearly glimpsed on another film, then utterly lost. What is not really a corpse substitutes in our psyche for a real coprse that has been lot — but not the same corpse as the filmed one in the show putatively represents.

There is no real person whom the CSI corpse represents because this is after all a script; but I say that there is another real dead person to whom this virtual corpse always already refers, only it isn’t the one the story would like you to believe it represents. A virtual corpse created to represent a fictional character now gestures as well to a real dead person or persons who never appear as characters in the script. 

And what effect might this additional covert reference have on the way the virtual corpse looks and gets treated? Here we have to be bold. We cannot know whether any of the script writers or directors or producers of the CSI and cognate shows ever had any of this consciously in mind. I assume they did not. But if it is plausible that there is a collective cultural unconscious, that is that certain images impress themselves on individual awarenesses, and that these iages have a great deal in common (the televised sight of the burning towers, the falling bodies) then we might also speculate that the writers and producers and directors are no less susceptible to begin occupied by, even haunted by, both these images and the unseen, and unseeable, Other - the 9/11 dead -- that the spectral images and Tower images stand in for but also, perversely, both present and obscure. And in producing images of dead bodies who have been discovered and tended to and interrogated for the meaning of their deaths, might they not, as citizens, unconsciously include references to these lost and as yet unassimilated dead? Are Poles, fort example, in the 21st century, still haunted by the specters of the dead Jews whose bodies can never be recovered? When one travels to the onetime Jewish section of Krakow, the Kasiemirz, one finds Poles and Belorussians and Ukrainians playing Jewish music and running quasi-Jewish restaurants. These people are performing, with their own bodies, the lives of the missing Jews. In a sense they are allowing themselves to be possessed by Jewish specters. I doubt they think this consciously -- playing klezmer music and singing 'Yiddische Mama' produces lucrative gigs for otherwise impecunious graduate students -- but they are nonetheless allowing themselves to represent these lost dead.

Is it any more of a stretch to suggest that the lost dead of 9/11 come to occupy the stories we tell about other, fictional, dead people, all of whom are represented as victims of sudden and unexpected violence? These fictional dead offer perfect openings for the secret reappearance of this other group of dead people who, without this medium of expression, would remain as inarticulate sources of cultural anxiety. 

As we wrote in another connection, these dead are always already the moral dead, that is, people whose deaths requirte a response, a redoing because of some misdeed in the production of their death. 

Let's go back to presentation. The CSI corpses hover between macabre and repose. They incorporate elements of the Grand Guignol, "Faces of Death" aesthetic with elements of the funeral scenes from "Six Feet Under".