CSI : THE PERFECT WORK-GROUP
by
Kalu Singh
[July 2006]
I came to the
show late. When I didn’t even know what the initials CSI stood for, their ubiquity in the TV
schedules – terrestrial & cable – had begun to annoy me. Then I read an article
in The Guardian by Ballard, in which he was reflecting on his unexpected
pleasure in the format of the programme. [See Appendix ] So,
being easily swayed by writers – it was only later that I recalled he was
further qualified to comment, being a former medical student - I switched on. Soon I was watching it
almost every night, as cable allows, and tiring my friends with my praises.
Most had not seen it, or only rarely: and I feared my enthusiasm began to sound
foolish. Had Seinfeld been broadcast as often, it would not be CSI
which is the TV programme I have watched with the
greatest frequency in my life: almost three hundred episodes in a year. I have
watched some repeat episodes wholly or at least partly.
In
this paper, whose original title was How Come Why Not, I will attempt to
describe and analyse both the programme
and my pleasure in it. As I will argue that it is the perfect presentation
of the perfect work-group, I will begin by introducing my understanding of
the key terms. This means I must clarify what I mean by the perfect work-group
in life, before going on to consider its representation in drama.
1: WORK
Unlike
Eliot’s “ loitering heirs of City directors”
and the WAGs of the Football Premiership, most
people have to work: most of them at jobs they do not like, and some at jobs
they hate: and too many of them, too often, among people they barely tolerate,
or even despise. Work is a concept from the realm of necessity, an inescapable
fact of life: the precondition, in fact, that there is some kind of life –
food, clothing and shelter for me & my family, and then some time for other
ways of being. What is the opposite of work? Most people would say rest.
But this is only a logical contrary, not-work . Another contrary, believed in by
the faithful, is prayer. Sayers
wrote, logically & theologically, “It is as much a sin to be praying
when one should be working, as to be working when one should be praying.”
2: PLAY
The other
contrary and true opposite of work is play: meaning both
purposeless creativity
- literal and metaphorical doodling - and purposeful creativity,
done either alone or with others. What makes the
activity play are three fundamental freedoms:
i)
One is not required by others – even one’s Superego – to do it.
ii)
One can stop and start at will.
iii)
One can negotiate with whom one plays, whether as creator or audience.
Because of the
basic misunderstanding of the concept of ‘contrary’, but especially because
work has to be done, endured or even suffered, physically and emotionally, most
people imagine that play must be as unlike work as possible viz
undemanding, without physical or mental exertion. But consider this quotation:
“It is
absolutely imperative for a serious young student of music to choose at least
six geniuses of the genre that you are wishing to join. As a player or vocalist
you must learn all the repertoire of at least two of your choices. By emulating
the masters you will be told how to find your own voice. It is from the roots
of the past that future creativity grows. How else would it?”
Schubert
learned this from Beethoven and, in turn, told it to Chopin. The Reader might
think: Yes that fits - the imperious 19C German tone of ‘absolutely
imperative’, the precise almost
restrictive conditions ‘at least six’ & ‘must learn all…of at
least two’ of admission to the elite
group ‘you are wishing to join’ and the rhetorical flourish ‘How else
would it? Putting aside cliches about the Germans, transpose the necessary
conditions to cricket, and you find Bradman putting
in the hundreds of hours: to football,
and you find Greaves & Beckham practising the
curved ball: to writing, and you find Joyce’s dazzling display of two millennia
of writing styles in Oxen of the Sun: to painting, and you find Van
Gogh’s notebooks on colour: to chess, and you find
barking Bobby Fischer.
The
hardest question a middle-aged man or woman can put to themselves is : “Did I put in that kind of effort to join the genre
and community I longed to join in my ardent hopeful youth or did I lazily board
the train to Palookaville?”
But
Reader, the writer of the absolutely imperative speech wasn’t a grizzled
old 19C German. Who was he?
You know what I mean…”
Bright enough
to stay at college, but precociously interested in Eastern scriptures, the
1950’s Beats and the new music, the young Scot dropped out and became a
beach-bum - washing plates to give him
time to chase girls, smoke dope and practise guitar.
And he searched for instruction from older players. This refutes the common notion that play
must be without effort, just a rest from the effort of work. Soon
he could say: “I was a virtuoso of
all the folk-blues guitar styles by the time I reached seventeen”. And it was the younger man, Donovan, who
taught the great Lennon a new guitar style.
3: HEALTH & BLISS
In one of his
more laconic pronouncements Freud offered “love and work” as the
criterion of psychic well-being. Erikson did the
necessary exegesis, explaining that it meant shared sexual-discharge & creative
effort, not merely making daisy-chains & coal-mining.
Developmentally,
it is (the necessity to) work that disrupts, and sometimes even ends the
ability to play. But there is no doubt,
in any culture, that childhood play is necessary to create a personal Self and
a social Self: and that a child who can’t or daren’t play is disturbed. In
childhood rest is merely a benign pause in play: put away your toys,
it’s time for dinner or time for bed.
4: SCHOOL WORK
School is seen
as a less benign interruption of play. That it should be seen in this way is of
course an adult construction. Bettelheim shows in On
Learning to Read how Anglo-American books, unlike continental ones, affirm
school to be a place that exists only to interrupt and spoil play. The concept
of homework is the child’s first glimpse of the horrors of post-school
adult-life – unpleasant, required tasks. Two observations must be made about
homework.
i) Its presence
is a perfect proof of a failure of teaching-style. All necessary transmission,
attention, memorising, discussion and correction,
ought to be containable in the school day. This is Michel Thomas’s position
with respect to language-learning: in fact he cautions pupils not to
think & practise outside the classroom. Freely
and spontaneously chosen extra effort at home, reading or practise,
is something else.
ii) If ‘borrowing
dulls the edge of husbandry’, then parents doing their kids’ homework not
only inhibits maturation, it is also a moral disgrace. I knew of a talented
Cambridge lecturer with a young child who once said “I’ve got to get back
early to do some homework” and another time referred to
‘our homework’. She justified this half-&-more doing of her kids homework and holiday-projects by saying “All the
parents do. It’s so competitive.”
Once at-school
learning is seen as just play-interrupting, unpaid-work, then the desired
not-work realm shifts to the playground, and to non-book group-activities like
sport and the arts – the school play or orchestra, chess club etc.
5: PLAY-GROUPS
In the
play-group realm, there are two basic criteria of group-connection:
1) Inclusion on the basis of
generosity or talent.
Opie, in her
beautiful book The People in the Playground, about Junior School
children’s playground games, was struck by their descriptive terminology “You
need four people for this game” :
people’ not ‘children’ or ‘boys & girls’. Some games require just bodies,
and some require talent. But happy-enough children enjoying
teaching skills & developing confidence in others. Opie has a wonderful example of a boy begging her, just
after the bell, to listen to his shy friend tell a joke.
2) Exclusion on the basis of
talent or prejudice.
One might make
the orchestra but not the net-ball team. One might be able to do funny tv and teacher voices but not
skipping-games. The hardest form of exclusion is when in spite of talent and
willingness, one is excluded from a group because of the preferences and
prejudices of the person(s) who’ve somehow acquired the power to rule and
judge.
Of course such judgements and ‘rules’ about cool beauties, jocks, nerds,
are over-determined by unconscious adolescent sexual desire and Super-Ego
torment, sibling rivalry and parental abuse at home.
Some people
have such good, even profound, group-experiences of either learning or of play
at school that they form the reference point for group-experiences for the rest
of their lives. Thirty years ago, I asked an older young-man who’d recently
graduated from London University, “Of all your years at school and university,
sixteen of them, which did you enjoy the most?” He thought for a moment, but not long,
and said “The fourth-form at school. We had such a laugh!”
While writing
this essay, a middle-aged man that I first met at eleven at Big-School, wrote
that he was going on holiday near where a group of us had gone to celebrate the
end of A-levels, thirty-five years ago. Then he adds: “I wonder if it will stir memories of my
summer of '65 (1971 of course). Nothing was ever as good again and so
maybe I'll try and find the torch I must have dropped then.” (my emphasis)
Other people
leave after eleven years of school with no useable good experiences. A few
tragic adults have only repeated, group humiliation to remember. The murderous revenge of the once excluded
and humiliated schoolchild, now rich but still broken (young) adult, is common
in drama (even
a CSI episode) : also in real life eg the Columbine
massacre.
6: LIFE AFTER-SCHOOL
The realms of
College, the Military, the Convent and routine paid-work, blue or white or
brown collar, may offer group-experiences which distance and repair the
miseries of school-groups. Or the subtle new brutalities may simply confirm
one’s intuition and judgement from one’s school years
that human groups are intrinsically dangerous. Some adults seek power simply so
that they don’t have to negotiate within the group they are on top of.
I mean emotionally negotiate, not merely impersonal planning and
discussion. This poison is even found at the fountain of talking-cure groups.
(I speak from experience & observation). Sven Erikson
was such another who didn’t know how to be in and how to meld into a world-beating
group a collection of talented young men, and sought instead the comfort of
gold and the loins of gold-digging girlies.
7: THE WORK-GROUP
A group is a
collection of more than two persons: two being a couple, with all sorts of
other affective resonance, sexual and non-sexual. Sartre brilliantly reminds us
of another basic distinction: between:
a) the group-in-series : a collection of
strangers, say at a bus stop, who perceive themselves as disconnected from each
other.
b) the group-in-fusion :
imagine the bus slowing down, the conductor hurling racist and sexist abuse at
some of the people in the queue, and then signalling
the driver to pull away without letting anyone board. Outrage flows through the
whole group and some start running after the bus to wreak justice and revenge
on the conductor. As they do so, they perceive themselves as connected to each
other in purpose.
Perhaps
Sartre’s distinction isn’t that original. Bion had
already gone much further. The concept
of a work-group seems ridiculously easy to define: a collection of
individuals who have come together for the purpose of doing some work. Let us
forget for a while our earlier distinction between work and play, whether the
task is required or desired, necessary or freely chosen. Interestingly,
language again fails to reflect the diversity of human experience. (Just as it
does with respect to the varieties of human affective & obligatory human
connection – types of friendship.)
Even the clear
compound nouns work-group and play-group are not in vernacular
usage. Yet work seems, and certainly in adult, non-child discourse, to wear the
trousers, as if play is the work of the play-group. This sounds
self-contradictory, even if one points to the earnest purpose of some middle
class families – who tell their children they must go round each museum properly
on the family ‘holiday’. But let us stick with the clear if not common term
‘work-group’, but keep in mind the connotations ‘purpose/function’ as the work
of the group.
[Perhaps we should also keep in mind the
definitions from school physics.
Work (Done) =
Force X Distance Moved
Efficiency =
Work Done
Time-taken.
These capture
three profound variables
: effort, space and time. It mustn’t be forgotten that human
effort is often merely pre-mechanical imitation. The hardest thing to quantify
is the effort of human affect – encouragement, humiliation, love and hate…. ]
8: THE REFERENCE-POINT WORK-GROUP
Consider this
sequence.
a) There is a community of
persons.
b) Some individuals in the
community observe a necessary task, T.
c)
They bring this task-T to the attention of the community leaders.
d) Some individuals, same or
different, volunteer, and some individuals are assigned by the community
leaders to do task-T. They are called Work-Group-T.
e) The community leaders and/or
the members of Work-Group-T assign a leader to be called the
Work-Group-Leader.
f)
The Work-Group-Leader, in consultation with the work-group, breaks
task-T into subsidiary tasks T1, T2 etc
g) She then assigns the
subsidiary tasks to individuals or sub-groups of the work-group, on the basis
of knowledge & capability,
without gender, race, creed prejudice:
and on the basis of fairness: group-members take turns to do nice
or disgusting subsidiary tasks.
She gives encouragement and due praise. She doesn’t take credit for someone else’s efforts. She chides & reintegrates those who are disrupting the work. She reminds them of their private moral duty to know the difference between necessary work and chosen play: and between a required task and a desired task: and to do both honourably and well. She can say this with moral and professional authority because she is living proof of its truth.
i)
j)
All the subsidiary tasks are done as well & as quickly as possible.
Task-T is over.
k)
The individuals in the work-group feel fulfilled, relieved and happy.
l)
The community leaders & the community feel happy and grateful to the
work-group.
9: That Other Too, Too Hard Question to the Middle-Aged
Perhaps it is
not a coincidence that many of the examples or reminiscences of perfect
work-groups are from wartime. Bion would say this is
because the actual threat forestalls the basic-assumption with respect to
constructed external danger. (see below) Consider
Huxley’s beautiful account of a bomber-crew in The Perennial Philosophy or
Hare’s exaltation of Special Operations Executive groups in the play/film Plenty : and here is the most sublime expression of
humility and gratitude at being part of a good & honourable
work-group.
Leo Marks was a
precocious code-cracker: so, despite his youth, he was given a team of mostly
female back-up crackers. He also taught and ran such heroic agents as Violet Szabo and Madelaine Khan. In the
triumphant weeks of summer 45, after the group had been disbanded, Heffer, one of the Top Brass, called him in, thanked him,
explained that the State was going to start awarding gongs and hinted at an honour. Marks writes:
“I’d made
the mistake of trying to say goodbye to each girl individually, and been
dismembered in the process. I’d found it impossible to thank them, and was
astonished when some of them thanked me. I assured Heffer
that I’d accept no honour higher than the ones SOE
gave the girls. [And} I’d already been given the chance to shake hands with
agents who’d returned from the field, and no other reward was comparable.”
[Writing the
above paragraph has just had me in such tears, I’ve had to go and wash my face.
This was clearly one of the best work-groups in history. The tears were
both of admiration and also of misery, for I know most people don’t attain to
such humility and gratitude. In recent months I have come across rank
ungracious plagiarism and deceitful appropriation : by
a 75 year-old Indian doctor of an old acquaintance’s efforts: and other low
blows.]
Above, I put to the Reader a question based on Donovan’s mighty
criterion of the true passion to create: at the heart of which was relationality, learning from an adept. In the realm of the
body, the sensual, sexual love, there is Tennessee Williams mighty criterion:
“Princess, the biggest of all differences between
people in the world is not between the
rich and the poor, or the good and the evil, but between the ones that had or
have pleasure in love, great pleasure, many long nights without sleep, and
those that haven’t had any pleasure in love but just watched it with sick, sick
envy.” Sweet Bird of
Youth”
But in the theme of the present essay, the question to the Reader is :
Have you ever been part of a perfect work-group: and
if not, whose fault is that?!
All three
themes – sexual-joy, creative-joy, work-group-joy - are brought into rare unity in the
wonderful documentary film : My Father,The
Architect.
Here’s an
ordinary question, sometimes seen as tainted by the ad hominem
fallacy: Can those who haven’t at least tried to attain the above three
criteria comment in any useful way about a criterion or its pursuit? I would argue that the failure to attain
the criteria, and even more so the failure to even try, doesn’t leave
one with neutral affect with regarding to intense joy in sexuality,
creativity and work – but in fact leaves one with different volumes of envy
and malice. Who would you trust on human sexuality - Tennessee & Lady Di or Anne Widdicombe, Billy Graham & the Pope.?
Is the
following statement a great truth or idle conjecture? Most adults 25, 45, 75,
have not had the experience of a good work-group: and most of those same adults
have not had experience of a good play-group. Now imagine how much envy &
bitterness and malicious spoiling these heart-core unhappy people – who may in
fact have attained position, power and pocketfuls of poundnotes
- bring into the world.
10 : WHAT DISRUPTS THE WORK
OF THE WORK-GROUP?
Assuming there
is a designated work-group, the work might fail to be done for various reasons.
a) Blameless Disruptions
No one in the community has the required knowledge or
daring.
Imagine the Hopi Indians planning a wet-hunt before
the Michael Fish era.
Imagine all the babies who died before someone
thought of a Caesarian.
b) Conscious Disruption
There is sufficient knowledge in an individual or a
sub-group of individuals but they refuse to act – for reasons of principle,
greed or malice.
There is insufficient authority in the Group Leaders
and in the Community Leaders to threaten and coerce the subgroup.
c)
Unconscious Disruption
Enter the genius - Bion.
He argued that humans, being what they are, each of
us carries an unconscious pulsating with desires and fears we are barely aware
of, and susceptible to the unconscious of others when we come into their orbit
as in a group. So a human group will very rarely attain to the unproblematic
purposive mutual communication of a network of computers. Humans, when in groups, quickly become
distracted from the work of the work-group, and begin to operate on the basis
of three extraneous assumptions:
1) To establish a Messiah.
2) To bring about an
emotional/sexual coupling within the group.
3) To establish whether an
imagined threat to the group should be met by fight or flight.
A vast amount
of psychic, intellectual and emotional energy is expended on these three mis-assumptions of what the work-group is for: and
of course the required work/task is badly done, or not done at all. The actual
satisfactions accruing from such misguided efforts might be thin for most of
the group members: but unfortunately there is insufficient (ego) strength in
the individual group member or in various subgroups of the work-group to
redirect the group to conscious effort at the proper work/task.
11: THE WORK OF THE CSI WORK-GROUP
A: AIM
To determine how
an injured or dead human body was injured or killed. That’s all!
They are
required to identify who was the cause only to confirm their conjecture
of how. They are not required to determine why the
who did it.
B: PROCEDURE/METHODOLOGY
i)
Foreground attention to and ‘dialogue with’ the material world of
evidence.
ii)
Develop acute use of human senses.
iii)
Use all available scientific apparatus.
iv)
Learn from and develop new scientific apparatus.
v)
Abstract out, as much as possible, human testimony, curiosity and
speculation. The axiom is that the evidence always has primacy over prejudice
and speculation. This is captured in a frequently repeated exchange:
CSI-1 : Are you
saying that bastard is innocent?
CSI-2 : No! The evidence
is saying this. The evidence doesn’t lie. Let him go!
I will discuss this reification below.
C: ATTITUDE
i : To The Body
Absolute respect (pity and sorrow) irrespective of gender, sexuality,
race, creed. It should not be forgotten how late in human
civilization, and how central a criterion of civilization this is: that the
State will provide resources to record the fact and the cause of each
human death. In Henry V Shakespeare makes the naming of the dead
from a battle almost two centuries earlier, a moral & dramatic element. This
theme has been developed recently by David Canter.
ii : To Fellow-Criminalists
a) Absolute respect &
humility for each other’s speciality.
b) Benign competitiveness which
never leads to hiding or distorting the evidence.
c)
Willingness to share all necessary tasks to collect the evidence,
regardless of their difficulty or their societal designation as demeaning:
bow-tie, white-collar, lab-coat, blue-collar, dungarees, olive-drab,
brown-overalls, wellingtons, full sewer-rubbers.Though it might seem ponderous to say this, I
assert that this willingness is another marker of civilization and maturation.
The best way to understand its revolutionary nature is to recall what the 20C
engineer & inventor Latham called Plato’s heresy : that when abstract philosophical
& mathematical thinking is defined
as the best & noblest use of
human reason, any use of the mind which also involves the hands, and
especially dirt, is degrading.
iii : To
the Intrinsic Horror of Suspicious, Violent Death
a) To learn to contain one’s
natural horror, disgust & dismay at the mangled body, and also one’s
rage at the murderer, so that one’s own work & one’s work-group’s work can
be done.
b) To accept offers by other CSIs to share one’s dismay: and to reciprocate.
iv : To the Institution in the Community
a) Pride in the arrival at the
true causal explanation of a suspicious death: and the restoration of a sense
of safety & hope in the community.
b) Allowable ascendant joy in being part of a
group that is ahead of the murderer:
CSI-1 : Oh! The suspect has
vacuumed the boot.
CSI-2 : We’ve got better vacuums.
c)
Consolation of having added to human knowledge and safety.
Young CSI : (seeing boiled
skull) That’s all we are in the end!
Older CSI
: It’s what you do with it
that counts.
12: WHAT DISRUPTS THE WORK OF THE CSI WORK-GROUP?
One might have
the intuition that there is something special about the CSI work-group that
means it suffers a special kind of disruption to those outlined by Bion. It would be easy to say this and propose the reason
that because this work-group deals with the spectre
and the corpse of death, battered and mangled bodies and tormented minds –
unlike civil servants, footballers, nursery teachers, gardeners. But this would
be to forget that Bion’s ideas came out of his work
in a military hospital
in WW2, and that as a young man in WW1 he had nearly got the VC,
and had been as deranged by war as Charlie Sheen in Apocalypse Now. The most one could say, and then only
tentatively, is that perhaps the fight-flight disruption is likely to be most
in force, as CSIs confront their typical work-object:
the disgustingly, mangled human body.
13: THE CSI NARRATIVE (DRAMA)
How better to
begin, than by putting on Aristotelean spectacles?
But let us tweak the order.
A: PLOT
One or more
bodies are discovered. They are mangled or dead or both. The plot is the unravelling of how death came to those bodies. Often
there are two main plots, two crime scenes, half the
team at each. There is not an echoing or contrasting sub-plot as in
Shakespeare. But the psychological element is suppressed: both why the
attacker or murderer did that to the body and also the inner-life of the criminalists. This contrasts with tragedy in which a
character flaw is both the engine and the explanation of the plot viz Hamlet, Taxi Driver.
B: SPECTACLE
Plain
dramatic stage-action
advances the plot, showing reversals of circumstance, shifts in character, or
clarifying thought : and it contributes to the sense
of form, of the story being a whole. Spectacle
is the presentation of setting or of an action, which by its unusual nature or
unusual duration, draws more attention to itself than to the principle elements
– plot, character, thought, diction. It can become almost separable from the
whole. The most common forms of spectacle are fighting, embracing and setting.
i)
Fighting – where the fight becomes a balletic
interlude. The audience senses, from the structure who
will win – the plot-advancing detail - and so provide moral and aesthetic
pleasure. Some fights go on so long – whether Wayne’s sluggings
in western saloons or Eastern dance-like martial arts - the intention is seduction “Yes little
man/woman in the front row – imagine joining in here” . (The implausibly
long crime-drama fight is brilliantly parodied in a Fast Show sketch.)
ii)
Embrace – where the kiss/skin-contact becomes a pornographic
interlude, even if neither penetration nor even great nudity is shown. Again,
it might be important to the plot to know who wants or is having
skin-contact with whom: but it is rarely dramatically necessary to see it in
detail. Most distinctions between so-called soft and hard porn are
conceptual nonsense. Here the seduction of the audience is more familiar: “Imagine
yourself naked in this scene.”
iii)
Setting – where the stage/film setting is so unusual or so
unusually detailed it distracts one’s attention from what the characters are
saying and the plot advance: eg: the hyper-realism of
Stanislavsky’s Chekhov, the too-densely visual-frame
of some Peter Greenaway scenes, and the lame visual
correlates of routine metaphors on Newsnight.
In CSI, the
central sight is the severely damaged or dead human body. Such sights are of
course ordinary for military workers, emergency service workers and morticians,
but they are not ordinary for the majority of the citizenry, and most tv watchers. So there is there
instant sense of shock at this unfamiliar and distressing gestalt of the human
form. Consciously there may be revulsion and fear of death: but unconsciously
or partly consciously there may be two ordinary and related human impulses – scopophilia and epistemophilia:
the desire to see and the desire to know. Desire, by definition, moves the
person, the minded-body, from stasis to tension and demands release from
tension.
The mangled
wounded body or corpse is nearly always shown in the documentary modality
within this fictional drama. Presentation in the ordinary fictional modality,
with its brief slide towards the spectacles of fighting or embrace, is only
ever the short prelude to the arrival of the CSI team to see the broken body.
The silent presentation, rarely spectacle, of the body is quickly broken by the
procedural quasi-documentary dialogue or voice over. (More on
this below). Another common device, which again pitches the material
between fiction and documentary, is when a complex scientific procedure is shown
without dialogue or voice-over and with non-specific rock-music background.
This grounds the programme in the visual medium: it’s
not about words or a tutorial.
There are three
basic settings/locations in the programme:
a) The crime scene
b) The autopsy room
c)
The CSI labs – DNA, ballistics, the workshop, the conference room.
Of course there
are a few other settings : suspects’ locations, CSI
locker room, and very rarely CSI workers’ private apartments.
Just as in
football where the viewer is assumed/invited to be
partly the referee and check for offside and fouls, so the viewer of CSI is
invited to look carefully at the crime scene. This is not the spectacle
modality because too much thinking is involved. In spectacles of sex and
violence the tendency is to diminish thinking.
CADAVER-LOVER
I was
introduced to this genre-marker term by my friend Mr
Walter Morgan. It points to the many tv
programmes, in the crime or hospital genre, in which
the audience is tempted with the sight, the spectacle, of a dead body. Of
course in our lifetime in the West, most of us have not had to frequently see
real dead bodies. So there is always scope for fictional shock and frisson.
One boundary
that even this quasi-documentary CSI narrative shies away from is the
presentation of the mangled or dead sexual-body. So despite the frequency of
the attacks on the sexual bits of the human body, the programme-makers
have still not found a way to show them either at the crime scene or at the
autopsy table. One sees the crisp white sheet covering all human middles. They
have not dared go further than Shakespeare writing of the post-battle actions
of civilians:
A thousand of his people butchered;
Upon whose dead corpse there was such misuse,
Such beastly shameless transformation,
By those Welshwomen done as may not be
Without much shame retold or spoken of.
It
is a footnote to Henry iv Part One that tells
the reader the historical fact of castration. Shakespeare couldn’t mention the
word ‘castration’. CSI daren’t show it, or the like.
Interestingly
the other complex human desire, aggression, is given broader scope in
presentation. There is even an almost pornographic invitation among the images
in the opening credits. One is shown someone vigorously smashing glass and then
putting an axe into a head. Though these are in lab conditions and so dummies,
there is still a powerful appeal to frissons of sadism.
C: THOUGHT
Very few
narrative media – stage, film, novel – present consciously, or even
unconsciously, any serious thinking about the human body. Of course I know a
drama isn’t an anatomy or metaphysics lesson: but the greatest narratives are
full of aesthetic thoughts. One of the greatest is of course Hamlet : but even there it is a puzzle why
Shakespeare presents the ‘dust to dust’ speech twice, almost three times. Peter
Greenaway is also up there. In The Cook etc
and Bodies in the Seine and Making a Splash, one is presented
with the body in innovative ways, which induce troubled thoughts.
Surprisingly,
even genres located in the realm of the body, like hospital narratives and
crime narratives, fail to foreground the body. So though Alan Alda is reputed to have fought the TV Network to insist in
an op-scene in each episode of Mash, the damaged body does not really have
dramatic presence. In fact is the tired bodies
of Hawkeye and BJ and the desired body of Hotlips
– that strange paradox of the army-nurse, that have the real presence. In most
hospital comedy the body is just a trivial prop and in most crime stories the
body is a non-comic, putatively serious, prop. Just as Green Wing finally
broke through the received hospital genre and initiated some genuine thinking
about the body and representation, so CSI is a genuinely new direction
in showing the murdered body.
Among the
thoughts/themes opened by CSI are the following:
1) How wonderful and yet how
fragile is the human body. How seemingly endless the ways it might be attacked,
damaged and killed.
2) How the good work-group of
CSI can determine the precise cause of this body’s, and in fact any body’s,
damage and death.
3)
How wonderful the growing knowledge of humankind,
particularly the portion in criminalistics. As a
living totality it will always be ahead of the solipsistic dreams of
omnipotence of the murderer. If Google is God, CSI
is his handmaiden!
4) All human bodies are equal.
Each man’s unexplained death diminishes me. No man is a CSIsland!
5) It is a criterion of
civilization that the State makes funds available to explain each human being’s
death: asserting posthumous equality, if not during life!
6) Humans can share knowledge
and work together for professional satisfaction and for the community good. No
activity, manual or mental, is demeaning if intended to contribute to the sum
of the group’s knowledge. This is an aspiration-marker: all kinds of humans can
be in a good work-group.. More cynical viewers may add
that this leads the programme into idealism and
fantasy.
7) It is a criterion of adult
maturation to want to learn new things from those who know, regardless of rank.
The perfect example being Group-Leader Grissom saying to a
freelance female consultant “So, teach me!”
8) This work-group may also be
being presented as an image of a good multi-cultural society. The cynical viewer may again
say that there is a typically American vanity and complacency here in this
sub-text.
D) DICTION
There are three
basic registers in the programme.
1) Naturalist: Daily Life – everyone can speak & understand
these kinds of words. The audience requires no translation.
1a) Thanking & Complimenting: there is
a noticeable volume of dignified thanking and quiet complimenting in the programme. This may seem easy to do, but it is in fact one
of the hardest adult registers. Most adults in most work-groups are quite poor
at it. Some are vicious in their withholding of compliments and gratitude.
There are even a few
people in the workplace who don't now how to say Hello!
2) Street Talk : this includes the coded language used in legal clubs
& casinos and also the slang/argot
used by drug dealers and by criminals. Not everyone in the CSI team, nor
everyone in the audience, can understand these: so translations/explanations
are often given.
3) Science Talk : this is the scientific register used when
collecting and analyzing evidence at the crime scene or at the lab. All the CSI
team have science degrees:
then they have
chosen to specialise – ballistics, materials, DNA
etc. It is assumed most of the audience will require explanations. Here
aesthetic balance is require
only the
necessary amount of science is to be given to prevent the narrative changing to
a lecture modality. Occasionally one specialist will also have to explain to
another whose speciality is in a different albeit
related realm.
The stylistic
‘language’ of a programme could be discussed under spectacle,
but I have chosen to place it here. This is on the analogy of a sentence: a
sequence of images is often used (unconsciously if not consciously) as a
sentence: establishing shot, developing shot, dramatic shot, closing shot etc.
Just as rhetorical devices play with the rhythm of words & paragraphs and
thereby with the emotions of the reader/audience, so one could say there are
rhetorical devices in film language: Eisenstein, Welles,
Greenaway…. One simple way
to play is with the speed of the film : slowing down
or speeding up. Green Wing is another programme
that used this device superbly. CSI prefers to use the flash&jump
cut: with an explosive noise accompanying the cut.
What is
magnificent about CSI is its democratic apportioning of Point of View shots:
the world/the crime scene is shown from the perspective of all the people –
CSI, civilians, the dead person – and all the things - the plant and insect
life, and the murder weapons - connected to it.
E) SONG
In CSI Las
Vegas, the title song is “Who are you?” by The Who. This is
fittingly the first question to the silent, dead body at the crime-scene.
During the programme there is often non-specific rock
music playing in the background when in the foreground complicated labwork is being shown or explained.
F: CHARACTER
In CSI, the
Team, not an individual, is the protagonist: and the person trying to hide the
evidence is the antagonist. A play is not a sermon, nor a political manifesto.
One ought not to begin with an idea or message and then try to squeeze
characters into abstractions and then manipulate them to false crises. Such
drama is of course doable and sometimes even palatable.
It is said that
Hitchcock’s wartime film Lifeboat was such a programmed work The world is at war, many great cities gave fallen, their
idea of civilization is at risk. The ocean is the overlapping tide of
barbarianism. The lifeboat is the hope of a future civilization. Both genders
and all nations and creeds and colours are
represented, except the Axis powers. (It is clearly a Eurocentric vision, but
let that pass for a moment.) The point is all or, it is hoped, most, must get on.
My sense is
that the makers of CSI have factored in an egalitarian vision: the CSI team or
work-group as a metaphor for an ideal America: we hold these truths to be
self-evident: that all men and women are born equal and are able to learn and
work together for the greater good…
So one of the
first things that strikes the viewer is that the team (field & lab,
night-shift & day-shift) is composed of the possible range of genders, colours ,
ages, ethnicity, classes, creeds, sexual charisma, emotionality and moral
authority. A common criticism is that the team are
unrealistically good looking. What is surprising to me is that they are not
prettier: Grissom has bowed legs, and in CSI Miami the blonde has a bumpy nose
& Caine’s face is not boy-band pretty. Having
seen the documentary The Real CSI, I’d say that the ‘real’ Grissom and
the ‘real’ Sarah are about equal to their fictional counterparts.
A SKETCH OF THE CSI LAS VEGAS TEAM
1: GRISSOM : Group Leader
45, white, bowlegged, bachelor, slight Aspergerish
poorness at emotions and sexuality. He is endlessly fascinated by his work: with a deep
desire to teach his staff how to learn.
2: CATHERINE : Senior Field
35, white, bastard-daughter of top-mobster, an ex-stripper who is still
good-looking, and a single parent of
a little girl. She is
the most streetwise about human sexuality,
male and female. To a male, she is a figure of awe: rather like X
(name-check) the real-life former Playboy bunny who
went on to become a respected original neuro-scientist:
the implied promise of intellectual and sexual wrestling.
3: NICK : Junior Field
28, white,
jock-physique, ex-fratboy,
bachelor with lots of girls in the background: ambitious to learn and be
promoted.
4: WARWICK:
Junior Field
33, black, fit, poor background, ex-gambler-addict, bachelor. He is the most streetwise about gambling
world and the non-white communities. He is almost thrown off the team for
gambling on duty.
5: SARAH : Junior Field
28, white, messy abusive family background, single, falls for
emotionally unavailable men, like Grissom, at time over-earnest. She is almost thrown off team for
drink-driving.
6: JIM : Police
50, white,
divorced, with a junkie-whore step-daughter. He is a detective, not a scientist:
bridge from CSI to Police. He’s the most streetwise about criminals.
7: DOC: Autopsy
60s, white,
married with teenage kids, lame (crutches): the grandad
of the group. He occasionally visits exotic-clubs
8: GREG:
Lab-rat
24, white, bachelor, baby of the group, rock fan, poor with girls. He is ambitious to be a field CSI agent.
9: VARIOUS –
lab-rats
Men and women (of different ages, colours,
ethnicity) from DNA, ballistics, filing etc. Their character is noted but not developed.
10: ECKLY –
Senior Admin
40, white, not
much known apart from ambitious & so bitter at being unable to get into Grissom’s
team, professional and social, he tries to spoil the group.
In the early
series little was disclosed about the team-members backgrounds or off-work
life. In more recent programmes this element has
changed: which of course changes the feel of the workgroup:
the balance of public work and private-emotion. So this essay is base on
the earlier episodes. In the other CSI teams, there are different emotions.
14: AESTHETIC PLEASURES & others
a)
Hello Cruel World
‘It behooves
the wise man to . . . familiarise himself
with disgusting forms of disease, with sounds of execration, and the vision of
violent death’. So declared Emerson.
I am reminded of Plato’s tiny parable of absolute ambivalence about
knowing. A minor character recounts being driven to return to a sight seen
earlier, a decaying dead dog: and arriving there, saying to his eyes “Alright,
damn you, look!” Monumental courage had
taken Freud to a higher plateau from where he could say: ‘Even the museum of
human excrement could be given an interpretation to rejoice my heart’. The non-Platonic quotes appear in Waldron’s
review of Durham
Peters’s book Courting
the Abyss on the psychological value of allowing even (evil) brutes to have
free speech. He goes to say: “[Peters also has] a long disquisition on Adam Smith’s
idea that a gentleman learns sympathy only as an impartial spectator of the
suffering of others, and there is an attempt to connect abyss-redemption with
the unflinching tough-mindedness of modern science “
Of
course Emersonian familiarity might be attained in
many ways: visiting the battlefield, the mortuary, or even a crime-scene. It is
a complex question to ask if a play/film would do? But
which play: Antigone with its image of rotting
bodies or Lear with an actual eye-gouging or Apocalypse Now? Is
the instructing, cathartic and maturation possibilities of a dramatic narrative
as fit-for-purpose as real or documentary modes? These of course are moral motives for
watching a programme like CSI with its fearful parade
of mangled, rotting and dead flesh.
b)
Unimaginable Pity
Aristotle
proposed that catharsis effected by certain narratives
purged not only fear but also pity. This emotion is rather less
explored than the other. How to take the shape of it? There two mighty guides
in Shakespeare : the simpler is uttered by the
tormented murderer Othello “The pity of it Iago,
the pity of it”. A far more complex
image is from Macbeth.
“And
pity, like a naked new-born babe,
Striding the blast, or heaven's cherubin, hors'd
Upon the sightless couriers of the air,
Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye,
That tears shall drown the wind.”
Blake,
famously, was so astonished at this image, he tried to
contain it by drawing it. In our own time, the greatest use of the word was in
the title of the documentary: The Sorrow and the Pity. One might conjecture that pity is not a judgement but the overflow of affect from the fear that judgement is superfluous when pain is so great. CSI
accesses and induces this emotion more than other crime narratives: perhaps
because it begins without a desire to judge, and because it abstracts out as
much as humanly possible emotional engagement. But of course emotions return,
as they must in a healthy human. Here are two CSI examples.
i)
A twelve-year old boy is found brutally clubbed to
death. Criminalistics proves that his younger brother
did it. Untypically, the reason is included: shame
and rage. The elder had been teasing the younger for bed-wetting, and even
threatening to tell the whole playground. Seeing the bereaved parents looking
at their surviving son being manacled leaves one with nothing but pity for the
eternal pain of all. And how bathetic the motive compared to Cain or Jacob…
ii)
In mid-investigation Catherine determines a dead
woman was having an affair. Looking at the distraught, ignorant cuckold, she is
tempted to tell him this fact. When Grissom cautions her that their job is
merely to determine cause of death, and that this fact is irrelevant and
certainly not to be made public, she taunts him for his lack of experience of
emotional life, and adds that she would like to know of betrayal. This is the
perfect crux of the programme and the test of the
ethos of their work-group. The viewer sort of sides with her, and wonders how
it will unravel. She tells the husband, but not long after, she proves the
death was an accidental drowning. Grissom confirms this from hydraulics. They
go to tell the husband and also to tell the lover to exonerate him. But the husband having learned of adultery, suspects murder.
Grissom and Catherine arrive to find two dead bodies. The husband has killed
the adulterer and then himself. Grissom looks at Catherine with pity. She is
filled with shame.
c)
Come Together :crashing the fourth
wall
There
cannot be a play/film unless there is a ‘willing suspension of disbelief’. But what if all sane belief is lost. This theme is explored
both in Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo when the unhappy wife
goes ‘into’ the film she is watching and also in Blackadder,
when the doltish Prince tries to prevent an on-stage murder.
The
viewer of pornography accepts the invitation to imagine him or herself in the
frame. Ordinary aesthetic joy involves fundamental physical restraint, and a
fundamental pleasure composed of an intellectual appreciation of the balance of
all elements of the narrative, with an appropriate physical-emotional affect.
Joy in pornography involves only those elements that sustain physical
stimulation and discharge. One ordinary identification
manifests as trying to come at the same time as the ‘actor/actress’. The
most pleasing (imagined) words are: “Fuck me now” and “Wow, you’re a
sex-god/dess”
The
viewer of CSI is invited to share in a different emotion: absolute sublimation.
Bodies are there all over the place, living and dead: but the point is to think
about them. There must be sexual and emotional continence. The pleasure is in
puzzle-solving and learning new ways to solve. Of course all human activity
pursued with intensity accrues libidinal affect/energy: so the thinking and
learning done by the CSI team is not-without a sexual charge. That much unsublimated libido or desublimated
libido is allowable and enjoyable to the team: and so to the viewer. The most
pleasing words are “What a brilliant idea: let’s test it” and “Thank
you. Good work”.
“I want a CSI torch.” I remember saying to a work colleague, very soon into my
daily fix of the programme, Why had I fixed on this
object?. Modern film and tv
(Bond & Scifi ) are full of dazzling gadgets and machines. Why not Bond’s
car or Luke’s Light-sabre? Thinking about my desire,
still present, one year on, I feel it is because of its symbolic resonance with
the bright clear eyes and the intellectual light the criminalists
bring to the crime scene. I am less covetous of their clothes than of the fact
that their work demands as much changing of dress as characters in Austen and
Wilde.
I
feel the desire to be in-screen most powerfully, my chaste orgasm, when one of
the characters suddenly says to a colleague, mouth
wide with joyous laughter, their chaste orgasm: “I love this job” or “You
gotta love this job”.
d)
Civilization (not Apocalypse) Now
There is great
relief and pleasure, even joy, in contemplating the possibility of a good
work-group. The CSI lab and the tea-room are proof that humans can work
together to honor that most puzzling object to humankind - the dead body. It
really does seem a hopeful picture of humanity, and a criterion of civilization : in the words of The Human League song:
Keep feeling
fascination
Looking,
learning, moving on….
After watching
a few episodes I wondered what was this programme
doing to me? Why did I find it soothing and calmly
exciting (if such a paradox is allowable), regardless of the gruesome
content. I think it is to do with the
ideas of sublimation & civilization. I experience a sense of aesthetic and emotional
balance. I feel a bit better afterwards. One aspect of this is the brief
release of a remembered fifteen-year-old Self that thinks: “What a job, what a Team, what a way to
live! I hope I can be in such a work-group when I grow up!”
That’s why I have
watched it almost every day for a year. I guess some people watch, and quite
wrongly, the news, the non-fictional record, in a similar way. Huxley rightly
chided such ‘interest in current affairs’ as “cultivating disquietude for
disquietude’s sake.” It is a fundamental category mistake, like treating
the Houses of Parliament and the UN as if they were annexes of the Big Brother
House!
CODA
I watch CSI for aesthetic pleasure and also to keep in mind the thought of the
moral task to find a good work-group.
I feel blessed
to have been in a good (paid) work-group. Praise to Alan Macdonald, Maggie
Smith, Janice Western and Chrissie Stevenson. I feel blessed to have found a
good (voluntary) work-group. Praise to Ivan Ward.
[Here is the
original article : JG Ballard: Saturday June 25, 2005 : Guardian Unlimited ]
In cold blood
It
has no car chases, no shoot-outs, no emotions. So what
makes Crime Scene Investigation so utterly compelling? The answer, writes JG
Ballard, goes to the heart of our most basic fears
Television
today is an ageing theme park, which we visit out of habit rather than in hope
of finding anything fresh and original. At times I think that the era of
television is over, but then it suddenly comes up with something rich and
strange. A few years ago, hunting the outer darkness of Channel 5, I began to
linger over a series called C.S.I: Crime Scene Investigation. After only a few
episodes I was completely hooked, for reasons I don't understand even today.
Set
in Las Vegas, the series described the work of the police department's
forensics team, a strictly tweezers and litmus paper operation where guilt or
innocence hang on having the right kind of sand in
your turnups. Lurid computer graphics provided flashbacks
to the actual homicides, a stomach-churning revelation of what actually happens
when an axe strikes the back of the skull, or a corrosive gas gets to work on
the lungs. The series was original, slick and deeply disturbing, though I
wasn't too keen to find out why.
At
least I wasn't the only one to be hooked. Two years ago C.S.I. climbed to the
top of the audience ratings in America, and its success led to C.S.I. Miami and
a third spin-off, C.S.I. New York. Now, as part of its Crime Season 2005, London's
NFT is hosting The C.S.I. Phenomenon, a weekend devoted to the show with
Quentin Tarantino as a guest. But for all its success, C.S.I. is a very unusual
series, and a mystery in its own right. I suspect that it taps deeply into the
collective unconscious of the TV audience, as did Sex and the City and Big
Brother, but in a far more sinister way.
What
is so unsettling about the series? First of all, there are the locales, which
are not what they seem. The Vegas series and C.S.I. Miami are set in the two
strangest cities in America, but take no advantage whatever of their bizarre
ecologies. The reason, of course, is that they are filmed in Los Angeles and
rarely come anywhere near Las Vegas or Miami, unlike Hawaii Five-O and Miami
Vice, which were shot on the spot, and where the lush flora and fauna helped to
authenticate even the most improbable storylines.
But
this shunning of the real Vegas and Miami has its advantages. The air in LA is
grey and dusty compared with the desert glare of Las Vegas and the spectral
whiteness of Miami Beach. So C.S.I., taking the same dim view of daylight as
Count Dracula, stays indoors whenever it can.
The
series unfolds within an almost totally interiorised
world, a clue to its real significance. The crimes - they are all homicides -
take place in anonymous hotel rooms and in the tract housing of the Vegas and
Miami suburbs, almost never in a casino or druglord's
gaudy palace. A brutal realism prevails, the grimmest in any crime series.
Suburban lounges and that modern station of the cross, the hotel bathroom, are
the settings of horrific murders, which thankfully are over by the time each
episode begins. Gloves donned, the cast dismantle u-bends and plunge up to
their elbows in toilet bowls, retrieving condoms, diaphragms and bullet
casings, syringes, phials and other signs of the contemporary zodiac. Faecal matter and toilet paper are never shown, perhaps
reflecting American squeamishness, though evidence of anal intercourse and
vaginal bruising is snapped out like the tennis scores.
If
the crime scene is brightly lit, the outdoor world is always dark. A car crash
or street shooting always takes place at night, when the city seems deserted
and dead. Light and safety are found only in the crime lab, among its high-tech
scanners and its ruthless deconstruction of human trauma. This rejection of the
outside world eliminates the need for transport, and there are no cars in the
C.S.I. series. David Caruso, who plays the head of the Miami team, sometimes
turns up in a vast Hummer, an armoured vehicle that
transforms a quiet Miami suburb into a bomb-ridden quarter of Baghdad, as if
underlining the hostility of the external world.
The
complete absence of cars touches a nerve of anxiety in the viewer. Television
crime series, from Felony Squad and The Rockford Files to our own Z Cars and
The Sweeney, were filled with their huge carapaces, swerving in and out of
alleys, reversing in a howl of burning rubber. Watched with the sound down,
episodes of Starsky and Hutch resembled instructional
films on valet parking. The identification of car and hero reached its
apotheosis in the 1970s series Vegas, where the playboy private eye played by
the affable Robert Urich actually parked his car
inside his living room, stretched out beside him like a faithful bloodhound.
In
C.S.I., not only are there no cars, but there are no guns. The team wear sidearms, but I have
rarely seen a gun drawn in self-defence, let alone
fired. The only bullets discharged end up in calibrated water tanks. The
assumption is clearly made that reason and logic need never rely on anything so crude as brute force. No cars, no guns and, even more
significant, no emotions, except in the flashbacks to the actual crime.
Every
viewer knows that the only people who show emotion in C.S.I. are about to be
dead. This lack of emotion extends to the cast, who never display a flicker of
anger or revulsion. None of the team have
relationships with each other, and there are few rivalries and no affairs. We
never see where they live and know nothing about them. Gil Grissom, the head of
the C.S.I. team played by William Petersen, is a likeable but hermetic figure
who will throw out a Shakespeare quote or a tag from Rousseau as he peers into
his microscope, but he remains sealed inside his quest for the truth. The
queenly Marg Helgenberger,
who plays Grissom's number two, is a former "exotic dancer", a single
mother with a daughter we never see. Her speciality
is "blood spatter analysis".
Still,
this reticence contrasts favourably with the demented
profligacy of The Bill, with its cast of murderers, psychopaths, child
molesters and arsonists, all of them in police uniform and all emotionally
interlocked with each other. New arrivals at Sun Hill station are ruthlessly
asset-stripped of whatever weaknesses they try to hide and then discarded.
Emotion
rules rather than reason. Characterisation, we are
always told, is the key to drama, but this is a literary notion that serves the
interests of unimaginative novelists. In any case, it is untrue to life, where
we can work with people in the same office for years, or even share the same
bed in a tolerable marriage, and know next to nothing about their real
characters until a sudden crisis occurs.
Given
that there are no interesting characters, no car chases or shoot-outs, no
violently stirred emotions and no dramatic action, why is the C.S.I. series so
riveting? What is it that grips us to the end of the episode, which is scarcely
more than an elaborate crossword puzzle with human tissues in the place of
clues? My guess is that the answer lies in the inner sanctum at the heart of
all three series - the autopsy room. Here the victims surrender all that is
left of their unique identities, revealing the wounds and medical anomalies
that led to their demise. Once they have been dissected - their ribcages opened
like suitcases, brains lifted from their craniums, tissues analysed
into their basic components - they have nothing left, not even the faintest
claim on existence.
I
suspect that the cadavers waiting their turn on the tables are surrogates for ourselves, the viewers. The real crime the C.S.I. team is
investigating, weighing every tear, every drop of blood, every smear of semen,
is the crime of being alive. I fear that we watch, entranced, because we feel
an almost holy pity for ourselves and the oblivion patiently waiting for us.
Crime Season 2005
is at the National Film Theatre, London SE1, June
30-July 3.
Special Preview: C.S.I. - Season 5 Finale, the final double episode of the latest
series of C.S.I. prior to UK transmission, is on July 1; the C.S.I. Phenomenon
is on July 2.
Box office: 020-7928 3232.
BALLARD’s RESPONSE TO
THIS ESSAY
I
wrote to Ballard, offering my compliments on his article, & sent him a copy
of this essay. With astonishing intellectual grace, he replied by return post, saying :
“ I greatly enjoyed your essay … the idea of the work
group is very interesting and I think spot on.” [1. Aug 06]
=========================================================================
REFERENCES
BETTELHEIM,
Bruno : On Learning to Read: The Child's Fascination
with Meaning : [1982: Knopf]
BION,
Wilfrid: Experiences
in Groups : [1961: Tavistock.]
LEITCH,
Donovan : Hurdy Gurdy Man :
[2005: St Martin’s Press]
MARKS,
Leo : Between
Silk and Cyanide: A Codemaker's Story 1941-1945. [1998 : Harper Collins]
OPIE,
Iona : The People in the Playground [1993 OUP]