FICTION DEAD

FICTION DEAD

FICTIONAL DEAD

The fictional dead are then received into the fictional forensic setting by a crew of well trained and dedicated government workers who have both the equipment and the knowledge to do what they are meant to do: not to save the already -dead, nor to resurrect them, nor to talk with them, nor to help them to another world. These are government functionaries, not mediums or Bodhisattvas. They cannot bring the dead back to life but they can do something else essential. They find out why the dead are dead and they can find justice for the dead by exposing the killers, using the knowledge they have gained. Crucially, this process of examination is not a one way street. The found dead, whose deaths need explaining, cooperate in finding the truth. They emerge from their mute hiddenness, can we say from their disappearance and obliteration, to offer themselves, in their intactness, to the skilled government functionaries who, this time, can read all the signs correctly and, if not save them, at least understand them and, by this act of understanding, both reincorporate them into the fold of their culture -- return them to our world -- and find expiation for their murders.

This is what drew me to my hunch. The forensic dead play key roles in these series and their role is never to be saved in any way. They are dead beyond saving, and all one can do is find out who killed them and why. But note the important differences between this sort of detection and that practiced in mainstream police procedural, noir and other forms of mystery narrative. In the forensic form of the narrative it is the corpse itself that offers all the evidence, or the crucial evidence. And it offers this to specialized knowledge provided by the government and paid for by the citizens. The dead here are finally found, correctly read, and returned to us for the purposes of mourning. What matters is not they be saved but that, being dead, they find a safe haven among the knowledgeable living, to be taken care of and reconstituted in ways that never happened, and never can happen, for the dead of 9/11. Can we read these anonymous forensic corpses as substitutes for the lost dead? And not as psychological substitutes for the families and friends; rather, as deeply and inalterably political and moral substitutes for the anxious citizenry. Are these shows telling us that even if the government cannot save you it will not ultimately lose you? Or, even if you are irretrievably lost in one plane - mundane reality, in what Lacan calls the 'horror of the real', there is a fictive space, a safe space of narrative consolation, in which you can be refound, in a sense put back together and be properly mourned and avenged?

This is admittedly a derivative and less satisfying place, on one level, than a real world in which (1) the dead citizen never gets obliterated and (2) in which, once obliterated, that citizen can be reconstituted and avenged directly and swiftly. But the real world almost never behaves in that way, and I might and will argue that there might be something more psychically satisfying to the anxious citizen -- here we return to the psychological/individual -- in a narrative specifically made to console, to assuage fears, even nameless fears and even fears we have never admitted to ourselves. On a psychic level, isn't the fictional narrative form more reassuring than some compromised 'adult' answer that only demonstrates the gross inadequacy of both the government and the individual citizen?

Let's examine how this narrative works; this will lead us to a larger reflection and discussion about how both political and mourning narratives might get constructed -- what work they do.

We circle back to the way fictional forensic dead people look. If they are us, or our symbolic fellow citizens, we are in a timeless world in which everyone is young or youngish or, if getting old, vigorously and wisely old. The dead are none of these things, literally - do corpses have ages? - but they are analogs to them. Our fictional corpses look young and moreover fit, as if the lives they lived as citizens must have been virtuous, at least in terms of clean living habits. They, perhaps unlike us, are fit and good looking and we, by a symbolic, dream-like extension, are also that way. If we were to die as citizens we would be exemplars of health and beauty. Dying into the hands of the ideal government employees would make us younger and prettier and overall more worthy of attention. It is as if our new beauty and fitness and youth are psychic compensations for the disappointment and anxiety we felt when saw that our government could not protect us.

They might not have been able to save us but they do find us in an altered and improved state, echoes, perhaps, of Paul's description of new bodies Corinthians. If this suggests a religious, specifically Christian and salvific undertone, so be it. Perhaps the forensic dead are candidates for imminent resurrection and/or salvation; perhaps they just got their Pauline bodies a bit early, compliments of the narrative conventions of the forensic cop shows. And as they received their new bodies, so, too did we -- just as we seem to have inherited a kind of Pauline version of our government. They too seem vastly better than the literal thing. Is the logical space of the forensic show an anteroom to the Christian Heaven, a crypto-Paradise created to make up for the loss of certainty on Earth? We can only speculate.

And these new bodies have another quasi-religious quality. Unlike real bodies these bodies do not seem to decompose. They look just as good at the end of the episode as they did 44 minutes earlier. But then they also exist in a space in which time is extraordinarily speeded up or else compressed -- it is impossible to say which. In any event, there is no time for the dead to rot because lab results are produced instantly, and lead directly to apprehensions. No three month wait to complete DNA tests, no delayed autopsy results, no three year backup in producing worked up rape kits. Here results are instantaneous. Within hours and at most a day or two of the death conclusive lab work has been completed by our lovable geeks and the body has helpfully yielded every scintilla of information it possibly has to yield. The corpses cooperate. The techs test and find answers. Beautiful young people cooperating with beautiful young people to produce a quick, unambiguous truth and swift justice. Exactly what we would want were we citizens killed by terrorists: a quick and seamless reincorporation to 'good' American society through brilliant police work. Our tax dollars paying off fully and instantly, rather than disappearing, like the 9/11 dead, into bureaucratic holes in the earth. Not only are the dead rediscovered and resuscitated - so are our tax dollars and, by extension, our citizenship.

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