MORE ON FICTION DEAD

The dead who appear in the CSI shows come from many cities -- Miami, Las Vegas, New York, Los Angeles -- all archetypically American yet all liminal, either coastal port cities or, in the case of Vegas, tourist entry points with a lot of foreign visitors. Every one of these cities is multicultural and multiracial and all have large Hispanic populations. All have to do with different iterations of the American dream. New York is finance, Los Angeles the entertainment industry, Miami luxury recreation and Cuban reinvention, Las Vegas, striking it rich amongst versions of the other cities.

These are open geographies, alluring and inherently unstable and dangerous, sites of unexpected violence. Las Vegas and Miami actually are dangerous; Los Angeles is moderately so, though much less so than in the past. And New York has become positively benign, its murder and assault rates having plummeted during the last 20 years to make it America's safest large city. But in the world of television New York has not caught up to its mundane reality. It is clearly more gentrified than in the past but it is still represented as dangerous.

Note: There is almost no connection between crime-fictional reality and real-world crime rates. Note the striking popularity of Scandinavian police procedurals, in print and on film. In these, Norway and Sweden are awash in murderous biker gangs and the home to a disturbing number of brilliant serial killers and corrupt government officials sitting on dirty secrets. But aside from the horrible mass killing in Norway two years ago, Sweden had 91 murders in 2010, Norway 29.

Miami had a murder rate of 15.4 per 100,000, far higher than Sweden's 1.0 and Norway's normal 0.9. Los Angeles and Las Vegas both have murder rates more than twice the US average, in the 7.5 range, while New York's murder rate hovers at 6.4. All of these cities are violent by Western European standards, but Philsdelphis, Buffalo, Oakland, Milwaukee, and Kansas City all have murder rates as high as or higher than Miami's. Los Angeles is much safer than Tulsa, St. Louis, Pittsburgh or Minneapolis. But in the world of fiction Vegas and LA and New York and Miami serve as ideal sites for interesting violence.

Returning to the fictional dead. If my hypothesis is plausible we see the discovered dead of CSI as a form of revenant, by which I mean someone dead who comes back. But the CSI revenants are outliers in the revenant tradition, which includes ghosts and zombies and vampires and such. The CSI revenants are dead bodies.

First question: how can a dead body be a revenant? Almost by definition dead bodies are not coming back from anywhere. They are not yet even on a journey. They are 'remains', what is left, not 'revenant', what has come back. My argument is that the CSI are never just remains, but reminders, indices, stand-ins, signs for other dead people who cannot come back because they have been vaporized by evil. In my construction, corpses stand in for other, absent corpses which are absent because they have been obliterated. They were ripped out of being into non-being; the CSI corpses - fictions, after all, that can be made to serve many purposes -- are entities created partly to plug an ontological gap, an unbearable hole in the fabric of the real. This hole is truly black: it leads nowhere, produces no meaning. It is just a pointless, painful absence. We look to the dead, we turn to them so we can tend them and make sure that they are properly buried so that they will not come back to haunt us. But in the case of 9/11 there are no dead to turn to, so we cannot tend them. Will they come back to haunt us? We have no idea. We do not know what obliterated bodies can or cannot do. Maybe the worst thing that can happen is that the dead cannot return even as haunts, so that the imbalance can never be set right and we will forever carry the burden of not having buried them properly. And our punishment will not be that we are haunted but that we are not. We will end up in Kephalos' unresolved anxiety, worriedly sacrificing over and over, never sure that what we are doing is the right thing, because the world beyond never gives us a sign, cannot, perhaps, givie us a sign.

So, I say, we manufacture a new set of corpses, leave them lying around conveniently where the authorities -- our surrogates -- can find them easily. Now we introduce a new idea loosely based on the work of the Hungarian psycho-analysts Abraham and Torok -- that ghosts can lie. The dead bodies that CSI discovers have been planted there and made to look like conventional murder victims, typical fictional 'stiffs' whose job it is to be found, to provoke the mechanics of detection, to produce a killer and his or her apprehension.

And all of this does happen. The CSI dead behave exactly as if thet were written into a standard police procedural plot, in which they will, if tradition holds true, play a crucial but peripheral role. But something funny happens on the way to the conclusion. We begin to linger around this body, this accidental occasion for police action, as if it is more than a functional part of the plot. In the CSI shows and their 'relatives', the body itself becomes the focus of investigation and procedures shift from interviewing suspects, chasing down criminals, and reading reports to doing lab tests and meeting in autopsy theaters.

The dead body becomes a major figure in the plot, It does not have any lines but it does provide a steady stream of information.

Note: there are large differences in emotional tone vis a vis the placement of the dead in these shows. In CSI the tone began, in 2000, as somewhat raucous and macabre. The bodies tended to the garish, there was a lot of blood, and graveyard humor prevailed. The bodies helped but they were not treated with much reverence or care, and their settings were stark andf unappealing. Even though CSI began in 2000, a premonitory year before the attacks on the WTC, it was only gradually, and especially after 2001, that the whole aesthetic of death changed and the role the bodies played became more mysterious and richer. As Tina Weber details in her poorly translated but very useful study of television corpses, Drop Dead Gorgeous, the settings for the dead in scripted forensic shows have become progressively less realistic and progressively more beautiful and, shall we say, reverential?

The labs and autopsy theaters are expensive, softly lighted, airy, spacious and above all almost preternaturally efficient.

WE HAVE DONE THIS ALREADY. INSERT.

What all this indicates could be two different but in this case complimentary things. On one hand as we discussed in the capital letter pice ther Hollywood conventions of character presentation took over and made the dead into appropriately coiffed and toned members of the cast. But on another level, the bodies represent something else more, something further -- a visitation, if we want to say it, an intrusion from another story line, one that cannot be openly told, one that is a hidden and shameful secret -- that we could never recover our dead from the Towers and that we have never resolved their loss. The reappearance of these dead, apparent murder victims but also, always, something more, means that the scripts have been invaded and to some degree taken over by forces and emotions whose power cannot be admitted.

We need to verify this with references to episodes in which the dead act like more than the dead.

OK: In Cold Case, this something more is brought forward by the introduction of the dead as spectral characters and the inclusion of earlier version of the murderes and their victims, as if both are ontologically trapped in the present time of the crin=me. The years have added age to the killers but they are really the young persons who did the original crime and when the evidence is presented, when the dead come back as their remains, as evidence, to help unmaks their killers, time and history are undone, shown to be illusory, and the original time of the crime is reinvoked, flickering in and out of the present, finally put where it belongs, in the past, by the resolution of the cold case.

In the CSI shows something different happens. The time is always now and the dead are dead now. They do noy change the flow of time but they remake space. That is, they die into a charmed space of knowledge, an epistemological treasure trove where the technicians have all the keys needed to unlock the secrets of their bodies. Because the CSI dead do carry that clear legacy. Thry have secrets to divulge that are crying out to be divulged but which cannot be divulged without the right intervention by the authorities.

Nothing the authorities could do could match the DNA scraped from the metal remains of the Towers to the DNA found in the thousands of body fragments found, until 2011, in and around the Towers site. No forensic dentist or anthropologist or crime scene tech -- no one , and no piece of equipment -- could ever successfully read the bodies of the 1,000 people whose remains were never found or untangle even the most elementary puzzles posed by the unclaimed fragments buried in the memorial at Ground Zero. Government, science, technology, human ingenuity, time, money --- nothing worked to remake the dead. And in the CSI series the dead are always fully reclaimed, the machines always produce definitive results, the technicians always bring the right tools and intelligence and the whole sad ineffective story of the 9/11 remains gets indirectly and ' correctly' retold, over and over and over until it is almost believable and the dead are almost saved and properly buried.

We also note that funerals play no role on CSI or any of the other shows except as sites to spot a perpetrator. It is almost as if these shows want to skirt the issue of whether the CSI dead have been properly buried. The idea is that they must have been because they were properly studied and gave up every scintilla of information they had to give up.