Forensic Television: The Case of CSI

HUM 3085: Television and Popular Culture

Spring 2015Dr. Perdigao

March 4-6, 2015

Framing CSI• Michael Allen, “So Many Different Ways to Tell It: Multi-

Platform Storytelling in CSI”:“CSI narratives are popular because, in their

procedures of continual hypothesis based on the gathering of evidence, facts and figures, they so completely mimic the activities of the viewers as they watch the shows” (72).

the episodes “conduct their own investigation: of the text itself, of its semiotic codes and of their own self-reflexive viewing pleasure” (72).

• David Bianculli, “The CSI Phenomenon”: “They not only get justice, they get closure” (222).

Framing CSI• Sue Turnbull, “The Hook and the Look: CSI and the Aesthetics

of the Television Crime Series”:

CSI “allows us to ‘look’ with Grissom at the body, witnessing every stage of his post mortem (albeit in a condensed time frame). As we follow his examination step by step, we are therefore invited to think along with Grissom, to spot the clues, to solve the case. In an era when the goal of audience participation is more usually assumed to

occur via an interactive telephone or computer link-up, CSI beckons its viewers into the show by inviting them into the world of the Crime Scene Investigators to participate in the solving the crime by looking at the evidence.” (30)

Framing CSI• Sue Turnbull, “The Hook and the Look: CSI and the Aesthetics of

the Television Crime Series”:

Visual style: “One of the ways in which CSI achieves this is through the use of CGI animated effects, including insert ‘pops’ which take us inside the human body to explore the forensic evidence from within. In this way, CSI becomes, in Caldwell’s terms, supremely televisual, the screen becoming more like that of a computer which, with a click of a mouse, opens up its graphic interface to reveal proliferating fields of information.” (30)

“Other inserts might include the use of flashbacks, frequently shot in a contrasting filter, or at an off-kilter and disorienting angle and accompanied by distorted sound, in order to visually and aurally distinguish them from the present and to suggest the haziness of memory. However, such flashbacks may also ‘lie’, in so far as the character telling the story, or the CSI reconstructing the event, tells it or imagines it wrongly.” (31)

Framing CSI• Sue Turnbull, “The Hook and the Look: CSI and the Aesthetics

of the Television Crime Series”:

“However, while Dragnet offered its viewers the innovation of documentary authenticity couched in the stylistics of film noir, what CSI in all its franchises offers its viewers is the crime show as a neo-noir digital spectacle. In other words, the ongoing characters function like avatars in a game world whose point of view we are invited to share as they go about their business of forensic analysis. This world is thus made intelligible to us through the process of visualising knowledge . . . As a spectacle, CSI gives us ‘the look’, which not only fascinates, but which also promises knowledge, truth and certainty. That’s the hook.” (32)

CSI, “Who Shot Sherlock?” • Reconstructing the crime

• When the members are asked when they last saw Kingsley/Holmes, they remember their last meeting; the episode then returns (in a hazy lens) to an earlier meeting

• They study a photograph of a murdered woman and Watson articulates his assessment; Holmes replies, “‘As usual, Dr. Watson, subtlety is lost upon you. You see a stab wound above her breast and overlook the absence of blood on the chair as well as the fact that her skirt is raised. This body was posed, and quite beautifully, I might add.’”

Using Sources• “meticulous recreation of 221-B Baker Street, residence of the

world’s greatest detective, Sherlock Holmes.”

• Greg: “The game’s afoot.”

• Grissom: “I didn’t know you were a Conan Doyle fan, Greg.”

• Greg: “I’m not. I saw a Sherlock Holmes movie once by mistake.”

• Grissom: “We all have our costumes.”

• Grissom as a “colleague” of the group

Plotting• Peter Brooks notes that “our common sense of plot” has been

molded by “the great nineteenth-century narrative tradition that, in history, philosophy, and a host of other fields as well as literature, conceived certain kinds of knowledge and truth to be inherently narrative, understandable (and expoundable) only by way of sequence, in a temporal unfolding” (xi-xii).

• Baring the device, metafiction

• Destabilizes its own plots and calls the “masterplot” of detective fiction into question

• “Who Shot Sherlock?” reveals what is at work in every episode

Contemporary Revisions• “serious literary association”

• Sherlock Holmes, Dr. Watson, Professor Moriarty, and Irene Adler

• Denny Kingsley/Sherlock Holmes; Nelson Oakes/ Dr. Watson; Josh Frost/Professor Moriarty; Kay Marquette/Irene

• “Professor Moriarty”: “Oh, a scenario created for our own entertainment, yes?”

• “Moriarty”: “This is all so contemporary.”

• Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s story “The Final Problem” ends with the death of Sherlock Holmes; “Who Shot Sherlock?” begins there

CSI Shot• Holmes’s body is concealed, never depicted, in Conan Doyle’s

story

• In CSI, the camera focuses on the bullet wound to the head and even the brain matter left on the floor

Manipulation• The Hound of the Baskervilles at the center, not of the plot

but the bidding war that may have led to murder

• In The Hound of the Baskervilles, Holmes tells Watson that his conclusions are “Interesting, though elementary” (576).

• When Watson asks if anything has “escaped” him, Holmes replies that “most of your conclusions were erroneous,” yet, in “noting [his] fallacies,” Holmes was “occasionally guided towards the truth” (576).

• Conan Doyle’s “A Scandal in Bohemia” introduces Irene Adler: Watson writes, “To Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman . . . In his eyes she eclipses and predominates the whole of her sex” (187) . . . “there was but one woman to him, . . . Irene Adler, of dubious and questionable memory” (187).

Re-plotting• Plotting the murderer from original to adaptation: the real

murderer (Moriarty) to Watson (the narrator and flawed detective) to Irene Adler (the woman)

• “A Scandal in Bohemia”: “the best plans of Mr. Sherlock Holmes were beaten by a woman’s wit” (204-5)

• Katherine’s plot—as new boss, in patriarchal system of the departmnent

Proficiencies• Final proficiency exam

• Revelation of dummy, from the recreation of Demayo’s accident

• Greg: “I don’t get it. I got the wrong guy, the wrong manner of death.”

• Grissom: “I don’t expect you to be correct in all your interpretations all the time. You collected the evidence. You thought there was something missing, you went back and found it. Hey, that’s the job.”

• “final proficiency” (i.e., complete understanding) is impossible, itself a fiction

• The unknowable, the fallibility of human understanding

• Brooks writes, “Any final authority claimed by narrative plots, whether of origin or end, is illusory. . . . It is the role of fictional plots to impose an end which yet suggests a return, a new beginning: a rereading” (109).

Readers and Fandom• Deborah Knight and George McKnight:

“Detection narratives confront us with a doubling of hermeneutical activity. At the level of plot—i.e., within the detection narrative— interpretation is required if the detective is to discern what set of actions in fact constitutes the puzzle or mystery that needs to be investigated and resolved. And at the level of reading or viewing— i.e., outside the detection narrative—interpretation is required to understand the plot of the investigation, recognize certain signs as clues, and eventually be able to organize relevant clues into an explanation of the mystery or crime which is at the heart of the narrative. (126)

• For Knight and McKnight, “The congruence between detective and reader/viewer is not an epistemic one. Rather, the congruence has to do with the interpretive abilities which allow both detective and reader/viewer to make sense of what is going on” (127).

The Sense of an Ending• Captain: “Okay, why don’t I tell this like a story, you know, like

the end of a story? Because I like the part when the detective solves the crime so here goes . . .”

• Kay Marquette/Irene Adler: “You see, detective, Denny would have wanted his murder to be the perfect puzzle. A mystery worthy of the master.”

And because it’s CSI . . . • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYsqMEX4Oh8

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWTJ1YZJsYk

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6bTvCRhG6k&feature=related

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_sarYH0z948&playnext=1&list=PL4D85924AF67A7140&index=34