[lbo-talk] Sopranos

[Dennis Claxton]

from Bitch | Lab:



>On this note, stuck in hotel teevee land, i see CSI all over the place.
>What in dog's  name is the appeal of that show?


Since I turned cable back on to watch the Sopranos I've seen a few of 
these on reruns.  The one in Las Vegas is not bad.  I think part of 
the appeal is there's no time spent on the characters private 
lives.  It's just straight investigation and detail about the science 
of it.  J.G. Ballard has a more philosophical take:



>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
>
>Saturday June 25, 2005
>Guardian Unlimited
>
>
>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.