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.
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What a treat it was when Ballard began writing these Guardian published reviews and essays. This is one of my favorites.
Here's another excerpt:
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".
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This seems exactly right to me.
Every now and again I experience what I'll call emotion fatigue. I'm sure there's a sensuously lovely French word or phrase that covers it.
No, not ennui. Something else.
What it is, I think, is a feeling of being fed up with the limitations which come from our reactions to things, both pleasant and unpleasant, and the eternal problem of staying sufficiently alert. It's an odd and fleeting state: yes, of course I'm horny Lucretia but what a bother it is to be vexed by such a thing.
Like a blue-white tendril of lightening it appears and then, just as quickly, is gone. I'm sure Siddartha fully described the matter.
CSI is, among other things, a fantasy land where the super-competent have achieved escape velocity from these concerns - have, in other words, permanently entered a beyond good or evil condition.
There's a job to do, data to be gathered, criminals to
apprehend. Let's keep the chatter to a minimum and the emoting to those weeping, laughing, copulating, murdering unfortunates outside the soft halogen glow of the lab.
.d.