Grave Danger: A Critical Analysis
What CSI’s sweet nothings say about everything
Intro: CSI Through a Critical Lens
CSI: Crime Scene Investigators is the most popular television program of the past ten years that doesn’t involve hometown heroes mangling classic rock hits in hopes of being voted into a recording contract. Its presence on television and in culture is ubiquitous, with three sister shows and countless imitators. Who is CSI for? As oft-impersonated CSI:Miami detective Horatio Caine might quip just before the theme song, “Who watches these watchmen?”[1]
Dubious scientific procedures, popular music, quirky supercops and a glitzy location indicate that it’s for non-educated, law-abiding and generally white-bread middle class viewers, and so do the statistics[2]. In his talk to McDaniel College, Ed Burns asserted that popular media largely concerns itself with the mythology of America. CSI, in playing to the most of the lower available denominators, has struck upon a formula that wins millions of viewers but unfortunately adds coating after coating of chocolate over the truth that inspired it. Real life forensic lab teams aren’t also homicide police, swat team and a bomb squad. It’s not for marginalized groups, since it has a tendency of skewing racial data and presenting different sexual orientations as a “Freak-of-the-week,” sensationalizing the headlines it claims to rip its stories from.
In truth, it’s hard to judge the artistic merit of network television. With few exceptions, executives tend to favor bad things that sell over good things that won’t because of the realities of advertising-supported programming. CBS (The network which ran 8 police procedurals at once, including 3 CSI shows) and Fox are two of the highest performing networks. CBS’s comedy lineup finds its highest performer in Two and a Half Men and Fox’s Marimow-esque talent for heaving away talent with great efficiency has been addressed best by the japes of its own animated programming. Instead, this paper aims to assess CSI in terms of what its aggressive lack of aspirations ends up accidentally saying. Showing people what you think they want tends to make them expect that, therefore forcing you to produce more of the same to placate an audience that asks for nothing by giving them with nothing.
For the purposes of this paper, the representative work chosen was the two-part finale for Season 5, entitled Grave Danger in which CSI Nick Stokes is kidnapped and buried alive, ransomed by the father of a girl the CSI’s recently used their evidence to convict. Season 5 was CSI’s highest rated season to date and this particular episode was plotted and directed by Quentin Tarantino and is a fan-favorite[3], despite the fact there’s recently been an episode where Justin Bieber meets his end in a hail of bullets.
Tarantino’s work is renowned for its stylized and homage-filled cinematography as well as its conversational dialogue. It’s possible that Tarantino’s direction and plotting made this episode a CSI outlier but after viewing several other season 5 episodes, it becomes clear that this episode is, if anything, indicative of CSI’s prevailing themes.
Genre: Your Average, Everyday Supercops
CSI is a genre all its own. The ensemble cast of quirky and unflappably moral police officers are confronted with a weird crime every week, then they stare at computer screens very intently while some music from a label owned by the same parent company as CBS makes everything look hip. Everybody’s got a morbid pun[4] prepared for the occasion and they’re so used to swooping in at the nick of time that their watches are perpetually set to the eleventh hour.
The strange conceit of the show is that while scientific evidence and not eyewitness testimony are what will make or break a case, the audience is left in the dark as far as being able to solve the case themselves. The audience’s reasoning skills are never challenged by a story that asks for nothing but attention to itself. The suspects are almost always introduced in the first 15 minutes and if there’s a twist at the end, it’s either telegraphed from the first moment or has nothing to do with anything else presented in the episode.
The biggest failing in this particular story isn’t the melodrama or the acting, but actually the plot. A taunting kidnapper drugs Detective Nick Stokes and buries him in an undisclosed location in a plexiglass coffin, demanding one million dollars or he will kill Stokes. At the end of part one, Detective Grissom delivers the money to the mystery man, who ends up detonating a suicide bomb (His motivation is never really explained) and kills himself, showering Grissom in viscera and leaving Stokes still trapped and counting down to his death.
While this subverts genre convention by denying the audience the release of seeing the criminal either apprehended or killed by the forces of justice (Poetic or otherwise), this story choice also deprives the second part of the story of any tension. The villain, who had never been seen before in any episode, was given a flimsy and ill-plotted motivation for his crime. The main drive of CSI is investigation. Using pubic hairs and impossible camera systems to pull a suspect out of thin air and make a big reveal about which previously introduced character in this episode is the murderer is kind of their M.O., and taking that element out leaves us with waiting for the CSI’s to find a character that we know won’t die because of the politics of television and the fact that he didn’t announce that he was “One day to retirement.”
As one expects, each member of the team contributes something according to their specialty and they make an incredible last-minute save. Post-rescue, Stokes goes to visit the kidnapper’s daughter (Imprisoned for a previous crime) and offers her ineffective words of advice, that “In a few years… When you get out of here… Don’t take it with you.” And while appearing unfazed by this advice, the epilogue shows her taking this into consideration in her cell. Good thing the mean, dumb criminal had advice from the smart, handsome CSI guy. Now that she knows not to take anger with her, I’m sure the world will be easier on her post-incarceration. Every employer and personal contact is willing to forgive and forget convictions.
Form: Montage, Montage, Slo Mo, Montage, Lensflare, Fade to Credits
While CSI’s many faults as a recreation of actual police work and crime have been made clear in the media since its premier, the Simpsons addressed its formatic failings. Chief Wiggum, in regards to a piece of evidence, asks that it be given “The full CSI Treatment.” The camera then spins around the soda can they had collected, swoops inside, cycles through several color filters and performs close ups on small parts of the soda can that carry no extra information. Satisfied, the chief hooks his thumbs in his belt loops and says: “Good work, boys. A lotta flash signifying nothing.”
The most well known part of CSI’s visual grammar is its extensive lab sequences, where non-diegetic music accompanies montages consisting of close-ups of whatever evidence is being investigated and occasional shots of the face of a concerned CSI technician. This episode splits time between CSI’s in the lab, enhancing video footage from traffic cameras and other unlikely sources and Nick Stokes, the unfortunate cop-in-a-coffin who is the focus of the investigation. These pieces dominate the episodes and relay the most important moral of CSI: That evidence is what is important, not people. In this episode, contact with actual suspects was limited to a brief pre-immolation speech from a criminal who didn’t realize that anybody with a team of geniuses and technology so advanced that it’s practically science fiction could solve his unsolvable riddle. A meeting with the kidnapper’s incarcerated daughter goes about as well as one can expect when she is expected to sympathize with the police who put her away instead of her dead father. At the end of the day the girl is only important to the police because she is able to give them a piece of information that breaks the case.
This preoccupation with evidence over personal relationships or characters is emphasized by the credit sequence, full of people looking concernedly at evidence and fingerprints and close-ups of guns. Even the theme echoes this focus on guilt and material, The Who’s “Who Are You?” begging to know who the murderer is with over-saturated shots of evidence designed to stick in the mind more than the faces of the people holding it.
The scenes in the police station that houses the lab are shot with a bluish tinge, which emanates from the high-tech equipment that the CSI’s are often parked in front of while saying things like “Enhance.” The blue indicates the safety and relative passivity of the lab, whereas “Outside” is presented in orange. This contrast, especially popular on movie posters[5] makes a highly visual distinction between the world of the lab (a set on a soundstage) and the world of the streets[6]. The orange/blue technique is used to great effect as Detective Grissom heads to the drop location for the ransom money. In a striking establishing shot, a cool blue sky clashes with a rusting orange shack that houses the kidnapper. The street/lab isn’t always the line for the effect, as the impressive one-take “All the pieces come together” scene uses orange lighting to highlight CSI members against the blue background of the lab.
Sound design includes the popular music used during investigation scenes, usually non-diegetic. In this specific episode most of the pop tunes are diegetic, with Bob Neuwirth playing in Detective Stokes’ car before his kidnapping and “Outside Chance” by The Turtles eerily playing in the background when the CSI team listens to the kidnapper’s taunting tape. Since we spend so little time on the streets of las vegas, there is no real sense of a world going on outside the crime scene investigated save for the foley snapping of polaroids and footsteps of police officers.
So why all the sound and fury? Simply put, it’s pretty to watch. It’s one of the highest rated television programs in the world, so it’s got to be doing something right for viewers if not for critics who have all the jaded sensibility of being middle class and taking film courses. CSI’s numerous Emmy awards are mostly for technical achievement and it’s a telling fact that its award for “Best Network Television Series” comes from the Saturn awards, a science fiction and fantasy award association.
Policy, Structures, People and Communities: Where are they?
Who are the cops of CSI protecting? In this episode, it’s other cops. The full resources of the department are flung toward retrieving detective Stokes. Admittedly, this episode is something of an outlier as far as story and while the personal hang-ups of the members of the team play into the plot of most episodes, this episode in particular turns the focus of the crime onto the police themselves.
Still, the rest of the narrative supports the idea that Police officers are the marginalized group being discriminated against. A pre-kidnapping conversation between Stokes and fellow CSI Warrick is about the difficulty of being a police officer in a world where people either don’t care about or actively antagonize them. We see only a handful of civilians who are all reluctant to interact with police in any way. Capping off this theme is the fact that Stokes is kidnapped expressly because he is a CSI.
The real focus of the episode to evoke an emotional response probably should have been Kelly, the incarcerated daughter of the kidnapper. What are the effects of a justice system that’s as focused on material evidence as the world of CSI? Kelly was convicted because of the presence of a Styrofoam cup that had her DNA on it. Her presence was interpreted as complicity in a murder and she was put away. CSI makes it its job to take the human element out of investigations. While this would make sense if the team were JUST a CSI team like in real life, the supercops of Las Vegas also interrogate witnesses and suspects. When nothing fruitful comes of the eyewitness account, they invariably return to the scene to find some new dandruff that turns over the truth. Her supposedly wrongful incarceration for accessory to murder was the basis of her father’s kidnapping, as he planted the Styrofoam cup at the scene to ensure that the police brought their attention back to Kelly’s case. Could this be perceived as a function of a system that’s looking for someone, anyone, to take the blame?
The effect of people on institutions finds its unlikely representative in Walter Gordon, the self-destructing dad and aerospace engineer who attempts to murder a CSI member to ensure that his daughter’s case is reassessed. While it’s hard to support Gordon’s methods and not everybody has access to plexiglass, ether and a complicated coffin life support system, he presents an important idea. Data, like eyewitness accounts, are often open to interpretation. Kelly purported that she had dropped the cup while fleeing in terror, which was clearly not enough for the jury.
The solution is probably something more mundane. Something like a civilian watchdog group devoted to looking for discrepancies in the investigations of criminal cases involving a certain level of sentencing. Functioning something like fellow CBS procedural Cold Case (Which takes place in the same universe as CSI), unaffiliated citizens with no political motivation such as juking the stats and no personal stake in the investigations would aspire to ensure that justice was truly served. The Internal Affairs department tends to catch the misconduct of officers, but there’s as yet no organization to ensure that officers aren’t sloppy. Obviously putting such an initiative inside the department would lead to bad blood and political friction, but making it federal or even part of a non-profit organization would mean that reassessing old cases could help free some of the wrongly accused.
Conclusion: What does this evidence about CSI tell us?
So at this point it has been demonstrated that the world of CSI is of brave officers obtaining instant results from computer programs to catch criminals who are targeting police. A woman is expected to sympathize with the police officers to put her away and assumes the guilt of her father, to the point that a piece of advice from Stokes to her is framed as though he was forgiving her for burying him, which she had absolutely no hand in.
CSI is pure entertainment. The story failings of this episode aside, an audience the size of several small European countries tunes in every week to three CSI shows so there must be a reason. And what is it telling them? Largely it’s mythologizing a completely inaccurate flow of police work as well as substituting black and white for very dark grey and very light grey in an attempt to seem socially relevant. As far as morality, consider this: the “Shades-of-grey” glimpse into Walter Gordon’s motivation says that he was just a guy, trying to save his daughter. And to do this, he murdered two dogs, buried a cop alive and then blew himself up. Is he a bad guy? Yes. Do we understand why he is bad? Yes. There is no question. The blackness of his selfish acts is lightened by his good intention, but nobody’s scratching their heads after this episode going “Wow, that was a real thinker.”
Ultimately, I think the form of CSI says more about the American people than it tells them. It’s a pretty, fast-paced and entertaining show that doesn’t take much thinking and almost aggressively rejects the notion of a shared humanity by placing fact and hard law above personal relationships. That’s what CSI says, and the American people have voted on this borderline sci-fi program with their Nielsen reports, placing it as a pop culture phenomenon. But is CSI too popular at this point to figure out if it influences people or if it’s the viewership that influences it? As Horatio Caine might say when confronted with a runaway motorbike that hit someone after the driver fell off, “It looks like the cycle… Continues.”[7]
[1] http://people.rit.edu/~bss6378/instantCSI/
[2] http://www.nij.gov/journals/259/csi-effect.htm
[3] http://www.tv.com/csi/show/19/top.html and http://www.csifanwiki.com/page/Top+10+CSI+Episodes
[4] “The victim was drowned in milk, just like the last three.” “Looks like we’re dealing with a cereal killer.”
[5] http://www.slashfilm.com/orangeblue-contrast-in-movie-posters/
[6] Which aren’t authentic either- like every other CSI show including “Miami” and “New York,” it’s filmed largely in California with occasional establishing shots and special set pieces on-location.
[7] http://people.rit.edu/~bss6378/instantCSI/
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