2003 Year in Review

Into the Night: Crime Scene Improbable

CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, the trailblazing television series on CBS now in its third season, is set in Las Vegas, the City of Lights - a Mecca for gamers, and a haven for night people. A reality-based series from the Jerry Bruckheimer production factory, it’s quite romantic in that it asks its audience to suspend its ‘powers of disbelief’ and accept the plots and timelines as factual.

As most ensemble television series, CSI boasts a cast of recurring characters with various racial, gender, social, and cultural backgrounds:

Gil Grissom – Santa Monica, CA, single, dedicated to his work
Catherine Willows – Bozeman, MT, divorced, with a child who has acceptance problems
Nick Stokes – Dallas, TX, single, as yet not a clearly defined character
Sara Sidle – Tamales Bay, CA, single, crush on Grissom
Warrick Brown – Las Vegas, NV, single, Black, runner for casinos as a child
Jim Brass – Newark, NJ, divorced, has trouble reconciling with daughter
Al Robbins – Church Falls, VA, married, precise in his work
Greg Sanders – San Gabriel, CA, single, young, smart, gee-whiz-zer from the Jimmy Olson school

What we learn from these characters is that single people (Grissom, Sidle) are lonely, and are either dedicated to their work or striving to establish a meaningful relationship; divorced people with children (Willows, Brass) have on-going parent-child relationship problems that often interfere with their work; and happily married people (Robbins) are devoted to doing the best job possible.

For the purposes of CSI, Las Vegas is a city of night. All things, good and evil, occur at late hours. Such time and setting provides the atmosphere for high contrast, dramatic lighting of the sort normally associated with sci-fi shows such as X-Files. But such lighting is odd in a show that depends so much on the gathering of evidence, even trace amounts. Good lighting, you would think, would assure that no evidence, no matter how small, would be overlooked.

Our intrepid crime scene investigators, however, depend on two indispensable sources of light: a hand-held flashlight (halogen bulb) and an ALS (blue Alternate Light Source). Why Willows doesn’t turn on the office lights when she enters, but relies on her hand-held, we’ll never know. Why Sidle uses her hand-held when examining a car in the brightly-lit lab garage, we’ll never know. Why the lights are off in the cargo hold of an airplane in one scene, and on in another are a mystery. Such derelictions to detail and reality leave the series open to self-parody, because they are ridiculous. Then, reality always bows to drama.

The LVPD dress code is lax for the characters pretty much wear civilian clothes, with the women dressed in provocative attire – bare-midriff, body hugging shirts, tight jeans – not far removed from the attire of the local prostitutes. Civilians, however, do not question the authority of these provocatively dressed officers. Occasionally they don ‘POLICE’ windbreakers for an outside assignment. The men dress casually as well. Lab smocks may or may not be the rule for laboratory work, and more often than not, they are unbuttoned.

The Crime Lab is state of the art with the following high-tech facilities: DNA Lab, Trace Lab, Grissom’s Office, Ballistics Lab, Audio-Visual Lab, Garage, and Layout Room. These facilities provide the CSI crew with quick results, unlike real-life detective work – no long waits for DNA results, quick returns on trace evidence tests, etc. In this TV world only hours, at most a day, pass between the finding of evidence and the determination of its relevance.

It is here, in the lab, that the viewer is treated to computerized visualizations, for example, of the trajectory of a bullet as it enters the body, tears muscles and organs, and exits. They are amazing visuals and indicative of the present state of computer-generated graphics more than the art of criminal investigation.

The crimes themselves fall into two categories, usually paired for each show. There are ‘ordinary crimes’ which have included a drive-by shooting, stalker, drug overdose, and robbery-murder. Then there are the ‘extra-ordinary’ crimes which the show depends on to hook its audience: an almost liquefied human body found in a container in the desert; a dead model discovered in a shopping cart under an overpass; the cannibalized body of a cheerleader found on a football field; a dead scuba diver lodged in a tree far from Lake Mead; and, a female tourist found dead in the press box at a Vegas high-school football field.

For those viewers who like to follow the trails and deduce the bad guys from the clues, CSI is a disappointment. It is not a ‘who-dunnit’ in the traditional sense of, say, a Sherlock Holmes or Perry Mason mystery. CSI’s intent is to overwhelm the viewer, to show how insignificant the ordinary person is in the high-tech world of modern criminology.

Felicity of intellect is important, mind you, but the viewer has little chance of identifying the criminal during the progress of the show. In keeping with the oddity of the crimes, the villain is not disclosed until the final minutes when some small, seemingly insignificant clue leads to the arrest of the unsuspected.

In the most recent program, a former convict’s hand span proves his undoing, at least in the eyes of Gil Grissom and Jim Brass. Honestly, though, it seems unlikely that such flimsy ‘evidence’ would go unchallenged by the defense. It’s equally unlikely it would stand as sufficient evidence to prove the man’s guilt – or innocence, for that matter.

CSI, engrossing as it may be, has parodied itself on occasions. In the dichotomy between science and human intuition, it tries to serve both. Often the simplistic takes precedence over the intricate and vice-versa, leaving the viewer dissatisfied with the outcome as in the example above (program aired May 8, 2003). Unlike in the classic police dramas (Dragnet comes to mind), the viewer is not an active participant in solving the crime, only a spectator.

CSI has spawned an offshoot that has proved quite successful for CBS. CSI Miami follows the same patterns as its parent. Let's hope there will be no more.

http://www.cbs.com/primetime/csi/main.shtml

by William Driver, Guest Columnist
May 12, 2003