An essay for a class called “Crime and Investigation in Contemporary US Television”, a really good course, even if we did have to watch an episode of “Threat Matrix”, the worst TV show ever made.
“With Reference to the Representation of Forensics and/or Profiling, Discuss the ways in which Contemporary Crime Drama Portrays and “Explains” Violence.”
The processes of forensic investigation and psychological profiling of suspects, both through different kinds of analysis of a crime scene, are, of course, methods by which evidence is accumulated and a suspect “discovered”. Contemporary crime drama employs these varying methods of detection to structure a suspenseful narrative, but they also offer a representation of violent crime and murder which can be witnessed and understood in empirical terms. As Gil Grissom of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation is fond of saying: “the evidence never lies” (Pilot). These shows posit the suggestion of infallible processes of detection. Whether they actually are or not in reality, the detectives at work in CSI: Crime Scene Investigation and Criminal Minds, the two programmes I will be concentrating on, can always arrive at a concrete conclusion – whether this is proving the guilt of a suspect through forensic methods, or anticipating his actions through successful psychological profiling.
That these shows suggest infallible methods of investigation – “[In CSI] the physical traces of the crime are always determinative…forensics is no longer a subordinate technical pursuit but has taken over the whole sphere of detection” (Valverde, 84) – allows them to project an authoritative conception of guilt and innocence. The varying expertise of the characters always leads them to the guilty party, and “justice” is done. In CSI and Criminal Minds, amongst others, this “justice” is never subjective; it is always the correct and proven conclusion to the crime that was perpetrated. There are no existential musings over the nature of right and wrong, as can be seen in other contemporary crime dramas such as Homicide: Life On The Street.
In keeping with Michel Foucault’s theories about discipline maintained through a control based on “a meticulous observation of detail, and at the same time a political awareness of these small things” (Foucault, 141), the definitive projection of right and wrong, guilt and innocence, based on the “assured” sciences of forensics and profiling derives from the consideration of all factors, no matter how small or seemingly unimportant. From discovering a toenail left in a discarded shoe (Pilot), to the correct analysis of a childhood trauma (Compulsion), the small details at the centre of profiling and forensics, allow the investigators in these shows to restore Foucault’s conception of “discipline” to the reality of the show, and reproduce the “subjected and practiced bodies, ‘docile’ bodies” (Foucault, 138). This return to “docility”, a return to a “normal” society and the removal of the perpetrator, acts in part as a method for these shows to explain the violent acts that they portray. By its nature, crime television accepts acts of violence, but the empirical, faultless techniques on display in shows such as CSI and Criminal Minds go someway towards reassuring an audience that these acts can be infallibly solved, and “docility” restored.
So, how is this violence portrayed across the shows? CSI and Criminal Minds do tend to employ different techniques, most importantly because of the nature of the crimes that are displayed. The CSI operatives often deal with several deaths and crime scenes each week, while the BAU team in Criminal Minds focuses upon one killer, or “unknown subject”.
Each episode of Criminal Minds centres around the team’s search for said “unknown subject”, or UNSUB, through means of psychological profiling, the perceived ability to project oneself into the mind of the UNSUB and attempt to determine his motive and, importantly, next move. Former FBI profiler John Douglas describes the process thus: “this is what it means to walk in the shoes…the crime itself begins to talk to you” (Douglas, 19). Douglas himself admits that “our stock-in-trade is human behaviour and human behaviour…is not an exact science” (Douglas, 26). Douglas is clear on this. However, on the most part at least, Criminal Minds shows the process of profiling as being virtually exact; placing upon it the same emphasis that CSI places upon forensics. Again, the empirical infallibility at work reminds us that “normality” will be restored.
In regards to the portrayal of violence present in Criminal Minds, the fact that the perpetrator begins each show as an UNSUB is apt. As well as literally being an “unknown”, the notion of the UNSUB also implies a willful inability, on the part of both the characters and the audience, to regard him (or, far less frequently, her) in terms of “normal” society. Indeed, as Mark Seltzer writes, the UNSUB becomes, through his decision to commit his crimes, “the iconic figure of the deliberate stranger as society’s most wanted man” (Seltzer, 138). And while Seltzer acknowledges this idea as a cliché, the psychological profiling at work in Criminal Minds is based on nothing if not established clichés. The ability of the team to profile their targets so successfully derives from an amassed knowledge of common links between previously captured perpetrators (the commonalities between which build to form the profile), people who, for whatever reason, have moved beyond the acceptable constrictions of society, beyond Foucault’s ideas of “mechanisms of discipline…their spread throughout the whole social body, the formation of what might be called in general the disciplinary society” (Foucault, 209).
So, a basis upon a science that is by no means exact (John Douglas himself has said that the key attribute of a profiler is “judgment based not primarily on the analysis of facts and figures, but on instinct” (Douglas, 31)) can certainly appear to be based around cliché and conjecture, in the reality of the show itself these techniques are, more often than not, portrayed as being as infallible as the forensics at work in CSI. In the episode, Extreme Aggressor, team leader Jason Gideon perfectly profiles the “Footpath Killer”, who he them proceeds to apprehend in the next episode. As Gideon quotes in the episode: “there are certain clues at a crime scene which by their very nature do not lend themselves to being collected or examined” (Compulsion). However, these clues (“psychological” clues) are, in Criminal Minds, just as valid and important as physical traces discovered forensically. In fact, forensic investigation is virtually non-existent in this show, the mental and psychological traces left by the UNSUB become the key to his capture.
In this way, both the portrayal and any possible explanations of violence are entwined within a focus on the mindset of the UNSUB. Both the crimes and the crime scenes themselves are portrayed as manifestations of the perpetrator’s psyche. For example, in the episode Compulsion, the UNSUB sets their victims on fire, a compulsion deriving from a childhood trauma. The violence evident here is a projection of the UNSUB’s psychological obsession. In this regard, profiling is shown as the ability to separate the perpetrator from their crime, as previously they were intermingled into one being – the “unknown subject” becomes not only the mysterious suspect, but also their very “known” crime. As Elayne Rapping writes: “the violence – itself an isolated event that stands out from the rest of the action – is…connected to a story about the perpetrator, in which, by the hour’s end, a rich mesh of sociological and psychological life circumstances has usually emerged to explain his act” (Rapping, 58).
CSI utilizes this same connection between crime and criminal in its portrayal of violence, but on generally a purely physical level. Here, the perpetrator is connected to his crime not through a psychological mindset, but rather by the physical traces that they will – in the context of the show – inevitably leave behind. As Marianna Valverde writes: “we [the audience] tend to take it for granted that every activity leaves traces and that every criminal unwittingly sheds clues, including bits of his/her own body, which can be used to reconstruct what happened” (Valverde, 83). We return to the infallibility of the detection process; the violent act can always be linked to the perpetrator. There is no escape.
In looking at how violence is portrayed in these shows both the crimes and indeed the victims need to be considered. While both the CSI team and the BAU (Behavioral Analysis Unit) investigate homicides, the nature of these murders is often very different. In Criminal Minds, the team deal exclusively with serial criminals, while in CSI the scope and variety of crime is larger, covering everything from their own serial killers to bizarre accidents. There is a definite hierarchy at work within CSI, in both the crimes themselves and the victims of these crimes.
The representations of violence and victims in CSI often seems to depend upon the deemed “worth” of the victim in terms of the show’s ideology. While in Criminal Minds the victims are more often than not passive, “docile” members of society violated by “deviant” UNSUBs, CSI’s victims are often perceived “deviants” themselves. Setting the show in Las Vegas, America’s notorious “Sin City”, allows the programme to set up a strong tension between the deviance of some of the inhabitants and the valiant CSIs, positioned as defenders of the boundary between this perceived deviance and the perceived “normality” of society. While discussing the show Cops, Elayne Rapping describes “visually implied proximity to “normal” society, [criminals] are likely, so it is ominously implied to seep through our borders and spread their chaos to our own vulnerable communities if left unchecked” (Rapping, 61). The same applies to some extent to CSI but rather than a distinction being made between “the urban streets where the crime we are used to occurs” (Rapping, 61), and what lies beyond, the entire city of Las Vegas is presented as deviant space – garish, opulent, populated with prostitutes, pimps, gamblers, drug dealers, gangsters and so on. In this way, many of the victims presented in CSI are portrayed as part of this deviancy; they are “othered” – the call girl murdered by her pimp, an angry gambler throwing another off a roof. These deviant dead are “unruly” bodies, beyond the “political anatomy of detail” (Foucault, 139), that Foucault cites as part of the disciplined society.
This unruly “deviancy” is defined by the Foucauldian attitudes towards society that these shows project. The audience, positioned as we are with the investigators themselves, becomes part of “normal” society, the perpetrators and often the victims themselves exist beyond it, deviants. As Criminologist Howard S. Becker writes: “the sociological view…defines deviance as the infraction of some agreed-upon rule. It then goes on to ask who breaks rules, and to search for the factors in their personalities and life situations that might account for the infractions…people who have been labeled deviant…share the label and the experience of being labeled as outsiders” (Becker, 37). The shows clearly project the “agreed-upon rules”, and those who break them, either as perpetrators acting within the time-frame of an episode, or their victims who have decided to transgress, thus placing themselves below the CSIs (and us) on the perceived social hierarchy.
This othering of certain victims in CSI is evident in the way that certain bodies are represented in the show. The bodies in many ways become the “property” of the observant audience as the camera strips away any vestiges of privacy. There are extreme close-ups into ruined internal organs, skulls are sawn open, limbs are removed, severed heads become humourous props. Of course, in a show dealing with forensic investigation and autopsy this is to be expected, but the victim hierarchy is once again at work, and bodies are treated and visually represented differently depending on their deemed worth and their position in that hierarchy. For example, in Dog Eat Dog, a hugely obese man who has eaten himself to death has his stomach sliced open, the contents is removed and investigated. The situation is presented in a humorous way; such a death is only viewed as ridiculous and laughable, and the man’s obesity has already positioned him as deviant anyway. Compare this to After The Show, in which a beautiful, young, naïve woman – not yet one of the city’s deviants – is raped and murdered. Her body is respected by the CSIs (and therefore the programme itself) to such an extent that Catherine Willows asks her fellow investigators to leave in case the body is too much to witness. What this really, means, of course, is that it may be too much for the audience. Again, the victim/crime hierarchy is made explicit – how victims are represented in CSI depends on their perceived morality, physicality, age, deviance or lack of it. In terms of victimology, it is far easier for programme makers to elicit sympathy for, in a sentimental example cited by John Douglas, “an accomplished, well-loved, exuberant and beautiful young woman of nineteen” (Douglas, 19) than, say, a murdered drug dealer. As Robert Reiner writes: “[violence] will be interpreted differently if the violence is perpetrated on or by a character constructed in the narrative to be sympathetic” (Reiner, 379). The show’s social hierarchy determines which bodies are deemed sympathetic. The more deviant the character is portrayed, the easier it becomes for the show to explain away both their death and their subsequent evisceration by the CSIs themselves.
But, while this hierarchy of victimology is certainly present, it still remains for the perpetrators to be brought to justice. No matter how the show may represent or label victims, they are still victims and, as such, their victimizers must be brought to justice. The CSIs and the BAU carry out this action (again, infallibly). They are our protectors – “support for law and enforcement and criminal justice is increasingly constructed in narratives by presenting them [the law-enforcers] as defenders or avengers of victims” (Reiner, 392).
But as well as capturing the criminal, the continual repetition of images of brutal murder, torture, kidnap and so on that these shows portray demands, for the sake of prime time viewing figures at the very least, that the violent acts be “explained” and a sense of “closure” achieved, both in the minds of the fictitious characters themselves (a concern highlighted in the Criminal Minds episode Unfinished Business, for example) and, of course, the audience. While certain bodies in CSI are explained through their deviant natures, many are merely violated innocents. The populist nature of these shows, and the faith placed in the infallible processes of detection, demands that the perpetrator be apprehended. In fact, there is virtually never any doubt that the teams will get their man, and the capture of the killer, or UNSUB is assured.
Just as the capture must be generally inevitable, so must a motive be coupled with the killer, just as the killer and crime scene are coupled through the process of detection. It is not enough simply to have caught the criminal; we must be shown why he acted as he did. In an episode of Homicide: Life On The Street, a contemporary crime drama far removed from CSI and Criminal Minds, one detective rails against another for needing to discover a motive behind a murder in which guilt is assured. Theoretically, the same idea should be applied amongst the CSIs, at least in professional terms, in whose investigations the how is more important than the why. But the show needs to present motive in order to explain the act. This “explanation” may be presented through smart psychological detective work, a confession, or simply through one of the show’s many flashbacks. The need for an explanation (however valid this explanation may or may not seem) not only fulfils audience expectations and achieves closure for an episode, it also completes the empirical rationalization of violence that CSI projects, completes the success of the CSIs in maintaining societal order and defending the boundaries of the ”normal” against “deviance”. And while the processes these characters use are not designed to “explain” violence (as they are to an extent in Criminal Minds) – it is forensic investigation after all – the way in which CSI is constructed allows them to do just that: finding the perpetrator makes the motive apparent.
In both Criminal Minds and CSI, as we have seen, the investigators that we follow are positioned as defenders of a normalized, docile society. This is the society that “we”, as an audience, inhabit, while Grissom, Gideon et al function on its periphery, protecting “us”. Foucault asserts that “the panoptic schema, without disappearing as such or losing any of its properties, was designed to spread throughout the social body; its vocation was to become a generalized function” (Foucault, 207). Through the overriding message that these programmes project – that the methods of detection displayed will succeed every time – the CSIs and the BAU become agents of this “generalized function”. They fulfill the panoptic ideal of everyone under surveillance at all times, even after an event may have occurred, in that every action leaves a physical or psychological trace, leading to a self-policing, at least by those inhabiting the “normal” social sphere – an ideal designed “to strengthen the social forces” (Foucault, 208). Thus, the question arises as to why an individual, an UNSUB, for example, has decided to transgress, to rebel against the “social forces” and to remove themselves from a docile society and the generalized panoptic function.
The question goes deeper than merely assigning motive and meaning to establish dramatic closure, as occurs in CSI, and is far more central to the dynamic of Criminal Minds. After all, as we have seen, CSI is primarily concerned with the how more than the why. In Criminal Minds, the why is the key, the why is what will lead the team to their UNSUB. The technique of profiling – figuration of a suspect based on previously amassed knowledge, a deconstruction (or perhaps reconstruction) of a person’s psychology – allows ideas of the why to develop along with ideas of the who. In dramatic terms, this allows Criminal Minds to always establish motive in each episode. Often, motive will be revealed even before the UNSUB has been captured/killed. In this way, Criminal Minds, to an extent, becomes a show about the explanation of violence. The explanation becomes a driving narrative force, much as John Douglas seems to believe it does in reality. As Douglas writes:
“I’ve often said that what we do in analyzing a murder, that what any good homicide detective does is very similar to what a good actor does in preparing for a role. We both come to a scene – in the actor’s case a scene in a play or movie script, in ours, a murder scene – we look at what’s there on the surface – written dialogue between the characters or evidence of a violent crime – and we try to figure out the principal characters in this scene” (Douglas, 43)
This Baudrillardian assertion places motive and explanation at the heart of violence, both in Douglas’ conception of profiling, and the same goes for the team in Criminal Minds.
So, what kinds of motive are presented, and are they sufficient “explanations” for violence? The motives tend to be anything that places the UNSUB outside of the docile sphere. Throughout Criminal Minds, various forms of deviance are at the root of an UNSUB’s actions – mental illness (Somebody’s Watching), bizarre delusion (The Fisher King), childhood abuse (What Fresh Hell?), sexual perversion (Won’t Get Fooled Again) and so on. We, as an audience, are repeatedly imparted knowledge about what makes serial killers “tick”. Again, this information is to be taken as “correct”, every time. In Compulsion, Elle Greenaway informs police (and us) about the “homicidal triad”, three traits apparent in the childhood of many killers – bed-wetting, cruelty to animals and fire-starting. Time and again we are reminded that the actions of the UNSUB doubtless stem from trauma, mental illness and so on. In terms of Criminal Minds at least, the killers “create” themselves. The process of creation may be initiated by the actions of others – child abuse perpetrated on the subject, for example, but the decision to kill comes from the mind of the UNSUB. As Seltzer writes: “this amounts to an understanding of the serial killer as something like a terminal instance of the self-caused, autogenic or self-made man: a hero of the drives” (Seltzer, 137).
This idea of a killer’s autonomy clashes with conceptions of social influence in the “creation” of a serial killer; that “the killer’s self-representations seem merely to reflect back cultural commonplaces: it is as if they have become merely the occasion of social construction reflecting back on itself…the blank surface that reflects back the commonplace anxieties and crises of his culture” (Seltzer, 126). Seltzer disputes this, as does Criminal Minds. After all, it is inconceivable that the docile, panoptic society that the BAU are staunch defenders of could play a part in creating the very UNSUBs that the hunt.
Indeed, a theme running through Criminal Minds, and a great deal of other serial killer fiction, is the danger that investigators face when putting themselves inside the head of an UNSUB – namely, that the boundaries between them will become blurred – as Gideon, quoting from Nietzsche in Extreme Aggressor, says: “When you look long into an abyss, the abyss looks also into you”. However, while this danger is often posited, it is never part of the driving narrative of Criminal Minds: the investigators here are too strong, too dedicated to their task and too much a part of normal society for the possible psychological damage to affect them. The killing is left to those individuals too weak to overcome their deviant urges.
So, we return to specific personal motive as the explanation for violence, and the profiles which so confidently delineate the UNSUB’s motive. The reasons for the murderous actions of said UNSUB lie within his own mind; they have been developed by him over time, for whatever internal or external reason. However, this view has its problems, as noted by criminologist Michael Levi:
“The difficulty lies in resolving what we expect from an explanation of violence. To the non-clinician, many accounts of the ‘mind of the murderer’…amount to little more than a list of mental states and some ex post facto interpretation of how their family interactions might have generated those ‘compulsions to kill’, without any obvious reason as to why the crimes occurred at that time and not previously or against some other person, nor consideration of why similarly agonized individuals never kill or cause serious violence to others” (Levi, 816)
This statement points to a serious concern about profiling in general: it is detection effectively based on a “list”. Of course, while even John Douglas recognizes the possible shortcomings of profiling, Criminal Minds in general does not. Again, profiling and forensics share the same sphere of perfection in these shows. But the explanations these shows offer are obviously simplistic in the extreme, relying on the dramatic dynamic of the show to offer their “explanations” of violence. When considering both profiling and forensic investigation, neither of which, in reality, are entirely infallible, the explanation of violence in CSI and Criminal Minds only work within the shows themselves. They are reliant on the audience’s compliance with the societal conventions that they project. In fact, the very process of profiling itself creates motive. The fundamentally irrational and problematic nature of serial murder is quantified and positioned in empirical terms by profiling, when what is really happening is that each unique case is understood by perceived similarities to previous cases. So, while the UNSUB is treated as an “unknown subject”, both in physical reality and in his decision to remove himself from “acceptable” society, he is ultimately a “known” subject, in that profiling assigns him known and accepted characteristics, characteristics displayed and analyzed many times before. The profiling process builds his motive for him, in the minds of the investigators, and once this motive is established, the subject can be apprehended.
Ultimately, the processes of forensic investigation and psychological profiling are utilized in CSI and Criminal Minds to reinforce the ideologies posited by the programmes. The suggested empirical accuracy of these techniques suggest a world in which good and “evil” or, perhaps more accurately, docility and deviance are clearly delineated. Violence is perpetrated, and often on, those who stray beyond the acceptable boundaries of society. The victim hierarchies at work in CSI reflect the hierarchies at work in the show’s conception of this society, and as such, much violence can be explained away through the fact that rules had been broken. On the other hand, the forensic technique also allows no shadow of doubt to remain as to who the culprit has been. And while a motive usually becomes apparent, the very fact that forensics is an “infallible” science allows a certain degree of explanation of violence, or at least that the specific question of an individual will ever arise again. In Criminal Minds, the detection process itself becomes the explanation for violence, but this explanation is again based on the relationship between a “normal” society, of which the investigators are the protectors, and the UNSUBs, who transgress against it. The show eschews ideas of societal influence upon perpetrators, preferring to assume that deviance derives from the mind of an individual. In this respect, both CSI and Criminal Minds attempt to offer simple, clear explanations for violence that place responsibility entirely in “our” hands, as individuals, while we same individuals are constantly protected by dedicated teams of investigators who police the boundary between docility and deviance.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
· Becker, Howard S. “Definitions of Deviance” in Jewkes, Yvonne and Letherby, Gayle, eds. Criminology: A Reader (London: SAGE Publications, 2002)
· Douglas, John and Olshaker, Mark. Journey Into Darkness (London: Heinemann, 1997)
· Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (London: Penguin Books, 1991)
· Levi, Michael. “Violent Crime” in Maguire, Mike, Morgan, Rod and Reiner, Robert, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Criminology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002)
· Rapping, Elayne. Law and Justice as Seen on TV (New York: New York University Press, 2003)
· Reiner, Robert. “Media Made Criminality” in Maguire, Mike, Morgan, Rod and Reiner, Robert, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Criminology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002)
· Seltzer, Mark. Serial Killers: Death and Life in America’s Wound Culture (New York: Routledge, 1998)
· Valverde, Mariana. Law and Order: Images, Meanings, Myths (New Brunswick: Routledge-Cavendish, 2006)
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