Dreaming the Future Closer

(and now for something completely different)

I wouldn’t be surprised if someone already caught this, but it’s novel to me right now.  I was watching the season finale of Dexter on CBS and it dawned on me all of a sudden why, for all of the gore and sociopathy, Dexter seemed so familiar.  The plot, the character, are modeled on superhero comics.  In fact, not just any superhero, but an iconic and powerful one–Spiderman.  There are significant variations, of course, but the structural parallels are strong.

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My wife and I were talking about the most recent episode of CSI, featuring a murder that occurs at a rodeo.  We both felt that this episode, moreso than a lot of last season or perhaps last few seasons, captured something that was inimitably about the CSI experience. 

She observed that one of the things people don’t seem to get about murder mystery driven shows like CSI is that they aren’t about a voyeuristic attitude to death, but about a voyeuristic attitude to life.  That’s just brilliant, really, and it exactly captures what I liked about CSI when it started.  The death provides an occasion to examine a life, sometimes a whole microworld of lives.  Like a bat’s sonar, it throws the world into sharp outline.

The detective is an essential part of the process and in this Grissom, at his best, provided an essential structuring role.  His quirkiness, his macabre objectivity, cast a gentle light over the ensuing investigations.  His perpetual out-of-place self provided a remarkably non-judgmental window into some very strange social circles.

At the same time, he wasn’t immoral.  He had a strong sense of right and wrong, they were just unhindered by squeamishness.  He could, at the opening, make an off-color joke about the situation in which a body was recovered and by the end look calmly across the table at the convicted killer and respond to their layers of self-justification with a simple, “but you didn’t deal with these problems, you killed them, you made their resolution impossible.”

Between those two moments, he spun out ideas, explored theories, letting nothing but the evidence he discovered guide his judgments.  Biases were present, but quickly abandoned when unsupported by later information.  Alternative lifestyles were not demeaned, but regarded with a certain affectionate bemusement.

What might have been viewed as gross or deviant, became mere variation, a delightful panoply of human life.  The deviants were not inhuman, just differently human, beautiful in the way a strange new insect could be beautiful, fulfilling a secret and wondrous purpose if we only had the eyes to see into it.  Grissom arrived at the crime by befriending the world in which it occurred.  “Here, let me remove the disease so that you may return to your health.”

Compare this especially to the current portrayal of the lead in CSI: Miami, Horatio.  He is nothing but judgment, and the drama exists only to affirm that.  The evidence inexorably bears out whatever moral qualms he has with a person.  His insight, his judgment, his actions, are all impeccable.  When someone gets in his way or misleads him, the writing makes clear the fault lies in them, not Horatio.

So unerring is his judgment that we are provided with a storyline in which he goes to Brazil to engage in vigilantism, to kill a man who has threatened and hurt those dear to him.  There is no suggestion of moral ambiguity here.  Because Horatio judges him guilty and in need of execution, so are we.  Blood and death serve to illustrate Horatio’s perfection, an inhuman ideal who justifies our prejudices.

Beneath Horatio’s piercing eyes, difference becomes sin, a sign of the corruption that led to murder.  The acquaintances are so many already-fallen suspects.  It’s not a question of who is guilty, but of who is more guilty, who is the most guilty.  All along the way, Horatio uncovers other crimes, as if the whole world might be put behind bars to leave Miami empty but for the well-lit innocents who would remain behind to haunt it.