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ARTICLE

INTERNATIONAL
journal of
CULTURAL studies

Copyright © 2006 SAGE Publications

London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi
www.sagepublications.com
Volume 9(1): 45–62
DOI: 10.1177/1367877906061164

Autoptic vision and the necrophilic

imaginary in CSI

● Sue Tait
University of Canterbury, New Zealand

ABSTRACT ● CSI changes the way television drama looks in the multiple

sense of its high production values, its novel autoptic and anatomic imagery and
the gazes it configures for the viewer. In these ways CSI showcases the
performance of forensic science, trades on an appetite for CG effects and,
through its graphic depiction of ruined corpses, draws imagery from Gothic
horror. This article examines the role of the corpse within CSI. How are the
viewer’s access to the corpse, and violent death, mediated through the gazes of
the CSI’s and the special effects used by the show’s producers? How might this
rendering of science and death contribute to a broader public imaginary? I
theorize pedagogic and necrophilic gazes upon the gendered, raced and
predominantly youthful corpse and elucidate that which is effaced by them. ●

KEYWORDS ● autopsy ● corpse ● CSI ● death ● forensics ●

necrophilic gaze ● representation of science ● television ● visual media

Autoptic vision and the necrophilic imaginary in CSI

For the true parallel of dissection, as an esoteric form of performance art, is

pornography. It is the same reduction of the human image into slices of
helpless meat, ripped out of context.
(Helman, 1991: 121)
Because they are so familiar, so evident, we are culturally blind to the ubiquity
of representations of feminine death. Though in a plethora of representations
feminine death is perfectly visible we only see it with some difficulty.
(Bronfen, 1992: 3)

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Crime Scene Investigation (CSI) is an international ratings success which

is screened in 28 countries (Dickenson, 2003), has spawned two spin-off
series, video games and a plethora of web-based fan activity. The show is
credited with popularizing the study of forensic science in the US (CBS
News, 2003) and, in what is termed ‘the CSI effect’, is charged with leading
jurors to place too much faith in scientific evidence (Willing, 2004).
Cultural studies has a history of investment in what science means and
what science is imagined to do, which has played out in the ‘science wars’
(Ross, 1996). As a site of public pedagogy about science, the positivist,
value-free rendering CSI presents warrants scrutiny. In this article I
examine CSI’s construction of science through the figure of the corpse. I
argue that CSI renders the corpse as the ideal docile body, a vehicle for
the constitution and performance of scientific expertise. This instrumen-
talized view of the corpse enables the performance of a Gothic eroticism
and the conceit that a rational imperative frames our looking authorizes
a necrophilic gaze. These dimensions of the corpse’s representation differ
in significant respects from depictions of the dead in wider popular
culture.
The weekly corpses on Six Feet Under, a recent series about a family of
morticians, are characters who meet an end and whose life is celebrated by
rituals of loss. On this show the corpse is both expertly restored to a simu-
lation of humanity and a powerful disruptive presence as the flesh of
somebody loved. In the premiere episode of the 2004 season of Six Feet
Under Nate Fisher, in accordance with his wife’s funerary wishes, buried
her naked corpse in the woods. Here the dead body was central to the
performance of grief while Nate’s transgression of cultural and legal norms
for burial drew attention to their authority and specificity. Similarly, in her
reading of several recent Hollywood films, Jermyn argues that the female
corpse can serve as a troubling presence, more complicated than an
expression of ‘necrophilic misogyny’ (Bronfen cited in Jermyn, 2004: 166).
Recent work in cultural studies has signalled the significance of the corpse
to the look and narrative of forensic and crime drama. Jermyn notes that
the grim spectacle of the corpse in Prime Suspect is used to signify realism
and discusses its role in representing the gendered dynamics of detective
work and looking (2003: 55–8). Nunn and Biressi observe that ‘Silent
Witness’ presentation of the corpse through staged scenes melds science,
sensational crime and theatricality to license curiosity and a frank,
unabashed (but far from erotic) gaze at the corpse’ (2003: 200). The authors
consider the manner in which the corpse is used to convey the empathy of
Silent Witness’s female pathologist: ‘[a]t the outset of most forensic exam-
inations she pauses to remind those present of the humanity of the body
before them: it breathed, had family, loved – the potency of human loss then
precedes the forensic scalpel’ (2003: 200). In turning sustained attention to
the corpse on CSI I explore and elaborate upon these aspects of its

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Tait ● Autoptic vision and the necrophilic imaginary 47

representation, illustrating that its depiction draws on both old and new
modes of showing the insides and outsides of bodies.
Rendering the anatomic effects of violence within and upon the body is
a principle way in which CSI visualizes the performance of forensic science.
In her discussion of the aesthetics of television drama Geraghty notes the
comparative lack of attention devoted to analysis of television’s visual
organization due to the perception that ‘small screen’ visual pleasures are
limited (2003: 33). While CSI’s plots are formulaic, the visual dimensions
of the show change the way television looks and, as a corollary, the way in
which we look at television (for example, CSI equips the viewer with a gaze
akin to Foucault’s (1994) medical gaze, which enables her to see the ‘hidden
truths’ beneath the surface of the body). I discuss the way in which CSI
signifies its quality and spectacularizes science through its high production
values and the use of elaborate prosthetic and digital effects. In my account
of these visual features and the gazes they configure I draw explanatory
devices from film theory, reflecting the cinematic origins of this imagery.
This aesthetic convergence between film and television, which reflects
hardware innovations such as home theatre and DVD technologies, suggests
that continued attention to television’s changing visuality is critical to
analysis of the pleasures and pedagogies of the medium.
My analysis of the way in which science and death are imaged on CSI
elucidates the politics of these representations. This may appear a dated
agenda when, as Turner observes, cultural studies of television currently
favour context over content and have ‘largely left ideology critique behind’
(2001: 378). My attention to the politics of the image is not intended to
imply mechanistic ideological effects, but rather to acknowledge the text as
the site where discourses which articulate particular interests, agendas and
fantasies are proffered. Attending to the text is central to an understanding
of the success of CSI’s formula and a phenomenon such as ‘the CSI effect’.
My analysis specifies textual features which invite particular ways of
thinking about science, death and bodies in order to interrogate the ways
in which ‘old’ issues around gender, race and power play out on fresh
terrain.

CSI as fictioned science

While forensic dramas are not new, CSI visualizes the forensic in new ways
and focuses on the team of forensic scientists. CSI also differs from earlier
forensic dramas in the range of scientific specialisations engaged to analyse
evidence and the extent to which the capabilities of CSIs, their vision in
particular, are augmented by technology. A variety of machines and optical
devices are used – microscopes, cameras, computers, alternative light
sources, gas chromatographs and spectrographic equipment – not to

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produce a type of knowledge, but The Truth. Within this fictioned universe
evidence is rarely open to interpretation; rather, according to the head CSI,
Gil Grissom, it cannot lie: ‘there is no room for subjectivity in this depart-
ment’ (season 1: episode 1).
What distinguishes CSI from other crime dramas is the focus on scien-
tific procedures. A variety of ministrations are performed with gadgets,
chemicals and elaborate machines, supplementing familiar modes of detec-
tion which rely on clues that may be gathered from a sociological context
or the psyche of the guilty. Physical evidence, its collection and analysis,
enables proof to be visualized. In the episode ‘The Accused is Entitled’ (3:
02) Grissom uses digital imagery in a preliminary hearing, convincing the
Judge to bind the case over for trial. In this sequence Grissom presents his
evidence using a laptop computer linked to a monitor. An image of a scar
on the accused’s knee is isolated from a photograph and enlarged on the
monitor. This is placed beside an extreme close-up of the distinctive
diamond-shaped pattern from the step on which the injury was sustained.
The image of the scar is resized and tagged with digital identifiers, then
layered on top of the image of the step. This is in turn superimposed with
an image of a blood stain left on a sheet at the crime scene. Digital identi-
fiers appear on screen to mark the correspondence between the cumulated
images. In effect this sequence depicts a simple assemblage of clues, but in
the hands of the CSI this evidence is translated and displayed via high-tech
signifiers. The problematics of photographic truth are elided and instead
this augmentation with technology and the expertise through which it is
deployed extends a panoptic gaze which enables science to succeed where
policing and the manipulations of lawyers fail.
In a fundamental fiction of the show the roles of other branches of law
enforcement are peripheral and the CSIs are inaccurately depicted control-
ling and solving cases, analysing the evidence they collect, questioning
suspects and making arrests. While in reality a Crime Scene Analyst’s role
is to collect evidence, in the world of CSI they are gun-toting super-
detectives with scientific powers. According to Dr Gary Telgenhoff, a
forensic pathologist who consults on CSI:
In real life, the homicide detective is in charge of the case. The CSA is an
evidence collector. They are directed by the Homicide Detectives and even
myself, the Medical Examiner. They do not ‘put the case together’. They do
not do the autopsy. They are there to take bullets and other trace evidence at
my direction, bag them and catalogue them. That’s it. That’s what they do.
They do not look under microscopes. They do not compare hair samples,
paint samples, bullets or anything like that. They do not analyze the insects
on the body. Nor do they reconstruct a face. In the real world, there are many,
many persons with their own expertise doing all of these things. (Dickenson,
2002: 2)

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Tait ● Autoptic vision and the necrophilic imaginary 49

In these ways CSI constitutes a performance of what I call fictioned

science. Unlike science fiction, which imagines the future, the fictioned
science of CSI excavates crimes of the past. Science is staged as an aesthetic,
with the performance of procedures set to contemporary music, while at
other moments the show adopts a pedagogic tone, rendering viewers as
initiates to the discourses of forensic science. However, because these
moments frequently rely on specialized terminology, the majority of viewers
must be excluded from comprehension. The effect, then, is to re-inscribe
science with a dense aura of authority which elides the partiality of the
scientist’s position. The presumption that edification on matters scientific
underpins the subject position that the show offers its viewers ostensibly
enables a prurient gaze to be displaced. What this conceals is that the
pleasure offered by CSI’s enactment of fictioned science may not really be
about truth-telling at all; it is also a means to excavate and visualize violence
in novel ways, proffering new renderings of body horror which derive from
autoptic vision.

Autoptic vision

A convention of each episode of CSI is the scenes which take place in the
autopsy suite. A typical scene from the episode ‘The Hunger Artist’ (2:23)
begins with a close-up of the face of a woman lying on the autopsy table.
The camera tilts to above her head to reveal a bowl of bloody viscera, then
pulls to an aerial shot which reveals a Y-shaped blood stain on the sheet
covering the body. These sequences elaborate a modernist imaginary: the
anatomized body as a vehicle for discourses of science and pleasure extends
regimes of representation and looking inaugurated in the Renaissance
dissection theatre.
The orchestration of the gaze upon the corpse has a long and broad
history: how the dead, or simulations of the dead, are depicted expresses
the aesthetic, epistemological and political preoccupations of a particular
cultural moment (Azoulay, 2001; Bronfen, 1992; Klaver, 2004; Llewellyn,
1991). Indeed, the orchestration of the gaze took on a literal meaning at
some Renaissance anatomy theatres, as classical music accompanied public
dissections. Sawday explains that in the 17th century, ‘The anatomy theatre
was a register of civic importance, an index of the intellectual advancement
of the community, and advertisement for a city’s flourishing cultural and
artistic life’ (1995: 42). Similarly, the anatomized corpse on CSI showcases
the state of the art of forensic science and, as I shall elaborate, television
production.
Sawday examines the Renaissance culture of dissection and the develop-
ment of what he terms ‘autoptic’ vision. Of this earlier context he writes,
‘Burton’s Anatomy [. . .] as it grew and grew throughout the seventeenth

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century, represented the panoptic, telescopic, protoscientific imagination at

work’ (1995: 3). Sawday explains the desire to see inside the body as a
displacement for the fascination, yet impossibility without trauma, to see
what lies within our own. This remains a cultural preoccupation: the BBC’s
Human Body series; the Visible Human Project, which ground away layer
upon layer of the frozen corpse to be photographed and stored as a database
(Cartwright, 1998; Waldby, 2000); the Body Worlds exhibition of human
corpses and the associated sell-out public autopsy; graphic renderings of the
opened body in crime and medical drama (Jacobs, 2003); and a host of
reality TV specials suggest a desire to see, if not the real thing itself, then
the most realistic depiction of the anatomized body possible.
Sawday locates this fascination with anatomy outside of a purely rational
motivation and instead connects it with a ‘poetics of dissection’ within
Renaissance drama, poetry and art. Of interest to my contemporary context
is the eroticism associated with death within this earlier cultural matrix,
expressed for example in Romeo’s speech to the supposedly dead Juliet:
‘Why art thou yet so fair? Shall I believe that insubstantial Death is amorous,
And that the lean abhorred monster keeps Thee here in dark to be his
paramour?’ (Romeo and Juliet V.iii.102–5 cited in Sawday, 1995: 46)
Of Ravenscroft’s The Anatomist, which barely left the London stage
throughout the 18th century, Sawday writes, ‘[t]he corpse is a focus of
attention, the site of investigation, a field in which to demonstrate techni-
cal skill (or lack of it), and, crucially, a place of refuge from the outraged
guardians of sexual morality’ (1995: 46, emphasis mine).
The corpse on CSI connects with this history in a number of ways. Exam-
ination and anatomization is performed with pedagogic pretension, which
enables the reproduction of the morbid eroticism which pervaded Renais-
sance culture prior to the ‘the ideal of a disinterested field of investigation’
(Sawday, 1995: 5). Science offers a refuge for the pornography of death. I
describe the gaze this offers the viewer as necrophilic because we are posi-
tioned to take pleasure from imagery of death, imagery which often pene-
trates the flesh.
Pinedo draws a parallel between horrific and pornographic imagery
whereby ‘[t]he horror film, like pornography, dares not only to violate
taboos but to expose the secrets of the flesh, to spill the contents of the
body’ (1997: 61). In figuring the opened body the slasher film has been
described as ‘carnography’: both pornography and horror that ‘expose what
is normally concealed or encased to reveal the hidden recesses of the body,
porn through carnal knowledge and horror through carnage’ (Pinedo, 1997:
61).
The autoptic gaze of CSI’s morgue scenes, which is often supplemented
by digitally produced shots which simulate bodily interiors and the effects
of violence upon them, are examples of this ‘carnographic’ revelation. In

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the episode ‘Blood Lust’ (3: 09) the body of a victim who has been shot and
stabbed lies on the autopsy table, a cavity the size of a basketball laying
open the chest from shoulder to waist. Simulated flesh is held back by
Grissom and Dr Robbins in turn as they peer into the cavity. An extreme
close-up allows the viewer to share their gaze upon the internal organs
revealed by the pathologist’s work. The heart in which a bullet is lodged
and its surrounding organs are rendered in sanguineous reds, moist and
shining with liquid pooling at the edges. The camera cuts to a view of the
room as the scientists move to the back of the shot to examine an x-ray on
the light box. Rather than track their movement, the camera remains
stationary so that the corpse remains in the foreground. In this way two
different looking relationships are established: one from the point of view
of the CSI (the autoptic gaze), and the other a carnographic spectacle of the
ruined body. According to Pinedo,
It is this very carnality that relegates hard core and gore to the status of
disreputable genres. As Richard Dyer points out about porn, both are disrep-
utable genres because they engage the viewer’s body (1985: 27), elicit physical
response such as fear, disgust and arousal in indeterminate combinations, and
thereby privilege the degraded half of the mind–body split. (Pinedo, 1997:
61)
As feminist commentators have highlighted the power which informs
pornographic representations of sex, so too do power relations inform
autoptic porn. In the ‘The Hunger Artist’ the eviscerated corpse, while
demurely covered by a sheet, testifies to the prior excavations of the
pathologist and conjures Sawday’s comment that ‘in medicine anatomiza-
tion takes place so that, in lieu of a formerly complete body, a new body
of knowledge and understanding is created’ (1995: 2). The CSIs’
discussion of evidence while examining corpses constitutes scientific
authority and purports to engage the viewer’s mind, displacing the effect
of the carnographic upon the body. In this manner the necrophilic gaze is
rehabilitated from its relation to ‘disreputable genres’. Indeed, the manner
in which the carnographic must be received is frequently illustrated on
CSI. A sequence in the CSI Miami episode ‘Tinder Box’ (1:22) depicts the
sawing off of a hand which is to be placed in a microwave so that evidence
clutched in a ‘death grip’ may be released. A CSI squeamish about
microwaving the hand meets bemused glances from her colleagues, over-
comes her reservations and starts the microwave. This illustrates the
manner in which some of CSI’s characters serve as the viewer’s proxy and
are instructed on the proper reception of the macabre. Dark humour may
serve to relieve anxiety around death, but there is no place for the squea-
mish; typically these characters are instructed in the correct mode of scien-
tific reception. This also instructs the viewer that the gasps and shudders
which signal the pleasure or revulsion of the body’s engagement must be

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avoided and while we may be discomforted by gruesome imagery we too

should let reason prevail. Of course the appeal of such imagery has little to
do with reason.

A necrophilic gaze

On CSI the performance of science, the pursuit of truth and solution, and
the apparent realism enable an explicit engagement with the erotics of
violence and death. Victims on CSI frequently meet their end in violently
eroticized contexts such as being smothered during sex, while watching a
peep show, following rape, to conceal incest, in the course of sex work or
upon discovery during a three-way of an unexpected penis. This conver-
gence of sex and death to recruit a necrophilic gaze plays out in the episode
of CSI Miami, ‘Spring Break’ (1:21).
The opening sequence of the episode depicts the partying young women,
who, taped for a TV show ‘Babes on Break’, are given tee shirts if they
bare their breasts to camera. The viewer occupies the gaze of the video
operator and his/our subjects demonstrate their consent to an inspecting
and desirous gaze. The sequence cuts to the next morning. Two young men
attempt to rouse one of the bikinied ‘babes’ who lies on the beach. As one
of the men shakes her, her head rolls back at an unnatural angle, her eyes
open and staring. Clearly she is dead. Later at the morgue the corpse
remains in her bikini as Alex, the forensic pathologist, bathes her, dis-
covering a series of bite marks on her thigh. This prompts her to swab for
saliva and semen.
A misrecognition of death informs the way in which the victim’s body is
initially displayed to the viewer. Because the woman’s flesh remains so life-
like (after all, the corpse is played by a living actor) and because she is the
site of carnal acts (both biting and sex) in death the body is still produced
as an erotic object. The necrophilic gaze becomes specifically about sex in
moments where cues of the erotic are used: panning and tracking shots
which evaluate the body are largely reserved for slender, young female
corpses and the coy refusal to reveal breasts, buttocks or genitals suggest
that the body remains a site of sexual looking after death. Indeed, visible
nipples and buttocks during a protracted sequence of Grissom collecting
evidence from a nude female corpse in ‘Slaves of Las Vegas’ (2:8) attracted
an advisory rating for nudity.
The corpse is also a site of sexual imagery through the circumstances
woven around a death. The show’s convention in these sequences is to
animate violence through flashbacks which are shot using hand-held
cameras and have a grainy appearance to signify vérité and the
voyeurism of videotape. That one of the looks the corpse may draw is
an erotic gaze is confirmed by the act of necrophilia on ‘Spring Break’.

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The perpetrator represents his rape of a dead woman as an honest

mistake: ‘It’s spring break, I’m not the first guy to find a girl passed out
on the beach’.
The display of the fictioned corpse is subject to a range of cultural
assumptions which indicate that while in death the corpse becomes meat,
this rational imperative is not without rupture; the corpse is still subject to
fantasies of the individual’s prior animation. The female forensic patholo-
gist on CSI Miami handles male bodies with an economic and indelicate
touch, while children and attractive young women are caressed, held and
cried over.
It is not just as an object of desire and scopophilic pleasure, but the
variety of objectifications and penetrations featured on CSI which violate
‘that special domain which belongs to the dead’. Sawday argues that ‘We
still acknowledge this taboo, even when we claim to be subordinating such
seemingly archaic, mythic beliefs to the demands of science’ (1995: 3). The
finger of the forensic pathologist probing a wound site for a bullet;
Grissom’s shining of a torch up a dead girl’s skirt to determine she is not
wearing underwear; the description of a victim as ‘stiff like a two-minute
burrito that’s only been nuked for a minute’ (1:11); the skull, boiled in the
pot to release its flesh; or the forensic pathologist’s comment that ‘we know
two things for certain: Jane Galloway died from a lack of O2 and she is a
natural blonde’ (2:19) transgress how we might imagine death as a sombre
and decorous business.
The inclusion of these details develop the necrophilic gaze while simul-
taneously contributing to a ‘reality effect’ through documenting the previ-
ously unseen. Of contemporary film culture Black writes that
Ever more talent and resources are devoted to making artifice seem natural,
the nonvisible appear visible, and the realm of the imaginary come across as
convincing and credible. In an increasingly artificial and visual world,
nothing must appear to be unreal, meaning that nothing must be left unseen.
(2002: 10, emphasis in the original)

The real and hyperreal: the look of CSI

CSI uses three different visual registers which each operate to produce
reality effects. The first is the ‘present’ within the world of the show. These
sequences are shot on 35 millimetre film, giving a cinematic appearance
through high-resolution images and high-colour depth. The flashback
sequences use visual language derived from amateur and documentary
recording, such as low colour saturation, a coarse grain and jerky
movement. The third effect is used in the digital sequences, or ‘CSI shots’.
These are described by Executive Producer Danny Cannon:

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‘CSI shots came from Anthony Zuiker’s pilot script. He has a great moment
where he says ‘camera travels with the bullet’ [. . .] If you are in an autopsy
room is the best way to just stand there and point, or get some pictures out
and do that? Or do we actually use the camera like they did in Fantastic
Voyage and dive inside that body and that will tell the story for us?’ (CBS
Broadcasting Inc, 2003)

The role of the CSI shot in the show’s distinctive look is explained by CSI’s
creator Anthony Zuiker: ‘When Danny Cannon took it that step further in
the pilot and had a periscope camera that actually periscoped into the body
and then pulled back out, in that pilot shot the series was born right there’
(CBS Broadcasting Inc, 2003).
The CSI shot is principally used to extend autoptic vision and render the
effects of violence within the body. What happens within the body as
violence occurs has previously escaped visual representation and this prolif-
eration of what is visible and able to be visualized is an example of what is
variously termed the ‘frenzy of the visible’, the ‘graphic imperative’, or the
‘reality effect’ and evokes the ‘unregulated gluttony’ of Donna Haraway’s
‘god-trick of seeing everything from nowhere’ (1991: 189). Haraway’s
description is particularly salient in relation to CSI’s shots within the body.
The desire to map new bodily terrain, for the sake of novelty and artistry
(wedded, needless to say, to economic imperatives), is expressed by CG
Supervisor Josh Hatton’s comment that ‘we’ve gone almost everywhere a
camera can go, and I guess that will be the challenge for next season, to
come up with places no camera has gone before’ (CBS Broadcasting Inc,
2003). This also suggests Black’s argument that ‘[l]ike the scientists they
originally were, cinematographers have much in common with pornogra-
phers, documenting previously invisible and even unimaginable scenes by
placing the observer – and quite literally the camera – in places they have
never been’ (2002: 29).
Further, the camera eye which produces our vision is a computer gener-
ated image, a virtual camera which appears photo-real but is not
constrained by the real. This virtual, mobilized gaze (Friedberg, 1993: 2)
becomes a vehicle of reason and visualizes for the audience what exists in
the CSIs’ imagination. Here the viewer sees what it is impossible to see in
reality: the corpse come to life, the world from a dog’s point of view, or a
cross-sectioned view of a knife’s passage through living human flesh. This
conceit of providing access to the real can of course only exist as a simu-
lation, a digital effect. In this way the graphic imperative, which extends
what we may see and how we may see it, produces a hyperreality.
Darley discusses the use of digital effects to ‘produce the effect of photo-
realistic representation in a scene that is conceptually fantastic in character
– a scene that could have no direct correlate in real life’ (2000: 108). Such
effects are usually discussed in relation to science fiction films, and in this

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context the digital production of the photo-real aligns with the visual
lexicon of advertising and music videos, producing a culture of spectacle
which ‘endorses form over content, the ephemeral and superficial over
permanence and depth, and the image itself over the image as referent’
(Darley, 2000: 81). As Lister et al. observe, this nostalgia for what is lost
as spectacular effects displace the ‘depth’ of classic realist texts idealizes the
characteristics once the object of film criticism: the way in which the real
was conjured through characterization, narrative and chemical photogra-
phy (2003: 148). Aligned with entertainment and youth culture, ‘special
effects driven films are commonly seen as illusory, juvenile and superficial,
diametrically opposed to more respectable aspects of popular culture such
as character psychology, subtleties of plot and mise-en-scene. They are often
associated with the technology, rather than the ‘art’ of cinema’ (Lister et al.,
2003: 146).
As with the carnographic image which derives from horror, CSI also
presumes to rehabilitate the CG (computer-generated) effect. While Associ-
ate Producer Brad Tanenbaum describes the CSI shots as ‘all those gross,
disgusting shots’ this imagery is necessitated by pedagogic intent: ‘we try
and educate you guys to the very best of our ability, to keep you guys on
the same page as our investigators’ (CBS Broadcasting Inc, 2003). So while
the CSI shot amplifies autoptic vision and stages gruesome imagery which
one may have previously been unable to imagine, our prurience comes with
an alibi: the pedagogic tone of the show; the sequences and camera shots
which enable us to see from the scientific and medical experts’ point of view
extend to their mind’s eye and suggest our edification rather than our
pathology. The hyperreal CSI shot and the visual pleasure it consists of in
these necessarily fictioned sequences perform two key functions: they spec-
tacularize science, making it exciting, and they enable us to look at (simu-
lations of) violence in new and specific ways.
Television domesticates brutality and the carnographic by bringing it into
our homes and subjecting it to the demands of narrative, aesthetic and
genre. That an episode of Oprah was devoted to CSI and forensic science
illustrates this domestication through the feminine space of daytime TV.
Throughout ‘Real Life CSI’ Stories’ (US air date 13 October 2003) Oprah
hyped the pending screening of a real autopsy. Oprah’s introduction –
‘[CSI’s] the show that has made science cool [. . .] they’re known for their
high tech gadgets. They’re also known for being ultra-realistic, no matter
how gory’ – is an example of the way the episode also functioned to authen-
ticate CSI’s relationship to the real, hereby the graphic, and the scientific
indexes the real.
The show included an interview with Marg Hellgenberger, who plays CSI
Willows. Hellgenberger described accompanying criminalists on the job and
attending autopsies, her proximity to death and science authenticating her
role on CSI. Elizabeth Devine, a criminalist and consulting producer on CSI,

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described the real case of Linda Sobek’s murder which she had worked on
and upon which the CSI episode ‘After the Show’ (4:08) was based. Viewers
were shown the real crime scene photos, and here death is grotesque. The
victim’s face is contorted, her body damaged and discoloured; after all she
had been sodomized with a gun and asphyxiated. In the episode of CSI
which fictioned this case the corpse is beautiful. This is one moment where,
despite CSI’s elaborate production of perceptual realism, ‘Real-Life CSI’
Stories’ implicitly reveals what is elided by its fictions. CSI offers a stylized
carnographic spectacle which, in significant ways, is not like the real:
Oprah: I hear that you refer to some of the crime scenes you go to as real life
scary movies?
Julie Wilson, LA coroner’s office investigator: They really are. Most of us in
today’s world are inundated with images, in scary movies, the movie of the
week on television. And what most people fail to realize is that this is some
people’s reality. For some people the moments before they die are filled with
terror and horror. And this is reality. This is real.
In the clip following Wilson at work, seven of eight corpses shown are
black and one is white. While US Bureau of Justice statistics reveal that
‘blacks were six times more likely than whites to be murdered in 2000’
(Bureau of Justice, 2004), on the first four seasons of CSI Vegas all but
several of over 100 corpses were white. This enables the effects of violence
to be rendered most graphically: the marks of bruise and blood more vivid
on the grey pallor of white skin. It may also serve to create the greatest
identification for the most desirable voting and advertising demographic,
who can imagine themselves potential victims of news media’s criminal
Others. This whitening of the corpse, and the media’s attention to the rape
and murder of cheerleader and model Linda Sobek tells us something about
what deaths (and lives) are sexy. A necrophilic imaginary is not only the
domain of CSI.
Indeed, Bronfen argues that the coupling of femininity and death ‘appears
as a popular though diversely utilized thematic constant in literature and
painting from the age of sensibility to the modern period’ (1992: 60).
According to Edgar Allan Poe ‘the death of a beautiful woman is, unques-
tionably the most poetical topic in the world’ (cited in Bronfen, 1992: 59).
While CSI’s necrophilic imaginary certainly reflects aesthetic considerations,
I do not think these can be accounted for in terms of this history of poetic
meditation on the artistic process, the meaning of death or ‘the articulation
as effacement of the unencompassable body of materiality-maternity-
mortality’ (Bronfen, 1992: 434). While this trope of the female victim may
sustain multiple meanings, it has in common with the history of the female
nude, and much of contemporary media representation, the female body as
the bearer of erotic meanings. A necrophilic imaginary courts the coveted
young male viewer. It testifies to the formerly live body as the site of violence

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and desire. It poses the female body as a site of danger (for those who
inhabit its glamorous screen rendering), and these carnal deaths, at the
hands of the peeper, the serial killer or the psychotic lover posit a particu-
lar category of wasted life. The erotic death stands in for the female body
that can no longer perform the erotic in life. It is a means of conjuring the
limits of sexuality within a context that at once cautions and punishes,
feigns objectivity, fantasizes power and, in speaking the sexual through the
scientific, poses the sexual from Sawday’s position of ‘refuge from the
outraged guardians of sexual morality’ (1995: 46).

The partiality and pedagogy of fictioned science

CSI rationalizes violence and death: they are subject to and contained by
reason, and thus their spectacular and carnographic depiction is framed as
truthful and realistic. This rational imperative extends to the way in which
the corpse and death should be viewed: as an object for science rather than
emotion, spirituality or othered cultural beliefs (autopsies may be objected
to on religious grounds, for example). Implicitly, this contributes to the
policing of borders between selves and others, illustrating Dale’s point that
‘[e]ach form of social organisation produces images of the dead human
body which come to play a role in the management of the human body
whilst it is alive’ (1997: 100).
CSI makes a case for hard science over soft: crime is not a social problem,
but a problem of law and order. This may contribute to a climate which
privileges the allocation of resources to solving crime and incarcerating
criminals, rather than the altogether messier agendas of prevention or re-
habilitation. According to Department of Justice statistics, the prison popu-
lation in the US was over two million as of June 2003, and 65 prisoners
were executed the same year (Bureau of Justice, 2005). In that year CSI
screened an episode dealing specifically with the issue of capital punishment.
The episode reflects the use of new forensic tests in the analysis of old
evidence, which has led to the release of a number of death row inmates.
The re-testing of evidence within the plot of CSI worked to confirm the skill
and authority of the CSI and ultimately to legitimize capital punishment.
‘The Execution of Catherine Willows’ (3:05) begins with an execution
by lethal injection. The prisoner is strapped to a table and a shunt inserted
into his arm. A drug is injected into the prisoner’s line and CG imagery
establishes our point of view inside the intravenous tube, following the
substance through the veins of the prisoner and into his heart. The shot cuts
to a close up of the man’s dilating pupil, then cuts back to his slowing heart
beat. A monitor sounds his death as a telephone rings to grant a stay of
execution. The prisoner is revived. Here the view inside the body fictively
parallels van Dijck’s description of the endoscopic gaze whereby a

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potentially shaming or sexual gaze upon the outside of the body is trans-
formed via imaging technology and ‘[t]he once private area of the inner
body has transformed into a public space of sightseeing, and as the ‘fantas-
tic voyage’ logic dictates, this journey is innocent, informative and even fun
to watch’ (2001: 226). In my example, the imbrication of capital punish-
ment within the discourses of human rights is displaced by rendering a fasci-
nated gaze upon the anatomic rather than political consequences of lethal
injection.
This prisoner is the first to be (almost) executed following a case for
which CSI Willows has provided testimony based on her analysis of
evidence. She tells Grissom that she hasn’t yet decided how she feels about
this matter, and he responds: ‘It’s just about evidence. It’s not up to you
whether he lives or dies. The case has no face.’ In the course of the episode
Willows adopts this rational stance and becomes reconciled to her role in
the capital case and the show ends where it began, with our point of view
inside the prisoner’s body as he is administered a lethal injection. This time,
however, CSI Willows is present and watches as the man dies, clutching the
hand of his victim’s mother. In this way the show posits a point of identifi-
cation both with the scientific (the interior of the body) and the scientist’s
clinical gaze.
CSI’s imaginary of scientific faith has consequences beyond the world of
the show. A story on William Petersen describes the character he plays as
viewing ‘the lab as a place where ultimate truths are discovered. Who’s the
murderer? How did he do it? If there’s a strand of hair or a partial finger-
print, science and high-tech gadgetry can provide irrefutable answers’
(Zaslow, 2002: 1). This representation of the forensic as the certain means
of solution impinges on the real world via the actor’s advocacy for his
fictional profession:
Petersen recently testified before the U.S. Senate to seek more funding for
crime labs. To prove someone is guilty, ‘eyewitnesses and confession don’t
work any more,’ he says. ‘In court, lawyers turn it all around. Criminalists
are the only guys who can prove you’re guilty. (Zaslow, 2002)
In what is termed ‘the CSI effect’ jurors in the US are placing too much
significance on scientific evidence and are making requests for forensic tests.
Prospective jurors are increasingly questioned regarding their television-
viewing habits (Willing, 2004). In a further spill-over into the real, CBS
News reported that CSI and CSI Miami ‘have created a whirlwind of
interest in forensic sciences [. . .] several colleges report long waiting lists
for forensic science courses, and dozens of others are developing courses or
entire programs in the science of crime fighting’ (CBS News, 2003). The
admissions director of one programme claims that ‘when students were
asked why they were interested in forensic science, most of them would say,
CSI’ (CBS News, 2003).

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Conclusion

Kirby contends that the accuracy of fictional representations of science is

less significant than the ability of entertainment to generate interest and
excitement about the scientific: ‘[w]hether the surface of Mars matches the
‘real’ Mars or not does not matter if the film is able to inspire people about
the possibility of Mars exploration’ (2003: 275). CSI generates interest in
the scientific by showcasing its performance as glamorous, imperative and
carnographic. CSI’s authoring of the scientific extends the visual language
of television by incorporating fictionalized renderings of autoptic and
anatomic vision. This reproduces and elaborates scopic and representa-
tional regimes within televisual culture by framing the corpse through
Hollywood’s aesthetic codes (rather than those of documentary or reality
TV). CSI’s sharp-edged images, high production values, elaborate physical
and digital effects (which are described by CSI’s physical effects supervisor,
Larry Dietwiler as ‘feature imagery’) lend television a cinematic appearance,
intensifying its visual pleasures through its ‘reality effects’.
This spectacle of death and science is framed by a high-tech and
ostensibly intellectual imaginary, producing a representational regime
which orders the unreasonable. This ideological labour frames images of
violence, and particular categories of gendered and raced deaths as fasci-
nating and spectacular (rather than ugly and terrifying) and fictions the
practice of forensic science in specific ways. The fictioned science of CSI
figures a compelling universe where crime is dealt with hygienically by
teams of elite scientists who bring truth to light with superhuman haste. It
presents a bounded and teleological world, where truth lies at the end of a
microscope and from an infinite range of possibilities the correct evidence
is always collected and accurately read. This preoccupation with how
crimes were committed displaces broader questions regarding the nature of
violence: why violence occurs is reduced to motive. Implicitly, what one
should fear is the pathological individual, never wider processes which
might produce cultural pathologies.
This positivist milieu authorizes a necrophilic imaginary, whereby visual
pleasure is produced through carnographic imagery, the eye’s penetration of
the body (a body often ruined in sexual circumstances) and a gendered gaze
upon the corpse (death is more interesting when it happens to somebody
beautiful). The depiction of the female corpse on CSI continues a history of
representation which relies on the female body to signify the sexual and
reiterates the modernist theme of erotics made possible only through death.
The case of Linda Sobek’s murder, which was fictioned on CSI, provides an
example of realism running secondary to the production of visual pleasure
via a comely corpse. This stages an ambivalence around the female corpse:
she is at once tragic and titillating, and thus sexual violence is domesticated
through its subjection to aesthetic and commercial imperatives. CSI’s

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preference for some deaths over others reveals the partiality of its fictioned
science, and while death and science are commodified in new ways, this
provides an impoverished knowledge of violence. CSI allows us to look at
novel imagery of violence but elides the social and cultural contexts which
may produce it. Instead violence is instrumentalized as a vehicle for the
spectacularization of science, reflecting the graphic imperative emblematic
of the contemporary mediascape.

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● SUE TAIT is lecturer in the Mass Communication programme at the

University of Canterbury, New Zealand. She has a PhD in anthropology
from the University of Otago. She has published on imagery of the male
body in advertising and is researching media representations of body
horror, the opened body and political iconoclasm. Address: Department
of Political Science and Communication, University of Canterbury, Private
Bag 4800, Christchurch 8020 New Zealand.
[email: sue.tait@canterbury.ac.nz] ●

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