CSI: Miami, or how we see life through our television sets every night.

Sometime last week, I was trying out a new ink in a pen to see if I liked it. The television was on following a late dinner and CSI: Miami came on. I'd recently read this interview and had been thinking about the things said there (warning: it's a long interview, but probably worth reading). I suppose that CSI is the sort of non-challenging television that Mr. Wallace identifies as problematic non-art, a non-art in which reality is basically unidentifiable and which presents the viewer with a passive experience that delivers the pain-free just world that people desire.

In case you missed this episode (I hope you did), I took notes on the plot:

• Opening scene: Mr. Reyes, a golf instructor, convicted of murdering a woman at his country club. Pointed out by prosecution that he didn't take the stand in his defense. Guilty. QED?
• Family views girl's body in morgue, flies escape body bag by the hundred.
• Flies are known to be a tropical variety that do not live indoors, thus not at the scene of the crime -- allegedly in the clubhouse.
• Defense attorney (Puff Daddy/P-Diddy/Diddy/Sean "Puffy" Combs/Sean John, himself) says he had one witness, a drug addict who came to him the day after the trial to say she saw the woman dead outside of the club. Info not brought forward because of her reputation.
• Cops track down addict in hospital just as doctors save her life following an overdose.
• Addict tells of seeing car with woman in passenger seat in alley.
• Cops find paint from woman's car in alley, investigate car for first time. Also find the infestation of flies (the fly they found in the woman (show gives 1:12,000 as odds!) in the alley behind pile of trash).
• Find an "odd blood pattern" in car. Stumped as to what made it.
• Eureka! A golf glove!
• Cops visit convicted man in jail who tells of woman gold-digging for a husband and of how she dated Mr. X (forgot his name).
• Cops find Mr. X on golf course and question him. Mr. X's cock-sure golfing golfing buddy questions validity of officer's investigation. Cop suspects him and sends Mr. X away, glancing knowingly at golfing pal.
• Cops search car's air filter for skin cells -- the murderer must have scratched his clean-shaven face in the car, so that his skin would have sloughed off and been lodged in the filter! right?
• Cop tries to obtain golfing buddy's DNA with "here drink this water" ploy. Puff Daddy bursts in as man's defense attorney. TWIST! "Nice try, officer," says Puffy as he drinks the water confidently.
• Judge denies request for DNA from golfing buddy citing weak evidence and golfer's (his name is Sheridan) ties to the Mayor. Cop implies P-Diddy is crooked, and the audience is supposed to understand that this is the case.
• Revisit convicted man's story of the crime: he saw the woman at the club after telling her she wasn't allowed back (she was a non-member and he could lose his job!), overheard to say "I'll kill you. Get out of here!" Ironing shirt at end of shift, phone call, places hot iron on top shelf of locker and leaves it unattended for ~10 minutes, returns to find woman stuffed in locker. Dead.
• Skin on auto air filter found to match sample on the iron, which had ended up on the bottom of the locker.
• Puffy shows up at lab and announces that he knows the iron was left unattended on the transfer back to the lab, so the match is worthless. Says something about some sort of tracking monitor and phone records.... (I didn't follow this, mostly because I don't think it made sense).
• Cop pulls over Sheridan for broken taillight, sees pills in the car that were the same that the addict ODd on. Puff Daddy is there! Cop leaves in a huff, but takes pictures with his iPhone before leaving the scene.
• Pictures blown up on space-aged lab computer to show in crystal clear 8"x10" detail that the light was broken from the inside and a human being (the addict who was the only evidence against Sheridan, obviously...) is revealed to be inside the trunk because they see an eye through the broken taillight. (Nonchalantly revealed that the addict had been missing since the last spoke to her). Also, iPhone users, how crappy is the quality of those pictures...
• Search Sheridan's house for addict (including under mattresses and in his dresser drawers as ominous, dramatic music plays) is a bust. No girl. Alas, Sheridan is taken into custody anyway.
• Memory flash! There were mylar (remember that they're mylar and not cotton, which will become important later) blankets in Sheridan's car at the traffic stop that are now gone!
• Puff Daddy calls cop over before leaving the scene to say he respects the law more than loyalty to a long time client and slyly reveals that the police should search Sheridan's other property, on which he wanted to build a par 3 golf course (easily 20 acres or larger).
• Search happens at night with assistance of infrared camera in order to identify voids of heat because mylar is a thermal insulator (coincidence? not in the script).
• Police find small amount of mylar sticking out of dirt pile, uncover manhole in middle of field (what?) and discover still breathing but traumatized addict essentially buried alive and gagged in the sewer.
• Golf pal confesses for deal. Cold and without emotion. He dated the woman, broke up with her because he was married, and decided to kill her when she threatened to expose him to his wife. He says, "I remembered the fight she had with Alfonso Reyes and I figured he'd be good to pin this on, so I called in a favor...." Remember: the locker was unattended and unlocked for only a 10 minute window while Reyes was on the phone.
• Scene cuts to faceless man helping Sheridan cram woman's body in locker (which just happens to be accessible for the exact ten minutes during which Sheridan arrives back at the club and wants to stash the body someplace).
• Scene cuts to cop approaching Judge on a bridge: "Sometimes the water's just not deep enough, is it Your Honor..."
• Judge confesses saying that he "didn't want to help," but he "didn't have a choice" because the man had helped him rise to his position on the Bench.
• Innocent man released and credits roll.

So here's my gripe. All of that nonsense is so far removed from anything that could even be considered close to the world that we experience as human beings, that I don't even identify the show with reality. Miami might as well be the year 7,251 on Mars and David Caruso might as well be some sort of talking space slug. These are not human beings, chance does not factor into life, there is never disappointment or evil, and Justice is always meted out appropriately. The man feels no shame for having cheated on his wife, but rather, the only reaction he has is a amoral calculation that if he murders the adulteress, she can't tell his secret. The judge is shown to embody the corrupt mindset of those who seek positions of power, yet takes no responsibility for his actions -- he "had no choice." We loathe the smug golfing pal and the judge in the end and feel guilty and bad for the woman who was murdered -- I bet you can't even remember why she was at the golf course to begin with, can you? I'll give you a hint: fancy country clubs have rich men who like pretty young women.

So, what? I sat in front of the television for an hour and watched the screen blink at me furiously (fast cuts, light flashes, bright colors), heard music that tickled my soul and told me which scenes were foreboding and which optimistic, and left the whole experience understanding that the bad men were locked up, that crooked judges get theirs, that lawyers who defend murderers actually have a conscience, and that the Law always... ALWAYS gets its man.

Sure, sure. CSI is notorious for this sort of low-level drivel -- it and Law & Order are all but mocked for how they always wrap up some insanely complicated plot neatly -- but it goes beyond that: all of today's popular television is this way. TV isn't all upbeat and ignorant of difficulties in human life, but all of it tells us that everything will work out and that we don't have to feel any pain. The same is true for movies. Think of the last romantic comedy that you saw in which Girl breaks up with Boy, Boy feels devastated and eventually realizes that Rebound Girl is the one he truly loves and not Original Girl, that Original Girl was a mistake of which he is lucky to be free -- pain followed by pleasure and fulfillment. Well, that's just not how life is.

Some films have done a better job of presenting a situation in which happiness is seemingly impossible due to social strictures (think Richie Tenebaum, who loves his step-sister and is unable to be with her). Yet, even these characters are difficult to identify with because they often take the most severe course of action in their grief. Many of us have been, or will be, heartbroken at some point in time by a love that we desperately want to work but ultimately realize can't, or won't. But, we don't contemplate suicide let alone attempt it. The gulf between the character's actions and what we see ourselves to be capable of in such a situation make identification with their experience difficult if not impossible. Moreover, such severe action is rarely an acceptable solution. I don't mean to attack Wes Anderson here. His Steve Zissou character actually is quite accessible, despite the absurdity of the pirate plot, the shark-eating-friend premise for the whole movie, and the generally silliness of the film. He has marriage troubles, a career on the rocks, experiences the loss of his beloved (best friend AND estranged son), and is hounded by an unshakable sense that he lacks a purpose in life. His course of action does provide an example for the way in which human beings can deal with the tragedy of human life: accept the loss one can't control and take solace in love and therein find a renewed sense of purpose -- note that he doesn't kill the shark, but cries while trying to identify with it, while trying to situate himself in the World. It's hard and it hurts, but sometimes it's all there is.

More often than not, however, television and film present the viewer with a passive experience more in line with what we want than what is. I don't mean to suggest that the largest entertainment outlet should be filled with unwed teen mothers faced with raising a child on their own, and who have lost the desire to be participatory in the World. Television isn't needed to show us that such a situation exists; we know and experience this, to varying degrees, ourselves. However, writers, directors, and producers aren't doing anyone a favor by papering over the fact that sometimes this experience is ineradicable, especially now that television and film has come to play such a prominent role in the daily lives of modern America, and the West more generally.

We need tragedy because a large part of our life is tragic. Perhaps all of it. We live and can't ever possess for ourselves what we truly want -- provisionally I believe this to be eternal requited love. Possession is one question, but eternal is not. We die. Largely we've stopped reading -- for those that do read, I'm not sure if contemporary fiction has a better record on this score than television -- so television and movies are the mirror to which we turn to understand ourselves in an abstracted sense. True introspection seems to be a lot harder and, if our taste in television is any indication, something in which we are becoming less and less apt to engage.

Television gives us what we want, but perhaps we want the wrong things. Difficulty and pain are a part of what it means to be a human being. To look at life as a game, one can't win if winning is understood as eliminating pain. Perhaps it's better if we don't medicate ourselves with images and stories that suggest we can. Rather, it would be better to understand this intrinsic difficulty of life and concentrate on finding a path to happiness within the bounds of the tragic element. Art is helpful. CSI is not art.