WHERE’D YOU HIDE THE BODY?

Because I don’t own a TV, I’m often struck by the appearance of entire TV genres that have risen up in my absence. The other day I found myself in front of a TV (a wide-screen sucker at that), and in the space of two hours saw ads for the following series: CSI, Without a Trace, Cold Case, and CSI: NY.

The basic premise of all of these shows, from what I could discern, is pretty similar: There’s a dead body and the investigators have to figure out how it got dead. So, in other words, we’re talking about Quincy, ME, only with cooler gadgets and hotter actors. In most cases—and I think this is crucial—the bodies have been forgotten, overlooked, or otherwise misplaced. The best example I can cite is the promo for CSI: NY, which I had the pleasure of viewing seventeen times. It shows a woman on a bus nudging a fellow passenger, apparently a black youth dressed in baggy clothing, who is dozing. His baseball hat falls off and we discover that the kid is actually …a skeleton.

Now, I want to make clear that I have never seen any of these shows. I’m sure they’re gripping and ingeniously written and expertly acted. But that’s not why I find them interesting. I find them interesting because they (and their massive popularity) strike me as a deep expression of the current national neurosis.

By which I mean that we, as a nation, are suffering from an odd form of survivor guilt. We are being told, almost constantly, that we are at war. We are aware that killing is being done in the name of our protection. Like the President, we see the casualty reports on TV. But we are not seeing any of the bodies.

This is the single most conspicuous aspect of our so-called war coverage. No bloody footage allowed, nothing that would make the consequences of our military operations too apparent. The media isn’t even allowed to photograph the caskets of the fallen. It’s as if the bodies of the Americans (not to mention the foreign combatants, not to mention the foreign civilians) have disappeared …without a trace.

Not only are the bodies gone, they have been stripped of any concrete narrative. Why? Because if we saw all those bodies, and learned something about the life that animated each of them, their deaths would become too real. We might start to ask the appropriate moral questions that ought to accompany preemptive military action. Namely: Why did this person die? For what cause? Was that cause worth his death, and the anguish felt by his survivors?

In this sense, we can see the deluge of necro-investigative shows as a displaced psychic response, a kind of compensatory pantomime. While the military are engaged in an elaborate cover-up of all those bodies (with a friendly assist from our free press), our popular culture crafts shows in which intrepid techno-equipped heroes start with a body and uncover the truth about its death. These programs are not concerned with morality, though. They are intended to deliver the viewer a sense of closure, of a job well done. They inoculate us against the senselessness of death by rendering death as a mystery to be solved.

I’m not sure I can convey the strangeness of all this.

But just imagine if a person from an indigenous culture with no access to media tried to take stock of our current historical circumstance. She would find a culture completely insulated from the abundant by-products of actual killing and yet curiously obsessed with precise, artificial renderings of death.

Americans have always had a tremendous knack for self-delusion, of course. We were founded by self-deluders, and we have been happily sustained by the habit. But I do think the terrorist attacks of 9/11 raised our capacities to a new high. All we heard about in the days afterward was the scope of the tragedy. Initial estimates, if you’ll recall, were up to forty thousand dead at the World Trade Center alone. And yet, oddly, we were shown very few images of human carnage. Instead, we saw an endless tape loop—the collision, the collapse, the rubble. The bodies simply disappeared.

A psychic vacuum was created, one we’re still trying to fill. I don’t mean to suggest that America’s death fetish is premeditated, or even recognized. On the contrary, it’s a powerful subconscious effort to explicate (and thereby tame) the horror of death.

One might locate the same paradoxical impulse in a Reality TV game show that subjects Americans to temporary states of starvation and disease when in fact these hardships define human existence in much of the world. Or a hit series such as Dexter, which stars a serial killer with a heart of gold whose elaborate torture methods are justified by the greater evil of his victims. (Don’t get me started on the sado-fetishism of 24.) Can it be any coincidence that Americans are offered such stylized visions of torture at the very moment our administration is arguing for its necessity against actual terrorist suspects?

Or consider the rash of recent films, such as Turistas Go Home, in which innocent Americans abroad—generally dressed in bikinis—are abducted by murderous foreigners. These movies arrive in the midst of a sustained campaign by this country’s leaders to cast our citizens as victims facing a villainous immigrant mob ravenous to pour over our borders and steal our jobs. (And the really plum ones, too, such as cleaning toilets.)

I’m not suggesting that the Bush administration has a secret pipeline to Tinseltown. Notwithstanding the Disney/Cheney collaboration The Path to 9/11, they don’t need one. These fables arise spontaneously, as a way of reinventing the world in a manner that absolves us of the violence carried out in our names. They are generated by the growing burden of our imperial guilt. America is talking to itself through these dramas, issuing frantic alibis that play more like twisted confessions.

It all comes down to dead bodies—the real ones, the fake ones, our profound national confusion over which is which. Do we even know anymore?

The figure that comes to mind when I consider this paradox is Lady Macbeth. As you’ll recall, she isn’t the one who does the killing. She sends her husband to do the dirty work. And yet she goes mad anyhow, rubbing and rubbing at a spot of blood that isn’t there, but was, and will be.