Session 10(a): Screening Evil

Session 10a: Screening Evil
Chair: William Myers

Seeing Evil: Rational Science in CSI
Lois Drawmer
Arts and Media Department, Buckinghamshire Chilterns University College, High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, United Kingdom

This paper will examine the ways in which concepts of ‘truth’ through empiricism are mapped onto scientific rationality in the quest for exposing evil in the very successful US drama series CSI (Crime Scene Investigation). Traits of ‘evil’ are assumed through reference to both the judicial system (classifications of crime), and through broader Western cultural moral beliefs (moral panics, anti-social or transgressive behaviour as potentially evil), and, in CSI are primarily correlated to murder. The series’ focus on forensic medicine has a long tradition in television drama (from Quincy in the 1970s to Silent Witness in the 1990s), but CSI breaks new ground in the filmic techniques used to track the progress of the dying body. The repetitive use of point of view camera work reveals the full trajectory and penetration, of a bullet, for example, in order to produce a visceral display of physical annihilation. The aesthetic implications of such detailed and vivid depictions of the body on the point of death are significant in that CSI reproduces the brutalised dead body as both subject and object. In this way it purports to offer up the dead body as a speaking subject, and, I shall argue, it is no longer the human agency of the detective who seeks out truth and apportions guilt, but rather empirical forensic evidence becomes the scientific apparatus upon which justice and containing evil finally rest.

Good and Evil in the Cinema of Martin Scorsese: A Moral Study of Raging Bull
Jose Gabriel Ferreras Rodriguez
University of Murcia, Spain

Raging Bull is, without a doubt, one the most acclaimed movies in recent times, the consensus masterpiece of the 1980’s and a very serious contender for the title of best American film in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Shot in astonishing black-and-white cinematography, it also contains one of the most celebrated performances in modern cinema, by actor Robert De Niro, and probably the most intoxicating boxing sequences ever registered on film. But Raging Bull is actually even better than this trend of admiration suggests, and it’s certainly far more complex. Viewers often get so caught up in the virtuoso surface of Martin Scorsese’s film that they miss the hidden meanings, the undercurrent of ethical questioning and moral conflict that lend the technical flash a solid base upon which to build the movie. Martin Scorsese is not a frivolous or hollow filmmaker. He is a morally serious person and a thoughtful Catholic who has always showed concern over the clash of good an evil and the struggle to lead a Christian life in a corrupt world. In a movie like Raging Bull, often celebrated for his explosive violence, Scorsese actually develops a study of the moral conflict within the human condition where a solution of religious inspiration appears ultimately to be drawn. The experience of temptation, of fall, guilt, regret, expiation, conversion, regeneration and rebirth, all happen in the quotidian context of one man’s life and flesh, that of a working-class boxer and his moral decline, allowing us for a chance to contrast the approach to this character in the movie against the background of Martin Scorsese’s religious interest in this kind of behaviour.

The Seduction of Evil: A Look at the Media Culture of the Current White Supremacist Movement
Anthony Crisafi
Department of English, University of Central Florida, Orlando, Florida, USA

From digital cameras to the internet, the advancements in media technology have democratized the access to public information in a way that has produced potentially dangerous results. Hate groups, who before the mid Nineties were relegated to the farthest margins of our society, have found a home in the virtual space of the internet. In many ways this increase of activity is related to the ability of these groups to disseminate their messages directly to the public via the internet. For instance, www.stormfront.org first went online in March of 1995, and at that time was the first and only pro-nazi website; currently there are more than 4000 of these websites with the number steadily increasing every year. There is a clear indication that hate groups are becoming much stronger because of the ease that internet access provides them, however, what is not understood is how exactly the internet allows them to become so. One way to assess this is by studying the media culture of the current white supremacist movement. These groups are not merely writing pamphlets or creating websites; they are also engaged in using current media technology to create culture through books, magazines, video games, and music. For instance, Resistance Records (www.resistance.com) advertises everything from jewelry to t-shirts, from music and video games, and from books to political pamphlets concerning white supremacist culture. This suggests that hate groups are increasingly more interested in creating cultural narratives in order to attract new converts and adherents. Elissa Lee and Laura Leets recently conducted a study in which they observed and recorded the reaction of adolescents to hate website material (Lee & Leets 2002). Their study concluded that hate material on websites were more persuasive and enticing to adolescents if the messages were more implicit and artistically presented than explicitly demonstrated. Their study helps to define the relationship between how material is rhetorically constructed and how we as an audience read cultural narratives. Using Lee and Leets as a frame for this discussion, this presentation will examine some of the different cultural narrative hate groups are creating and how the new digital media makes these narrative so powerful.