Framing the Body, Staging the Gaze” Representations of the Body in Forensic Crime Fiction and Film (Ph.D
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David Levente Palatinus “Framing the Body, Staging the Gaze” Representations of the Body in Forensic Crime Fiction and Film (Ph.D. Dissertation) Peter Pazmany Catholic University Faculty of Humanities Doctoral School of Literary Studies School Director: Prof. Éva Martonyi, CSc. university professor Theories of Literature and Culture Program Program Leader: Prof. Kornélia Horváth, Ph.D., lecturer, Institute of Literary Studies Dissertation Supervisor: Prof. Kornélia Horváth, Ph.D., lecturer, Institute of Literary Studies 2009 1 Palatinus Levente Dávid “A test bekeretezése, a tekintet színrevitele” A test reprezentációi a törvényszéki krimiben és filmben Doktori (Ph.D.) értekezés Pázmány Péter Katolikus Egyetem Bölcsészettudományi Kar Irodalomtudományi Doktori Iskola School Director: Prof. Éva Martonyi, CSc. egyetemi tanár Irodalom- és Kultúraelméleti M őhely Mőhelyvezet ı: Horváth Kronélia, Ph.D., docens, Irodalomtudományi Intézet Témavezet ı: Horváth Kornélia, Ph.D., docens, Irodalomtudományi Intézet 2009 2 Contents Acknowledgements ...................................................................................................................5 1. Corporeality, Vision, Popular Culture: .................................................................................7 A Skeptical Introduction ............................................................................................................7 2. (Re-)Framing the Image ...................................................................................................17 2.1 T(h)e(rr)orizing Visual Culture .......................................................................................17 2.2 Violence and the Power of Images ..................................................................................25 3. Framing the Body: CSI: Crime Scene Investigation ............................................................31 3.1 Detection and Deconstruction? ..................................................................................31 3.2 Forensics, Science, Spectacle – Contextualizing CSI...................................................39 3.3 (De)Constructing the Look: CSI’s Visual Style ...........................................................54 4. Staging ‘Différance’ – CSI ’s Ekphrastic Bodies .................................................................69 5. Staging the Gaze: .............................................................................................................96 Murder as a Self-Consuming Artifact in Red Dragon .................................................................96 5.1 Con-Texts ................................................................................................................98 5.2 Enter the Monster: Cinema, Art and Psychosis .........................................................102 5.3 (Re-)Introducing Blake: Monsters, Bodies, Traumas .................................................110 5.4 Excursus: Imagination and the Phenomenology of Perception in Blake ......................116 Appetite for De(con)struction .........................................................................................125 5.5 Revisiting Red Dragon: fetish, gaze and the pathologization of the image ..................131 3 5.6 Aesthetics of Murder? .............................................................................................139 5.7 Conclusion .............................................................................................................143 Summary ..............................................................................................................................146 Összefoglalás ........................................................................................................................148 Bibliography .........................................................................................................................150 4 Acknowledgements There is, in fact, an endless list of people to whom my thanks are due. So many conversations have had their impact on this dissertation that it is difficult to know where to begin acknowledging them. I am most indebted to my supervisor, Dr. Kornelia Horvath in the Doctoral School of Literary Studies, Theories of Literature and Culture Program at the Faculty of Humanities, Peter Pazmany Catholic University. Not only did she provided me with useful and constructive suggestions and comments concerning the structure of the dissertation but she also gave me the freedom to explore new fields, at times only remotely related to her own professional expertise. Her doctoral seminars and our informal conversations contributed greatly to shaping the individual chapters of this work. I want to express my gratitude to Prof. Tibor Fabiny of Karoli University, who was the supervisor of my MA thesis in English Literature. His undergraduate seminars, his radiant enthusiasm for the various interconnected questions of interpretation, iconology, corporeality and violence as well as our innumerable discussions have, beyond doubt, formed and informed my understanding of these issues to a great extent. I am also thankful to Imre Dobri for his personal and professional friendship, for his silent encouragement and the experience of the special seminars we taught together at the Institute of Literary Studies at PPCU. At this point I also have to thank my students at PPCU for their contributions to and enthusiastic involvement in the seminars I taught. I have learned in various ways from the discussions with my “fellow body-snatchers,” 5 Malcah Effron at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, and Barbara Hollendonner at the University of Applied Arts, Vienna. My thanks are due to Ingrida Povidisa, University of Munich; our conversations about and shared fascination with corporeality and the forensic crime genre in particular have always meant great inspiration to me. I have to mention with the greatest appreciation Prof. Nick Mansfield and Prof. Nicole Anderson in the Program of Critical and Cultural Studies at the Department of Media, Music and Cultural Studies, Macquarie University, Sydney, as well as Prof. Marguerite La Caze at the School of History, Philosophy, Religion and Classics, University of Queensland. Their advice, encouragement and intellectual support gave a final impetus to the often painstaking processes of shaping my ideas and contriving them into legible form. My thanks will also go to the Tempus Mobility Program and the Norwegian Financial Mechanism for their joint financial support that enabled me to conclude my research at the University of Oslo. Also, I would like to thank the staff of the Department of Language, Culture and Area Studies at the University of Oslo for creating a calm and productive research environment in which I could work on the final version of the dissertation. But above all, I must thank my wife, Judit Mudriczki, who has been the ultimate inspiration and support during the entire process and to whom this work is dedicated. Apart from the patience with which she endured my absorption in the theorization of decaying bodies, I also have to acknowledge that this dissertation would have never gained its present shape without her gentle but constant prodding. 6 1. Corporeality, Vision, Popular Culture: A Skeptical Introduction Yet ev’n these bones from insult to protect Some frail memorial still erected nigh, With uncouth rhymes and shapeless sculpture deck’d, Implores the passing tribute of a sigh. […] On some fond breast the parting soul relies, Some pious drops the closing eye requires; Ev'n from the tomb the voice of Nature cries, Ev'n in our ashes live their wonted fires. (Thomas Gray: Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard) Defining the subject of this study is by no means an easy task. Each word of the title would benefit from the addition of an extensive footnote, or even an individual chapter, because each word stands out as a key theoretical concept, a distinct focal point, in recent discourses about culture in general and the culture of vision in particular. It does not even bring us any closer to this topic if I say (with a most indulgent and rudimentary gesture and ignoring the criticism attracted by the tautology) that the present study deals first and foremost with the body. This apparently minimalist but all the more ambitious claim requires an equal amount of explanation and clarification; it requires, at the minimum, the delineation of the context (most simply phrased as “In what sense?”) and the specification of the subject-matter (“What body?” or “Whose body? Is it the body proper, or is it the body’s ‘other’ that we talk about? Is it the white, male, heterosexual body, or is it the black, female, lesbian body? Is it the iconic body of the colonizer or is it the stigmatized body of the colonized? Is it a 7 modern, coherent, single and ideal body or is it a post-modern, fragmented one?”1). Alongside this claim lingers the suspicion concerning the possibility and legitimacy of a universal master-theory of the body, a unifying theory of corporeality , one that promises to frame and stage the figure of the body as a central symbol, as the source and apex of Western philosophical thinking. As one may correctly suspect (and as the abundance of recent critical output amply demonstrates), there is no unifying theory, no definitive conceptualization of the body. The complexity of the problem undermines the possibility of such a theory. At the core of corporeality lies an artificially sustained binarism: