In that sense, there is a strong link between 9/11 events and the fiction of J. G. Ballard, inasmuch as they both concern a ’staged’ reality, a manufactured space-time (particularly in Ballard’s ‘mid-period’ novels, Atrocity Exhibition onwards). In early Ballard this sense of deep, geological, ancient time is usually more of a natural fact (as opposed to technological), a deeper ‘voice’ of reality that comes to claim the characters, undoing the more superficial cortex structure of the ego. Ballard’s characters are upper middle-class individuals, absorbed in a state of emotional alienation that can only be broken by the most spectacular transgressions.

In Ballard, however, we only get the point of view of the ubiquitous disaffected individual, but never from the point of view of the engineers of this staged reality. I can think of the architect in High-Rise, perhaps. But he himself is only unlocking a deeper layer of the unconscious through the language of architecture.

This is what annoys me a bit about Ballard: his POLITICS. What are the politics of Ballard?

Ballard, it seems to me, subscribes to a kind of naïve Freudianism. The technological landscape can only unlock what already pre-exists in the human mind. Or the key can be a liberating violence, an absurd violence beyond rationality. There is always a death-drive powering the characters and events. New ‘psychopathologies’ and configurations can, of course, be created (so, it is not a simple regression, or return to the primal scene, or whatever). But there is no sense of real human interests or other historical, social factors driving the manufacturing of these realities (for example, the enclave-resorts ubiquitous in the latest Ballard novels). There is always a sense of withdrawal, of entropic regress, which perhaps is (as R. D. Laing might have put it) a sane reaction to an insane society. Yet, there is no way out of this lock, except a resort to some transcendental mental structure; a natural, essential, pre-social drive. Ballard espouses a certain fatalism born out of a psychological reductionism. Can we ever escape this programming, this death-drive?

When film adaptations of J.G. Ballard’s work are discussed, Crash and Empire of the Sun are always mentioned but never Jonathan Weiss’s Atrocity Exhibition. Now, thanks to the Dutch film company Reel 23, we can see what Weiss was up to — they’ve recently released this buried work on DVD (and it’s a beautiful piece of packaging, too, filled with cut-up imagery and a revealing essay on the film’s genesis from Weiss himself).

According to Fright Site, the film “was shot over a two-year period in a number of disparate locations, from junkyards to abandoned military installations to the Philadelphia Museum of Modern Art. It was initially completed in 1997, but reedited from a near two-hour running time down to 105 minutes for screenings at the 1999 Slamdance and 2000 Seattle Film Festivals”.

OK. So what’s it all about, then?

>>> EXCLUSIVE Read Ballardian’s fire-breathing interview with Weiss, in which the director responds to this review.

DVD information
Aspect Ratio: 4:3
Sound: English 2.0
Region: 0, Pal
Subtitles: Dutch, French, German and Spanish
Duration: 80 min
Price: 24.99 euro
Extras: Audio commentaries by J.G. Ballard and Jonathan Weiss

Lead Actors: Victor Slezak (Travis, The ‘T’ Figure); Anna Juvander (Karen Novotny; The Woman in White); Michael Kirby (Dr Nathan)
Director: Jonathan Weiss
Director of Photography: Bud Gardner
Screenplay: Jonathan Weiss & Michael Kirby, based on the novel by J.G. Ballard
Producers: Robert Jason; Jonathan Weiss
Music: J.G. Thirlwell (Foetus)

REVIEW BY Andrés Vaccari

First published in 1969, J.G. Ballard’s Atrocity Exhibition is a demanding text to read, let alone to translate into film. Rather than a ‘novel’, Atrocity Exhibition consists of a series of short fragments, which Ballard described as ‘condensed novels’, and which were published separately over a period of four years.

Centred on a psychiatrist undergoing a mental breakdown, the book deals with media violence, psychological alienation, the death of affect, and the dark unconscious drives shaping the technological environment. It expounds the now-renowned Ballardian thesis that the barrier between interior dreamscapes and the outside world has collapsed in our hyper-mediated and manufactured world. For fans of Ballard, the book is significant as a preview of themes that would later be unpacked in more depth, and with more success, in novels such as Crash and High-Rise. Although it provoked much controversy on its publication, Atrocity would most certainly have been forgotten or become a minor cult curiosity if it wasn’t for the fact that Ballard wrote it, and that it provides another perspective on his remarkable artistic vision.

The main problem with the book, and with Weiss’s film adaptation, is the outdated cultural references that saturate it: Marilyn Monroe, Nixon, the Vietnam War, etc. The strength of the rest of Ballard’s work is that it’s not set in any specific era; at best, his novels and stories mostly take place in an allegorical near future that blends with the present. The locations, for that matter, are mainly symbolic (the obvious exceptions here are Empire of the Sun, The Kindness of Women, and to a lesser extent Millennium People). This imbues Ballard’s worlds with their characteristic interiority and topicality. It’s also the same quality that makes Kafka’s nightmarish worlds still resonate with us, the fact that they take place in their own tome and space.

It’s hard to justify Weiss’s decision to stick so faithfully to the book, especially since so much has happened since the late sixties, and its cultural icons and motifs don’t have the resonance they once did. Examples from, say, the Gulf War, the death of Princess Diana or modern advertising would have rendered much more effectively the prophetic nature of Ballard’s intuitions, as well as reinforce the themes of Atrocity. Weiss sometimes does use some more contemporary footage (most notably, from the Challenger disaster), so why not take the same liberty with the rest of the footage? In an age where we can watch surgical procedures on reality TV, the old footage of plastic-surgery procedures and Vietnam war atrocities seem strangely quaint, not to say banal and self-conscious. Perhaps the modern world has become too Ballardian for this film to tell us anything that we can’t learn from an average afternoon on television.

Another big problem with this adaptation is the nature of writing in general, as opposed to that of film. In writing, Ballard’s clinical descriptions convey the pornographic and violent nature of scientific rationality. This does not translate well into film. For Ballard, writing is, among other things, a space in which to reflect on the nature of media images, and take some distance from them. His style often parodies scientific or pornographic texts, as much as media imagery. But how do you reflect on media images with media images?

On the page, Ballard’s obsessive, solipsistic dialogue can be poignant and humorous. When spoken by actors, it sounds preposterous, and often unintentionally funny. A description of a surgical procedure might acquire an unexpected poetic tone on the page; on the screen, a surgical procedure looks just plain repulsive and pointless. The book can also be read at random; flicking through the pages, the reader can make his own novel (a bit like Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch). In the film, one is trapped into a linearity that clearly conspires against the spirit of Ballard’s original.

The Atrocity Exhibition is well crafted and beautifully photographed, although the images cannot successfully outweigh the aimlessness. Individually, the images work, but the overall effect is flat and contrived. Nonetheless, as a first feature film, it’s an impressive effort, showing great focus and marking Weiss as a unique talent. Another standout feature is the music by Jim Thirlwell (aka Foetus), which lends great atmosphere to the images.

The film’s extras include a running commentary by an enthusiastic and indefatigable Ballard, in conversation with the director. This in itself is worth the price of the DVD.

Overall, Jonathan Weiss’s Atrocity Exhibition is a nice cult object – and perhaps an interesting failure.

– Andrés Vaccari

MORE INFO
>>>>>> Read Ballardian’s exclusive fire-breathing interview with Weiss, in which the director responds to this review and all the other critics who’ve dared to cross his path.
>>>See Reel23 for bios of Weiss and Ballard; a Director’s Statement; and letters from Ballard to Weiss praising the film; a trailer from the film; and information on how to order the DVD.

The following is an excerpt from an official report prepared by Andrés Vaccari, on behalf of the JG Ballard Institute for the Study of Eroto-Responsive Kinetics, Canberra.

DISCLAIMER: The following photos have been modified by the patients referenced by this report. The JG Ballard Institute for the Study of Eroto-Responsive Kinetics, Canberra implies no endorsement of any kind whatsoever by their publication.

The Conspiracy of Grey Men

“The Grey Men,” Dr Travis explained, “play a pivotal role in these kinds of fantasies. The appearance of this archetype is contemporary with the dawn of large bureaucracies and the rise of pseudo-rational economic ideologies. The Grey Men share the ideal traits of bureaucrats, accountants, lawyers, businessmen and other exemplars of the human fauna spawned by industrial capitalism. They are emblems of efficiency and procedure, to whom people are abstract quantities, and society a series of equations of greed and demand. Their code words are ‘inevitability’, ‘invisibility’ and ‘profit’. Their language is a mixture of esoteric jargon and mathematical ephemera, with constant references to quasi-alchemical concepts like ‘The Invisible Hand’, the ‘Balance of Trade’ and ‘The Trickle-Down Effect’. It is not surprising, therefore, that we are witnessing a marked increase in these paranoid fantasies after the Liberal Party’s rise to power in 1996. It is not a coincidence either that patients are becoming fixated sexually on the figure of John Howard, the Australian Prime Minister – the living embodiment of Grey Man.”

The Mechanics of Inhumanity

During one of the studies, a series of photographs was presented to a group of schizophrenic patients, who were instructed to group them in a meaningful schema. This series included: 1) a diagram of a Watt steam engine; 2) Liberal Party figureheads; 3) the disfigured genitalia of anonymous car crash victims; 4) well-known environmental disasters; 5) Jeanette Howard, the Prime Ministers’ wife, eating at a corporate dinner; 6) queues at banks and Centrelink offices; 7) victims of police brutality; Victorian ex-Premier Jeff Kennett’s hairstyle; 9) Iraqi refugees at Port Hedland Detention Centre.

Sixty-five per cent of patients strongly associated the disfigured genitalia with various powerful figures in the Howard Government, a phenomenon doctors interpreted as expressing powerlessness – projected as psycho-sexual impairment – before a divisive and hermetic political regime. The Liberal Party figures were the objects of mutilation scenarios, and often the photos themselves were torn or cut. Also, forty-nine per cent of patients reported various elaborate, Sadean erotic fantasies. In these, they took submissive roles, often involving binding and genital disfigurement.

The Sleep of Reason

Dr Travis explained that the advent of discourses like “Scientific Management”, “Human Resource Management” and “Economic Rationalisation” had introduced a novel figure into the pantheon of modern psychosis. These prophets of efficiency and mechanism had become insistent iconic presences in the cosmologies of the deranged. Dr Travis said that the new millenium would bring nightmarish variations on these archetypes. He cited a recent US study, where patients in various states of terminal psychosis described terrifying meetings with cold female inquisitors, who would read out long strings of numbers, soliciting detailed information such as physical characteristics and financial assets.

These visitors, clad in neat, spotless grey suits, dictated intricate megalomanical theories that explained society through the workings of a cryptic “Economic Realm”, which they described as a land of milk and honey where the souls of workers and managers travelled after death, and which was ruled by a benevolent, all-seeing entity.

Assassination Fantasies

During one of the studies, long-term inmates were provided with Conceptual Assassination Kits, and the ensuing fantasy-elaboration process was monitored closely.

In 87 per cent of cases, the figure of Prime Minister John Howard emerged as a favourite target of assassination. Elaborate death schemes were put forth, many of which involved multiple automobile disasters and byzantine torture machinery. Twenty-one per cent of patients singled out Minister for the Environment Robert Hill as a preferred object of death, with the proposed methods of execution clearly echoing the present global devastation: death by toxic waste poisoning, melanoma and famine.

Psychotherapists concluded that the Prime Minister’s lack of any vital human traits – such as compassion, imagination or sexuality – made him a favourite vessel for various paranoid projections and erotic decontextualisations. In a minority of cases, this perceived emptiness facilitated reconceptualisation of Howard as a robot or a computer-generated image.

John Howard’s Conceptual Pudenda

Shortly before his unexplained disappearance, Dr Travis outlined the results of his research in a manuscript presently in the possession of a Federal Police Task Force.

CLICK HERE FOR MORE PHOTOS FROM AMPLIFICATION.

Amplification
A book of photographs by Jeff Busby.
3 Deep Publishing
ISBN 0-9580508-2-1

Review by Andrés Vaccari

This handsome and hyper-glossy coffee table book concerns the unpleasant subject of automobile accidents. It’s impossible, of course, to put out a book of photographs of wrecked cars without thinking of JG Ballard; in this regard, Amplification makes a good companion piece to Crash. But Busby’s collection of photographs deserves to stand on its own as a stark meditation on the pleasures and perils of one of the key technologies of modern times.

The pictures were taken at night. A mournful atmosphere pervades over these dismembered, abandoned machines. They look serene, almost like they are sleeping; yet their dreams are full of violence, still reverberating with the aftershock of death. There is no text whatever to accompany the images, and the desolate close-ups of shattered glass, panels and dashboards hold no traces of human presence. I found myself searching closely for traces of blood or other organic matter, any remnant that may bespeak of what happened to the missing victims. But nothing. The very configuration of automobile interiors, ergonomically designed to tightly accommodate the human body, seems to amplify the absence of these (presumably dead) bodies.

The photos are seductive and unsettling, almost pornographic. The paper is thick and sleek, underscoring the brash colours and shadows, delineating the crisp and cutting contours of crushed glass and skewed chrome. The choice of plastic, glossy paper adds a tactile dimension to the whole experience. It feels almost like vinyl.

Busby simultaneously invokes the stylised aesthetics of everyday hi-tech and the brutal ‘autogeddon’ taking place right under our noses. Readers of Crash may recognize the same dialectic fuelling Ballard’s prose, its hypnotic mingling of fascination and horror, its aloof poetic descriptions of the mundane urban apocalypse. Ballard exploited automobile accidents as a perfect metaphor for the logic of modern technology. Our cities have incorporated them into the overall technological system. In a way, our deaths have already been planned, risk-managed, integrated into the equation and codified into the urban landscape.

The automobile is a powerful cultural figure that embodies individualism, the implosion of time and space — all the liberating promises offered by triumphant ideologies of technology. It’s a machine that has coevolved with the city and directed the course of urban development, deeply shaping our lives in the process. In fact, nowadays modern cityscapes cater more for cars than for human beings. The automobile accident is the cemetery of all these dreams.

A certain cryptic logic suggests itself, a kind of technological unconscious. For all the planning and analysis that supposedly goes into the rational management of the technological systems that support us, the automobile acts as an extension of our irrational side. The car is a prosthetic shell that paradoxically exposes our egos and instincts, amplifying and releasing them from the usual social protocols. Automobiles tune into the repressed currents stirring beneath the surface of our minds—the frustration, violence, anxiety, or plain boredom and distraction.

Amplification is a must for that Ballardian coffee table, and a worthy addition to the genre of techno-porn.

..:: End
CLICK HERE FOR MORE PHOTOS FROM AMPLIFICATION.

Recently I’ve come across a piece by one of my favorite authors, J. G. Ballard, on a show I’ve become addicted to against my better judgement: Crime Scene Investigation (you can access Ballard’s article here). I was pleased and disappointed by Ballard’s analysis. Although a lot of his comments are perceptive, I think he missed some of the fundamental reasons for the appeal and popularity of this series.

I approach television nowadays with heavy doses of cynicism and trepidation. It’s hard to get me hooked. But after two episodes of CSI, I’m addicted. I cannot stop watching it, regardless of what my critical faculties say. I love it and hate it in equal measures.

I think the allure of the show derives mostly from what it borrows from the crime genre. Crime is the purest and most efficient form of narrative, one that allows endless permutations, but which adheres to a strong, logically seamless structure. I speak here of an archetypal, perfect crime narrative; one that perhaps does not exist, but which perhaps subsists in many remarkable examples of the genre. Every element in the story moves towards a final goal, an anticipated revelation, and every bit of plot must contribute to this final denouement. Hence the suspense, the narrative drive that compels reading, watching, discovering.

The characters are clearly defined by their relative position in a network of relationships: Detectives, suspects, perpetrators, innocent bystanders, etc. The detective acts as a kind of master storyteller, a demiurge enclosed in the world of the story, anticipating different twists and the possibilities that lurk behind the manifest events. The detective must weigh probabilities, hypotheses, plot scenarios, what-ifs? Form and content, plot and structure merge together perfectly in this genre, for each piece of text is (ideally) structurally necessary. The reader may even be allowed to know the identity of the killer from the beginning; and even then the crime story would obey this tight teleological structure. The story doesn’t even exist, it’s not a story, until we reach the end—and the whole edifice is glimpsed, and the swarm of possibilities collapse into a single reality.

The genre also permits a myriad interesting variations and detours. The crime narrative can be used to comment and digress on the society of the time. (Ballard himself has done this, in his remarkable foray into the crime genre, Cocaine Nights). A crime reveals skeletons in the closet, allows intrusion into intimate places. “What were you doing at 9:15 on Wednesday night?” The genre effortlessly opens the space for a piercing psychological intimacy.

A second dimension of the genre, always identified by theorists and critics, is the fact that it is concerned with morality. (This has, in part, to do with the historical beginnings of the genre in the urban, industrial environments of the nineteenth century.) The very fact of a crime—the act at the core of the narrative, the impetus—obviously implies a wrong, a morally reprehensible act. The stakes are high; the genre absorbs some of the functions of ancient myth, dealing with moral infractions, violence, monstrosity, the forbidden. In other words, the moral order.

Crime narratives are concerned with the social and institutional apparatus that comes to bear on such a transgression—as well as the human, psychological universe that surrounds the act. We may even be allowed to identify with the killer or criminal, forgive him or her, share his/her perspective. The narrative can also turn against this apparatus, exposing its flaws. The detective, as the human incarnation or focus of this apparatus, usually must be a sharp judge of character, a connoisseur of human nature. Again he/she is a surrogate of the writer.

Crime stories may not always have a ‘moral’, but they explore a moral universe. Even in its most jaded, disillusioned noir incarnations, the crime story still portrays a moral universe—or anti-universe where the good don’t always win, and where things are not black-and-white. Witness one of the great crime novels of all time, Dostoyevski’s The Brothers Karamazov, which realizes the philosophical potential in the old genre trick of having multiple characters, each with his/her own story. Each ‘suspect’ in Dostoyevski’s novel incarnates a perspective on life, a system of ideas.

CSI, of course, is nowhere as interesting as Dostoyevsky, yet it presents its own moral universe. The series boils down the structure of the archetypal crime story to its bare schematic skeleton, with some postmodern twists.

Firstly, the fiction of detection has undergone an interesting mutation in the age of forensic science. In this regard, CSI is part of a larger phenomenon, largely spearheaded by the novels of Patricia Cornwell, and the subgenre of ‘forensic detection’.

Nowadays every time you switch the TV on at prime time, you’re bound to see a corpse lying on a table, or some ghastly forensic procedure take place. The voyeuristic spirit of TV has now taken a worryingly morbid turn. What is the root of this obsession? Given the immense popularity of these shows, they definitely seem to touch a paranoid nerve. In fact, you need to watch the news to find their ‘real-life’ counterpart. Terror, fear, catastrophe.

But first, let’s look at the narrative side. In the subgenre of forensic detection (or whatever you want to call it) the whole process of reconstructing the events takes place in the laboratory, by following chains of deduction based on laws of physics, biology and chemistry. Whereas in, say, Agatha Christie’s novels, the detective must piece together the events from people’s testimonies and their inadvertent bodily or facial clues, here it is the objects that speak. Chemical substances, pieces of glass, blood splatters, footprints and, of course, cadavers. The only people the investigators are interested in are dead. Yet, the narrative thrust of the archetypal crime story is intact. CSI follows a very classic structure. Despite its flashy hi-tech gimmicks, we could call it conservative. All we get, in fact, is plot.

Grissom (the head of the crime forensics unit in CSI) is like a postmodern Sherlock Holmes. One of the things that makes Conan Doyle’s stories so delightful is that moment of revelation, when we find out what Holmes has been thinking, how he has logically pieced it all together out of clues that have completely passed us by. Grissom surprises us with similar inferences and logical gymnastics. But his reasoning is firmly techno-scientific. Grissom knows where to look because he knows his science. This is not to say that he’s stupid. He has hunches; but these are nothing without evidence. At the end of the day, what matters is the evidence, the scientifically incontrovertible facts. A CSI investigator might conclude from the impact lines in a piece of glass that a window was shattered from the inside. Grissom might deduce from the presence of a particular insect that a human corpse has been hidden nearby. To function properly, reason now needs a huge apparatus around it—a laboratory, lots of machines, a vast corpus of knowledge. Chains of deduction must be anchored on an institutionalized body of observation, on complex apparatuses of imaging and measurement, and on the strict following of police procedure. We have come a long way from the quasi-solipsistic, opium-fuelled rationality of Holmes.

That’s why we get no character interaction, no emotions, hardly any narrative ‘fat’. The suspects, once faced with the truth, hardly struggle. In the face of the unassailable evidence, they surrender feebly, blurting out their confession in time for the credits to roll. In the last couple of seasons, the creators of the show have been trying to give us more rounded characters, creating affairs and rivalries, and trying to generate more tension between the members of the team. The results are uninteresting, and add nothing to the show—in fact, we feel vaguely uncomfortable with their ‘human’ side. Ballard perceptively notes this austerity, and identifies the qualities of the setting, its strange claustrophobic ‘ecology’. Most of the action takes place indoors, and we rarely see the characters travelling anywhere. There are also a lot of close-ups. We inhabit the gaze of techno-scientific procedure: intimate yet inhuman.

Grissom is self-absorbed, literate, and quirky—yet somewhat infantile, emotionally stunted. Grissom’s obsessive quest for the ‘objective truth’ sits incongruously in the midst this technological paraphernalia. We get the feeling that his quaint idealism (‘science is about finding the truth’) has no place in the modern crime-fighting machine. And this is Grissom’s tragedy (and largely why we sympathize with him). His team-mates are happy to tag along, and don’t need this kind of grand justifications; most of the time they just look happy to have a job. I think we also sympathize with Grissom also because of William Petersen’s great performance in the role. Petersen plays the oddball Grissom with affection and humor, and the show becomes more interesting as soon as he walks into the frame. Despite his limitations, Grissom is somehow unpredictable; we just never know what he’ll come up with.

Needless to say, the purported ‘gritty realism’ of the series is curiously at odds with the fantastic, preposterous nature of the action. The dialogue is ludicrous, the attempts at humor fall flat on the face (when they are not in very bad taste), and not for a minute can we reasonably believe that we’re watching a faithful rendition of police procedure. For a start, forensic scientists are not detectives, and do not interrogate suspects or conduct investigations.

Yet this trashiness, this awkwardness almost, is central to the appeal of CSI. The patent artificiality acts as a buffer against the most unpleasant aspects of the reality that the show is documenting. Yes, because CSI does have a basis in reality, however dim; it hooks into powerful social and psychological forces. American film and TV (even US culture in general) can’t stomach realism. (Remember that realism is not about a faithful portrayal of reality but about verisimilitude: fooling the audience into thinking that what they are watching could easily happen). The only way Americans can recognize reality is when it mimics film (witness the attack on the World Trade Centre). A ‘realist’ crime show would simply be unwatchable. In fact, Australians make the best realist crime TV: Wildside and Blue Murder, for example. These shows are so stark and uncompromising they’re almost unpleasant to watch.

Even the celebrated, flashy computer simulations of CSI (in which we follow in clinical detail how a bullet enters the lungs, or the effects of a certain poison on the internal organs) are distancing devices, abstract and synthetic images that provoke a strange mixture of physical revulsion and intellectual remoteness.

Ballard misses the point completely. I think the massive popularity of CSI does not stem from the obscure echoes it strikes in the ‘collective unconscious’. Ballard likes this kind of explanation, and most of the time he’s quite persuasive. The reasons are partly psychological, yes; but they float much closer to the surface. CSI is, in fact, a parable about the War on Terror. It is full of paranoid warnings, admonitions, explorations of fear. The space the forensic investigators tread on every day is a landscape of death and remains, of accidents and rotten intentions. This is the modern traumascape, an unsafe and paranoid place, a netherworld of catastrophe and loss. No, there’s no heaven; just decomposing bodies, flesh cracked open on the stainless-steel table, organic fluids and chunks of tissue under the microscope. CSI portrays a world in which we have come to accept these things as necessary and inevitable—and, surprise surprise, it is our world. Perhaps the source of the fear is not limited to the War on Terror, but also to the war crimes that have ravaged the closing decades of the twentieth century, and which seemingly will also be a staple feature of the twenty-first. The terror arises from the collapse of the myth of globalisation with its happy vanishing of frontiers and cultural barriers. It is the dark awakening to the horrors of genocide and rabid nationalism. Maybe Grissom and his crew are symbolic stand-ins for the anonymous crews of forensic anthropologists that have to catalogue the mass graves in Bosnia, Sarajevo, Rwanda, South America, and countless other places.

But there’s a right-wing edge to CSI, a morally conservative paranoia that urges us to lock the doors and find refuge in—where? Where does Grissom find refuge? How do the characters gather the moral fortitude to deal with this horror on a daily basis? CSI doesn’t tell us. This is where right-wing moralism comes face to face with its own emptiness. Or alternatively (as a couple of shows have suggested) we must look somewhere else, outside this fallen universe. Shall we look to the church, to God for guidance? “You might not believe in God,” an unmasked murderer tells Grissom at the end of one of the episodes, “but you are doing His work.”

So, remember kids: In the immortal words of Robocop: STAY OUT OF TROUBLE.

– Andrés Vaccari