Conclusion

Abstract

In the introduction to this book, I outlined my surprise at the immense popularity of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation and 24 in a post-9/11 environment. Both dramas seemed to present almost opposing methods of detection and seemed to react to the national and international trauma surrounding them in such decidedly different ways: one with an insistence that only science can provide definitive, objective ‘truth’, the other one playing out increasingly violent scenes of torture that were, at least for me, difficult to watch in light of real-life political debates about torture. Researching the genre history, and, particularly, the history of the use of methods of detection in the genre, has led to an understanding that the difference in methods of detection has not simply appeared out of thin air as a result of a social and political discourse concerned with questions of how to come to terms with national trauma. Though CSI: Crime Scene Investigation and 24 may be extreme examples of rational-scientific and irrational-subjective methods of detection, they are not ‘merely’ television’s responses to 9/11; both are situated in complex industrial and aesthetic discourses and within a rich genre history. To view Jack Bauer as an heir to the Sam Spades and Philip Marlowes of hard-boiled fiction and film noir also helps to understand the text as, despite its willing and active engagement with contemporary torture discourses, not without a specific genre history.