Uncovering the Bones: Forensic Approaches to Hurricane Katrina on Crime Television

Abstract

Crime television reflects American culture’s desire to see the spectacle of trauma and its equal need for a rational narrative to contain it. The search for the motive behind a violent act informs its investigative structure and provides professional motivation for its (traumatized) investigators. Within what cultural theorist Mark Seltzer calls “wound culture,” crime television offers an opportunity for televisual spectators to gather around the wound, to visualize a “sociality [which] is bound to the excitations of the torn and opened body, the torn and exposed individual.”¹ Crime programs also offer the reassurance of a functioning system of scientifically informed justice, embodied by an exceptional investigator or interlocutor who can personally work through the trauma of living in a violent and risk-attuned culture.