at the top of the Nielsen ratings since the beginning of its third season. Recent figures indicate that over 26 million viewers in the US watch each new episode. However, my own interest in the show does not stem from its enormous popularity, although that is a phenomenon worth considering, but from research on what literary theorist and critic Mark Seltzer has called 'the spectacle of crime'. [START_REF] Seltzer | Bodies and Machines[END_REF] employs this expression in his study of 19th-century realist literature. But I believe that this concept, as well as its connotations, can be usefully updated, amended and applied in a different media environment where televisual dramas take advantage of digital imaging techniques to produce gripping spectacles. CSI, in which dramatic developments frequently pause for dazzling displays of computer graphic virtuosity, offers plentiful examples of such applications. However, electronic media do not just play instrumental and performative roles in CSI. Scientific inscriptions also appear as important terms in the series' semiotic vocabulary, supplying the most reliable (and often incontrovertible) information used to identify and locate the felons who set the law enforcement apparatus in motion in every episode.

This article explores how the proliferation of digital imagery on television may -or may not -indicate significant shifts in visual culture, signaling the advent of a new way of seeing, a new visual culture. Surely the term 'new media', used to describe digital electronic entertainment of various kinds, holds out this promise. The proliferation of computerized devices used in the production, storage, retrieval and distribution of information and entertainment has generated qualitative transformations in cultural forms and institutions, as well as in economic and political processes. But undertaking this line of enquiry cannot ignore the lineage of current imaging techniques, which can be traced back to 19th-century mechanical and electrical systems such as photography and telegraphy. 2 The grandchildren of these systems can be found both behind the scenes and on screen in many recent TV crime dramas, perhaps most notably in CSI. Their status as performers in and producers of electronic, digital spectacles calls attention to CSI's incessant referencing of scientific technologies and knowledge pertaining to human life. In short, the program offers weekly demonstrations of the benefits of modern science linked to efforts to ensure public security, as well as suggestions for how to bring this about.

Alongside the flux of visual imagery that harnesses the quest for scientific truths to scenes of very dramatic and always successful criminal detection in CSI there emerges a related and perhaps more significant feature of the series' departure from earlier (as well as many current) television police shows -the mobilization of a historically and culturally specific kind of subject. Victims and criminals alike are portrayed as transparent creatures whose every secret is revealed by means of resolute scrutiny. This aspect of CSI is not identical to what has become one of the most controversial effects of electronic digital media on social life: the

     :                    ,         
production, performance and inhabitation of 'virtual' identities and communities. Instead, the transparent self produced by CSI is neither 'virtual' nor 'real', nor can it be understood solely in terms of embodiment (or disembodiment). What is more intriguing is that the paradigmatic self proposed by CSI also entails the disappearance of the subject, a self rendered so transparent that it vanishes or remains perceptible only as the sum of inscriptions. 3 Thus, this study of CSI proposes two analytic vectors. First, the program produces an echo chamber effect, where attention-grabbing digital video images are employed to engage viewers in mysteries best solved using hitech forensic investigation techniques. Second, the program's dramatic visualization of crime detection maps a social realm conducive to certain kinds of subjectivity that differ substantially from the coherent, sovereign self of modernity. The article will proceed from the first to the second of these concerns by moving through a set of thematic explorations. However, there are a number of points at which any hope for linear logic must be abandoned, since the various motifs are intricately interrelated.

Spectacle

To begin a critique of CSI with an emphasis on its visual qualities, its spectacular features, may seem to neglect a central concern of much television criticism: the narrative elements of dramatic fiction and the meanings that can be attributed to these. Nevertheless, it is important to recognize that CSI is a cop show, even if the main characters are not police officers but the 'civilian' employees of a police department. Another, more significant, difference between the series and its TV crime show precursors is that the primary agents of law enforcement in CSI are not uniformed cops, plain clothes detectives or virtuoso private investigators. They are scientists. These protagonists care more about the application of scientific technologies to generate and organize knowledge than crime and punishment. The show's main character is Gil Grissom, a nerdy, middleaged, white forensic scientist who is in charge of the crime laboratory. Although Grissom occupies the position of éminence grise, the show does not perpetuate traditional notions of science as an exclusive white or masculine preserve. With one exception, his four associates are younger, less experienced and somewhat less nerdy. Warrick Brown is a black man and Catherine Willows and Sara Sidle are white women; Nick Stokes is the only other white man in the group. A hipper young laboratory technician, Greg Sanders, assumes a key role as the operator of the laboratory's hi-tech equipment. The main set is the Las Vegas Police Department crime laboratory -not a squad room as in most police shows, but like a squad room it serves as the primary site where the regular characters interact, the space to which they return after venturing into the world [START_REF] Sparks | Television and the Drama of Crime: Moral Tales and the Place of Crime in Public Life[END_REF]. (At a panel at the Museum of Television and Radio the series' 447 producers noted that their laboratory is better equipped that any real crime laboratory in the country; Museum of [START_REF] Museum Of Television | Videotaped panel discussion on CSI, including cast members, series creator and producer[END_REF] These features of CSI suggest a need for critical approaches that differ substantially from the standard questions that have been asked of television programs dealing with crime. Crime drama has been a staple of television in the US since it became the country's most popular form of entertainment in the 1950s (the first major success of this kind was Dragnet), and criminologists, sociologists, social psychologists, TV critics and politicians have all scrutinized the knotty relationships between television's depictions of crime, the police, social behavior deemed criminal and attitudes toward public safety. Some critics are interested in the medium's effects on those prone to engage in illegal activities, a position that assumes the probity of police institutions and practices. This approach tries to determine to what degree TV shows (and other popular media) inspire or glamorize crime. Others are suspicious of television's reinforcement of a moral order that favors authoritarian social structures and justification of related methods of social control. Although the latter critical stance is shared by researchers using various methods and emphasizing different analytic elements, the interpretative strategies undertaken from this position all involve unmasking television's ideological complicity with state power [START_REF] Buxton | From The Avengers to Miami Vice: Form and Ideology in Television Series[END_REF][START_REF] Carlson | Prime Time Law Enforcement: Crime Show Viewing and Attitudes Towards the Criminal Justice System[END_REF][START_REF] Donovan | Armed with the Power of Television: Reality Crime Programming and the Reconstruction of Law and Order[END_REF]Ericson, 1995;Scheingold, 1997;[START_REF] Sumser | Morality and Social Order in Television Crime Drama[END_REF][START_REF] Surette | Media, Crime and Criminal Justice: Images and Realities[END_REF]. 4 Despite the apparent opposition of the two schools, both study stories about crime and policing on TV to tease out their moral messages.

Compared to earlier television offerings, CSI and other recent shows inject a major new ingredient into this particular kind of program, treating crime dramas as occasions for audiences to engage with displays of power presented as technological mastery. In some cases, the police themselves wield the digital tools, such as the Compstat (computer statistics) system featured in The District, which allows a fictional Washington, DC police chief to illustrate deficiencies in crime prevention in order to embarrass underperformers in his department as well as to assist in catching crooks. Other shows such as Law and Order increasingly include scenes where a detective looks over the shoulder of a fingerprint analyst watching digitized records from the FBI's Automated Fingerprint Identification System (AFIS) database race by on a computer screen. They also consult regularly with medical examiners and ballistics specialists who hover over microscopes and recite the results of scientific tests. The protagonists in the newer program Las Vegas (which is not a proper cop show, but a first cousin featuring security officers at a fancy casino hotel) perform their duties in front of an impressive bank of surveillance monitors. But more than any of these shows, CSI relies on hi-tech gadgetry as instruments of discovery and discipline.

In addition to placing CSI in the context of contemporary TV crime drama, a critique of CSI must take into account what John Thornton [START_REF] Caldwell | Televisuality: Style, Crisis and Authority in American Television[END_REF] calls 'televisuality'. According to Caldwell, the aesthetic priorities of television underwent a massive overhaul in the early 1980s, when dependence on sound as the organizing principle was replaced by an emphasis on visual elements. Competition for TV audiences in the US in an era when proliferating cable channels threatened to chip away at the dominance of the big three networks provoked the development of distinct styles that gave each prime-time program a signature 'look' that set it apart from its rivals. CSI is no exception. Its style is replete with highgloss, color-saturated imagery that often flashes on the screen for brief moments, usually accompanied by fast-paced, driving music. The show's Las Vegas setting provides a rationale for lots of neon glitter. The CSI team forming the core of the show's cast works the night shift, which justifies the use of high-contrast lighting and lots of shadowy spaces to produce dramatic tension. In brief, CSI shares the ensemble acting, film-style lighting and camerawork, fragmented yet realist narrative and jazzy graphic construction of many contemporary series that appear on US television, with its own aesthetic flourishes intended to generate visual excitement. But CSI also displays other characteristics that are rarely seen in other cop shows. Crimes are almost always portrayed as flashbacks, often as imaginary reconstructions, hardly ever as prosaic realism, which continually disrupts the cause-effect logic that is common to visual narratives. At the same time, the series rarely treads upon the supernatural territory occupied by series such as The X-Files, Profiler or various Stephen King-inspired (or scripted) series. Several episodes have involved paranormal adepts who seem able to perform detective work without bothering with scientific instruments or methods. Still, these are rare, perhaps because emphasis on the uncanny would signal a retreat from the show's basic commitment to well-supported, objective, deductive reasoning.

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However, as a spectacle, CSI demands a revision of Caldwell's concept of televisuality. In particular, he insists on the autonomy of visual elements, proposing that '[t]he practice of graphic performance tends . . . to resist analysis as content, since it comes across as an autonomous process based on the potentially endless permutation [of] style and form ' (1995: 147). As a result, he plays down the social resonance of spectacle. In his study of realist fiction, [START_REF] Seltzer | Bodies and Machines[END_REF] suggests a more productive approach. In his discussion of a 1893 novel by Stephen Crane, Seltzer remarks that violence is converted into spectacle through the intervention of the police, who are themselves turned into an entertaining spectacle. More than a century later, applications of digital imaging techniques in both law enforcement and television production have aligned televisual style with police practices. And computer science provides both with the tools of power. CSI exploits this technical affinity. This is not merely another example of the fluid interchange between digital formats, referred to as convergence in 'new media' studies. Rather, the incom-449 O2@6K? O2@@@@@6X? W2@@@@@@@@1? ?O&@@@@@@@@@@? ?W2@@@@@@@@@@@@L W&@@@@@@@@@@@@@1 ?O&@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ O2@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@L? W2@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@)X ?O&@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@)X? ?O2@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@)X ?O2@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@1 ?O2@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ W2@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ ?W&@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ W&@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ ?W&@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ O&@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ ?O2@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ ?W2@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ O&@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@5 W2@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@? ?W&@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@1 W&@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ ?W&@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ W&@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ ?O&@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@5 ?O2@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@H @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@0M?e?I4@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@? @@@@@@@@@@@0M?hfI4@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@? ?J@@@@@@@@(M ?I'@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@5? W&@@@@@@@(Y?

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Photography

CSI has accomplished a rare feat for commercial television: bridging the divide between modern science (not science fiction) and entertainment.

Although this may seem an odd coupling, the two cultural fields share one important attribute: both concentrate upon the production of new kinds of knowledge using new kinds of scientific apparatuses and the inscriptions these produce. Of course, empirical science from the 17th century onwards has been premised upon just such developments. And so, too, has plentiful entertainment. Enlightenment culture was the first to bring the two together. Barbara Maria Stafford notes that telescopes and microscopes were popular as home entertainment in 17th-century Europe:

Until the middle of the nineteenth century, traveling exhibitionists set up raree shows stocked with monsters, magic lanterns and peep boxes.

Perspective games such as concertina-folded views, anamorphoses, mirror metamorphoses and polyoptic pictures were both playful and scientific amusements. (1994: 366) Still, skepticism regarding visual imagery produced with optical devices abounded, informed by fears that appearances would be mistaken for substance.

Another instance of images produced for scientific purposes but also consumed as amusement was X-ray photography, an accidental discovery made in 1895. These apparently non-intrusive vistas of the innards of living beings engendered what was known as 'X-ray mania', until their pathological properties became accepted as a matter of fact (Cartwright, 1995: 107). There were X-ray movies as well. Cinema in general could be described as the most famous example of popular enthusiasm for a new optical technology almost as soon as it made its public debut at the end of the 19th century. Concomitantly, the cinematic apparatus, as well as its progenitor, photography, was recognized and quickly integrated into biological research and medicine [START_REF] Cartwright | Screening the Body: Tracing Medicine's Visual Culture[END_REF].

In sum, optical apparatuses, cameras and photographic media in particular, occupy a privileged place in the history of the relationship between science and popular culture. The reason is simple: a camera mechanically records an image by means of chemistry or, nowadays, electronics, free from human manipulation. The photographic image, if not intentionally distorted, is intended as a precise record of what is in front of the camera. In the laboratory, the camera has been employed by scientists as a guarantee of objective observation and inscription of experimental phenomena, since a camera has no sentiments, soul, consciousness, politics or biases -or so commonsense wisdom tells us. Cameras in tandem with microscopes -a duet performed almost as soon as the daguerreotype process was made public in 1839 -epitomize the concept of depersonalized vision.

The intimate relationship between photographic imagery and scientific realism in the realm of policing was established on similar grounds. As early as the 1830s, photographic media provided police departments with an invaluable tool [START_REF] Tagg | Power and Photography -A Means of Surveillance: The Photograph as Evidence in Law[END_REF]. Alphonse Bertillon, chief of the Paris police at the end of the 19th century, was not the first but probably the most famous advocate of police photography for criminal identification. He augmented his system of criminal classification and identification, which consisted of anthropometric measurements of the bodies of criminal suspects, with what became known as 'mugshots' [START_REF] Sekula | Body and the Archive[END_REF]. The information obtained was compared with a huge file comprising cards with the measurements and photos of previously detained criminal suspects, housed at the Paris Department of Judicial Identification. Significantly, Bertillon was among the first police officials to photograph crime scenes in murder cases, sometimes operating the camera himself [START_REF] Parry | Crime Album Stories: Paris, 1886-1902[END_REF].

The formation and proliferation of police departments in the 19th century came about because of the perceived need for increased knowledge concerning rapidly growing populations of modern cities. A related factor was the reconceptualization of crimes, previously regarded as actions per se but now understood as actions carried out by deviant individuals [START_REF] Foucault | Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison[END_REF](Foucault, [1975]]). Mugshots codified the connection between particular people and criminal behavior and became a mainstay in the project of policing. And around the turn of the century, police photography added another rational system of identification to its repertoire: fingerprints, which until recently were recorded and archived as photographs [START_REF] Cole | Suspect Identities: A History of Fingerprinting and Criminal Investigation[END_REF]. Not only is photography the medium used to preserve fingerprints; the two can be linked metaphorically. In William J. Mitchell's words, a photograph 'is like a direct physical imprint, like a fingerprint left at the scene of a crime or lipstick traces on your collar. A correspondence with reality is thus causally established ' (2001: 24).

Therefore, it is not surprising that when the criminalists in CSI go to work at a crime scene they methodically take photographs, which presumably will be used when testifying as expert witnesses in court (although we hardly ever see this phase of the process, a point that will be explored later). In addition to portraying an actual police procedure, these scenes present a visual reiteration of the terms upon which the show is premised, reminding viewers that visual knowledge is at stake. Even when cameras are absent in the depiction of a particular investigation, every episode offers persistent references to the primacy of vision, most notably when 451 the crime scene investigators (CSIs) brandish what might be considered the program's trademark: sleek Mag-lite high-intensity flashlights. An almost predictable moment in every episode is a close-up of one of the CSIs delicately describing the area where the crime occurred with her or his flashlight, scrutinizing some minutia that will be plucked from the scene and sent to the laboratory for analysis.

Once in the crime laboratory, the opportunities for eye-catching images emphasizing knowledge gained through visual observation expand exponentially. The laboratory is also where the analogy between digital video effects and digital scientific equipment is most pronounced. The typical shots that accomplish this fill the screen with (supposedly) microscopic views, enlarged electronically so the scientists and the audience can examine, for example, a single carpet fiber, a particle of soil or a fragment of broken glass. Computer screens display data of all kinds. Specialized software simulates the process of facial reconstruction. Digital printouts of DNA analyses appear routinely, offering certain proof of guilt or innocence. Computer programs generate floor plans of entire crime scenes.

Curiously, the notorious potential for altering digital photographic imagery is never mentioned. Of course, tampering with photographs was hardly unknown before the introduction of digital cameras and scanners. Many still view digital photographs as ambiguous representations of reality, and there is little doubt that the mirror-of-nature quality of photography has been seriously undermined in recent years as visual culture becomes increasingly digitized. But to acknowledge this would create a contradiction between the certainties of science that television's CSIs depend upon to assert their authority, and the uncertainty produced by pictures of the world composed of something as imperceptible as electrons, organized by something as immaterial as binary code.

Vision

The collection of artefacts of crimes and their translation into evidence is the basic occupation depicted in CSI, which gives rise to myriad imaginative puzzles for the scientists to solve. The options seem limitless, ranging from the staples of forensic police work -blood analysis, microscopic examination of spent bullets, impressions of tire tracks and footwear, chemical analyses of paint chips, etc. -to the more esotericcalculations of the life-cycles of insect larvae, for example. The variety of forensic techniques depicted in the series may attest to the inventiveness of CSI scriptwriters, but the series' standbys are fingerprint analyses and X-rays of DNA molecules. Fingerprint identification, which was accepted as legally admissible by a British judge in 1905, is in many respects the classic type of forensic science [START_REF] Beavan | Fingerprints: The Origins of Crime Detection and the Murder Case that Launched Forensic Science[END_REF][START_REF] Cole | Suspect Identities: A History of Fingerprinting and Criminal Investigation[END_REF]. Surprisingly, a nationwide computerized fingerprint database was not developed in the US until the early 1970s and even then, police departments in various cities and states installed incompatible systems which delayed the possibility of a fully integrated system until the end of the century [START_REF] Cole | Suspect Identities: A History of Fingerprinting and Criminal Investigation[END_REF]. It is no accident that this achievement practically coincides with the debut of CSI, where an array of fingerprints flashing by as a computer performs a search for a match can be seen in just about every episode.

Such scenes not only portray computers augmenting the power of the police. They also imply a hierarchical human-machine dyad, with machines taking command. In actual AFIS searches computers produce only candidates for matching prints, from which a specialist selects the print that she or he deems identical to whatever was collected at the scene. Then the fingerprint expert must defend this decision in court and judges and juries sometimes disagree. In contrast, on CSI the machines do all the work and the matching process is represented as definitive. Likewise, DNA analysis is presented on the program as foolproof evidence of guilt (or innocence), ignoring successful challenges to the iron-clad veracity of this method of identification by defense attorneys, most famously in O.J. Simpson's trial for murder (Halfon, 1998;[START_REF] Jasanoff | The Eye of Witnessing: DNA in the Simpson Trial[END_REF][START_REF] Lynch | The Discursive Production of Uncertainty: The O.J. Simpson "Dream Team" and the Sociology of Knowledge Machine[END_REF]. If CSI's crime laboratory workers declare a match between two DNA samples, whoever is the source of the genetic material might as well forget about hiring a lawyer.

Computers running the AFIS and CODIS (Combined DNA Identification System) databases, along with all the other extremely complex and efficient equipment in CSI's laboratory, play prominent roles that practically upstage the human technicians who push buttons and brandish documents containing the machines' output. In doing so, the series reiterates increasingly common analogies between computers and neurological processes found in many sectors of contemporary life. Mark Poster (1990: 148) traces this conflation to developments in computer science: '[T]he scientist projects intelligent subjectivity onto the computer and the computer then becomes the criterion by which to define intelligence, judge the scientist, outline the essence of humanity.' This spiral of substitutions and its effect on subjectivity accelerates as the social environment is increasingly visualized as a digital 'grab bag', as it is in CSI. The endeavor becomes an even more vertiginous exercise when the realism implicit in scenes of scientific discovery is delivered by means of elaborate, painstakingly crafted videographic effects.

It seems apt to ask this point whether mastery of various digital imaging apparatuses CSI and the potency of the inscriptions that they generate indicative of a new visual culture which, as Bruno Latour (1986: 9) says, 'redefines both what it is to see and what there is to see'. He offers several criteria for the proliferation of new forms of inscription, which then inform new visual cultures. According to Latour, the move from instrumental inscription to conventional visual culture is accomplished when the former results in the domination of a given field, 453 as mechanized printing of maps and other geographical information did for navigation in early-modern Europe, enabling economic and political domination. Control of trade routes and colonization are but two examples of the effects of Europeans' development and utilization of printed documents that described the physical world and, as a result, such documents became authoritative representations of that world. Foremost among Latour's ingredients for a new visual culture are portability and speednot, he insists, perception. 'The main problem to solve,' he contends, 'is that of mobilization . . . you have to invent objects which have the property of being mobile but also immutable, presentable, readable and combinable with one another' (1986: 7): five check-offs for digital images. Not only are visual displays -diagrams, photographs, graphs and so forth -used by scientists to represent data but these inscriptions also constitute data in the first place (Lynch, 1985: 44). Moreover, Latour maintains that what these inscriptions look like makes arguments about how the data should be interpreted (Latour, 1986: 3). It is the same on CSI. The visualization of social disorder as a series of problems best investigated and represented by the latest computer equipment conveys a way of seeing both crime and policing that valorizes the 'machine intelligence' that organizes and describes 'evidence'.

Evidence

The reliance on truths generated and represented by scientific inscriptions in CSI produces yet another significant innovation in TV crime drama: its disregard of psychological knowledge. None of the regular characters are endowed with much of what is called an inner life, nor do they exhibit extraordinary psychological awareness like the protagonists in many other TV series about crime detection. No attempt is made to provide them with so-called well-rounded personalities. They rarely lose their tempers or raise their voices or otherwise appear out of control; this is especially true of Grissom, the boss who sets the tone for his underlings. Plot twists involving protagonists' personal problems are rare. When one of them enquires about another's private life, the friendly gesture is usually brushed aside. Most tellingly, scant attention is paid to the main characters' sexual or romantic relationships, although there was some flirtation between Grissom and Sara in several episodes, but nothing beyond an exchange of meaningful looks. 5 In the same vein, CSI plots do not revolve around efforts to understand the motives of those who commit crimes. Overall, there is remarkably little concern with why people kill but a great deal with how people die. Consider, for example, the infrequency of confession scenes in the series (although for the purposes of narrative coherence criminal characters confess, but only if they are confronted with the CSIs' forensic data). In other police the confession occurs at the moment when the puzzling elements of a particular crime are finally pieced together. Such an enunciation of truth often serves as the resolution of an episode -or at least as the moment of high drama where the lead interrogator gets to demonstrate his (less frequently her) superb understanding of what makes criminal minds tick. In addition to the narrative function of confessionsand arguably more importantly -these scenes produce an illusion of depth in an otherwise two-dimensional medium. As Peter Brooks (2000: 111) comments, 'the practice of confession creates the metaphors of innerness that it claims to explore . . . the very notion of inwardness is consubstantial with the requirement to explore and examine it'. However, on CSI the search for truth has been relocated, in concert with a more general cultural turn, from reading minds to reading bodies.

The moment when one of the CSIs informs a suspect that his or her confession is not necessary to establish guilt, which happens quite frequently, signals a revision of the traditional TV representation of the police as psychological experts. Laboratory science supersedes selfrevelation and eliminates worries about human fallibility -deceit, inaccuracy or ignorance. Brooks interprets the probative power of confessions in law courts (as well as in other disciplinary contexts such as religion) as a 'generalized demand for transparency ' (2000: 4). In CSI transparency is still in demand, but the conditions for producing it have changed. The impediments to transparency posed by human distortions, which will always plague confession, are overcome deftly by inanimate machinery capable of processing and analyzing information.

As we are reminded in just about every episode, the CSIs differ from other members of the police force not because they possess greater psychological insight, but because they are required to think scientifically. Over and over the CSIs repeat the mantra: 'The evidence doesn't lie.' When one of them loses sight of this maxim, as when Warrick's inaccurate identification of a murderer leads to the downfall of a friend whose daughter was the murder victim, the error seems to bring the vengeance of Francis Bacon down on the lapsed scientist's head. Gaffs by other CSIs have been less serious, but all become object lessons -for the heedless, too emotionally engaged characters and also for viewers -on the importance of abjuring any personal interest while interpreting evidence.

However, what the show fails to acknowledge is that data -which on the program describes all of the material collected as 'evidence' -is not the same as evidence by scientists. CSIs' routine statements about for rigorous adherence to scientific practices seems to promise a new approach to justice, in which outlaws are convicted well before they appear before a judge or a jury is impaneled, well before the evidence is presented in court to be tested by the defense attorney's crossexamination, well before a jury decides whether the evidence presented by the prosecution is indeed credible and relevant and therefore qualifies as evidence at all. Klaus Amann and Karin Knorr Cetina (1990: 88) make 455 this distinction very clearly: '[D]ata become evidence only after they have undergone elaborate processes of selection and transformation', which is accomplished by discussions among researchers about what inscriptions of data represent. In scientific practice, the ideal sequence goes like this: data collection-inscription-evidence-truth. In legal contexts, inscriptions qualify as evidence only when their validity is considered and accepted by the court.

But on CSI no disputes over what inscriptions mean seem to trouble the course of justice. Indeed, the program implies that judgments of guilt or innocence based on scientific findings will be more even-handed and impartial than those meted out by humans. Culpability is determined in the laboratory, proven by its instruments. Accused lawbreakers are indicted and found guilty by scientists before they even get to court. The absence of adjudication by juries and judges is unusual for a crime show and suggests that CSI is not really about crime and punishment (although it may suggest a chilling futuristic fantasy where punishment is meted out without due process). Nor is it about eliciting truth by means of a confession. Rather, the locus of truth in CSI resides in expert applications of scientific technologies that organize and produce inscriptions, without troubling with problems of interpretation. What allows CSI to skip the step of interpretation -to present inscriptions, which on television are always presented as photographic images, as irrefutable proof -is a kind of magical property of photography: a visualization technology associated with the idea of unmediated truth, 'not "copies of nature" but portions of nature herself', to quote Samuel Morse, America's first daguerreotypist and telegraph inventor (quoted in Miller, 1998: 5). But when photographic media are conscripted for entertainment, the hedonistic pleasures associated with popular culture threaten to override impersonal objectivity. This is a problem that the producers of CSI seem to have taken to heart, counteracting the sensuality of visually compelling digital effects with images that evoke the somber of human flesh -dead, weighty, inert human flesh.

Autopsy

So far, CSI has avoided the charge of excessive violence often leveled at other crime shows. Instead, it serves up blood and guts using such a heavy dose of aestheticization that any accusation of authentic brutality would be difficult to sustain. Nevertheless, the most gruesome autopsy scene in almost every episode (sometimes there is more than one) is concocted as another kind of frightful spectacle. Such scenes of methodical disembowelment, glossed by the narration of the resident pathologist, appear near the beginning of just about every episode and provide the foundation for whatever the team will do for the rest of the hour. (In contrast, the and only 'cop-science' series on American TV before CSI, Quincey, M.E. , never showed the gory labor performed by the eponymous hero.) What can be seen as the 'money shot' in CSI occurs when, during the autopsy, the camera appears to penetrate a wound or orifice and produce gushing blood, exploding organs or distressed viscera, simulating the damage inflicted by the fatal weapon or the disintegration of tissue resulting from some sort of toxic substance.

The virtuoso display of digital videographics used in these close-up zooms boring into human bodies, recall the pictures produced by medical endoscopy. But despite their dependence on state-of-the-art special effects -hybrid images made up of photographs films of props, virtual 3D models, digital 3D animation and photographic texture mapping -these scenes faithfully recapitulate the authority of the medical gaze -that is, knowledge about human life gained through visual perception that date back several centuries. In The Birth of the Clinic, Foucault (1975[START_REF] Foucault | The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception[END_REF]) describes the dissection of corpses that became commonplace in European hospitals and medical schools during the mid-18th century. He maintains that these autopsies provided epistemological support for the rationalization of knowledge about disease and health. Foucault's précis of the lessons learned from autopsies is: 'That which hides and envelops, the curtain of night over truth, is, paradoxically, life; and death, on the contrary, opens up to the light of day the black coffer of the body' (1975[1963]: 166).

Numerous scholars have elaborated the history of the diffusion of insights gained through applications of the medical gaze that link examination of the insides of human bodies to knowledge. For example, Ludmilla Jordanova (1980: 57) informs us that 'when Jules Michelet wished to comprehend the condition of women in mid-nineteenthcentury France, his first port of call was the dissecting room and his reading was anatomy texts'. Mary [START_REF] Poovey | Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation, 1830-1864[END_REF] extends the analysis to analogies of social organization and the human body in mid-19th-century British culture, including examples from early sociological studies of urban environments that combined eyewitness accounts with statistical data to produce images of truth akin to what she calls 'anatomical realism ' (1995: 74). The analytic techniques used to achieve verisimilitude in these studies, she contends, resembled the realism attempted in pedagogical drawings and three-dimensional models of human anatomy.

Literary texts written during a slightly later period demonstrate what Seltzer (1992: 95) describes as realist insistence on a compulsory and compulsive visibility', which he relates to '[t]he frequent association of nineteenth-century realism with a of vivisection, or surgical opening of the body'. In addition to work by British and American novelists Seltzer considers publications by Jacob Riis, whose photographic survey of New York City slums is often credited as the founding text of social documentary photography. Riis's reformist texts, like Poovey's examples, include statistics in order to infuse his study with scientific 457 realism alongside the pictorial realism of photography. Returning to the medical arena at the end of the 19th century, Norman Jewson (1976: 231) identifies a transition from what he calls 'Hospital Medicine', which privileged 'anatomical pathology' to 'Laboratory Medicine', where biologists and chemists reigned. The effect of this phase was, as the title of Jewson's article on the topic asserts, 'the disappearance of the sick man'which could be construed as the disappearance of the human subject.

Such excursions into sociocultural history demonstrate the legacy of the relationship between anatomical imagery and both social science and popular media. Now, however, the translation of visual images into computer code revs up television's mobilized gaze of modernity -as analyzed by Raymond [START_REF] Williams | Biographical note Martha Gever teaches at the University of California, Irvine and is the author of Entertaining Lesbians: Celebrity, Sexuality and Self-Invention (Routledge, 2003), as well as[END_REF] and Margaret Morse (1998) -allowing the audience to glide seamlessly between the outside and inside of bodies in feats of micro-voyeurism. This triumph of videographic image-making brings to mind non-invasive medical technologies like the magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) used to render internal bodily tissues transparent. Although CSI evokes the anatomical textbook of the 18th century and the disappearing sick man of the 19th, the program distances the production of knowledge about life even further from living bodies. Each dead body is represented as a repository of encoded information, not unlike data stored on digital media. The CSIs frequently talk about their responsibility to 'speak for the dead', a cliché heard often on television crime shows these days that seems to honor the particular lives of those who have been killed. But what the CSIs say on their behalf tells little about specific individuals beyond the particular circumstances of their deaths. Doctors once sought new knowledge about disease, and therefore health, in anatomized, anonymous cadavers. CSI extends and resituates the knowledge provided by the performance of autopsies as diagnoses of social pathology. But in order to do this the social body must be visualized, constituted as information and made knowable by employing scientific instruments and procedures. Enter, once again, the police wielding gear devised to visualize, and generate knowledge about, the social landscape and those who inhabit it.

Crime

One of CSI's most curious features is its ambivalent appeal to realism. The series' episodes are narrative dramas with characters who resemble, and are sometimes modeled on, actual forensic scientists; they are also fictions with plots sometimes borrowed from actual cases [START_REF] Giatto | The Dead Zone[END_REF]. But the aesthetic style of the program never tries to mimic documentary realism or employ a formal approach akin to the deadpan, no-frills Dragnet of the 1950s. To state the obvious, the way in CSI characters run exemplary investigations, solve all puzzles and always locate and indict the culprits appears far removed from messy, often incon-clusive quotidian police work (or laboratory science). Still, in addition to the realist conventions used to present convincing representations of places, people and events, CSI benefits from a 'reality effect' in so far as it reiterates recent trends in law enforcement policy that treat crime as a feature of everyday social commerce. According to this approach, crime is neither extraordinary nor particularly remarkable. Therefore, it is best analyzed in terms of 'risks and rewards, rationality, choice, probability, targeting and the demand for supply of opportunities' (Garland, 1997: 186). Similarly, the miscreant is regarded as a rational economic actor who seizes self-serving opportunities that come his or her way. As a result, the criminal's aura of monstrosity becomes difficult to sustain.

In almost every instance, CSI's wrongdoers fit this description. Murderers (the category to which most of the program's felons belong) take advantage of situations but remain invisible to the police as criminals because of their apparent normalcy. Even more difficult to spot are the accidental killers, who are more prosaic characters than the opportunists. Similarly, crimes and their solutions on CSI sidestep moral categorization -right or wrong -and are evaluated instead in terms of truth and falsehood. Without invoking the authority of personal or collective values, crimes are deciphered through applications of objective scientific standards. Ultimately, however, CSI does involve morality, but not a system concerned with the distinctions between good and bad individuals. The latter, more familiar framework informs narratives where evil, dangerous villains are captured, indicted and punished. In CSI morality operates as an expression of scientific truth, equated with the generalized social good.

When the forensic scientists in CSI use information-processing, imageproducing apparatuses, they delve into the nooks and crannies of the social fabric, in many instances without leaving the laboratory. In order to apprehend those who threaten social wellbeing, they capture and study physical remnants -a strand of hair, a toenail clipping, a fleck of dandruff, a drop of saliva or blood, dirt adhering to soles of shoes, insects feasting on a corpse and so on. In order to produce 'evidence' they transform all sorts of objects, including bodies in the morgue, into digital inscriptions. Scenes showing the CSIs at work searching a database, peering through an electron microscope, or skillfully operating all sorts of elaborate equipment, constitute arguments for the advantages of digital computing and communication the most efficient, effective surrogate And affirms this achievement in its constant reminders of the electronic underpinnings of the program's existence. Indeed, CSI goes to great lengths to reveal the means of production and a curious kind of selfreferentiality is built into the series. The discovery of truth -what really happened -in any CSI episode requires the careful reading of inscriptions, both by the fictional investigators and the audience. At the same time, the program's televisual style inscribes a particular way of seeing. Whenever a 459 character offers a theory or subjective account of a crime, the voiceover is illustrated by stylized, obviously manipulated images. Such scenes underscore the concept of crime-solving as a visual enterprise. But because they also always turn out to be eroneous, these scenes imply that truth is detected best by machines, not mere humans.

A spectator cannot help but gawk. But she may also want to keep in mind that what she sees is an optical game, an entertaining but hardly innocent vision of computer code configured as knowledge, a power play that commends digital technology for its ability to make lives -individual and collective -transparent. This is a world where electronic mastery provides solutions to all mysteries, full disclosure of all secrets, discovery of all truths. Even the tiniest, mundane residues of human life can incriminate. But rather than leading inevitably to paranoia or despondency, CSI's televisual spectacle of crime also calls attention to the imaginary aspects of digital media, which consistently frustrate ambitions for incontestable knowledge. Significantly this goal, shared by Grissom and company, will always remain beyond reach. Notes 1. Gross's article appeared in the New York Times's Sunday 'Style' section and was subtitled, 'Thanks to "CSI" Sleuthing Appeals to the Young and Tech-Savvy'. 2. Or much further, if one considers apparatuses used as aids for inscribing realistic images, such as the camera obsura; some credit Aristotle with the first recorded reference to this device. 3. The metaphor of the transparent subject becomes explicit in another successful Jerry Bruckheimer production for CBS, Without a Trace. The initial sequence of each episode shows the last known movements of the character whose disappearance occupies the show's FBI team responsible for locating missing persons. Just before the opening credits roll, the week's object of inquiry appears to evaporate while other aspects of the scene remain unchanged. 4. For Carlson, Ericson and Scheingold, the key question involves disparities between actual crime and arrest rates and how these are distorted in television crime fiction. A good example of genre criticism with an emphasis on ideology is Buxton. Surette and Sumser concentrate on analyses of stereotypes as indicators of ideological effects. Donovan also

     :                    ,         
makes ideology the central issue in her critique of television's representation of crime and justice, although her primary interest is 'reality TV' shows such as Cops, where stereotypes are less an issue than the moral implications of relationships between cops and criminals. 5. At least this is as far the attraction had progressed as of the time of writing (summer 2004). Whether or not more intimate involvement between the characters will ensue cannot be predicted, since it is always wise to resist the temptation to speculate about future directions taken by any TV series until it has run its course.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Jack Levinson, who offered thoughtful comments and suggestions, especially concerning work in science studies. Thanks also to Eric Freedman for recommending CSI as a fitting example of a televisual 'spectacle of crime' and Geoff Thomas, who graciously provided information concerning the methods used to create special effects for the program.


no longer able to be the vampire that he was. Having attempted to rape Buffy, the woman he loves, similarly Spike realises that he cannot be a man. Suffering an identity crisis, Spike leaves Sunnydale in search of a solution. 'Neither a monster nor a man', Spike yearns for reconciliation of his divided self. The answer comes in the form of the return of his soul. This article will explore how the return of Spike's soul does not deliver a reconciled Spike but rather one which has been exponentially fragmented. In a show that prides itself on complex character development, Spike undergoes the most dramatic character arc of anyone on the series, from madman in the basement to self-sacrificing champion, taking place in one season in an almost schizophrenic fashion.

Through close analysis of narrative structure and mise-en-scène, I will demonstrate how each of these personas is presented as distinct and individual, a mosaic of personalities rather than a coherent character arc. Identity in this season is not defined by growth and evolution but rather the recognition that we are each made up of a multitude of selves. These selves do not lead Spike to further crisis but instead take him one step closer to his final sacrifice.

Vampires with souls

To understand the impact of the return of Spike's soul, first we must consider his place within a tradition of reluctant and 'ensouled' vampires. The concept of the reluctant vampire originated (if one dares suggest any form of 'original' text) with the television soap opera Dark Shadows (Dan Curtis (producer), 1966-71). The story follows the vampire Barnabas Collins after he is released from the tomb in which his family imprisoned him, to stalk his Maine estate once again. However, he is revealed to be a tortured creature, torn between his human emotions and his vampiric physical needs. The soap-opera narrative fluctuates between storylines on his attempt to find a cure and flashbacks of the tragic circumstances that led to his transformation. Barnabas' conflict is exceeded only by Anne Rice's tormented and self-loathing Louis, the title character of Interview with the Vampire (1976) who, as Janet K. Halfyard has pointed out, has a great deal in common with the vampires of the 'Buffyverse' for he is described in the film version of Rice's novel as 'the vampire with the human soul ' (2005: 158). Louis' tragedy is that his new-found vampire senses enable him to see and appreciate the beauty of the human world as never before, simultaneously causing him to become disgusted by his very being which is now designed to destroy all things human. Duality is the essence of the reluctant vampire, torn between conflicting desires. 1 Within the 'Buffyverse' the reluctant vampire has been transformed into the vampire with a soul, established on BtVS and Angel through the characters of Angel and Darla. One could argue that the introduction of a soul into a vampire is a literalization of the metaphorical humanity of

      :                     
vampires such as Barnabas and Louis, which in many ways seems to remove the moral ambiguity of these earlier vampires. They are literally provided a soul, which makes them 'good'. Rhonda [START_REF] Wilcox | Every Night I Save You": Buffy, Spike, Sex and Redemption[END_REF] has suggested that in BtVS Angel's soul, restored to him through a Gypsy curse, provides a clear-cut distinction between his good and evil sides, while in an interview for the series website, City of Angel (www.cityofangel. com) BtVS-writer David Fury himself has suggested that Angel's journey toward redemption has removed any moral ambiguity from his character [START_REF] Fury | The Sound of Fury, Part I and II', interview in City of Angel: Behind the Scenes[END_REF][START_REF] Wilcox | Every Night I Save You": Buffy, Spike, Sex and Redemption[END_REF]. However, this article would argue that the imposition of a soul into the body of a vampire serves to undermine the distinction between monster and human as one dissolves into the other. As has been argued elsewhere [START_REF] Abbott | Walking the Fine Line Between Angel and Angelus[END_REF], one of the main achievements of the series Angel was to blur the distinction between Angel and his evil alter ego Angelus by recognizing that they are intricately linked together. Angelus' identity may be defined by absence -he is an unrepentant monster because he lacks Angel's soul -but the series goes to great pains to demonstrate that Angel's identity, his strength and power, is defined by the presence of both Angel and Angelus [START_REF] Abbott | Walking the Fine Line Between Angel and Angelus[END_REF].

The case of Darla is even more interesting and, to my knowledge, has yet to be discussed in detail. One of the most evil of The Master's Brethren of Aurelias, she was chosen and sired by the Master himself. She later transformed the drunken layabout Liam into the diabolically evil Angelus and together they wrought havoc across Europe for 150 years. Darla rejected Angelus after he regained his soul, and 100 years later paid the price for that choice by being killed by Angel in Sunnydale ('Angel', 1:5; 'Becoming: Parts I and II', 2:21 and 2:22; 'The Trial'). Hers is a clear-cut tale of a vampire until this point. However, when resurrected by the evil law firm Wolfram & Hart on Angel, she became a curious hybrid of her vampire and human selves. Brought back as human with a soul, she has all of the memories of her life as a vampire and still yearns for reconciliation with Angelus, eventually begging Angel to turn her into a vampire again. When he refuses, Wolfram & Hart bring in Drusilla to do the job in a perversion of 'normal' family lineage ('The Trial'). 2 Ironically Darla, who was denied salvation and redemption as a human with a soul, finds it as a vampire when she becomes pregnant with Angel's human son. Once again ensouled, this time by the presence of the child within her, she becomes a mix of human and vampire. She feels the goodness of her child's soul and as a result feels genuine love for him, but his presence also causes her to crave the blood of innocent children. She becomes the image of both a nurturing and monstrous mother, reconciling this duality by sacrificing herself to allow the birth of her son ('Lullaby', A3:9).

Spike, the latest in the series' vampires with souls, is a curious entry into this tradition for he possessed this duality before he regained his soul. Claire [START_REF] Fossey | Never Hurt the Feelings of a Brutal Killer": Spike and the Underground Man[END_REF] argues that Spike's dual nature, which is made transparent through the implantation of the Initiative's computer chip, is 331 actually there from his first appearance on the series and is demonstrated through his love for Drusilla. She argues that at this point [in Season 2], his humanity functions as what Christopher Golden aptly describes in his novel about Spike and Dru's pre-Sunnydale days as 'a phantom limb': a small presence, as annoying as it is disturbing, which can be easily shrugged off. By Season Six, this minorly troubling and ultimately ignorable phantom limb has grown into a whole other self, a double. [START_REF] Fossey | Never Hurt the Feelings of a Brutal Killer": Spike and the Underground Man[END_REF] The chip restrains his monstrous impulses, allowing his humanity room to develop and take stronger hold of his personality. This is exacerbated by his love for Buffy, which again gives him motivation to be good. Rhonda Wilcox argues further that Spike's humanity acts as a complicating agent for Buffy's perception of the world, thus explaining her refusal to believe that he could love her. As she explains: Spike's is a metaphysically interesting case because of the difficulties it poses . . . Spike owns no human soul, yet repeatedly does good; if he can be seen as capable of change, capable of good, capable of love, then he can represent an existentialist definition of good. [START_REF] Wilcox | Every Night I Save You": Buffy, Spike, Sex and Redemption[END_REF] He confuses Buffy's perception of good and evil, which remains quite clear-cut even as late as Season 6. 3 Spike's attempted rape of Buffy in 'Seeing Red' (6:19), aired after Wilcox wrote her article, seems to undermine this reading of his goodness by presenting such an extreme act of violence that it was difficult to imagine accepting that he had changed and recouping him ever again as a hero. However, this scene actually serves to reiterate the duality of the character, acting as a reminder that Spike, like Angel before him, is a vampire who walks a fine line between his monstrous and human desires. For while his actions are monstrous, linking him with the series' misogynist Big Bad, Warren, who also sexually assaulted his ex-girlfriend, Spike acknowledges this in a way that Warren does not. As Jim Smith explains: Neither a monster nor a man, Spike looks for resolution. But if Spike already embodies the series' characteristic moral ambiguity traditionally associated with reluctant or 'ensouled' vampires, then what is the reasoning behind the reintroduction of his soul? One could argue that it is to do just the opposite, by resolving the ambiguity around his character and providing us with a coherent and heroic Spike who is able to sacrifice himself for Buffy and humanity at the end of the series. However, this ignores the fragmentation of his personality that characterizes Spike throughout the season, and which will be the focus of the discussion of this article, but it also ignores a fundamental schism within the series itself. Throughout Season 7 of BtVS, as well as the final series of Angel, Spike claims that he chose to regain his soul, which separates him from the other 'ensouled' vampires of the series and makes him a truer champion than Angel, who had his soul thrust upon him. This argument assumes that we believe him when he says that he went in search of his soul. As all keen viewers of the series know, the final episodes of Season 6 are far more ambiguous -or in fact not ambiguous at all -as they clearly suggest that Spike went to hell and back again to have the chip removed and be once again what he was: a vampire. After the attempted rape, Spike laments that the chip has confused the natural order of things when he complains:

Everything always used to be so clear. Slayer. Vampire. Vampire kills Slayer. Sucks her dry. Picks his teeth with her bones. It's always been like that. I've tasted the life of two Slayers. But with Buffy . . . It isn't supposed to be this way. It's the chip. Steel and wires and silicone. It won't let me be a monster and I can't be a man. I'm nothing. ('Seeing Red ', 6:19) He decides to leave town and as he does, he warns: 'Get nice and comfy, Slayer. I'll be back and when I do . . . things are going to change.'

The dialogue in the scene when Spike requests the restoration of his true self is deliberately written so that it can be interpreted either as the removal of the chip or the return of his soul, but Marsters delivers his lines with clear intent. He is playing Spike as a monster, not a hero, made explicit by his repeated references to the chip (he never once mentions his soul) and the aggressive use of the word 'bitch' at the beginning and end of the scene, serving as another link between Spike and Warren, who uses it frequently. This again reinforces the misogynist theme which runs throughout the season and presents Spike's intentions as violent rather than noble: Spike: Bitch thinks she's better than me. Ever since I got this bleeding chip in my head, things ain't been right. Everything's gone to hell. Demon: And you want to return to your former self. Spike: Yeah. Demon: Look what she's reduced you to. Spike: It's this chip. Demon: You were once a legendary dark warrior and you let yourself be castrated. And you have the audacity to crawl in here and demand restoration. 4 Spike: I'm still a warrior.

333

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This ending therefore creates a tension with the Spike following in Season 7 who claims that his intentions were pure. To ignore this tension and simply believe Spike's story is to forget that this is a television series which, despite the overall coherency of the arc narratives and writing strategies, operates with a range of external imperatives, including the desire to end a season with surprise and shock and the different writing perspectives on narrative, character and theme. For example, David Fury, who has been quite forthright about his own disagreements with certain Spike-related storylines or character arcs despite fan disapproval, explains in an interview with the website City of Angel that a writer can only 'overcome the obstacle of writing a story they can't get behind . . . by justify[ing] it to yourself' [START_REF] Fury | The Sound of Fury, Part I and II', interview in City of Angel: Behind the Scenes[END_REF].

The tension between the Spike of Season 6 and the Spike of Season 7whether or not you believe him -is fundamental to our reading of his character in these final days, for it immediately establishes the existence of two Spikes. Not simply the divided Spike, split between his good and evil side, but rather different Spikes: one a monster intent on embracing his monstrousness; the other 'ensouled', believing that his intentions were good. It is this fragmentation of his identity that comes to define Spike, and to understand the impact of the reintroduction of his soul, first we must examine how and why the narrative structure of Season 7 is built around a series of different Spikes.

Multiple Spikes

Throughout Season 7 of BtVS, Spike appears, or is discussed, in a range of different personas including the following: mad, tormented, tortured, soulful, seer/truthsayer, bloodhound, stalker/serial killer, vampire, rapist, you Spike. I want to kill the monster who took my mother away from me', acknowledging a distinction between the current Spike and his vampiric persona.

When, in 'Never Leave Me', Buffy explains that Spike seemed like a different person before he attacked her and Andrew, Willow asks: 'Like William the Bloody different?' calling to mind yet another image of Spike. The name 'William the Bloody' is used quite often in Season 7 to refer to the murderous vampire that Spike used to be. This is a curious development, as the Scooby Gang have rarely referred to him in this way beyond his first episode, 'School Hard' (2:3), when Professor Giles researched Spike's history as a vampire. While the name 'Spike' had monstrous implications (he impaled his victims with railroad spikes), the character has ceased in their and the audience's eyes to be the murderous vampire that he was and the name has since become the name of a helpless demon, ally, lover and adored character. To consider him once again as a murderous monster, they think of him as having returned to the killer he was by referring to his dark past as William the Bloody (in much the same way that everyone distinguishes Angel from Angelus). However, the name William the Bloody carries with it another image of Spike to which only the audience have been privy, which is William the bloody awful poet ('Fool for Love', 5:7). Therefore, Spike's multiplicity is addressed quite overtly within the narrative and dialogue of the show.

It is through the series' careful manipulation of mise-en-scène that these different personas are evoked and distinguished from one another. The significance of mise-en-scène to the interpretation of character, particularly the series' main vampires, has been established previously through the examples of Angel/Angelus and Drusilla. For example, when Drusilla first arrives in Sunnydale, she is suffering from some form of vampire illness which has weakened her substantially. To evoke this sense of helplessness, she is dressed in lacy or silky white nightgowns, the very image of a Victorian waif ('School Hard'). Once healthy again, she dresses in red and black to evoke a more Gothic sensibility ('Surprise', 2:13). Similarly, when Angel's soul is lost in 'Surprise' and 'Innocence' (2:14), the distinction between Angel and Angelus is made clear to the audience through Angelus' increasing preference for leather trousers, cigarettes and black eyeliner. In addition, the setting itself is used to convey the vampires' differing personalities. The old-world Master is depicted living in a demolished church buried within the earth, while the more modern Spike and Drusilla live in an abandoned factory. When Angelus takes over leadership of the group, they move to a more gothic villa which suits his aesthetic tastes.

Costume and make-up are significant to Spike throughout the series in terms of his consistency of style and look. With the exception of certain flashbacks, which demonstrate different styles for Spike and reflect the changing times in which he lives, from his first arrival through to his departure from Sunnydale at the end of Season 6, Spike is generally depicted in a set costume: black leather coat, black jeans, boots, T-shirt, red shirt hanging lose and open, slicked back, bleached blond hair and black fingernail polish (see Amy-Chinn, in this issue, for a more detailed analysis of this look). Spike's image in Season 7, however, undergoes a quite selfconscious deconstruction, as each persona is represented by a different visual look and style. The importance of costuming to signal changes within Spike is prefigured in 'Seeing Red', when Spike leaves his leather coat behind after the attempted rape of Buffy. He leaves Sunnydale, not in the Cadillac established in previous arrivals and departures in 'School Hard', 'Becoming: Part II' and 'Lover's Walk' (3:8), but rather on a motorcycle, and dressed entirely in black. The shedding of his iconic coat prepares the audience for a series of shifting images and representations of Spike which take place throughout the season, indicating changes in his narrative role.

These new 'looks' begin quite shockingly with his first appearance in 'Lessons' (7:1), when Buffy discovers him living in the basement of the new high school. He is almost unrecognizable as Spike for, although still dressed in black, he is now wearing a black shirt which hangs open and loosely around his waist, revealing his scarred chest where he has tried to scratch out his heart/soul. Most significantly, his hair is no longer immaculately bleached and slicked back, but instead he is sporting curly bleached locks that reveal his dark roots. The unkempt look is designed to signify his loss of reason, reinforced by the final shot of him, all in black, sitting in the dark surrounded by such blackness that he is almost lost within its shadows as the First speaks to him in the form of each of the show's annual 'Big Bads'. This visual image reinforces the First/Drusilla's comments to him, stating that he'll always be hers, 'always in the dark with me', In 'Beneath You', Spike suddenly shows up on Buffy's doorstep, after having been previously presented as mad in the basement, having rebleached and combed his hair and wearing a blue shirt, suggesting that he has regained his sanity and can be of assistance to her. This new look turns out to be a façade, for when he accidentally injures a human he flees in horror at what he has done and retreats to the confines of a local church. When Buffy finds him, he has removed the blue shirt, which he himself describes as a costume that cannot conceal his torment. The blue of the shirt is replaced by the blue filter lighting that surrounds him, no longer concealing his torment but evoking it. Blue is a colour repeatedly used this season, either through lighting and in stark contrast to his iconic red shirt serves as a reminder of Spike's ensoulment and resulting torment: but never more evocatively than in this sequence with Buffy. Spike and Buffy, in one of the most beautifully-lit sequences of the series, are surrounded by a chiaroscuro design of blue light and shadow. Spike moves in and out of the dark as he explains in cryptic terms that he regained his soul so that he can never hurt her again, but was 337 shocked to face the horrors of his past actions as a vampire. Here, the visual design of the sequence brings together Spike's madness, guilt, torment and repentance, which culminates in the final tragic image of the plight of the ensouled vampire as he drapes over the altar crucifix, begging for solace and comfort as his skin begins to burn.

In contrast to the poignancy of this scene, in 'Same Time, Same Place' (7:3) Spike is still presented as crazy, but now his madness is used to reflect his role as seer rather than as penitent ensouled vampire. In fact, beyond a few exchanges between Buffy and Spike, little reference is made to the previous episode and the magnitude of its revelation and emotional resonance. No longer bathed in blue light or acknowledging this torment, Marsters now plays his scenes as simply crazy. In the high school basement, Willow approaches him to ask about Buffy and Xander as well she has found at the school. Their conversation is regularly interrupted by outbursts of non-sequiturs and random poetry. However, it is revealed to the audience, through repetition of events from Buffy and Xander's point of view, that his seemingly insane observations were actually statements he was making to Buffy and Xander, who cannot see Willow. The importance of this sequence is that it places Spike in the role of seer as his seemingly mad ramblings are revealed to the audience to be conversations with those unseen. This foreshadows the revelation to the Scooby Gang, and the confirmation to the audience, that Spike is not madly talking to himself but is in constant conversations with the First. The lack of reference or continuity with the previous episode in terms of Spike's torment also serves as an indicator that Spike's persona is constantly changing and will continue to change throughout the season.

One of the most significant moments for Spike, which takes him down yet another road of multiple Spikes and narratively links costuming with personality changes, is when he reappropriates his leather coat ('Get it Done', 7:15). In this episode, it is revealed that Spike's soul is preventing him from relishing the kill. When defending Anya from a demon sent to kill her, Spike fights back but rather then kill the demon he runs away as soon as it is knocked out. Buffy sees this as a weakness, taunting him: 'If I need someone to get weepy and wailed on, I'll call you.' She needs the 'old Spike' to win this war, and when he is called upon to find and kill another demon in order to save Buffy, he first returns to the high school where he stored the jacket. With the restoration of his coat, we see the return of the much loved Big Bad Spike from previous years who then catches and kills the demon, howling with pleasure and lighting up a cigarette afterwards to mark the occasion, claiming 'a tussle like that is good for the soul'. The coat also acts as a reminder, reinforced by the presence of Robin Wood (principal of the new high school), of the monstrous vampire that Spike was long before his arrival in Sunnydale when he killed Robin's mother, the Slayer Nicky Wood (for the coat originally belonged to Nicky and was taken by Spike as a trophy when she died).

Vampires and Slayers

One explanation for Spike's multiplicity is that it is a response to the needs of the plot and the idiosyncrasies of different writers. However, Spike's significance is more than random as in many ways the narrative arc of Season 7 is structured around each of these Spike personas, with a key plot revelation built into the shift between one Spike and another. The relationship between Spike and Buffy also changes as a result of his mosaic of personalities. The first few episodes, in which Spike is mad, see the Scooby Gang reforming and coming to terms with their own past transgressions, increasingly aware that a yet-unnamed threat looms -'From beneath you it devours'. It is in 'Conversations with Dead People' (7:7) that the season's Big Bad makes its presence known to the gang and part of that revelation, for Buffy and the audience, is the realization that Spike has been killing again. The next two episodes are built around Spike as vampire, stalker and sleeper agent for the Big Bad. It is when Spike is abducted by the Bringers, henchmen of the First, and enters his next phase as tortured victim, that Buffy identifies the Big Bad, having previously encountered the First in 'Amends' (3:10). This realization launches the next section of the series, which is their attempt to understand the First's plan (which is partially explained by the arrival of Giles and the potential Slayers) and fighting the übervamp, unleashed by the First, who is both torturing and guarding Spike. Once rescued, for the most part Spike no longer seems to be mad, tormented, murderous or vampiric (although he 'plays' the vampire for the benefit of the potentials' training). Neither does he seem to be suffering from his quite horrific torture, beyond one reference to some sensitivity around his wounds. He has moved onto his next phase as Buffy's right-hand man, working with her in training of the potentials. He is now Spike the friend and ally. This is quite a significant development in their relationship and the narrative structure of the season, because we must remember that when Buffy sees Spike in 'Beneath You' she can barely talk to him, as memories of his attack on her come flooding back. She does not welcome him back into the team upon the revelation of the return of his soul, but rather continues to treat him as a mad fool, even using him as a bloodhound in 'Same Time, Same Place', and exhibits a great deal of frustration and irritation with his suffering and torment. It is the movement of Spike's character through each of these different phases, including murdering again, acknowledging his guilt and most significantly his survival of the torture of the First, which enables Buffy to see him as an ally. It is no coincidence that 'Bring (7:10), an episode in which Spike is brutally tortured the übervamp and Buffy suffers one of her worst beatings by same vampire, ends with Spike unbroken and resilient against the taunts of the First followed by Buffy's emergence from her room, cut and bruised, defiant and determined that she can win. It is at 339 this moment that Spike's role as Buffy's shadow and double, previously recognized by both academic writers and fans [START_REF] Abbott | A Little Less Ritual and a Little More Fun": The Modern Vampire[END_REF][START_REF] Fossey | Never Hurt the Feelings of a Brutal Killer": Spike and the Underground Man[END_REF][START_REF] Nurss | Spike as Shadow[END_REF][START_REF] Wilcox | Every Night I Save You": Buffy, Spike, Sex and Redemption[END_REF], becomes the focus of their relationship throughout the rest of the season. It is following this episode that Buffy is determined to rescue him, describing him as absolutely necessary to the upcoming battle.

This, however, does not mark the end of the multiple Spikes. Instead his schizophrenia climaxes in 'Lies My Parents Told Me', an episode that highlights Spike's fragmentation both narratively and structurally, and demonstrates the significance of Spike's multiplicity to the season. A Freudian's dream episode, the plot deals with Giles' concern about Spike as a potential weapon of the First. He concocts a spell to find the source of the brainwashing. This leads to a series of flashbacks revealing Spike's prevampire and post-vampire relationship with his mother, demonstrating that it is his with her that lie at the root of his problems. Having made this realization, the trigger is deactivated and Spike emerges at the end of the episode a unified character.

But this episode is more than simply an example of television pop psychology. To begin with, we see more Spikes then ever before. The episode opens in New York City, 1977 as Spike, in full punk-rock vampire mode, engages in his first fight with the Slayer Nicky Wood. The sequence then cuts to the contemporary as Spike, now ally to the Slayer, is engaged in a fight against vampires alongside Buffy and Nicky Wood's son, Robin. This pre-credit teaser establishes both the multiplicity of Spike and the relationship between past and present that will be the focus of the entire episode. In a flashback we are reminded of William the Bloody Awful Poet, as he reads poetry to his mother, and when he sits at her knee and listens to her singing the traditional song 'Early One Morning' (the song that is being used by the First to trigger the transformation of Spike back to his incarnation as a monster), we learn that he was not only a romantic but also a mummy's boy. In a flashback we see William the newborn vampire, enjoying the sensual and carnal pleasures of his life with Drusilla. Returning to the present day, when he recalls his mother singing (or simply hears the song), he responds, as the First intended, to the trigger by morphing into the monstrous vampire Spike yet again.

What is more significant in this episode is the manner in which these multiple Spikes are presented, for rather than present these personas as individual and distinct, the structure of the episode emphasizes simultaneity. The opening teaser sets up not only certain narrative considerations but also stylistic ones. The move from the past to the present is achieved through a clever sound/lightning mix which suggests a temporal and spatial relationship between the two events. When the young Robin in 1977 New York runs away from his mother to pick up her stake, she calls his name as a flash of lightning overlaps with a cut to a shot of the adult Robin in Sunnydale 2003, as if in response to his mother's call. This way

Conclusion

To conclude, let us return to the suggestion that Spike is a shadow of Buffy. If this is the case then what is the relationship of Spike's multiplicity with Buffy? The idea that Spike is made up of a multitude of interconnected individual identities contributes to a broader theme of the season. Holden, newly born as a vampire, tells Buffy that he feels 'connected to a powerful all-consuming evil that is going to suck the world in to a fiery oblivion' ('Conversations with Dead People'); the kidnapped Bringer informs Giles under questioning that he is 'part of the great darkness. I am only a fragment of the We' ('Touched', 7:20); and the Guardian of the Scythe explains that she was 'one of many' ('End of Days', 7:21). Yet there is greater emphasis upon Buffy's isolation as the Slayer than ever before. Buffy tells Holden that she is 'not so much connected' ('Conversations with Dead People'); Spike tells her that she is 'The One' ('Touched'); Caleb refers her as 'the One and Only -Accept No Substitute -Slayer' ('Dirty Girls', 7:18); and Faith and Buffy openly discuss how being a slayer, no matter who surrounds you, means being alone ('End of Days'). In 'Lies My Parents Told Me', Buffy does not recognize Spike's multiplicity in her conversation with Wood, and this is because she has yet to truly recognize her own. However, it is clear to the audience and Robin that at this moment, Buffy herself is part of something even bigger when she echoes Wood's mother's words from the episode's teaser: 'I have a mission. To win this war. To save the world. I don't have time for vendettas . . .The mission is what matters.' With the return to the Shadowmen who created the first Slayer and the arrival of the potential Slayers, Season 7 reminds us that she is but one face within a long line of Slayers. The emphasis upon Spike's multiple identities over linear character development, however, prepares the audience for the finale's break with the show's mythology of one Slayer at a time, as Buffy finally accepts that she is 'connected' and sacrifices her 'uniqueness' by sharing her power. From the multiple faces of Spike emerge the multiple faces of the vampire slayer. Notes 1. These are not the only reluctant vampires to precede the 'Buffyverse'.

Other notable examples would include the vampire police detective working the night shift from the television series Forever Knight (1992 and 1994-6), a key predecessor for Angel, and Blade, the vampire/human hybrid superhero of comic book and film fame. 2. As Darla sired Angelus, who went on to sire Drusilla, this final transformation makes Darla both Drusilla's vampiric daughter and grandmother. 3. Possibly even as late as Season 7. Consider her response to the revelation that Anya, now a vengeance demon again, has murdered a group of university fraternity students because they played a on a young woman. When Xander points out that they help their friends when they       :                      turn evil and start killing people, referring to Willow, Buffy argues that Willow was different as she is human while Anya is a demon with free will. She must die ('Selfless', 7:5). 4. The use of the word 'restoration' at this point is a clue that the end result will be the return of his soul as the spell used to return Angel's soul was the Spell of Restoration ('Becoming: Part I', 2:21). 5. Some might argue that Spike is reconciled at this point because he has confronted and accepted his issues with his mother. While this does explain why the trigger is disabled and he regains his free will, it does not explain why he should emerge having sorted out his identity crisis. The two issues seem unrelated at this point.

  Demon: You're a pathetic excuse for a demon. Spike: Yeah. I'll show you pathetic. Give me your best shot. Demon: You would never endure the trials required to grant your request. Spike: Do your worst. When I win, I want what I came here for. Bitch is going to see a change. ('Villain', 6: 20) Having endured the trials, Spike demands that the demon 'give me what I want. Make me what I was so Buffy can get what she deserves' ('Grave

through this research that she first became interested in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel. She has since written on both Buffy and Angel for Slayage: The Online International Journal of Buffy Studies and has recently edited an anthology of essays on Angel. She has also written on F.W. Murnau's classic vampire film Nosferatu (1922), the rise of the horror blockbuster in Hollywood cinema and the work of New Zealand horror filmmaker David Blyth. A D D R E S S : Roehampton University, School of Arts, Film and Television Studies, Digby Stuart College, Roehampton Lane, London, SW15 5P, UK. [email: s.abbott@roehampton.ac.uk]

      :                      mummy's boy William, William the Bloody, 'Big Bad Spike', the friend, lover and champion. These personas are spread out throughout the season, with some dominating a few episodes while others appear only briefly and overlap with each other. It is the extremity of the differences in Spike's appearance and characterization which suggests that there is more going on than simply the creation of a multifaceted character. Instead, Spike appears almost schizophrenic at times, a fact that is addressed directly within the narrative by his reappearance in Sunnydale as a madman living in the high school basement, seemingly talking to himself. The Scooby Gang describes him repeatedly as crazy and, during brief moments of lucidity, which themselves suggest schizophrenia, he even refers to himself as crazy. In 'Beneath You' (7:2) when Buffy asks Spike, who is ranting incoherently, if he has completely lost his mind, Spike pauses and turns to her and says, 'Well, yes. Where've you been all night?' One episode later in 'Same Time, Same Place' (7:3) Spike insults Xander cleverly in a fantastic moment of clarity that belies his previous musings, by stating: 'I'm insane. What's his excuse?'

The gradual revelation in 'Sleeper' (7:8) and 'Never Leave Me' (7:9) that Spike is the victim of brainwashing by the First, raises the spectre of the psychological fragmentation of 'schizophrenia'. In 'Sleeper' the First appears to Spike as a mirror image of himself, visually splitting Spike in two for the audience's eyes only. The First/Spike encourages him to attack Buffy, to 'take her . . . taste her . . . make her weak' and be the monster that he should be. The appearance of Spike literally talking to himself visually suggests the idea of personality division. This suggestion is reinforced and made apparent to Buffy in 'Never Leave Me', when she witnesses Spike's transformation from 'tormented Spike' to murderous vampire. Having realized, through his own admission, that Spike has been killing again, Buffy ties him up and attempts to question him. Forced to exit the room briefly to speak to Xander, upon her return Buffy overhears Spike talking and singing through the door. When she re-enters the room, he is alone and seems strange and disconnected from their previous conversation. He then morphs into the vampire and attacks both Buffy and then Andrew. Buffy later tells the gang that at times he seems like another person.

The characters themselves often describe Spike in distinctive ways suggesting an awareness that he is made up of different personas. When he arrives to assist Buffy in 'Beneath You' he is treated by Xander and Dawn as rapist Spike. And as has been mentioned previously, he is regudescribed as 'mad' or 'crazy' in the first few episodes of the season. Once suspicions that he may be killing again are aroused in 'Sleeper', he is discussed repeatedly as a stalker or potential serial killer, and noticeably not as a vampire, particularly by Anya who suggests that they should search his room to look for the trophies or souvenirs common among serial killers. In 'Lies My Parents Told Me' (7:17) Robin Wood, preparing to avenge the murder of his mother, tells Spike that he doesn't 'want to kill 335

of stylistically relating past and present is achieved also through the flashbacks to Spike's past with his mother. Rather than use conventional transitions, i.e. a slow dissolve or fade to black, they are structured to merge the past and present together. The first flashback begins with a flash of bright light over a close-up of Spike as he looks off-screen. The camera tracks around him as it slowly reveals a period setting and a voice is heard reading poetry. The camera stops its tracking movement when it is directly behind the contemporary Spike, looking on at William the poet, reading to his mother. Later in the scene, as William sits at his mother's knee, the camera tracks into an extreme close-up on him until he opens his eyes, and it is as the shot dissolves to the modern Spike that he morphs into the vampire Spike. Here three Spikes are literally merged together through technological means.

This form of mixing past and present, and the different Spikes along with it, continues throughout the episode. It is most significant in the fight between Robin and Spike as a flashback to William's confrontation with his now-vampirized mother, who accuses him of incestuous desire for her, is intercut with the vampire Spike taking a beating from Robin. While he seems to be losing the fight against Robin, it is really the fight against his mother that is weakening him. Only after he tells his mother that he is sorry, repeating the words in the present as well, and stakes her is he able to turn the fight with Robin around and regain his strength and composure. He fights back, but this time not as the vampire Spike but as Spike, pure and simple. He emerges from the fight reconciled, with his usual attitude and vampire pragmatism, as demonstrated by his statement to Robin: 'I don't give a piss about your Mom. She was a Slayer. I was a vampire. That's the way the game is played.' This statement is a return to his lament in 'Seeing Red' about how it used to be. But in this case, he is no longer yearning for that type of clarity but possesses it. When he attacks Robin, he makes it clear that he is not acting under anyone's influence and when he decides to let him live, it is his choice. By confronting and reexperiencing his different selves simultaneously he is forced to accept that they are all a part of him, making him stronger than ever. 5 When Buffy tells Robin that he was fighting a man who no longer exists, Robin quite rightly tells her, 'Don't delude yourself, that man still exists'. A reconciled Spike is a multiple Spike. But Buffy also rightly points out that 'Spike is the strongest warrior we have. We are going to need him if we are going to come out of this thing alive.' Her words foreshadow the climax of the series Spike accepts the role of champion by sacrificing himself to save the world ('Chosen', 7:22). Buffy's words connect the moment of his sacrifice with his multiplicity in this episode and suggest that it is the process of embracing his multitude of personas and identities that make him a champion strong enough to close the Hellmouth. To be a vampire with a soul is no longer about moral ambiguity but, as the First in the form of Buffy explains to Spike in 'Lessons', 'It's about power'. 341