Page 27 - Courting the Media Contemporary Perspectives on Media and Law

18 Shaeda Isani and Geoffrey Sykes

source of puzzlement to the French who have no equivalent jurisdiction. A
Channel 4 English observation documentary entitled ―The Coroner‖, first
broadcast in March 1999, was used as a visual support to illustrate what a
coroner‘s functions in England are. The documentary was, on the whole, very
restrained, although parts of it were highly suggestive as, for example, the to-
and-fro movements of the pathologist‘s arms sawing through an unseen but
nevertheless present cadaver, the zipping up of being zipped, etc. During these
passages, some students shut their eyes, protested, and generally moaned about
the ―gruesomeness‖ of such scenes. However, the same students report that
they regularly view American forensics television series currently very
popular in France, some examples of which are CSI, (which marked the great
popularity of forensic television shows), Bones and NCIS, which they found
highly entertaining.
In contrast to the muted and restrained footage regarding the medical
examiner‘s work in the BBC documentary, the television series tended to be
very explicit about blood, human tissue and dead bodies without any attempt
at visual ―euphemism‖ destined to ―soften‖ the image with regard to the
viewer‘s sensibilities: the cadaver, its injuries and mutilations, are reduced to
an object of scientific reification.
The contrasted viewer reaction as expressed by the students seems
paradoxical and contradictory and motivated further enquiry: why is it that
blood and cadavers attract when made explicit in the context of entertainment
fiction, yet repel when merely suggested in the context of an educational
documentary about professional legal work?

Explaining Effects

The leading question and point of departure for this paper, is how to
explain contrasting reactions to the two sources of related material? Why were
intelligent, undergraduate, law students, accustomed to discussing the murder
and mayhem of criminal law, repulsed by images of footage which, although
firsthand, had been carefully edited to cater to sensitivities. The parts that most
shocked the students were most implicit: the medical examiner‘s arm shown
sawing, presumably at bones, is highly implicit in comparison to what is
dramatised on forensic drama where the cadaver is laid out on ―the
pathologist‘s slab‖ and internal organs are shown being weighed and placed in
kidney dishes. This reaction raises the question as to why implicit images shot