Prisoners of the past

September, 2003. Lilly Rush, detective in the Philadelphia Police Department, investigates into a triple homicide when she is sought by a woman, terminally ill, and who reports to her a murder she has witnessed… in 1976. Disturbed by the insistence of the dying woman, Rush abandons the current case and dashes into the re-opening of one cold case, an unsolved criminal mystery whose investigation was given up. After solving this case, she specializes in these type of cases, without having wanted but not by chance, without a doubt.

In four years, five TV shows – CSI (2001), Without a Trace and CSI : Miami (2002), Cold Case (2003) and CSI : NY (2004) produced by Jerry Bruckheimer's company contributed to make of CBS the most watched channel in the US, beating its competitor NBC, who dominated the broadcasting scene of the continent since the early 80s. Of these five shows, Cold Case is, in my humble opinion, the most beautiful and the most moving; because if the investigators of Without a Trace take a case before knowing exactly its ins and outs, those in Cold Case have the difficult mission to look into files covered with dust, sometimes forgotten for several decades. The investigation does not rely (otherwise very rarely) on DNA analysis or state-of-the-art technologies, and lots of witnesses might have disappeared and those who are still alive might have lost their memory.

But it is often the memory of one witness or one relative that urges Lilly to re-open a case from where it was abandoned. A memory haunted by the face of a victim whose murderer has never been caught… whose remembrance is marked twice, by the mourning and by the injustice. Because the unexplained deaths are always tinged with suspicion… especially when they gave place to an arrest – even to an unjust conviction. It is the desire of recognition of symbolic redress which drives a man or a woman to appeal to Lilly. It is never said explicitly during the first thirty episodes, but it seems early on that Lilly is herself in search of a repair of the same order, and that it was not chance alone that has urged her to look into the cases of these long-standing suffering victims.

Everything is atypical in Cold Case, to begin with the fact that the show takes place in Philadelphia, one of the most ancient cities and the richest in the history of North America, and that its main character is a woman. These two characteristics, as we shall see, are perfectly in agreement with the tone of the series.

Supervised by Stillman, an experienced lieutenant embodied by John Finn, mostly used to old idiotic pervert roles but excellent and perfectly credible here as a father figure, the blonde detective Lilly Rush (Kathryn Morris) is assisted by three colleagues as different as colorful: Scotty Valens (Danny Pino), a young and reserved but solid inspector; Nick Vera (Jeremy Ratchford), an investigator with a bull’s neck and a hoarse voice and Will Jeffries (Thom Barry), a black giant who is about fifty and grew up in the darkest districts of Philadelphia. As it sometimes happens that the three men to disagree, or are in confrontation even, they always seem to gladly assist the young woman in following the cold tracks of the buried cases. Along with Stillman, Jeffries is the one who seems the most touched by the ancient stories - they were already policemen when those inquiries took place, they heard the investigators talk about it back then. Sometimes, they have grappled with a case and are still haunted by it. Vera and Valens, for their part, often handle witnesses or suspects as if they had just assisted or committed the ancient crime.

In the middle, Lilly Rush stands as an investigator with a two-level personality of her own. If it is often the emotion of a witness or a relative reappeared from the past which urges her to investigate. She can show high qualities of intuition and emotion then, abruptly, an absolute icy brutality. And, contrary to what her name suggests, Rush never hurries up. She seems to know that in the end, time does not necessarily work against her. Over the years, the proofs disappear, but the sense of guilt is only increasing. And if it is not about the guilt of the doers, that of the witnesses who remained silent can single-handedly allow her to solve a long time forgotten crime.

If I described the psychology of the five main characters, it is because they are an integral part of the dynamics of the series, whose investigations are all based on a series of interviews. The visual treatment of the show is in this respect, completely remarkable. The teaser sequences are always divided into two parts. The first one gives the date of the crime and shows the protagonists, during very short expository scenes, and naturally elliptic on their intentions. At the conclusion of this first sequence, the camera shows us a dead body - one of the characters with whom we have just got acquainted. The second sequence of the pre-credits transports us in the present time: a lost item (a suitcase containing personal objects); a macabre discovery (the corpses of two young people found under a building recently pulled down); the bones of a prisoner in a tunnel for evasion or a witness of the past (a young lady out of the coma, a son of a murdered woman, a widow suffering from Alzheimer's disease), cross Lilly Rush's road...

In the following scenes, Rush and her colleagues relive the same journey as the victim; visit the places where they were found, where they lived; and, especially, meet those who had seen them on the day of the murder. The process used in this occasion is visually striking: when the witness of the past appears, he is presented to us at the same time under his current feature and - in a brief, but perfectly distinct flash – under his feature from that time. When the facts go back to only a few years the make-up, the hairstyle, clothes and treatment of the colors of the image are enough to make the actor look younger. When the crime is very ancient, two different actors are cast, but their resemblance is stunning. This process of superimposing of both ages of the same character is regularly taken back, during the intrigue, to illustrate the moments when the witness expresses today the same feelings he experienced years earlier. The same process is systematically reused at the end of the episode, when the doer is arrested, or the murder is solved (it happens that there is not a culprit). The characters of the drama, such as they were presented to us in the teaser, appear in a ghostly way to Lilly or to one of her colleagues, who put a lot of themselves into the investigation, in order to signify that the crime finally became a closed case.

This staging with extremely powerful effects would have no real interest if it did not come to serve scenarios which transfigure the usual frame of the criminal investigation. Because Cold Case does not content itself with looking into the past of the individuals: it also revisits the past, underestimated or too fast forgotten by America. When the first episodes of a new show is broadcast, nobody knows if it will catch a large enough audience to order a full season. The first six episodes of Cold Case, probably shot with a limited budget, approach essentially cases with an intimist nature.

But from the seventh episode, A Time to Hate, the show changes its register. In the dark back alley of a dancing club frequented by the homosexuals of Philadelphia during the fifties, a young baseball player was murdered by gay-bashers. In these days, the taboo aspect of homosexuality had prevented the follow-up of the investigation. Forty years later, the mother of the young man asks Rush to look for the murderers.

As from this very beautiful episode, Cold Case will take quite another dimension and will not cease placing its tragic human stories in the history of the America of yesterday and of the day before yesterday, under its social, cultural or religious aspects: the discovery in a box, in 1958, of the body of a child that nobody reclaimed; a corpse buried under a disco club burned in the 80s or two young people flooded in the concrete of a building since the 60s are so many opportunities for the scriptwriters to approach unknown or forgotten pages of history: the wild experiments carried out on orphans during the cold war, the Disco wave and the generational disruptions it has caused, or the underground work of activists for clandestine abortion.

Two other particularly striking episodes (The Letter, Factory Girls) take place during the forties. The first one speaks about the condition of the black women disdained and mistreated by white men. The second is about the women gaining admittance to financial independence, when the husbands' departure to war incites their partners to participate in the war effort by working in weapon factories. The most beautiful episodes of the first season for that matter are almost all centered on women: the defenestration of a young drug addict mother and the little girl from whom she was threatened to be separated (Fly Away); the insanity of a woman following the death, in a sordid place, of her husband, a chapel organist (Churchgoing People); the death of a disco dancer whose girlfriend and dance partner, disfigured by the fire of the discotheque, are still mourning (Disco Inferno); Without forgetting Boy in the Box and Volunteers, magnificent and deeply moving episodes dedicated to the activists of abortion.

Finally, there is something profoundly literary in Cold Case: numerous scenes show the investigators searching dusty files in the middle of tens of meters of shelves aligned as far as the eye can see, deciphering faded letters, examining pictures gone yellow, inspecting historical documents. Through its dialogues always playing with the contrasts in vocabulary from one period to another, and through its permanent anchoring in the personal and collective past, the show really calls to mind Homicide, a very literary show too, marked by numerous cultural and historical recollections: Baltimore, where Homicide was shot, was the city of Edgar Allan Poe and one of the stages of the underground railroad, the clandestine network which, before the American Civil War, allowed the black slaves of the South to join the North and Canada. The soundtrack of Homicide, one of the richest soundtracks ever made, used all the popular musical styles of America. The music of Cold Case very logically, and with a very accurate taste, resorts to numerous songs contemporary from the crime - which doubtlessly explains that the first season of this show, one of the most popular of America has not yet been released in DVD zone 1: the negotiation of the musical rights represents indeed a puzzle for the producers...

To conclude, I would like to insist on what I shall call the positive feminism of Cold Case. Created and directed by the writer Meredith Stiehm, centered – which is highly unusual - on a female main character, this show demonstrates tremendous plastic beauty, a striking psychological accuracy and a profound sensibility, and often offers a beautiful perspective on the women who try to take the bull by its horns, but also on the men who love them and respect them. Intelligent and intuitive, the energetic Lilly Rush is not afraid of men and does not hate them either. She considers them as her equals, and the most intelligent of them treat her in the same way. Also, the sensibility and the intelligence in Cold Case must not be mistaken with sentimentality: at the end of every episode, during the scenes where the death of the victim is described by the murderer or by the direct witness, the show does not hesitate to tell us how monstrous it is to kill, whatever the reason is. What is shown to us, without beating around the bush, without any sweetened effect, is the total nonsense of the inflicted death, the suffering, the sorrow and the loss which inevitably ensue from this. In this perspective, the solving of the crime appears less as a social necessity to put the criminals in prison than as a necessary condition to a symbolic rehabilitation of the victims and their close relatives.

Finally, when Lilly exchanges a glance with the ghostly silhouette of the victim, after she has taken away the murderer, the audience experiences a rare and elusive feeling. Maybe the feeling one gets when knowing mourning has come to an end, and when one can start living again.