Forget its telegenic cast: the real star of CSI is Luminol. If neo-noir torchlight defined the look of nineties television in shows like The X-Files, the fluorescent glow of Luminol is its twenty-first-century successor. Sprayed in the dark onto a carpet or a car trunk or a bathtub, Luminol turns invisible traces of old blood into light. It makes death itself visible, as if registering the body’s secret neon, by bringing its traces to sudden, glowing life. It’s no coincidence that CSI is set in neon-lit Las Vegas, and that each episode opens with a sequence of aerial shots of the city’s sunsets and shining casinos in hyperreal, glowing color. In CSI even the city seems to have been sprayed with Luminol, to offer itself up, radiant and transparent, to our gaze.

I’m obsessed by CSI. I watch it for the light. I watch it for the exaggerated sheen on the roofs of new tract houses on the desert’s edge as the camera pans across them; for underlit laboratories as sleek as display kitchens; for the gold of a desert sunset igniting a suburban lounge room. I love its saturated colors, the waxy polish of black cars, the squeaky patina of its hallways. I love the light’s excessive, even gleam, the implacable glassiness of its cobalt blues and pinky purples; the sense that objects are always on the verge of flaring into further brightness. I love the way the handsome cast of CSI move through this exquisite brilliance, their faces overcast with color, as if in the grip of some limpid thought made visible: the way the sky, as the camera glides above the city’s casinos and dusky lots, appears to flash and stutter.

My pleasure is only in part aesthetic. There is something more to this weird radiance. It feels allegorical. This is due to the association of death with light instead of darkness. There is also the perfection of the marriage between Las Vegas—with its history as a destination for sin that is approached through a biblical desert—with sleepless brilliance. (This is why CSI’s spinoff series, set in New York and Miami, cannot hold the same compulsive appeal). But it is the sheer, insistent presence of CSI’s manipulated light effects that makes them feel so pregnant with meaning. Shot on 35mm film and then telecined to high-definition (HD), where its colors are exaggerated, CSI’s light is self-consciously artificial and baroque in its deployments. It is so pervasive, so intent on playing out its own technical dramas each week, that it overwhelms the series’ storylines and human cast.

In CSI, light dwells: it inhabits. It imparts a strange aura to every object, including the faces of its cast, so that each appears held in suspension, illuminated from within and without. It is the democratic beauty of this light, with its hint of occult knowledge married to technical expertise, that is so addictive and disturbing. It makes both the animate and the inanimate equally charismatic. It touches every surface with glamour, and imbues each space with potential radiance. Watching its relentless beauty I am reminded of Werner Herzog’s voiceover, in Grizzly Man, in which he reflects, watching outtakes from filmmaker Timothy Treadwell’s archive—a sequence of long takes of the same sunlit Alaskan clearing—on the intrinsic mystery of images when they are captured by a camera: “Sometimes things have their own magic, their own mysterious stardom.”

What does it mean, the slickly brilliant illumination of CSI that turns everything into cinema? The program always takes care to remind us that its world is in the process of a mechanical, yet potent, transformation. Everything is sensitized, portentous, filled with a sense of its own potential stardom—in CSI’s “in-wound” animation sequences, even human flesh appears, as the eye plunges through it, to be lit up from within. Everything is filled, or fillable, with light.

For some time I have been convinced that Luminol’s deployment in CSI, at the very threshold between life and death, has something significant to tell us. Part of the tremendous popularity of this series about Las Vegas’ forensic graveyard shift is the way it plays with the very idea of illumination. It longs for mystery; at the same time it embodies a bright fantasy of scientific exactitude. It celebrates glamour, but you could also call this glamour residue. It banishes mystery, yet appears, uneasily, to be saturated by it. CSI stages for its audience the very limits, in this new century, of blood and light.

Luminol makes its first appearance in “Who Are You?”, the sixth episode of the first series of CSI. When a woman’s skeletal remains turn up in the foundations of a tract home, Grissom (William Petersen) and Stokes (George Eads) suspect she has been murdered by her ex-boyfriend. Finding varnished maple floorboards and traces of aquarium sand beneath a carpet, they come to the conclusion that this is the site of a violent altercation. They spray the floor with Luminol—but it fails to react. Grissom explains that it only works on surface traces of blood, and calls for the Alternative Light Source (ALS). As he kneels and points a thin tubular torch attached to a machine at the area, its concentrated beam suffuses the floor with a light as blue as a Madonna’s robe. Beneath this fluorescent light, occult blood traces (as forensic scientists call them) spring to life from beneath the surface, blooming into electric blue spatters, streaks and handprints. Although this first use of Luminol is, technically, a failure, the scene trains us to anticipate the many Luminol scenes to follow, in which places will reveal themselves as gory dance floors of chemiluminscent struggle. It establishes the deep and addictive aesthetic connection—which infuses all of CSI’s light effects—between death, revelation, and eerie luminescence.

The following episode, “Blood Drops,” is one of the most beautiful and baroque in the entire CSI series. Although Luminol is not used, the episode marries blood and glowing light to the “occult” in its other sense—something secret or mysterious in nature. When the entire forensic team is called to a house where a multiple homicide has occurred, they find the bodies of a father, mother, and two sons: two daughters, a teenager and a five-year-old, have survived. The spilled blood is still fresh—the house smells strongly of copper, Grissom remarks to a young police detective, as they climb the stairs—and congeals in pools and odd circular patterns on the walls. Part of the team’s work will be to correlate the sprays and soakings into a pattern that makes sense. As Grissom begins to work with Sara Sidle (Jorja Fox) on the mother, who has been slain in bed, they stop talking as they grow aware of a soft patter. The woman’s blood is still dripping onto the floor. That’s not all—her soul is still in the room, Sidle observes. Later, Grissom and Sidle will observe that the killer has also “left something of himself” in the house.

No episode of CSI is more disturbing than “Blood Drops.” It taps into the odd energy of crime scene photography, which the Australian critic Ross Gibson points out can be strangely beautiful, both in the haphazard aesthetic arrangements it creates, and the sense of portent it conveys to objects; for until it is solved a crime scene remains literally “unfinished,” and so acquires extra presence, as if longing for something outside itself to complete it. (CSI’s shots frequently emphasize this decentered, unsettling feeling, by placing the actors at the edges of the frame.) In “Blood Drops,” light carries the potent weight of the invisible: it appears sentient, almost knowing. Slick highlights render domestic objects sinister. The camera dwells on photographs in the stairwell, and the family’s china rabbits, as kitschily shiny as Jeff Koons’ “Rabbit,” which proliferate on the front lawn beneath the mailbox. Light seems almost to plaster itself to the living. As he approaches the house, the strobes of emergency vehicles alight on Grissom’s plump face, and later, as she sits in a police car, they seem attracted in swarms to a fragile Dakota Fanning’s golden hair. Colors are as intense, as chemiluminescent as Luminol—the hyperreal green of the lawn, the aquarium blues of shadows. It is as if color, like blood, is pooling on objects, beneath things. The lurid light is filled with a sense of uncanny threat, the feeling that every surface harbors invisible violence. An early breakthrough occurs in the kitchen when Grissom manages to lift an intruder’s footprint from the lino with an electro-static magnet. This sense of uneasy revelation reaches its high point when Sarah Sidle uses an ultra-violet camera on Dakota Fanning’s chest to reveal a tracery of bruises beneath her pure white skin.

Throughout the series, but especially in these early episodes, the light of CSI is omnipresent, unnaturally alembic, mysterious in provenance. Like Luminol’s chemiluminescence, it often appears to find its magical source within itself—for Luminol’s strange power derives from its biblical ability to bring itself forth, like the first light, out of darkness. Luminol does not throw a light onto the world, but reacts with traces of old blood, to give life to a secret world of death. In this way, it is a kind of closed circuit: both the igniter and product of blood. And the world it creates is uncanny, almost sentient. It is as if, watching, we are returned to the belief held by the early theoreticians of optics, that light was not reflected by objects, but a quality intrinsic to them, that their radiated beams actually penetrated the eye. Light, in CSI, is almost a material presence. It is personal, it seeks us out. The series delights in hyperreal lighting that makes banal locales uncanny. As Willows (Marg Helgenberger) and Grissom search for body parts in a desert turned yellow by post-production manipulation, it is as if they walk through a world of viscous sunlight, as radiantly pregnant with significance as the gold-leaf background of a medieval church mosaic. And it is as if—as we watch a car move along a desert road between intense tangerine sky and paler desert, or Grissom, silhouetted on a pedestrian crossing within a dusk of unnaturally even, tender blue—we are asked to believe in a medieval notion of the air, infused with magic and intent, perhaps even with belief.

Within this glowing reenchantment of the everyday, material objects loom large. They frequently occupy the foreground of scenes— the pink heel of a patent leather stiletto glistens in close-up, a jagged fragment of toenail glows in a pair of tweezers, creamy and translucent. Spotlit, these objects bask in the aura of their own glamour, or flare into brightness. In the opening credits Brown (Gary Dourdan), his own face shadowed, holds a sandshoe to the light, as its unfurled laces fluoresce into whiteness. In a recent episode a supermarket is flooded so intensely and evenly with white light that spilled bags of peas and broken washing powder almost vibrate with uncanny danger. In the universe of CSI it is as if a revolution has taken place and the material things of this world have emerged from their mute service, and now assert dominance over us.

The light of CSI is compelling because it situates itself at the unnerving border between animate and inanimate. In doing so, it may appeal to our instinctive sense that the world is now uncanny in a new way, tapping into an unspoken ambivalence about our relationship to “things.” For some time the balance of the world has been tipping away from nature and toward the manufactured and machine-made. We are surrounded by more and more objects of our own making, more junk and debris. The frightening potential of this proliferation is captured by images in the World Wildlife Fund’s recent “The future is man made” campaign: a jeep-load of tourists photographs a wooden rhino in the African savannah, fake trees grow in an asphalt desert, and plastic turtles forge an empty, moonlit beach. As we become increasingly alienated from the cyclical rhythms of nature, outnumbered by the mass-produced objects of our own making, and our society more secular, the choices we make as consumers have come more and more to define us. We are, in effect, what we buy: and we are haunted by it. The objects that surround us are burdened by our desire.

It is perhaps no coincidence that the slick luster of CSI’s light appears to have migrated into the program from the advertisements that surround it. The same highlights plaster themselves to glossy images of computers and handbags; the same baroque level of color manipulation defines Baz Luhrmann’s advertisements starring Nicole Kidman for Chanel. Even the laboratories and morgues in which the CSIs work could be the setting for an edgy fashion shoot. These are not the overworked, dingy morgues of nineties television, but spaces as smoothly glossy as a Bang and Olufsen catalogue, as exquisitely lit as Howard Carter’s photographs of King Tutankhamen’s tomb (in fact, Carter traveled to Hollywood to learn the craft of cinematographic light). The bodies lying in state on their slabs are not The Silence of the Lambs’ visions of abject, gothic horror or Quincy, MD’s excuse for macho heroics (an unforgettable sight of my childhood: Quincy demonstrating his “Lazy S” in the series opening credits to a row of fainting police cadets). The glamorous cast, like Marg Helgenberger—whose sun-ravaged face and styled strawberry-blonde hair the camera dwells upon—are beautiful enough to be models. They appear, as they work, almost to be absorbed by this sticky light, stalked by color. The landscape of things, in the shape of evidence, makes continual demands upon them. But more than this—it seems to want to transform them, with a kind of ruthless appetite, into gorgeous objects.

CSI suggests that the margin between the human and the inhuman is thinning. The aura objects accumulate is so intense that it is almost mystical: they brood, they hoard light, they may even be imbued with the spirits of the dead. They almost appear to exist on the same plane of consciousness as the series’ human protagonists: to have turned, according to the Buddhist division of states of being, from “things without desire” to “things with desire.” By the same token, people are understood as the sum total of the things that they have touched and accumulated during their lives. Their bodies speak for them: material evidence alone provides the answer to the question “Who are you?” Homes and homely places are particularly uncanny containers of traces, spatterings and brushings. Like Luminol, CSI’s light makes us see a haunted landscape that is at once beautiful and frightening.

But there is another aspect to Luminol—its chemiluminescence suggests, gorgeously, the ideal of “enlightenment.” Luminol may bring the invisible, quite literally, to light; but it derives just as much power from its brilliant embodiment of illumination as metaphorical ideal. When Luminol appears in CSI, it fluoresces with knowledge; it delivers spectacular certainty; it is a beautiful manifestation of insight. In “Blood Drops,” a detective blunders into the kitchen and tells Grissom there is nothing to see. Grissom replies testily, “You guys will never get it.” And “getting it,” in CSI, is the point. As Catherine Willows tells a new recruit in the series’ pilot episode, the detectives are able to interpret the world in a way that offers closure to the victims. Doing this, she drawls, is guaranteed to “make you feel as good as King Kong on co-caine.”

There is even a hint, in the series’ many Luminol scenes, of the divine or spiritual sense of “illumination.” The CSIs of the night shift are “sensitives,” unusually talented individuals who love their work, and have a greater sense of driven vocation than the day shift. They bring an attentive reverence to the evidence. The camera dwells upon their faces in the laboratory or the strange silent fishbowl of a crime scene, as they make their private connections with the dead. This, in particular, is a very great part of my own enjoyment, as a writer and ex-academic, of the program—that it makes a fetish of thought. This celebration of thinking is truly revolutionary television. While the police procedural has traditionally revolved around action, CSI’s drama centers around rational resolution. As the investigators bend over ruined bodies, peer at epithelials under a microscope, or pour wet plaster into footprints, their faces are calm. As if lit from within by their own concentration, they have the absorbed grace of renaissance angels.

This unhurried, methodical, almost meditative pursuit of knowledge forms the narrative structure of CSI. The investigators “listen” to the evidence and follow its trail to clear conclusions—“What does the room say?” Grissom asks one of his staff. “Concentrate on what cannot lie. The evidence.” “We resolve,” Willows tells the raw recruit. “We restore peace of mind.” And this is the other charm of CSI: as the detectives painstakingly reconstruct the angles of bullets or establish the place of death through local pollen, they are never wrong. Some snobs complain that CSI’s plots are thin, their resolutions pat, while real CSIs point out that in real cases results are rarely obtained so quickly—but this is precisely the point. CSI’s Luminol scenes are a kind of shorthand for the pleasures the series offers, of repetitive problem-solving and speedy resolution. The light of CSI has a powerful hold over its audience because it not only captures our sense of millennial unease; its strange brilliance compensates us. In the face of the strange, proliferating life of things, it holds out the possibility of truth.

No wonder the CSIs love their jobs. The cutting-edge investigative software at their disposal includes databases of tire treads, weather records, clowns’ copyrighted face designs, and DNA. It is capable of staging remarkable simulations. Investigating a fire in a lounge room, Stokes scrolls through a database of furniture, drags the icon of a particular brand of sofa into an on-screen model of the room and, using another database of ignition temperatures, recreates the fire. (Stokes discovers that the “Curie Point” of the sofa is so high that if the fire had begun here the damage should have been much greater: this ability to divide up and name the world is another of CSI’s pleasures.) In another episode Willows uses red tape to trace the angles of blood spatter, graphs these lines into a computer, and is able to watch the exact sequence of death play out before her eyes. Not only do the scientists have access to this equipment, but the expertise to use it. The seamlessness of CSI’s illumination is striking. Nowhere is this more clearly expressed than in its “in-wound” animations, in which the camera travels through flesh at high speed to the very cause of death. It is perhaps not too far-fetched to suggest that the series’ luminous cinematography embodies the speed-of-light simultaneity the information superhighway promised, but has so far failed to deliver.

This is just one of the complicated fantasies about enlightenment and science embodied by CSI’s clean, silky light. First, it repolishes the “aura” of science as a pure discipline. While popular culture has, since at the least the fifties, depicted scientists as sinister shut-ins, CSI’s investigators are good-looking, cool, and driven only by the thirst for knowledge: as if The X-Files’ Lone Gunmen had had a makeover, stopped playing Dungeons and Dragons, and emerged from their boys-only bunker with an improved attitude toward “the man.” The CSIs are, in a significant reversal, now more pure of heart than the regular police force, who in turn refer to them as the “nerd squad” (an insult that their aura of glamour negates). In CSI, science is an elite form of knowledge: the reserve of experts (regular detectives “wouldn’t know fingerprints from paw prints,” Willows says). The investigators move with extraordinary freedom through a clean, infinitely resourced, and uncluttered workplace. The program breaks with the grainy, drab colors and jerky camera work used in nineties programs like NYPD Blue or St Elsewhere to invoke the decay and under-resourcing of public institutions. Instead, its labs are Utopian preserves, in which the scientists are free to be the best that they can be. Without obstruction, they use their computers to consolidate and match data from a vast number of instrumentalities, both public and private, across America. They always know the right questions to ask to make them yield an answer.

The difference from our own world, in which science has lost its gloss, is marked. It is hard, in an era of multinational drug companies, gene banks, and competing private data services, to believe that science is our friend; or to believe that is capable of supplying answers to overwhelmingly complex problems like global warming. All around us, the glamour of data is wearing off as it is compromised by privatization, lack of coordination between instrumentalities, and uneven development. It is true that those of us with the means may have access to more and more “information,” but as journalist Gideon Haigh points out in a recent article on the problems inherent in Google, we may no longer have the research skills to make sense of it (or even to know what we don’t know). Even governmental democracy can find itself compromised in the swampy gaps between different modes of collecting data, as the Florida election debacle showed us. The CSI investigators’ dogged pursuit of knowledge has a broad audience appeal, because it touches not only those viewers who long for “straight” answers, but also the many of us who mourn the disappearance, in our fragmented service economy, of holistic expertise.

Of the many fantasies that CSI offers us about knowledge, this continuity of care is perhaps the most persuasive. The investigators follow each case through from beginning to end; they assess a body in the field, attend the autopsy, conduct all experiments: no research is contracted or outsourced. Their old-fashioned, holistic approach contributes to an enormous sense of job satisfaction: as Grissom points out to Eckley, the head of the day shift, he does not think of his job as a “career.” It means that the CSIs are able to engage deeply with each client, without distraction, on a case-by-case basis (in fact, they live for their work and appear to have little in the way of social lives). In the laboratories of CSI, as the theme song reminds us every week (from the second series onward), who you are matters. Identifying the victim is the first step in standard forensic practice, but CSI takes this further: the investigators’ obsessive, thoughtful gazes confer on each body a kind of grace. There is a great consolation, in our era of distraction, in the series’ remarkable aestheticisation of the dead. Whether petrified, waterlogged, or burned, they are always beautiful. Their faces are peaceful. The camera also dwells upon them with respectful attention. Gilded by light, they acquire an odd, intimate glamour, which persists until each gives up its secret: Scrabble letters lodged in a throat or a fatal dose of Jimson weed. How many of us could expect to receive this tender, attentive care from a public amenity, regardless of socioeconomic status? CSI offers us an ideal, if disturbing, image of deathly democracy, in which every victim is important and of intense interest. Perhaps a rather sad, and very modern fantasy underlies the allure of this series for so many of us: in death, CSI suggests, every one of us can be a star.