With its defining focus on "sexually-based offenses," Law & Order: Special Victims Unit is exemplary of these foundational incitements linking genre, knowledge, desire, and violence. Resonances between its stated epistemological mandate to search out the truths of criminal sexuality and a televisually-inflected vigilance around more subterranean investments in family and heteronormativity are typical of SVU, and I'd like to illustrate these structuring principles through a detailed discussion of a single episode. This episode, "Sacrifce" (#50/3.07), which involves a case of gay misidentification, is not classified as one of SVU's "handful of gay-related episodes" (through season 5) by Angie B. (1:P5). Lesbian themes have since been treated occasionally, but never beyond the program's framework of victimization and criminality, and too rarely to ameliorate what is perhaps a symptomatic absence: if, as I've argued, lesbian desire has an especially overdetermined relationship to TV's working women, this apparent reluctance to include it in the range of sexual sensations that SVU mediates may signal the risk already inherent in its hazardous undertow. Nor is "Sacrifce" among the episodes that make frequent appearances in fan catalogues of onscreen "subtext" between Olivia and Alex. While my example is thus idiosyncratic, I've chosen it to analyze how the logics of SVU overall set up epistemological schemas that put forward the possibility of Olivia as lesbian object and subject, even when it doesn't surface in obvious ways. "Sacrifice" demonstrates how homosexuality tends to alternately emerge and disappear in conjunction with violence, family crisis, consumerism and spectacle, and epistemological uncertainty more generally.
Its opening tableau is what we might imagine is a stereotypical scene from gay life: a crowd of men loitering outside a bar, as two negotiate their first date. Just as they are making plans to continue the evening, gunshots ring out, and the incipient romance is disrupted (SVU's constitutive coupling of transgressive desire with violence). When the shots go off, one of the men pulls his gun and dashes away -- he's a cop, we are to assume, so personal life is also interrupted by the professional, here. Next, this gay officer (called Steve) meets up with Olivia and her partner Elliot at the hospital where the unconscious gunshot victim was taken. Their conversation establishes, first of all, the detectives' fluency with the city's licentious gay subculture, perhaps a necessary part of their purview as "panty police" (or, one might speculate, a particular competency of Olivia's, as she does most of the talking). Steve informs them that he believes he spotted the victim in "Puffy's" (near the scene of the crime), and Olivia responds with surprise, "Inside the bar?" "I was on a date," Steve confesses, clarifying what he was doing in what she evidently knows to be a gay establishment, and activating the significance of inside vs. outside so characteristic of the closet. Elliot's main role is to ask, after they've gotten the facts out of the way, if Steve "wants a little discretion on this," making clear the intersection of this incident with the figures of the homophobic police department and the closeted gay cop (where we can't help wondering about Olivia).
The initial phase of their investigation reveals several assumptions typical of the hermeneutics of SVU's sex detectives. First, the unit is involved because "copious fluids" were found (in the victim), raising the suspicion of gang rape -- as if any non-normative sexual behavior (in this case, having multiple partners) must proceed from violence. Second, their reading of the victim as gay, which you'll recall is based solely on the location of the crime (as they presume the sex with men was non-consensual), is unshaken when they note he's wearing a wedding ring. "If he's in a committed relationship," Elliot muses, to which Olivia replies derisively, "He was in a meat market bar. Let's hope his partner's more committed than he is" -- they rely here on stereotypical models of homosexual partnerships (both positive and negative) to interpret the evidence. Third, they immediately verify that the victim has no prior arrests for solicitation (i.e. prostitution), cluing us in to an implicit connection between (homo)sexual criminality and commercialism. Fourth, Detective Munch's opinion is that "Good money's on a hate crime. Perps are usually hetero or closeted and in denial," referencing an awareness of the very real violence that can be provoked by the closet's oppressive architecture. And most importantly, what the discussion of the facts of the case among the SVU team exhibits is that their procedures for investigating sex consist in large part of applying imagination to the evidence to tell speculative stories that fit the crime (e.g. Elliot's: "maybe he was cheating, went out, picked up the wrong guys in the meat market"). One might say that the pleasure of being a detective (particularly for those detectives playing along in the audience) lies in this creative exercise of conjecture.
The problem with SVU's hypothetical account of the crime, in this instance, is that the victim won't accommodate his tale to theirs. When Olivia and Elliot finally catch up with the elusive Wesley at his apartment he is uncooperative, and denies he was raped. The detectives are incredulously confronting him with the "evidence" when his wife and daughter walk in. In this instant juxtaposition of a narrative of gay violence with a portrait of nuclear normativity, the detectives' (and the audience's) interpretation is thrown into fatal disarray (in the sort of entertaining plot twist that advances virtually every episode of SVU). This is the first transposition of the episode, from a sordid saga of homosexual, subcultural sex and violence to a drama of an ordinary family threatened -- and I would argue that the combination is not coincidental. The connection is emphasized by an initial period of confusion when it seems that Wesley's family might be endangered precisely by his gay desires. The detectives question him back at the station:
Much of this murkiness is conveniently cleared up, though, when there's a break in the case: it turns out Wesley is a gay porn star. In what I'm identifying as the episode's second transposition, another suspect confirms that their "victim" is "not gay... Wesley's strictly gay for pay at 1500 bucks a bang," and any exploration of homosexual (or even bisexual) desire, whether violent or consensual, quite effectively vanishes from the episode as the detectives wholeheartedly adopt this rather simplistic explanation. Thus, homosexuality as the episode's framing perversion is displaced quite baldly onto the commercialization and spectacularization of sexuality, the moral debate transferred from the peccadilloes of (married, closeted) homosexuals to those of pornographers. Whether Wesley is a closeted homo or a closeted porn star, however, the effects of the closet are still in force. The detectives aren't surprised that Wesley refused to come clean, and Tutuola states the obvious: "a straight guy wouldn't want the world to know he's doing gay porn." The SVU team's own moral judgments remain in force: while Elliot tetchily reminds Wesley that "Pornography isn't illegal. Making it isn't illegal" (establishing that, in this episode of SVU, there isn't any bona fide sex crime involved), Wesley responds, "I see the way you're looking at me. I'm scum because I make money having sex." Later, Alex goes to court to remove Wesley's daughter from her parents, on the grounds that "pornography is a form of legal prostitution. The minor's physical, mental, and emotional welfare was corrupted... [by] exposing her to an environment of wanton sexual activity." These attitudes are representative of how SVU's narrative language is shaped by imperatives of normative containment as much as by the legal enforcement of sexuality, whether the deviance in question is homosexuality or another eminently substitutable threat to the conventional family.
The pivotal revelation of Wesley's reluctant stardom comes out simultaneously in two interviews that are intercut with each other as SVU personnel watch through one-way mirrors. Shooting windows and through windows, particularly during interrogations at the station, is a signature visual device of SVU, one that could be interpreted as a self-reflexive commentary on television itself ("Your Window on the World"): an allusion to the privileged point of view of the audience, and to the affinity of this position with the diegetic detective work. The new pornography angle is, of course, even more insistently self-reflexive (as are SVU's many instances of videotaped evidence). When Olivia expresses incredulity about the suspect's gay porn story, he volunteers "I could screen the film for you if you'd like." The detectives don't respond, but the unfulfilled promise of explicit images hovers over the rest of the episode, functioning both to differentiate SVU's text from porn (educating us about the difference between good sex TV and bad sex TV) and simultaneously to destabilize this very distinction -- as SVU is obviously portraying porn (albeit with some delicacy) even as it condemns it. Elliot and Olivia drop in on a porn set, where the camera tracks tightly behind them as they stride through a labyrinthine corridor from the respectable outer office into the sordid interior, passing by the video equipment and crew before they stop short, their backs framing a tableau of Wesley's wife Jaina, in a tawdry maid's outfit, kneeling on the floor between two buff, shirtless men -- a titillating picture indeed. On their second visit, the shots track across the literal border between realist illusion and televisual apparatus, crossing walls sporting lifelike domestic interiors on one side and scaffolding, machinery, and lounging talent on the other. The flick's director goads Olivia by asking her, "You ever thought about doing a movie? You look like you'd be a real natural" -- calling attention, perhaps, to her existence onscreen in a sensationalistic show about sex. In summary, then, "Sacrifice" serves as an example of the ways SVU's language of investigation mediates the normative, as well as criminal, boundaries of sexual acts and desires, mobilizing critical ambivalences at the multivalent intersections of (homo)sexuality and perversion, family and eroticism, consent and violence, sex and consumerism, private acts and public performance, truth and simulation, revelation and concealment -- a diegetic network of structuring ambiguities that reverberates intertextually and metatextually as well.
Its opening tableau is what we might imagine is a stereotypical scene from gay life: a crowd of men loitering outside a bar, as two negotiate their first date. Just as they are making plans to continue the evening, gunshots ring out, and the incipient romance is disrupted (SVU's constitutive coupling of transgressive desire with violence). When the shots go off, one of the men pulls his gun and dashes away -- he's a cop, we are to assume, so personal life is also interrupted by the professional, here. Next, this gay officer (called Steve) meets up with Olivia and her partner Elliot at the hospital where the unconscious gunshot victim was taken. Their conversation establishes, first of all, the detectives' fluency with the city's licentious gay subculture, perhaps a necessary part of their purview as "panty police" (or, one might speculate, a particular competency of Olivia's, as she does most of the talking). Steve informs them that he believes he spotted the victim in "Puffy's" (near the scene of the crime), and Olivia responds with surprise, "Inside the bar?" "I was on a date," Steve confesses, clarifying what he was doing in what she evidently knows to be a gay establishment, and activating the significance of inside vs. outside so characteristic of the closet. Elliot's main role is to ask, after they've gotten the facts out of the way, if Steve "wants a little discretion on this," making clear the intersection of this incident with the figures of the homophobic police department and the closeted gay cop (where we can't help wondering about Olivia).
The initial phase of their investigation reveals several assumptions typical of the hermeneutics of SVU's sex detectives. First, the unit is involved because "copious fluids" were found (in the victim), raising the suspicion of gang rape -- as if any non-normative sexual behavior (in this case, having multiple partners) must proceed from violence. Second, their reading of the victim as gay, which you'll recall is based solely on the location of the crime (as they presume the sex with men was non-consensual), is unshaken when they note he's wearing a wedding ring. "If he's in a committed relationship," Elliot muses, to which Olivia replies derisively, "He was in a meat market bar. Let's hope his partner's more committed than he is" -- they rely here on stereotypical models of homosexual partnerships (both positive and negative) to interpret the evidence. Third, they immediately verify that the victim has no prior arrests for solicitation (i.e. prostitution), cluing us in to an implicit connection between (homo)sexual criminality and commercialism. Fourth, Detective Munch's opinion is that "Good money's on a hate crime. Perps are usually hetero or closeted and in denial," referencing an awareness of the very real violence that can be provoked by the closet's oppressive architecture. And most importantly, what the discussion of the facts of the case among the SVU team exhibits is that their procedures for investigating sex consist in large part of applying imagination to the evidence to tell speculative stories that fit the crime (e.g. Elliot's: "maybe he was cheating, went out, picked up the wrong guys in the meat market"). One might say that the pleasure of being a detective (particularly for those detectives playing along in the audience) lies in this creative exercise of conjecture.
The problem with SVU's hypothetical account of the crime, in this instance, is that the victim won't accommodate his tale to theirs. When Olivia and Elliot finally catch up with the elusive Wesley at his apartment he is uncooperative, and denies he was raped. The detectives are incredulously confronting him with the "evidence" when his wife and daughter walk in. In this instant juxtaposition of a narrative of gay violence with a portrait of nuclear normativity, the detectives' (and the audience's) interpretation is thrown into fatal disarray (in the sort of entertaining plot twist that advances virtually every episode of SVU). This is the first transposition of the episode, from a sordid saga of homosexual, subcultural sex and violence to a drama of an ordinary family threatened -- and I would argue that the combination is not coincidental. The connection is emphasized by an initial period of confusion when it seems that Wesley's family might be endangered precisely by his gay desires. The detectives question him back at the station:
Wesley: "No one raped me."Various unmappable territories of sexuality converge here in a hermeneutic sinkhole that renders rape stubbornly indefinable in the binary terms that Olivia insists should characterize it. In her potent line, retaining the opposition between forced and consensual sex dictates abandoning the one segregating desire into homo and hetero (not an insignificant maneuver given that this is our culture's structuring premise, as Sedgwick conceives it). In evidence also is the potential boomerang effect of the vague "lots of people": when Olivia is the one who defends transgressive erotics (as she often is, the foil to her more conservative partner), there's always the risk that her sympathy will be viewed as an insinuation about her own sexuality. Olivia presses Wesley for the "truth" with benevolent frustration that he won't allow SVU to "help" him, demonstrating an axiom of SVU's investigative logics (and those of the culture at large): people -- and television characters -- don't often willingly offer up the verities of their desire; this knowledge can only be produced through vigilant observation and inquest. So, at this point in "Sacrifice," the figure of a family in crisis momentarily overlaps with the concurrent difficulties of delineating both desire (which appears mystifyingly bisexual rather than stably homosexual) and violence -- and hence also with the fissures in the supposedly rock-solid reality of rape itself, the show's ostensible raison d'être (as Olivia expresses their dilemma: "without a complaining witness [the rape] doesn't exist").
Elliot: "Then how do you explain the semen inside of you -- was it consensual?"
Wesley: "I'm married, I've got a kid."
Olivia: "Look, lots of people hit for both teams. Now either you were forced, or you weren't."
Wesley: "OK, I'm bisexual. Are we done?"
Much of this murkiness is conveniently cleared up, though, when there's a break in the case: it turns out Wesley is a gay porn star. In what I'm identifying as the episode's second transposition, another suspect confirms that their "victim" is "not gay... Wesley's strictly gay for pay at 1500 bucks a bang," and any exploration of homosexual (or even bisexual) desire, whether violent or consensual, quite effectively vanishes from the episode as the detectives wholeheartedly adopt this rather simplistic explanation. Thus, homosexuality as the episode's framing perversion is displaced quite baldly onto the commercialization and spectacularization of sexuality, the moral debate transferred from the peccadilloes of (married, closeted) homosexuals to those of pornographers. Whether Wesley is a closeted homo or a closeted porn star, however, the effects of the closet are still in force. The detectives aren't surprised that Wesley refused to come clean, and Tutuola states the obvious: "a straight guy wouldn't want the world to know he's doing gay porn." The SVU team's own moral judgments remain in force: while Elliot tetchily reminds Wesley that "Pornography isn't illegal. Making it isn't illegal" (establishing that, in this episode of SVU, there isn't any bona fide sex crime involved), Wesley responds, "I see the way you're looking at me. I'm scum because I make money having sex." Later, Alex goes to court to remove Wesley's daughter from her parents, on the grounds that "pornography is a form of legal prostitution. The minor's physical, mental, and emotional welfare was corrupted... [by] exposing her to an environment of wanton sexual activity." These attitudes are representative of how SVU's narrative language is shaped by imperatives of normative containment as much as by the legal enforcement of sexuality, whether the deviance in question is homosexuality or another eminently substitutable threat to the conventional family.
The pivotal revelation of Wesley's reluctant stardom comes out simultaneously in two interviews that are intercut with each other as SVU personnel watch through one-way mirrors. Shooting windows and through windows, particularly during interrogations at the station, is a signature visual device of SVU, one that could be interpreted as a self-reflexive commentary on television itself ("Your Window on the World"): an allusion to the privileged point of view of the audience, and to the affinity of this position with the diegetic detective work. The new pornography angle is, of course, even more insistently self-reflexive (as are SVU's many instances of videotaped evidence). When Olivia expresses incredulity about the suspect's gay porn story, he volunteers "I could screen the film for you if you'd like." The detectives don't respond, but the unfulfilled promise of explicit images hovers over the rest of the episode, functioning both to differentiate SVU's text from porn (educating us about the difference between good sex TV and bad sex TV) and simultaneously to destabilize this very distinction -- as SVU is obviously portraying porn (albeit with some delicacy) even as it condemns it. Elliot and Olivia drop in on a porn set, where the camera tracks tightly behind them as they stride through a labyrinthine corridor from the respectable outer office into the sordid interior, passing by the video equipment and crew before they stop short, their backs framing a tableau of Wesley's wife Jaina, in a tawdry maid's outfit, kneeling on the floor between two buff, shirtless men -- a titillating picture indeed. On their second visit, the shots track across the literal border between realist illusion and televisual apparatus, crossing walls sporting lifelike domestic interiors on one side and scaffolding, machinery, and lounging talent on the other. The flick's director goads Olivia by asking her, "You ever thought about doing a movie? You look like you'd be a real natural" -- calling attention, perhaps, to her existence onscreen in a sensationalistic show about sex. In summary, then, "Sacrifice" serves as an example of the ways SVU's language of investigation mediates the normative, as well as criminal, boundaries of sexual acts and desires, mobilizing critical ambivalences at the multivalent intersections of (homo)sexuality and perversion, family and eroticism, consent and violence, sex and consumerism, private acts and public performance, truth and simulation, revelation and concealment -- a diegetic network of structuring ambiguities that reverberates intertextually and metatextually as well.
