SIDESHADOWING “CRIMINAL MINDS”
The popular television show called “Criminal Minds” is very formulaic — that is, there is usually no “sideshadowing” of the plot sequence, except in the goofy computer programmer, though there is much of something similar when the team of behavioral analysts are considering all the possible answers to the “unsub’s” behavior. The story always goes like this:
1. The vivid acting out of the crime, which is sometimes so heinous and repulsive that it affects the inner lives of even the watchers. Mandy Patinkin quit the cast because these presentations were so mind-and-heart corrupting.
2. A demonstration of the solidarity and mutual caring of the team which is what helps them stay sane and effective though even the characters admit it’s a challenge.
3. The accumulation of research comes from many sources: data, search engines on the internet, accidents, personal memories and associations, clues so subtle they could not even be imagined before high technology. The team assembles all this into a “profile” that they present to a solemn crowd of enforcement officers, each team member presenting a sentence of information.
4. The team continues by using the profile to search for more information and corrects any dead ends or wrong takes. They must deal along the way with whatever the situation kicks up in their own lives. This is very much in line with scientific theory, which goes in roughly four steps: question, theory, accumulation of evidence, new conclusion. In fact, often the premise is a psych theory, though psych is a “soft” science.
5. A confrontation, often violent, and almost always including the use of force like chases and take-downs, explosions and shootouts. This is what keeps the fans there and the program on the air.
6. A quote (there is also one in the beginning, often citing the theory of the crime) that is classic and reassuring. This forms a kind of parenthesis and reminds us that this is a story.
On the search engines there are lists of writing about “Criminal Minds”, both the subject matter and the changing process as the series ages over an exceptional number of years, so actors and therefore characters come and go, and towards the end variations are introduced in hopes of new energy.
The concept of the writers’ room where a team of writers gather to think through each episode and then write the scene sequence and dialogue has prompted a new kind of story-making created by several people who consider the possibilities of a story-line and under a deadline, working together with a presumed audience in mind. This is a theatre approach in contrast to the theory of an inspired individual working alone.
New ideas about how to shape a tale often find names and become explicitly described, therefore found for use. The difference is like the difference between a box, which limits and confines, and an egg, which protects until the time of completion. One of the newer “figures of tale” is called “sideshadowing,” and comes out of the idea of “foreshadowing” which hints at what might happen later, plants clues, and creates expectations.
https://ofbnbmagazine.com/2019/02/05/the-technique-of-writing-a-novel-using-sideshadowing/
In more high-toned circles the sideshadowing may be about what would have happened without certain forces or incidents. What if Columbus had not found North America, what if it was the Europeans who caught a deadly disease and died, what if Hitler won WWII, what if JFK had not been shot?. In individual terms sideshadowing might ask what one’s life would be like without marriage, without a particular job, if one hadn’t moved and so on. If this is pursued honestly, it can be a bit like therapy with a result of possible dissatisfaction or maybe reconciliation or insight.
What “Criminal Minds” does not do is sideshadow what might have changed the result in crime. What if a helper had intervened? What if a crucial beloved person had not died? What if the unsub had not been brutalized as a child? What could have changed everything and how does the culture define what needs to be done? Where does the will to redeem and rebuild come from? It has in the past been religion, a set of people in affinity to each other who choose to pull an individual into their support for the good of everyone?
If it is a physiological fact that watching a sport or dance triggers in watchers a shadow version of what they are seeing that is even detectable in the muscles, why can’t a television series create in watchers an echoing experience as though it happened to them? Of course, that’s exactly what happens!
This particular series is so structured by tabloid-level shocking events and the theories of how to understand and address them afterwards, that it’s as if we were on that team, so there is a happy effect on the ability to manage in real life. It helps the prefrontal cortex business of executive decisions so as to know how to endorse or intervene, whether it’s kid-squabbles in families, contentious school board meetings, or the state legislature engaged in the sausage-making process of writing laws.
This is what we’ve been missing for the last twenty years, this informed consideration of the side-shadowing possibilities of new laws. Instead we’ve seen people just ignore reality except for forcing the only story they want, the one they control, forbidding consideration of anything else.
There is another sideshadow here, the story of the writers themselves as they worked across the table from each other. It could be framed from an objective investigator who is “bird-caging” as the traditional term has it from the early days of understanding discussion. Or it could imitate the show itself as the writers speak in turn to explain what they were thinking and how they felt. Maybe someone has already done it. They could call their book or video “Creative Minds.” That’s a little bit corny — we should discuss it.
