Naked City and the existence of a man

I will always insist that one of the very best police dramas ever shown on television—one of the best dramas of any kind, for that matter—was Naked City. Today's police procedurals pale in comparison; not only are many of them simply inferior products, even the best of them mostly fall short of the intellectual, emotional, and even spiritual depth contained in the eight million stories of the naked city. Of all its many fine episodes, perhaps the one that most epitomizes this is the extraordinary episode "Which Is Joseph Creeley?" That title is not a typo or a misstaatement, for the question of Joseph Creeley's identiy is not one of who, but which. It is an extraordinary episode, and while I can be accused of overusing that word from time to time, in this case I thought it really was extraordinary, even as the episode was unfolding. 

It's an unusual episode in many respects, not the least of which being that of the Naked City regulars, only Detective Adam Flint (Paul Burke) and his girlfriend Libby Kingston (Nancy Malone) appear in the episode; none of the other detectives are shown, or even mentioned in the opening credits—but then, this is not their story. The cold open gives us Adam and Libby heading up the steps to where some type of legal proceeding is being held. Adam is clearly tense, with Libby providing moral support. She heads into the courtroom, while Adam first detours to another room, where he meets with Joseph Creeley and Creeley's defense attorney. At this point, we still have no real idea what the episode is about, except for this intriguing tidbit: Creeley tells Adam that if he, Creeley, is guilty, then he wants to be punished for it.

The story is dominated by Martin Balsam's performance as Creeley, a man who finds himself at a crossroads few of us should ever hope to face. He's on death row, awaiting execution for a murder committed during a botched robbery, when he collapses from what turns out to be a brain tumor. The doctor gives him two choices: undergo an operation to remove the tumor, which may or may not succeed, or do nothing and see whether it kills him before the electric chair does. Adam, who was the original arresting officer and has been guarding Creeley in the hospital, is thrown into the maelstrom when Creeley asks him what he should do. For Adam, life is precious because it allows for hope, and he urges Creeley to undergo the surgery even if it changes nothing in the long run. Creeley signs over a Power of Attorney, and Adam authorizes the surgery.

And here's where it gets interesting.

As it turns out, the surgery is a success, with one caveat: in removing the tumor, the operation also wipes clean about ten years of Joseph Creeley's memory. He has no recollection of the crime, of his wife having divorced him, (or even having been married), of the circumstances that led him in desperation to the robbery that killed a man and left him on death row. It's as if his entire life ended ten years ago and has now started up again, with a giant hole in the middle. Furthermore, his doctor believes the tumor was probably responsible for his behavior up to and including the time of the robbery, which means he may not have been legally responsible for his actions.

All of this we learn from flashbacks generated by Adam's testimony on the stand, and now we understand just how we've gotten to this courtroom, on this date. Creeley's attorney has successfully won a new trial based on the doctor's opinion, and he's now going about demonstrating that there were two Joseph Creeley's: the one before the tumor, and the one after. He uses the testimony of people who have known Creeley throughout his life to demonstrate how his behavior had changed; a priest remembers him as a studious, polite boy; his ex-wife says that she divorced him because he was no longer the man he had been when she married him (a phrase which we often hear but in this case is meant to be taken literally), even Adam says that Creeley had the look of a wild man (i.e. crazy) when Adam arrested him.*

*Key point in understanding Adam: despite this wild look, Adam did not shoot (and risk killing) Creeley; he wouldn't take such action if he didn't have to, and in this case he didn't think he had to. 

The defense's insanity plea is an unusual one, in that the attorney suggests not only that Creeley was not legally responsible for his actions at the time due to the tumor, but that his memory loss (likely permanent) means he can never be that man, and that punishing him would be an injustice. The prosecution does not contest the notion that Creeley is a different man today, but their contention is that this is all immaterial: the Creeley who committed the crime did understand, for the purposes of the legal definition, the difference between right and wrong, and whether or not he remembers it today is beside the point as far as the administration of justice is concerned.* He calls as a witness the widow of the man Creeley killed, who herself was seriously injured in the attack, to share how her life has forever changed as a result of Creeley's actions.

*It's a line of thinking that invokes Dismas, the Good Thief who confessed the divinity of Christ on the Cross. Christ promises salvation for Dismas, but does not pardon him from earthly punishment for the crimes he had committed.

Quite a conundrum, isn't it? As the defense attorney says in his closing summation, the jury has now heard two versions of who Joseph Creeley is. According to one, he's a man who poses absolutely no threat to society, who has no memories of the man he was, and who should be allowed to live to be the man he is today. According to the other, he's a man who robbed and murdered, who knew that it was wrong regardless of why he did it, and who now must pay the penalty. The question for the jury to decide: which of these is Joseph Creeley.

We never find the answer to that question; the episode ends with the verdict yet to be given. It's an appropriate way to end the story, I think, because the answer to this question really lies within ourselves, in how we see and define the humanity of an individual.

Is it true that a man is the sum total of his memories? The philosopher John Locke used, as the criterion for personal identity (the self), not the substance of either the soul or the body, but the psychological continuity of consciousness: the memory. In other words, you are what your memory shows you to be.* Locke contends that you "are in truth only responsible for the acts for which you are conscious," which lies at the heart of the insanity defense, that if you are not aware (or conscious) of an act, you cannot be held accountable for it. Without that memory of who he was, he is not the same man. The court would, in effect, be punishing the wrong man for having committed the crime.

*Displayed in his analogy of "The Prince and the Cobbler," where a prince, whose soul (and memories) were transferred to the body of a cobbler (whose soul had departed), would continue to think of himself as a prince, even though he finds himself in appearance to be a cobbler. Think Here Comes Mr. Jordan, or its remake, Heaven Can Wait, as examples. This is, of course, the same premise upon which Doctor Who is based.

Against this, the argument can be made that Locke has no lock on the truth. In discussing the concept of "identity over time," the Catholic philosopher Peter Geach denies the idea "that there is a single absolute relation of identity rather than a host of relative identity relations." In other words, it is impossible to say that the prince is identical to the cobbler. "Instead there must be a concept of a kind of thing, a so-called sortal concept, that serves to answer the question." We would have to ask: is the prince the same what as the cobbler? The same man? The same thinker? The same craftsman? The same husband? The same leader? Likewise with Creeley: Is he the same man? The same murderer? The prosecution might well contend that while he is not the same man, he is the same murderer, and must be punished accordingly.

It's no surprise that Naked City could generate this type of discussion. In the book The Philosophy of TV Noir, Robert E. Fitzgibbons labels Naked City as an example of a "relativist" television series, one that insists that there is no clear definition of the truth at any given time. Dr. Wirtz, Creeley's doctor in the episode, says as much: "Sanity is a relative term." Even when someone in the program does something we might define as "wrong," Fitzgibbons insists, the viewer "was left—indeed almost forced—by the end of many episodes to wonder whether perhaps these choices might not have been right in some way." The concept of moral relativism, expressed in this manner, dovetails with Locke's would-be insistence that Creeley today cannot be judged as if he were Creeley yesterday, because that man literally no longer exists at this moment in time.

So what does this all mean? There is no closure to this question, since we never see the verdict come in. Gilbert Ralston, the writer of this episode, almost certainly intended for the viewer to be the jury and to let each one of us make the decision for ourselves. Although I am not a moral relativist, I find myself, for the most part, agreeing with Creeley's attorney that it would not be in the interests of justice to hold Creeley accountable for a crime which he has no memory of, which in fact, he may not have been legally responsible for having committed in the first place. And yet justice does demand an answer; it's similar to a terrorist who commits suicide after having perpetrated his mass murder. We're left with an empty feeling, a sense that the circle has not been squared.

Ultimately, what I love about this episode is not just the lack of a neat conclusion, but that it dares to raise this kind of question in the first place. Had the story ended with a jury verdict, we need not have agreed with that verdict to have been stimulated by the questions presented in the episode. Perhaps only The Defenders would have dared to go into this type of territory at the time; most of the discussions offered in contemporary television usually consist of straw man arguments that are eventually knocked down by the cast member acting as a surrogate for the writer. I never got that feeling from "Which is Joseph Creeley?" Regardless of how Ralston wanted us to think about Creeley, and whether or not he should be punished, he gave us more than enough to chew on, more than enough for us to come to our own conclusion about just how it is that we define the existence of a man. TV

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Is television inherently bad?

Just to show you how long it sometimes takes for me to get to things, I first started this piece sometime in January, and now I'm making another attempt to finish it.  (I suppose I should mention that I'm writing this paragraph at the end of March; in case I don't succeed this time, you'll probably never read the above words.)  I don't usually procrastinate for this length of time, but I've got a concept here that I've had trouble getting my hands around.  In fact, I'm not completely sure I've got a concept at all; I guess ultimately you'll all be the judges of that.

It starts, though, with a trip to the neighborhood used book store - the television section, to be precise. There, I'm accustomed to running into a copy or two of Jerry Mander's Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television.  A provocative title to be sure, especially for a blog like this one, I'm sure you'll agree.

Now, I haven't read the book so this isn't a review, but from what I understand (i.e. the blurbs I read), the crux of Mander's argument is that

many of the problems with television are inherent in the medium and technology itself, and thus cannot be reformed. In specific, the technology of television is not a neutral, benign instrument, or tool. The author argues that in varied technologies and institutions such as militaries, automobiles, nuclear power plants, mass production, and advertising, the basic form of the institution and the technology determines its interaction with the world, the way it will be used, the kind of people who use it, and to what ends.

This is territory we've covered here before; as longtime readers know, my opinion has always been that technology is neither moral nor immoral in and of itself.  It all depends on how it's used - objects can be used to save lives or take lives; drugs can be used to kill or cure; money can corrupt or resuscitate, and so on.  We wouldn't say that gas stoves are inherently bad just because bad men once used them to kill millions of people.  The bottom line is that objects are morally neutral until used by someone, at which time the use of that object or technology assumes a relative stage of morality vis-a-vis the person using them.

Mander apparently doesn't share this view, believing that "that far from being 'neutral,' television predetermines who shall use it, how they will use it, what effects it will have on individual lives, and, if it continues to be widely used, what sorts of political forms will inevitably emerge."

Now, I don't dismiss this argument out of hand.  In fact, there's much in what Mander says that I'd likely agree with it.  Could it be that he's right, and I've been wrong all these years?  I'd hate to think that was the case; my ego might be so dashed that I'd never write for the blog again.  Seriously - although there is sense to Mander's comment, it just doesn't pass the smell test for me.  Television provides great services for people - it can educate, entertain, inform.  Just because it doesn't always (usually?) do that, just because it isn't a perfect technology, does that mean we have to chuck it out altogether?

I think not, but why?

This is where the original piece stopped, by the way.  It wasn't because I lacked an answer; to the contrary, I believe I've found one, but I haven't been sure how quite to explain it.  Finally, I've decided to just go with it.  This isn't a formal review, and I don't write a scholarly site, after all.

What gave me some confidence in my viewpoint came from the teachings of the great scholar and theologian, St. Thomas Aquinas.  Aquinas wrote at length about man's virtues and vices, and how to relate them to the world.  Even though he wrote about them several hundred years ago, his words - as is the case with those written by Shakespeare and other visionaries - tend to be timeless, and just because television didn't exist in his day doesn't mean that his words can't be used in this discussion.

The virtue I have in mind is temperance.  Simplifying things greatly, Aquinas defined temperance as freedom from slavery to things that don't appeal to reason, and further said that we can't be subject to thinks that are lesser than us.  In saying that, he didn't mean to suggest that it was literally impossible for baser, lesser things to control us.  Drugs, alcohol, pornography - these all appeal to our baser instincts, rather than our intellect, and the abuse of them, the addiction to them, certainly controls us.

What Aquinas meant was that the practice of temperance means we don't allow lesser things to control us.  And television, for all that can be said about it, is definitely a lesser thing.  It was invented by humans, a product of human intellect and ingenuity.  From a scientific standpoint, it is a testimonial to the creativity of man.  It is, however, still a lesser thing, one not to be allowed to control us.

When Mander says that television "cannot be reformed," I think he misses the point.  He says that "the basic form of the institution and the technology determines its interaction with the world," but how can that be, if television is a lesser thing?  We can't allow television to become our master; we can't allow the lesser to become the greater.  It can happen, of course, but the virtue of temperance means it is within our power to prevent it.  Mander's hypothesis completely discounts the abililty - the amazing resiliency of humans - to withstand and defy control by the lesser.

It's the same thing with advertising.  Of course advertising is corrupt - as Aquinas would say, advertising wouldn't work if we weren't of a fallen nature.  Our desire for things, for possessions that go above and beyond our immediate needs - materialism, in other words, which is anything but a virtue - may well be the backbone of modern advertising, the foundation upon which our economy is built, but it's also a baser instinct.  We don't have to let it control us, any more than we have to let television control us.

Now it's true that the system can appear rigged, and furthermore I won't argue against the difficulties of maintaining a virtuous life while living in a culture that has allowed itself to be defined by adherence to the lesser things.  Yes, it's difficult, but difficult has never meant impossible.  Yet by accepting Mander's premise, it would appear we have no choice in the matter, which goes directly against the free will with which man is created.  And therefore, I feel entirely justified in rejecting Mander's argument that television cannot be reformed and should be abolished.  (The way in which TV is used, on the other hand, would probably often horrify Aquinas, but it would again come back to not letting the lesser control the greater.)

Does this make sense?  Even after reading it again, I'm not sure if it does.  I think it's part of a much larger discussion, which encompasses not only Mander but other philosophers and sociologists as well.  One of these days I'd love to write a book, or at least a longer essay, entitled Everything I Needed to Know About Television I Learned From St. Thomas Aquinas.  With a title like that, how could it not fly off the bookshelves?  I jest, but I'm serious at the same time.  For example, I've written before about how shows like Mission: Impossible sometimes give me pause when it comes to justifying American involvement in the internal affairs of a sovereign nation.  This is, after all, a strong element of many of M:I's plots.  But Aquinas has an answer for that, in his discussion of the virtue of patriotism, and the abuse of same.  True patriotism not only respects the country in which one lives, but the independence of other countries as well, and his opinions lend greater clarity as to when a nation is justified - and not justified - in intervening in the internal affairs of another.

And so on.  You can see why I view this as such a fertile area for discussion.  It is, though, a discussion for yet another time.