CSI S11E14 “Sqweegel”: The Celluloid Dungeon

CSI usually follows a certain format: e.g. we rarely see action that isn’t from the perspective of an investigator or a detective. Episode S11E04 “Sqweegel” (aired October 14, 2010) radically departed from this rule, so much so that some scenes look more like a slasher or giallo film.

Someone is slashing famous people around Las Vegas with a straight razor. Through the usual forensics business, the CSIs find that the assailant was wearing a latex suit. One of them even comments, “Time to get kinky!”

Stokes and Willows visit a fetish clothing store for research.

Willows: Doberman head, nice. That’s new.

Stokes: What do you mean, “that’s new”?

Willows: You got to keep up with these things, Nicky. All sex crimes start with fantasies. When it goes from the big head to the little head, that’s where we come in. You follow? I mean, you didn’t think I came here recreationally, did you?

Stokes: I don’t know. You just referred to a dog mask in a sex shop as “nice” and “new”. I had to ask. Are you okay?

Willows: Are you?

Willows takes professional pride in knowing about fetish clothing, and chides Stokes for not knowing about it, but she’s defensive about the possibility that she actually does anything with fetish clothing.

(Interesting that Joey, the shop clerk, greets Willows by her first name. If you squint, you can interpret this exchange to mean that Willows is purchasing fetish gear for her own purposes, and keeping it secret from her co-workers. Maybe she’s into it, maybe she’s modelling or camming or pro-domming on the side.)

Her claim that “All sex crimes start with fantasies.” is more troubling. In the world of CSI, crime is not the result of social structures like poverty or racism, but of the psychology of aberrant individuals. In that logic, monitoring the productions of the sex toy industry is a way of understanding sexual criminals. It’s uncomfortably close to Robin Morgan’s second-wave feminist maxim “Pornography is the theory, and rape is the practice.”

Joey links the latex lube the CSIs found to a guy who ordered custom-made two latex full-body suits. As usual in CSI, he hands over his records without hesitation. The only name the CSIs can link to him is “Ian Moone”, an anagram for “I am no one.”

The perp strikes again, this time slashing up a woman in her card in mid-carwash, with her young daughter in the back. The kid calls the perp “Sqweegel”, after the sound of the mops on the car window.

Sqweegel is part of a tradition that goes back to the original master criminal, Fantômas, a evil-doer and master of disguise who has no internal identity. In visual media like film and television, this is often represented by form-fitting, whole-body coverings. In this case, Sqweegel wears a full body, skin tight black latex suit and hood, with zippers on the back and mouth. Supposedly, this makes him forensics-proof; his face is covered, and he leaves no fingerprints, hairs or skin cells, or fibers from his clothing. He has heterochromia (different colored irises) but that might be faked. As I’ve commented before, film and TV tend to use men in fetishwear to represent the loss of identity, e.g. Cruising, O Fantasma, I Love A Man in Uniform, etc.

The episode makes Sqweegel almost superhuman: able to infiltrate his targets’ homes and surveil his prey for months in secret, squeeze into tiny spaces like the spare tire bay of a car, hang upside-down by his toes, and somehow vanish in public places. His performance, by contortionist and stunt performer Daniel Browning Smith, gives him eerie, inhuman movements, and his voice is dubbed. Furthermore, the episode shows that his victims are “false heroes” with dirty secrets, making him a kind of anti-hero. For a show supposedly based in real forensic science, this is a supervillain.

Sqweegel actually first appeared in Level 26: Dark Origin (2009), a digital novel co-written by CSI creator Anthony E. Zuiker.