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 o TV actress has embodied the ol' madonna/whore paradox more literally and figuratively than Marg Helgenberger. Trained in the soaps (Ryan's Hope, 1982-86), the Nebraska-born actress never looked corn-fed. Whether portraying a Vietnam-era hooker/heroin addict/abandoning-mother in her thirties on China Beach (1988-91) or a contemporary forensic investigator/ex-stripper/single-mom in her forties on CSI, Helgenberger is distinctive. Not merely pretty strawberry-blonde, she has a haunted look that manifests itself in her crafty eyes, her gaunt cheeks, her smoky-yet-sharp voice. In an earlier era, she'd have been compared to Ida Lupino, another atypically alluring, flinty, brainy actress, but movies have little place nowadays for the sort of forceful, pitiliess persona Helgenberger projects at her best. Her fiercest big-screen performance to date was as a raw-boned working-class woman helped by Julia Roberts in Erin Brockovich (2000). That same year, she was perfect as Patsy Ramsey, the emotionally hard-shell-shocked suburban mother in an otherwise standard exploito-TV-movie, Perfect Murder, Perfect Town: JonBenet and the City of Boulder. Otherwise, she's been sidelined in schlock features like Bad Boys and Species I and II.
It's on the small screen where Helgenberger radiates power and shrewdness. She won an Emmy playing KC in China Beach, the overrated Vietnam nighttime soap, with Dana Delany and Helgenberger transcending, via their great, excessive earnestness, the M*A*S*H-as-a-drama gab-fest that Bill Broyles and John Sacret Young created. Even unto Beach's maudlin final episode (one of those reunion shows where most of the characters paint snow-white streaks into their dark hair to convey age), KC remained a brassy redhead. Though portrayed throughout the series as a troubled woman incomplete for having abandoned her daughter during the '60s, KC was revealed to be — thanks to a rare clever plot twist and, even more, Helgenberger's performance — a confident, wealthy businesswoman: a prostitute redeemed in the eyes of the boardroom, if not society.
On CSI, her Catherine Willows is fully the equal of star William Petersen in terms of ability and hardboiled impatience. The show's distinctive, much-noted camera style — with its swooping dives into the bodies of corpses to explore wounds with microscopic intensity — also forces close-ups of the investigators' faces as they lean in, flashlights in hand, to peer at death. The fine lines on Helgenberger's face tell Catherine's "back story" better than the few clues the series drops about her private life. Learning that the avuncular old Vegas coot who rescued her from stripping was actually her father (and a murderer to boot) may have startled Catherine initially, but she recovered quickly, assessing the situation as one more example of how men screw over women. This is Helgenberger's gift as a performer — to convey a scarred-over vulnerability that doesn't rely on TV's standard tropes of rote feminism or male-identified dependency.
In the past year, CSI has become the most-watched prime-time drama —this, despite the potentially diluting spin-offs set in Miami (David Caruso, his fair Irish complexion never mottled by the baking sun) and New York City (Gary Sinese looking lost on sets lit so darkly, they look more like backdrops from Tim Burton's Batman than Manhattan). More to the point here, CSI's popularity makes Helgenberger the woman more Americans see, week-in, week-out, than anyone aside from Paula Abdul.
In a recent plot development, Helgenberger's Catherine has become a co-leader of the Las Vegas crime unit, the organizational equal to Petersen's Gus Grissom, whose practiced stoicism tends toward the wooden. Catherine is now going through the same process so many women do who attain authority — finding the right tone to exert that power, wanting to do the job the way she's long known it should be done (one of the best things about CSI is that Grissom, the hero, is a disaster at interpersonal relationships) while not fearing the almost-inevitable judgment of her passed-over colleagues: hard-ass bitch. So far, she's been admirably un-even-handed, yanking collagues both male and female into working overtime on her cases to expedite the solutions to murders, not office politics or building a stronger emotional bond with viewers. "Thanks for gettin' our back," said the CSI played by whew-I'm-still-employed George Eads. "No," said Catherine evenly, explaining why she defended her crew against a pushy administrator, "I'm the boss." Of the women solving crimes on TV right now, only Sonja Sohn on The Wire and the long-suffering Katherine Erbe on Law & Order: Criminal Intent do as good a job at playing irresistible don't-fuck-with-me women, and they do it for a fraction of the size of Helgenberger's audience.
Sure, it's not likely that many real-life CSI forensic sleuths wear scoop-neck shirts, tight jeans and high-heeled boots, but jolly good for her and us: Helgenberger has spent her career pulling off unlikely get-ups and set-ups without actually removing almost any of her dignity. n°
Adapted from Ken Tucker's new book Kissing Bill O'Reilly, Roasting Miss Piggy: 100 Things To Love & Hate About Television (St. Martin's Press).
To buy Kissing Bill O'Reilly, Roasting Miss Piggy,
click here.
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| ABOUT THE AUTHOR: |
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Ken Tucker is the film critic for New York Magazine. He was Entertainment Weekly's chief TV critic and Critic-At-Large since EW's founding, in 1989. Visit his website: https://www.kentucker.net/
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©2005 Ken Tucker and hooksexup.com.
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