The concept of identity in Without a Trace
by Silke Guenther, Researcher, University of Lübeck, Germany

Most crime series involve the portrayal of victimized people. For some reason these people cannot evade a potentially dangerous situation and either lose their lives or get seriously hurt. Without a Trace1 is an American crime series that focuses on this disruption. The series centers around a fictitious FBI unit whose members try to acquire and connect information on missing persons to determine their whereabouts as quickly as possible. The team members need to understand who the missing person is to work well.

The term identity, derived form the Latin pronoun “idem”, refers to a state of congruency and implies a notion of continuity, which enables us to understand ourselves and other people not only in the present but also with regard to the past or the future. On the other hand current research defines identity as a flexible and ever continuing process full of changes and ambivalent demands,  rather than something clear-cut and unalterable.2 The loss of fixed parameters changed identity development from a collective achievement into the task of every single person, resulting in more individual freedom as well as an increased risk of visible disruptions or failures.3 When the stability and continuity of space and time are no longer reliable cornerstones of identity development, it becomes questionable whether there is something like an identity, what defines it, where it comes from and  what happens when it is lost.

Without a Trace   is a crime series that gives possible answers to these questions by showing a team of FBI agents who succeed in finding somebody in spite of a serious disruption in the stability and continuity of his or her identity. Within each episode it becomes crystal-clear that nobody actually disappears traceless and that there are ways of connecting even the smallest pieces of sometimes contradicting information to form a cohesive picture of a person. As a result of this Without a Trace can be read as a crime series that offers its viewers some reassurance with regard to a concept that got shaky in a fragmented world.

The vanished persons are put into the focus of the narration because of their disappearance that may or may not be connected with a crime. During the teaser of each episode they seem to disappear out of the blue and seemingly in everyday situations like going to a ballgame or boarding a flight. The act of vanishing derives them of a marker that is essential to defining identity. They are no longer at home, at the workplace or at any other place they used to be before they went missing. In most cases chances are that the missing person was victimized and might no longer be alive and well.

During the first episode the team leader, Jack Malone, explains to a rookie how the team approaches the search for a missing woman:

“Right now, we don’t know if she’s been kidnapped or murdered or killed herself or run off to Rio with her dermatologist. We’ve got to work form the inside out. Once we find out who she is, odds are we’ll find out where she is. In most cases, after 48 hours they’re gone.”4

As the missing woman somehow seems to have fallen from the face of the earth, Jack can only speculate on the reasons for her disappearance and everything depends on him and his team uncovering who she is. They do that by narrowing down the seemingly infinite number of people and place that may be related to the woman’s disappearance.

In a city like New York this seems like an insurmountable task. Most episodes of the show contain shots of the skyscrapers and streets within “New York”5 that make the city look like a maze about to devour the people trying to navigate it. Thus getting lost is not a mistake or an exception, but almost a logical consequence of this setting while finding someone by following up on just a few available clues appears like a heroic cause.

Nonetheless all of the agents are up to it and they usually start by probing into the current and  past lives of the potential victims. During this process the team members can rely on two major sources of information.

Firstly, they enter public and private spheres connected with the missing person’s life, for example the workplace or the flat. The public sphere used to be defined as a predominantly male terrain that separates the outside, e.g. the workplace, and the private life at home.6 During the first season of Without a Trace it becomes evident that, no matter if they are looking for a man or a woman, the agents need to connect both spheres to locate somebody.
Public and private spaces are revealing in themselves so that the missing person oftentimes “emerges” from his or her environment in the mind of the agent who is scrutinizing it. Besides, they are the setting for conversations with people like friends, coworkers and neighbors who have some kind of knowledge of the potential victim. During each episode it becomes evident that finding someone is not a matter of asking a single person or visiting a single location, but involves several interactions at different locations. Furthermore, the process of locating someone requires not only one agent but a whole team that works at different places and frequently returns to the office to patch together seemingly disparate results.

Secondly, the agents’ work is facilitated by the availability of information stored in databases. Whereas gaining single pieces of information pertaining the potential victim’s private life is a tedious and time consuming process, technology apparently offers more than just random scrapes of information, helps to find people and places and is at the agents’ fingertips whenever obtaining somebody’s credit card records, phone bills, employment history etc. is deemed to contribute to identifying his or her whereabouts.

Since the missing person is not available, the agents need to rely on other people’s perceptions, memories and opinions as well as their own perceptions and past experiences in their professional and private lives. As a result of this the process of gathering information to locate a missing person is inextricably tied to the agents’ understanding of their own identities. It almost appears as if they cannot look for somebody without discovering at least a piece of themselves.

In most cases the missing person is located at the end of each episode. Locating somebody who is still alive usually brings about the possibility of stabilizing this person’s identity, for example by helping him or her to reconnect with family members, whereas the discovery of a murder or suicide takes away any chances of rebuilding the victim’s life. As far as the odds of finding someone are concerned, wasting no time is as important as collecting information on the person. When the agents start their search they need to establish a timeline for the days leading up to the disappearance. At first this chronological order of events is full of gaps and uncertainties. In the course of the show more and more holes are filled and when the agents can discern a significant event the viewers often get to see a scene that illustrates the event in the form of a flashback. Each episode turns a seemingly unexplainable, dangerous and overwhelming situation into something explicable and less threatening even if the missing person is not found alive. The show conveys that there is a chronological order and a logical explanation with regard to the things that happen to the missing people and thus is an example of a genre that helps its viewers to make sense of their experiences.

“TV series produce causality, meaning and logical structures by turning disparate and confusing everyday experiences into cohesive narratives.”7

A visual centerpiece of the show is a white board which shows a picture of the missing person and a timeline that evolves within the show and gradually restores the sequential order of events that is lost at the beginning of each case when the viewers and the agents are completely in the dark as to why and how the missing person actually vanished. In contrary to current definitions of identity, searching for a vanished person is a process that has a beginning and a clear ending, although there are some cases that do not end within a single episode. At the end of cases that are depicted as emotionally straining for a certain team member, the act of wiping out the timeline and removing the picture brings about a sense of closure. The team members can move on and the case is closed for now.

 

Sources

Baumann, Zygmunt: Identity. Conversations with Benedetto Vecchi (Themes For The 21ST Century), Cambridge 2004.
Breger, Claudia: Identität. In: v. Braun, Christina; Stephan, Inge (Hrsg.): Gender @ Wissen. Ein Handbuch der Gender – Theorien, Köln 2005.
Creed, Barbara: Media Matrix. Sexing the new reality. Crows Nest 2003.
Lecke, Bodo: Zwischen Medienpädagogik und Literaturdidaktik: TV-Serien im Deutschunterricht. In: Erlinger, Hans Dieter; Lecke, Bodo (Hrsg.): Kanonbildung bei audiovisuellen Medien im Deutschunterricht? München 2004, pp. 89-135.
Spurlos Verschwunden. Without a Trace. Die komplette erste Staffel, Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc., 2004.