March 14, 2007
24 and the Politics of Popular Culture Posted by Fredric Smoler at 03:30 PM EST Last month The New Yorker ran a longish article on Joel Surnow, cocreator and executive producer of the Fox television series 24. Vice President Cheney is apparently very fond of 24; Joel Surnow calls himself “a right wing nut-job”; and Jane Mayer, the author of the article, mostly reads 24 as ideology, as her title suggests—“Whatever It Takes: The Politics of the Man Behind ‘24.’” Her analysis centers on torture, noting that 24 depicts torture by American national security officials as omnipresent, absolutely necessary, and more or less infallible. The torture always occurs in the context of what is called a ticking-bomb scenario, when the person being tortured knows something that must be discovered within, at most, hours, in order to save vast number of civilian lives. On 24, this is almost always an imminent threat of a terrorist attack involving nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons. Ms. Mayer points out that it is not clear that a ticking bomb scenario has ever actually occurred, and she is disturbed by the fact that on 24 torture always works. The vital information is always given up more or less immediately. On her account 24 is an apology for some of most contested premises of the War on Terror. It repeatedly drums in the notion that we are in a situation of unprecedented danger, savage measures are clearly necessary, and we should let the administration get on with the job. I found myself thinking about that New Yorker article as I watched the latest episode of 24 in an airplane on Monday night. Is 24 a “rightist” show? While everything Mayer says about 24’s depiction of torture is true, the series has other recurring themes. In most of 24’s seasons the terrorists are abetted, without their knowledge, by highly placed members of the American government who control sections of the national security apparatus, are represented in the cabinet, and are attempting to panic the public into supporting authoritarian rule. These officials are invariably attempting to overthrow either the President or crucial portions of the Bill of Rights, and sometimes they aim to extend American imperial power over some portion of Central Asia, so as to control a crucial oil pipeline or provoke a war with one or another Muslim state. They have attempted various constitutional coups and have not scrupled at sterner measures. They have to date assassinated one American President, and last week they appeared to have critically wounded another. It may be interesting that the good and virtuous Presidents they seek to overthrow or murder are black, while the evil plotters are invariably white. The plotters act in the name of national security but are clearly villains, and are sometimes described, by their virtuous antagonists, as traitors. Sometimes the President is himself one of their number, sometimes the Vice President is in on the conspiracy, sometimes defense contractors are in on it too. One criminal President, who conspires at the murder of his heroic predecessor, looks and sounds like the result of a recombinant DNA project working with genetic feed stock from Richard Nixon and Orin Hatch, and is a fundamentalist Christian. This is not a traditionally conservative conception of the Bush administration. My sense is that 24 is less a consistent ideological argument than an updated version of The Perils of Pauline, with about as much political import as the original. It is perhaps mildly interesting that people on the right enjoy imagining that the government is on the verge of a happily unsuccessful fascist coup, as do people on the left, at least when they are watching television. This probably means nothing much. After all, many Americans enjoy reading novels about their cities being infested with vampires and have watched television series based on that premise. 24’s endlessly reiterated defenses of torture does not seem to have had much effect. After three or more years of them, the revelations about Abu Ghraib produced widespread revulsion in both the public at large and within crucial elements of the Republican party, and the American military and the courts remain aggressively hostile to arguments in defense of torture. It is no doubt a bad thing that 24 consistently defends torture, although I am not sure it is such a good thing that 24 repeatedly asserts that the government is riddled with fascist traitors. It may be interesting that the first sin attracts some critical attention, and the second, as far as I can tell, none at all. One thing seems clear: If you are going to analyze the politics of a work of popular culture, you probably ought to take on the whole of the available evidence.
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