Posted by Tim · 2 Comments
My apologies if this should have been written in 2005 or so.
The unpleasant label of ‘torture porn’ gets thrown around a lot: Hostel, Funny Games, Saw, anything from the Rob Zombie oeuvre. But these are caricatures compared to the real, everyday evil that 24 embraces. Evil isn’t something so obvious as a dark, menacing figure. That’s The Bad Guy — evil is going about your business with no moral quandaries about what it is you do. And this is the position Jack Bauer takes in the opening minutes of this season of 24.
The people of 24’s CTU work for a secret government agency, with near limitless resources, and access to every type of surveillance imaginable… and yet despite these innumerable resources they are still trapped in crisis mode, continually finding themselves in shootouts, on the run, making shaky alliances, and yes, resorting to the oft-used plot device of torture to achieve any sort of meaningful results.
The flaw in the show is the same flaw of its characters — 24 is guilty of mistaking motion for action. If the characters were any good at their jobs, this shit wouldn’t keep happening. [Also, we wouldn't have a show. But still.] From my time in web development, I recall this same organizational anti-pattern: from botched website launches and last-minute patches, to dirty hacks performed to keep a website limping along for the time being, or to avert an all-out catastrophe, until the time spent patching the leaks obliterated any opportunity for forward progress. Here I see the same kind of sloppy work going on in 24’s CTU. Would you call an agency where every situation they’re given devolves into catastrophe a well-run agency?
Disregarding how sickening its appearance is in real life, the show’s flagrant over-use of torture has turned into a laughable deus ex machina. Our heroes need information? Torture. Someone isn’t cooperating? Torture! One scene depicting torture, implied torture, corporal punishment, or even the threat of torture and ba-da-bing! Jack or whichever other maverick hero 24 serves up has the next piece of information to get us to the next scene. Not only is it morally bankrupt, it’s just lazy writing. Or maybe Jack Bauer is just a one-trick pony. When all you have are electrodes, every problem looks like testicles.
If torture is so effective, why don’t our antagonists use it to the same ends? When lawyers are trying to find their client (around 10:40), why not torture Garafalo to get her to give his location? Is it just that they haven’t thought of it, or are they somehow less immoral than our “heroes”?
I find it myopic that the things to get singled out for moral reasons are typically fantasy comics such as Tales From the Crypt, Spawn, (the movies above) and similar, by people like that douche who wants more moral and uptight upright heroes, while 24 is uncritically embodying the zeitgeist of the last eight years, and the much more damaging lessons it has imparted in the name of freedom and justice — if it even stands for those things at all and not merely the fantasy of getting to play by your own rules and bully those unable to defend themselves. Lessons like:
The ends justify the means.
Might makes right.
Those who enforce the law are allowed to be above it.
There is an uncomfortable double-standard where the characters will break the law when it suits them (even when it is contrary to their character), yet will contend that to uphold the law requires there to be two sets of rules: one for everyday plebes like you and me, and another different set of rules (or perhaps none at all) for those who would protect us. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? If they violate the law, what makes them better than their enemies? That they would save American lives and kill vaguely-defined foreigners, and not the other way around? I hold out a slim hope that 24 is doing this to purposefully make that point about moral ambiguity, but I don’t believe it’s a show that works on that many levels.
To make sure the series doesn’t go too overboard in its authoritarian power fantasy, despite championing freedom-at-the-cost-of-freedoms kind of liberty, in a later scene (around 9:30) Bauer will denounce the use of force; I assume a move by the writers to placate the audience or remind them that despite his demonstrable contempt for the law, his use of torture, and the killings that are all part of the job, that he’s still the ‘good’ guy. How can this be when our hero is working to defeat an enemy who is demonized for roughly the same things? For this I find the show on shaky moral ground, when its best defense is, “Do as I say, not as I do.”
Jack Bauer isn’t the first anti-hero, and that wouldn’t bother me if his actions didn’t have real-world consequences, like when politicians use 24 to justify the use of torture. These are our nation’s leaders ignoring the bill of rights because of something they saw Jack Bauer do on TV.
Ultimately, 24 holds up an interesting mirror to the society that created it. In it, there is an attitude of fall-in-line-or-resign in the White House, there’s an unpopular military action taken by the US to unseat a dictator in some backwater country (only this time, it’s like totally justified!), a transparent villain in government-trained terrorist Tony Al Qaeda Almeida, and a government that asks, nay requires, that is be above the laws it enforces. That and the whole “being OK with torture” thing.
That the last eight years define this as what makes a hero is sickening.
