Breaking Down Fox's 24
by James Tracy
Reprinted from Left Turn, October 2007
The television show "24," is a fast paced roller coaster of a spy series scripted so that every screen minute is corresponds to an actual minute - and each episode represents an hour in a day. The show made its debut shortly after the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center. As a melodrama, the show has held a mirror up to the mood of a nation at once deeply paranoid but also confident that it has the bad guys in the crosshairs.
In the beginning of the season, the main protagonists are the Arab Araz family, nestled in suburbia while plotting the kidnapping of the Secretary of Defense James Heller (William Devane) as a smokescreen for the detonation of a nuclear bomb in the United States. Retired Federal Agent Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland) is brought back into action since he happens to be dating the Secretary's daughter, Audrey Rains (former Sesame Street child star Kim Raver.)
Understandably, many Arab American organizations denounced the plotline as another piece of the growing "Arab Menace" subtext in much of U.S. popular culture today. Fox TV finally aired spots with Sutherland earnestly reminding viewers that not all Arab-Americans were prone to terrorism; and that the network regretted it if anyone believed otherwise. His beach-bum/vampire role in the Lost Boys seemed realistic by comparison.
The Araz family, could well represent the high-tech worker, or the shopkeeper in any suburban area in the United States. Much like the Red Menace entertainment (such as Mission to Moscow) of decades past, the twenty-first century has found its scapegoats. They might wear baseball caps instead of turbans. They wield computers instead of scimitars. But that's the exactly network televisions flimsy thesis-the terrorists might even send their kid to the same school your kids go to. Ironically, Shohreh Aghdashloo, who plays the mother, Dina Araz, is also the first Middle Eastern actor to be nominated for an Academy Award for her role in "The House of Sand and Fog."
Anti-Arab sentiment is actually the beginning of the show's problems, not the end. Torture is the central theme of the program; and when performed by government agents, they always seem slightly regretful about it. In the most recent season an anti-nuclear protester (also the Department of Defense's son) undergoes sensory deprivation torture; and a corporate executive has electrical wires applied to his chest by Bauer; who is also sleeping with the exec's estranged wife. A government agent falsely accused of treason is walloped with truth serum; yet dutifully returns to work when her name is cleared.
The line between fiction and non-fiction is always blurred in 24. It is never reasonable or desirable to demand that every character and plot turn in a work of fiction pass an impossible test of political purity. Most compelling pop culture plays with the viewer's notions of right and wrong. After all, the best heroes must wrestle with their own corruption and contemporary villians are usually fallen heroes with their own complex set of motivations.
Yet "24" isn't simply entertainment-it is a perfect articulation of the Guantanamo Bay Ideology. In this world-view, just as in the Bush Administration's, the Geneva Convention is amounts to quaint words that may as well been printed on toilet paper.
The show's issues reflect the very real anxieties of the day-nuclear annihilation, biological warfare, and kidnapping. The swift minute-by-minute plot device makes it seem as if the viewer occupies the passenger seat in the chase to get the bad guys - exacerbating fear and instilling false confidence through the illusion of participation.
In this context, a work of fiction helps to build a rationale for torture; gently explaining away the political prisoner situation, the round-ups and detentions of immigrants and the Abu Grahib scandal. The show gently builds political consensus for increased surveillance, curtailed civil liberties and so on. 24 allows that of course, the government tortures the wrong people from time-to-time; but anything short of shock treatment would be letting the terrorists win.
24's narrative this season has gone the extra mile to explain who America is up against: Arabs, the Chinese Government, Amnesty International lawyers, and just about anyone who still uses the term civil liberties with a straight face. The next to final episode revealed that the entire nuclear plot was made possible by a homosexual liaison between Secretary Heller's son and a bisexual terrorist.
We can never be certain to what extent shows like 24 actually mold the American political consensus. Of course many viewers are perfectly able to tell the difference between reality and a fictional spy show. However, a strange dialogue emerges between the network's fiction and the network's news. Fiction during prime time turns to pundits condemning Arabs as a entirely corrupt culture during the day-time talk shows. Agent Bauer's statement "Look I love the Constitution as much as you do but millions of lives are at stake here," is of course a comment on the news of the day such as the debate in Congress surrounding the USA Patriot Act.
The Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci laid out what shows like this are meant to do before the dawn of the television age. While imprisoned by Mussolini, by he developed the concept of Cultural Hegemony meant to explain why revolts didn't always happen when the material and political conditions were particularly desperate. He reasoned that in addition to economic conflict there was a battle for cultural values that explained reality: forming a "common sense" of deeply held beliefs among ordinary people. All things considered, 24 is not just another salvo in the culture wars. As the gospel according to Karl Rove, it is the perfect prequel for the nightly news at ten.
