Terrorism? You don't know Jack
|
More Articles:
Most Viewed:
The Lovely Bones(1689 views)'Burn Notice' gets renewal(1325 views)Swiss OK Polanski move to chalet(889 views)Pearce hops on to 'Hungry Rabbit Jumps'(731 views)'It' is 3D's lost opportunity(690 views)Ninja Assassin(643 views) |
A middleclass family in L.A. is appalled to see its next-door Muslim neighbor beaten up by usually well-mannered folks who live in the area. The trusting son of the family staunchly defends the ethnic neighbor, only to discover that he is in fact a member of a fanatical sleeper cell, and not adverse to murdering whoever gets in his way.
This is not an outcome we expect from liberal-minded Hollywood, but this show, which airs on Fox, breaks a lot of rules in playing on our collective paranoia .
The New Yorker recently highlighted some of the conservative instincts of the show's creator, Joel Surnow -- he's friends with Rush Limbaugh and has long felt an outsider in Hollywood. The piece focused on how the show implies that torture can, in certain circumstances, be efficacious in combating terrorist threats. Seems a lot of folks in power in D.C. adore the show.
Problem is, I do too. Its tick-tock urgencies, delightful implausibilities and dramatic confrontations often override any squeamishness about the violence.
For one thing, I'm amused at how Jack Bauer and the CTU team always manage to get where they're going -- in traffic-clogged Los Angeles -- in record time. I also marvel how cell phones, GPS tracking systems and CTU computers instantly connect, and always come up with the right coordinates. (Why hasn't someone like T-Mobile enlisted Kiefer Sutherland to do an ad?)
And to make me feel even better, differing political viewpoints are dramatized. There's plenty to relish, for example, in the machinations of double-dealing advisers trying to do in the president.
In short, it's hard not to enjoy the show. And we're not alone: The series does well in the ratings almost everywhere around the world, even in those countries that most loudly decry U.S. government policies.
As for the political underpinnings of "24," one could argue that it simply holds a mirror up to our government's less-savory practices.
The show doesn't explicitly excuse, say, behavior like that at Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo, but it tilts the argument between hardballers and softballers toward the former.
In this respect, the most important rule of conventional TV fiction that's broken in "24" is that the good guys -- as epitomized by the sleep-deprived and much put-upon Bauer -- end up behaving almost as badly as the adversaries they're dispatched to neutralize. (Let me qualify: Bauer's not blowing up innocent civilians; but he's not averse to kneecapping someone to obtain information.)
There's not much time for reflection in this show. Bauer is hurled into one crisis after another -- crises which, by definition, could spell the end of civilization as we know it. (Still, whenever anyone calls Bauer on his cell and asks how he is, his response is invariably "fine.")
And things are worse for Jack Bauer this season. He's just returned from two years in a Chinese detention camp and now has to deal with his horrid family.
The odds have been considerably ramped up as Bauer fights to keep a bunch of suitcase bombs from exploding. One, in Valencia, Calif., has already gone off and 12,000 people have perished.
To pry information out of folks, the screws are occasionally applied to the bad guys. Not perhaps as tightly as the bad guys treat their good-guy victims, but still, torture it is.
The most excruciating scene so far in the season is one in which Bauer subjects his own brother, Graem, to interrogation with pain-inducing drugs. Nothing is glossed over: The doses are administered with out-sized hypodermic needles, and the writhing is difficult to watch.
Graem spills the beans, or at least a few beans, but then in a turn of events of almost Shakespearean dastardliness, his own father, Phillip, murders him to protect the family's shady business interests.
Were Martians to plop down in front of a TV set and watch "24," they would conclude they had landed on a very paranoid planet.
Fortunately for us, it's just entertainment.
