Saturday, February 24, 2007

Agents Of Fortune

Beyond the Staples Center you can see America with its tired, poor, avenging disgrace,
Peaceful, loving youth against the brutality of plastic existence.
Pushing little children with their fully automatics,
They like to push the weak around. -- System of a Down, Deer Dance


I recall that when the 24 series began, it sounded like a moderately interesting gimmick, but one I would not have been able to keep up with. The very nature of its premise essentially requires the viewer to watch every episode in sequence, or lose the narrative.

Or so I had assumed.

This notion was tested in the second season, when my work schedule and other commitments actually allowed for such a weekly "guilty pleasure", as it were. Fine, let's give it a shot, we thought. By about, oh, the sixth episode, it was clear that even on a limbic thrill-seeker level, this was simply too ridiculous, contrived, implausible, etc., not to mention belabored with endless commercial breaks. But that was just far enough in to where the viewer may have enough "commitment" (ugh) to sorta wanna see how it resolves. So we trudged on through a few more eps, as they say in the biz. It's not like there was anything else on.

Suffice to say that it never got any better, and we basically said "fuck it" about halfway through. That's the other real problem with the premise -- twenty-four episodes is an awful lot, which means there's going to be a lot of fat that would ordinarily have been trimmed. Even marquee series such as The Sopranos or The Shield, with only 13 episodes per season, have at least one or two subplots that could just as easily been changed or tossed. In recent memory, only The Wire seems to be as close to a perfect model of narrative economy as imaginable -- there is no excess, no throwaway lines or performances, no wasted motion whatsoever. It is as seamless and flawless as episodic television can aspire to.

My point is that I had come to think of 24 as merely a dopey, gimmicky show that should have jumped the proverbial shark a couple seasons ago. Then again, I assumed that of other cinema verité warhorses such as Survivor and American Idol, the former of which especially seemed destined for the glue factory some time ago. But that was all clearly wishful thinking; there are some cultural things, particularly music, that I am pretty good at sussing early in the game, but I don't have a fucking clue about mainstream pop culture. I don't have the patience for it, any of it, and book-ending the whole sordid process with repetitive, indistinguishable smash-cut commercials doesn't help. (No, I don't own a TiVo, yet.)

So I had written off this ever-more ridiculous exercise in adrenaline as something that Steven Seagal would probably have done just fine at twenty years ago. Whatever, just not my thing. But apparently, not only is the series stronger than ever, but its more contemporary political and operational proclivities, and those of its creator, Joel Surnow, are coming more to the forefront than when I sat through it several years ago.

Each season of “24,” which has been airing on Fox since 2001, depicts a single, panic-laced day in which Jack Bauer—a heroic C.T.U. agent, played by Kiefer Sutherland—must unravel and undermine a conspiracy that imperils the nation. Terrorists are poised to set off nuclear bombs or bioweapons, or in some other way annihilate entire cities. The twisting story line forces Bauer and his colleagues to make a series of grim choices that pit liberty against security. Frequently, the dilemma is stark: a resistant suspect can either be accorded due process—allowing a terrorist plot to proceed—or be tortured in pursuit of a lead. Bauer invariably chooses coercion. With unnerving efficiency, suspects are beaten, suffocated, electrocuted, drugged, assaulted with knives, or more exotically abused; almost without fail, these suspects divulge critical secrets.

The show’s appeal, however, lies less in its violence than in its giddily literal rendering of a classic thriller trope: the “ticking time bomb” plot. Each hour-long episode represents an hour in the life of the characters, and every minute that passes onscreen brings the United States a minute closer to doomsday. (Surnow came up with this concept, which he calls the show’s “trick.”) As many as half a dozen interlocking stories unfold simultaneously—frequently on a split screen—and a digital clock appears before and after every commercial break, marking each second with an ominous clang. The result is a riveting sensation of narrative velocity.

Bob Cochran, who created the show with Surnow, admitted, “Most terrorism experts will tell you that the ‘ticking time bomb’ situation never occurs in real life, or very rarely. But on our show it happens every week.” According to Darius Rejali, a professor of political science at Reed College and the author of the forthcoming book “Torture and Democracy,” the conceit of the ticking time bomb first appeared in Jean Lartéguy’s 1960 novel “Les Centurions,” written during the brutal French occupation of Algeria. The book’s hero, after beating a female Arab dissident into submission, uncovers an imminent plot to explode bombs all over Algeria and must race against the clock to stop it. Rejali, who has examined the available records of the conflict, told me that the story has no basis in fact. In his view, the story line of “Les Centurions” provided French liberals a more palatable rationale for torture than the racist explanations supplied by others (such as the notion that the Algerians, inherently simpleminded, understood only brute force). Lartéguy’s scenario exploited an insecurity shared by many liberal societies—that their enlightened legal systems had made them vulnerable to security threats.


It would -- and should, believe me -- be easy to dismiss all this as just the projected ravings of a closet-case hack, just mindless adrenalized fun that had no real-world analogue. That would be nice, but then again, we are talking about a guy who threw Rush Limbaugh a party and gave him a custom smoking jacket. I'm not sure if this was before or after Limbaugh went Teh Big Funny at Michael J. Fox's expense, but it really doesn't matter -- the show itself may be having real-world repercussions:

Although reports of abuses by U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, have angered much of the world, the response of Americans has been more tepid. [U.S. Army Brigadier General Patrick] Finnegan attributes the fact that “we are generally more comfortable and more accepting of this,” in part, to the popularity of “24,” which has a weekly audience of fifteen million viewers, and has reached millions more through DVD sales. The third expert at the meeting was Tony Lagouranis, a former Army interrogator in the war in Iraq. He told the show’s staff that DVDs of shows such as “24” circulate widely among soldiers stationed in Iraq. Lagouranis said to me, “People watch the shows, and then walk into the interrogation booths and do the same things they’ve just seen.” He recalled that some men he had worked with in Iraq watched a television program in which a suspect was forced to hear tortured screams from a neighboring cell; the men later tried to persuade their Iraqi translator to act the part of a torture “victim,” in a similar intimidation ploy. Lagouranis intervened: such scenarios constitute psychological torture.

“In Iraq, I never saw pain produce intelligence,” Lagouranis told me. “I worked with someone who used waterboarding”—an interrogation method involving the repeated near-drowning of a suspect. “I used severe hypothermia, dogs, and sleep deprivation. I saw suspects after soldiers had gone into their homes and broken their bones, or made them sit on a Humvee’s hot exhaust pipes until they got third-degree burns. Nothing happened.” Some people, he said, “gave confessions. But they just told us what we already knew. It never opened up a stream of new information.” If anything, he said, “physical pain can strengthen the resolve to clam up.”


Anyone who's done even a modest amount of reading on the subject (and, to be fair, it's not exactly light or commonly available reading) understands that simple fact -- virtually every interrogation profesional willing to go on record attests to the fact that torture almost never works. Almost as important is that the "ticking time bomb" scenario is exceedingly rare.

But we are a nation that watched Jeff Goldblum hook up to an alien spaceship computer with a fucking Macintosh in Independence Day -- verisimilitude has never been on the short list for these sorts of movies and shows. Yet it is profoundly disturbing that, according to the U.S. Army, interrogators are using this show to get their game face on, and set about dehumanizing people until they give up information that we think they may possess.

More than ever, the idea that individuals in a terrorist cell are privy to any more than the bare minimum of operational info and planning runs contrary to everything that has been learned about 4GW (and now, 5GW) warfare. There's no need to let the minions know anything, and the ringleaders are never going to let themselves get within range of capture.

But this is all easily forgotten in the swift jump-cut frisson ginned up by the pulpy narratives in the show. Perhaps individual Americans are indeed wise enough to discern reality from fiction; or perhaps we are systematically being further desensitized to the things we are actually doing, to the deeds rough men commit in the night in our name.

And if some people make some money and political points hitting what could be perceived as an ideological vacuum, there's another incentive for these vicarious sadists.

[to be continued]

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