Kevin Drum asks why, if it’s so conservative, 24 is so liberal. I’ve only watched 96 hours worth, but here goes. Yes, the CTU action is, at bottom, a kind of Dirty Harry dirty bomb fantasy. But, since this is partly a fantasy of (justified) moral transgression, the show needs to telegraph awareness that ‘this is all very complicated and fraught with moral peril – yet we are doing it with clear eyes.’ So you need to spend some time gesturing in that direction, but it would be annoying if these gestures slowed down the action. So those bits get outsourced to the political side of the narrative. So a subdued sense of how the game actually ought to be played, cleanly, gets played as a sort of steady accompaniment, with the left hand, while the right is banging out a rousing, martial tune. It would be a good bargain, if the reality-based liberal community could strike it: in exchange for liberal control of actually existing institutions and policy-making, conservatives could be ceded total control of a network of powerful but strictly mythical agencies, headed by omnicompetent, albeit non-existent agents.
{ 19 comments }
brooksfoe 03.26.07 at 3:22 pm
I still say the Dirty Harry parallel goes deeper than one might suppose. I happened to catch the beginning of DH on TV the other night; I had completely forgotten about the crypto-feminist Tyne Daly subplot. After the initial righteous-violence-emasculated-by-liberal-bureaucracy setup (hello, post-Vietnam), the movie takes what looks like a really ugly gynophobic turn – the dumb liberals have quotas for promoting women. But as it turns out, the first woman DH encounters is the badassed no-nonsense Tyne Daly, who proves her mettle before ultimately being gunned down in the climactic scene on Alcatraz (if I remember right).
I think there’s something going on there about a gender-progressive agenda actually clawing its way forward, crablike, through a movie that thinks it’s about conservative vengeance. Or something. There’s definitely something weird and complicated going on under the surface. Perhaps the most shocking thing was seeing how Clint and Tyne Daly in “Dirty Harry” prefigure Clint and Hilary Swank in “Million Dollar Baby”, down to carrying the wounded violent-girl-protege in his arms.
Anyway, seems not unlike the way apparently “liberal” agendas materialize inside “24” – the return of the repressed or something.
Richard 03.26.07 at 4:02 pm
conservatives could be ceded total control of a network of powerful but strictly mythical agencies, headed by omnicompetent, albeit non-existent agents.
Sounds like a church.
aaron 03.26.07 at 4:27 pm
It’s neither. It only seems conservative or liberal cuz you’re nuts.
ejh 03.26.07 at 5:50 pm
I still say the Dirty Harry parallel goes deeper than one might suppose. I happened to catch the beginning of DH on TV the other night; I had completely forgotten about the crypto-feminist Tyne Daly subplot.
Not terribly surprisingly since Tyne Daly appears not in Dirty Harry but in The Enforcer.
robert the red 03.26.07 at 5:53 pm
There is another, plot-structural reason for the “liberalism” (e.g., hands-off attitude) of the international scale action. If the terrorism plot could be resolved by forceful international action of some kind, then the plot would have to shift focus away from Jack. The whole terrorist scenarios are carefully constructed so that only Jack can save the nation — no amount of bombing-the-bejeesus out of some foreign country can help. This means non-interventionism on the international scale is required, and that means “liberalism”.
abb1 03.26.07 at 6:53 pm
Non-interventionism means liberalism? I wish.
Dave 03.26.07 at 8:28 pm
I always thought 24 was there just to provide a convenient shorthand for reductio ad absurdum for us MTV generation.
marc sobel 03.26.07 at 10:24 pm
I didn’t start watching 24 and after it had been around for a couple of years, got the DVD’s from netflix, watched the first three shows and sent them back. It was clearly (to me) advancing an authoritarian agenda in that:
1) you can’t trust anyone
2) you can do whatever you want as long as you think it is right
3) violence is justified and normal
4) government is corrupt
5) people are corrupt
6) the world is out to get you.
This seemed to be a show that like JFK convinced a lot of people that there was a plot to kill Kennedy, intends to make people afraid and suspicious, just right for the GWOT.
radek 03.26.07 at 10:58 pm
Aside from 2) I don’t see anything particularly authortierian on that list.
Ronald 03.27.07 at 12:18 am
But the one thing you’re overlooking is that Jack spends quite a lot of time fighting the so called
“right wing” political evil-doers too. The entire second half of season 2 is about Jack trying to prevent an unnecessary war in the middle east and take down an evil oil tycoon (The terrorist threat was completely resolved halfway through). And then last season he was directly trying to stop the evil repub president Charles Logan from carrying out his plans. He even tortured Logan’s top aide and put a gun to the presidents head on seperate occasions.
The thing is there is alot of overlap between the political and terror fighting spheres. So much so that a recurring plot device is that the war hawks in the government actually set the terror cells in motion but then lose control of them. (they always have a secret agent inside the terrorist cell that is ordered to stop the bad guys at the right moment but he always gets made and executed) again see seasons 2 and 5.
I really don’t buy that the CTU action stuff is right wing in the first place. The bad guys do just as much if not more torturing than the good guys (Many times Jack himself is on the recieving end of it.) There have been a few occasions where completely innocent people get tortured and when the torturing doesn’t get correct info out of the bad guys. And do you honestly think that any Republicans would sacrifice themselves the way Jack does to save American lives?
sara 03.27.07 at 2:58 am
24 would be more amusing if American soldiers didn’t feel encouraged by it to make like Jack Bauer.
Without the encouragement of at least some of their superiors.
For those who find the above source ironic (it’s late even on this side of the water, so I am too tired to find the primary), another.
Tom T. 03.27.07 at 3:24 am
John H, I think you ought to watch more of the show. Thus far this season on 24: (1) the mass detention of Muslims has been shown to be ineffective, misguided, and counterproductive; (2) an effort to torture a confession from a suspected double agent has been shown to be ineffective, misguided, and counterproductive; (3) the (clearly virtuous) President has embraced a policy of achieving peace through dialogue with former terrorists; (4) the warmongering vice-president has been acknowledged as crazy and dangerous for his plan to make a unilateral strike against a Middle East nation as putative retaliation for the apparently unrelated nuclear strike by this season’s terror group. Moreover, the supposedly “omnicompetent” agency has failed to prevent a nuclear strike on US territory, has been hamstrung by internal resistance to point (3) above, and, like every season, is shot through with leaks and spies.
brooksfoe 03.27.07 at 7:54 am
Not terribly surprisingly since Tyne Daly appears not in Dirty Harry but in The Enforcer.
Doh. Serves me right for channel-surfing.
Katherine 03.27.07 at 11:09 am
I have just finishing sitting through the two last series of Alias. In a similar way it has a very odd combination of “we’re the good guys and it is therefore necessary for us to beat bad people up in order to get answers” with “the bad guys do nasty torture against good people and are thus bad”. This is mixed up with more developed (and not subplot) feminism thread.
Interesting combo, but less likely to be debated because, I guess, Alias was less popular than 24.
Sk 03.27.07 at 11:47 am
“It would be a good bargain, if the reality-based liberal community could strike it: in exchange for liberal control of actually existing institutions and policy-making,”
But you’ve already got that: you’ve got the press, you’ve got academia, you’ve got the teachers’ union, as well as other unions. You’ve got Hollywood and the music industry. You’ve even got Congress.
No surprise, though-they’re all a bunch of moral degenerates.
Sk
Clif 03.27.07 at 8:41 pm
“24” is of course neither liberal or conservative, but it is patriotic. To a true left winger, this makes it “conservative”. But in America it is considered “conservative” because our hero employs torture. Sometimes torture is wrong, sometimes it is the only way to avoid a greater evil. I was a huge fan of “La Femme Nikita”, an earlier product of the same writers. “Nikita” would not kill in cold blood. But as a result many innocents were annihilated and the terrorists got stronger, conducting more missions and so forth. “24” and “LFN” force us to confront the kinds of situations that real decisionmakers face. “24” annihilates the arguments of the dogmatic (“torture is always wrong no matter what” and “all POWs should be given taxpayer paid court appointed attorneys and $4 million court trials before interrogation if their attorney says so”).
Terry 03.28.07 at 7:51 am
“But the one thing you’re overlooking is that Jack spends quite
a lot of time fighting the so called “right wing†political
evil-doers too.”
Jack Bauer, the *hero* of 24 regularly tortures people. You’re saying that’s ok because he fights right-wing vil-doers??
The idea that a show that promotes and glamorizes torture is ok so long as it isn’t racist, sexist or too right-wing is just soooo disgusting.
ejh 03.28.07 at 8:40 am
Sometimes torture is wrong, sometimes it is the only way to avoid a greater evil
In which circumstances would this be? Would they not be circumstances which are largely fictional?
abb1 03.28.07 at 9:04 am
“24†is of course neither liberal or conservative, but it is patriotic. To a true left winger, this makes it “conservativeâ€.
But isn’t patriotism (being a weak form of nationalism) a conservative concept? Liberalism is usually associated with cosmopolitanism.
As far as these shows ‘annihilating’ some arguments – c’mon, they are basically modern comic strips; their ability to make a serious argument is obviously very-very limited.
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