Getting medieval

The TV show 24, featuring Keifer Sutherland as a US anti-terrorist agent who also happens to be a one-man weapon of mass destruction, is hugely popular in the States. (It has its devout followers here, too, as a Filipino-dubbed version shown on local TV proves.)

Week after week, it shows us a government faced with disasters, lacking in coordination and riddled with evil motives, indecision and inefficiency. In other words, it’s like an average day in the Bush administration.

No, just kidding. The fourth season of this 24-episode series gives an inside, hour-by-hour account of a day in the life of Counter-Terrorism Unit (CTU) Special Agent Jack Bauer.

Along the way, it makes indirect reference to the post-9/11 world, even giving us an American president whose deer-in-the-headlights gaze could rival Dubya’s. But though it pretends to be liberal in some matters, it’s essentially more conservative than the rabid anti-communist "Rambo" movies of Ronald Reagan’s era.

After all, 24 focuses on a covert US government agency that sanctions illegal and unsavory methods to get the job done. Torture, high-level deception and misinformation, psy-war tactics: these are the mechanisms of a totalitarian government. But they are also the everyday tools of CTU, where Jack works (or worked, until the end of the third season. Now he’s just a consultant who gets called in to save the world – or at least America – once per season).

There’s a distinct emphasis on torturing suspects this fourth season that seems like a direct nod to the Abu Ghraib prisoner scandal – where captured Iraqi suspects were humiliated and tortured, sometimes on film and video – and the alleged abuses at the US Guantanamo Bay prison. But rather than condemning such practices, the show seems to accept them as a necessary part of fighting terrorism and extracting information.

Bauer is the hero of the show, but he is by no means a by-the-book government agent. In fact, his professional zeal makes him TV’s hardest-working rogue cop. Need some dirty work done because some government bureaucrat can’t handle it? Send in Jack Bauer. Need a terrorist suspect tortured? Send in Jack Bauer. Need results? Send in Jack Bauer.

Indeed, there’s a certain programmed thrill in seeing Bauer skip the usual formalities of asking a suspect questions – instead, he goes straight for the bullet through the leg. Americans – and many viewers abroad, apparently – have registered their approval by making the show a huge hit for FOX TV.

The FOX network has a reputation for conservative politics, notably during the 2000 presidential election when it called the Florida vote for George W. Bush way ahead of the other networks. (Not coincidentally, whenever a TV news update occurs on 24, it’s Fox News – not CNN – that’s shown onscreen.)

Bauer’s character is a direct throwback to ’70s vigilante movies like Death Wish and Dirty Harry, in which we applauded Clint Eastwood’s eponymous cop for, not only shooting the unarmed serial killer Scorpio in the leg, but grinding his boot heel into the suspect’s wound to get information about a kidnapped girl. Eastwood’s character was a hero archetype that fulfilled certain audience expectations in the 1970s, when many Americans felt mired in Vietnam, domestic race riots and rising crime in the cities.

The hero – or anti-hero – was established as a loner, someone who worked for the government, but didn’t necessarily agree with or believe in its methods; who was skeptical of liberal rules, and used his own tools to get results. The archetype goes back even further to the noir anti-hero, yet with an added twist: this guy works for the state, not as a private eye.

And this guy might not be altogether hooked up right, either. Part of the implicit attraction of watching Dirty Harry/Rambo/Jack Bauer in action is the promise that they will, at some point, cross the line. They are TV’s fully-functional psychopaths, ready to do what is necessary to save America. And, as in the 1970s, they are popular again because so many Americans have begun to feel that the government can’t control all situations (as Katrina’s aftermath bears out). During such times, lone saviors, at least in fiction, become dominant cultural archetypes.

They become dominant archetypes, typically, when a Republican is in the White House. Think Nixon era, which spawned Dirty Harry. Think Reagan era which begat Rambo. And now, in the wake of 9/11, TV brings us inside a government agency devoted to stopping terrorism – at any cost.

But the show has its contradictions, in the service of entertainment. Like, has there ever been an office environment on TV more dysfunctional than the offices of CTU? Dark and shadowy, presumably set underground with banks of flashing computer terminals and rows of shifty-eyed employees, the people at CTU are always shown spying or eavesdropping on one another. Is this the group of people you want handling your national security? They back-stab, they relay wrong information, they flub basic protocols resulting in mini-crises. This is what is known as "plot advancement" in screenwriting classes. If it weren’t for all the mistakes this covert agency made every week, there would be no crises to resolve on 24.

Sometimes Jack, always quick to choose action over talk, makes his own job more difficult. When a suspected terrorist Jack is tailing stops his minivan at a self-serve gas station and must be delayed for a few minutes until a CTU satellite can initiate a trace on his vehicle, Bauer doesn’t go the simple route – say, letting the air out of the terrorists’ tires while he’s paying for gas – no, he pulls a ski mask down over his face and stages a fake holdup of the gas station to slow things down. This leads to further complications.

This season focuses on a bin Laden-type charismatic radical Muslim leader (played chillingly by Arnold Vosloo, best known as High Priest Imhotep in The Mummy) who plans not one, but four major assaults on America within the span of one day. Implausibility runs high on 24, such as the insistence that only Jack Bauer can get the job done – coupled with a puzzling lack of appreciation from his superiors that ties in with the anti-government/lone savior ethos.

But at its core, 24 is more than just deeply conservative in its advocacy of brutal methods. It’s practically medieval. It basks in our fantasies of revenge, torture and retribution for offenses. It preys on our fears, bundles them into entertaining hour-long capsules, and suggests they can be solved with a few quick, painful sessions in the interrogation room – or a few minutes alone with Jack Bauer.

Oddly entertaining is Jack’s doomed love interest this season – the daughter of the Secretary of Defense who doesn’t quite know the extent of her beau’s professional zeal. When her husband, from whom she’s separated, seems to be linked to the unfolding terrorist plot, she watches as Jack tortures him in a hotel room with two exposed filaments from a lamp plug. Is this the guy I want someday raising my kids? you can practically see her thinking.

Speaking of medieval, the women on 24 come to us in three varieties – clueless, backbiting or lethal. The more interesting femmes on the show are the femme fatales, since they at least get to wield some real power. The others are either as catty as a couple of gals on The Apprentice jockeying for position, or so dumb they routinely walk into trouble (like Jack’s daughter Kim, later hired by CTU).

Jack himself remains a bizarre jumble of contradictions – as, surely, any good TV action hero/psychopath must be. He’s fiercely individualistic, resistant to bureaucratic restrictions and government meddling, yet still dedicated to the government’s preservation and "mission" nonetheless.

Thus he’s allowed to represent the "good American" – one who is blessed with extraordinary resilience – but also granted extraordinary (and lethal) government tools at his disposal. He can be, for us, both patriot and individual, a luxury that the mass of American civilians – who are treated on the show as, at best, an abstraction: basically a large mass of people threatened by this terrorist annihilation or that – may never fully attain, even less so under the US Patriot Act.