Last week’s New Yorker contained a piece entitled “Whatever It Takes” about Fox’s torture-porn hit 24 and, no surprise, it got a lot of play beyond New Yorker circles. The author, Jane Mayer, posted audio comments at the magazine’s website that play over video of the show’s star-protagonist Jack Bauer doing what he does best: torture people.
In the article and to a lesser extent on the web, Mayer begins by demonstrating how the politics of 24 mastermind and executive producer Joel Surnow shape the show, particularly in regard to the controversial question of the American use of torture in the War on Terror. The show, she says, “argues absolutely that torture is necessary and that torture works.”
No surprises so far, but then the article takes a strange turn.
The show is so popular with cadets at West Point and makes such a compelling case to U.S. soldiers on active duty, writes Mayer, that West Point Dean Patrick Finnegan, a brigadier general, traveled to the set of the show in Hollywood to plead his case with Surnow and the rest of the show’s writers. Finnegan, who in his general’s attire was initially mistaken for an actor on the set, told the Fox people that 24 was undermining West Point curricula, which teaches that torture is illegal and that it doesn’t work. He told Surnow and Co. that it was becoming difficult to get soldiers in the field to obey the law. “Please just stop,” he pleaded. “We don’t get information through torture! It doesn’t work that way. Your show is bad for the troops and for the war effort and for the image of the country around the world. We can support international resolutions officially as much as we like, but what the world sees is Jack Bauer, an American-made ideal, our dream secret-agent superhero, and Jack Bauer is a torturer!” **
The Fox execs responded by explaining to the general that the show follows a narrative formula that works. They then politely showed him the door.
So okay, that’s a very interesting exchange. Why Mayer takes it no further than that, though, is baffling. What happened to analysis? We’re talking about the New Yorker here, a magazine whose mission is to have reason to feel smug. Where were the fancy-pants editors? The trail of this story certainly doesn’t end at the door of the Fox Network. It only starts there. Where is examination of the desperation, for example, that would lead the West Point dean and his officers to fly to California and talk with TV execs about problems they’re experiencing training American soldiers? I mean, doesn’t there seem to be a serious disconnect there, one underlined by the comedy of the Hollywood folk thinking Finnegan was an actor?
TV is everybody’s favorite whipping boy. But West Point’s problem is not TV. Wouldn’t there, for example, seem to be a more direct relationship in this case between the cadets and the soldiers on one hand and the political leaders writing the laws of the War on Terror and commanding our troops on the other? Why not leave TV out of it until you get that more-direct relationship ironed out? Well, maybe because the political leadership isn’t taking calls from the brigadier general dean of West Point. Could that be true? Mayer never asks. But why? Why wasn’t she all over it, like: “Hey, Gen. Finnegan, instead of going to Hollywood, why didn’t you go to Washington, to the president and the vice president and the attorney general and tell them to stop rendering prisoners to known torture sites and denying basic defendant rights at home and intimidating prisoner legal defense teams and losing evidence in high-profile prisoner abuse trials and sanctioning torture in a million other ways?”
Does anyone seriously doubt Dick Cheney has more direct influence on our torture policy than does Jack Bauer— the former being, at least technically, a living breathing human and a particularly well-placed elected official who fully endorses torture because he believes, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that it works! He has said as much repeatedly. So why would we expect our West Point cadets to think differently? What is Camp Delta at Guantanamo if not a real-life manifestation of the Jack Bauer “whatever it takes” self-defeating approach to national defense?
Another strange (and related) thing about Mayer’s article is that she seems to think, like the West Point Dean, that the fact that soldiers are watching and loving 24 translates necessarily to their embracing torture as policy, as if the relationship is simple cause and effect. Yet media scholarship for the past twenty years has effectively rebuked this old-style interpretation of media “effects,” where it is assumed people watch things happen on the little blue screen and are hypnotized like Manchurian Candidates into reenacting whatever they see happen there. It was a nice clean theory. But it doesn’t work like that. What’s on TV is not the problem. It’s never the problem. It’s just a symptom of the problem. Violent societies make violent TV, not the other way round.
I watch 24 and it horrifies me and captivates me and hasn’t influenced my thinking in the least about the rightness or effectiveness of torture. I also haven’t found myself looking to torture anyone personally. What it does regularly make me think about, though, is the situation we’re in and can’t seem to get out of that has given rise to “good guy torture” as an immensely popular, repeat American TV story line. Why doesn’t “24″ appear to make Mayer or the editors of her media column think about such things too?
**Note: Those quoted lines of General Finnegan were reconstructed from the story for the sake of flavor and efficiency! Don’t flame me.
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John Tomasic is managing editor of Pop and Politics.