March 15, 2007
More on 24 II Posted by Fredric Smoler at 10:55 PM EST Alexander Burns notes that Joel Surnow, the executive producer of 24, is described in The New Yorker as an isolationist with no faith in nation-building, is critical of the way the war in Iraq has been conducted, and thinks we should have replaced Saddam Hussein with “some other monster who’s going to keep these people in line.” He thinks 24’s politics can be described as rightist in the manner of Pat Buchanan’s politics, writing that “where neoconservative Republicans and liberal internationalists alike favor an expanded international role for the United States, Surnow apparently would prefer a more self-interested and coldly amoral foreign policy,” and that “on the one hand, 24 presents the United States as a nation under siege by terrorists, requiring all possible means of self-defense in order to beat back the barbarians at the gates. On the other hand, the show depicts an America profoundly threatened by the machinations of big business, the arms industry, and irrationally militaristic government officials. This rendering of the United States may not be in line with the conservatism of George W. Bush, but it is a conservative rendition all the same.” I have some reservations about this argument. 24 plot arcs almost invariably go like this: Terrorists (Muslims, Serbian nationalists, or Mexican drug lords) acquire weapons of mass destruction and threaten American civilians, and will at one point descend into a subterranean labyrinth while retaining possession of a polished metal cylinder. Attempts to defeat these terrorists are sometimes obstructed by weedy civil libertarians, but the always infallible method of torture is employed first against the terrorists, then against U.S. officials who are members of the rightist cabal that has indirectly supplied the terrorists with WMD. These U.S. officials are themselves advocates of the more self-interested and coldly amoral foreign policy that Surnow would apparently prefer, yet they are clearly villains. They do not have what Pat Buchanan takes to be Israel-centered dual loyalties, or any ideals about exporting democracy, and with one belated exception, they do not have economic motives. They are authoritarian imperialists, but both their imperialism and their contempt for legalism are driven only by their understanding of the imperatives of national security. In 24, legalism must be defeated when it obstructs the torture of terrorists, but it must be vindicated by defeating the cabal, and each series sees first the triumph over one form of legalism and then the successful defense of that different form of legalism (the President’s authority must always be vindicated against the machinations of unelected officials). I don’t think the domestic villains of 24 descend from Pat Buchanan’s despised neoconservatives or liberal internationalists; they rather seem to have wandered in from a dog-eared copy of Seven Days in May. They are the sort of villains liberals enjoy thinking villainous—I know I do—although since remarkably few American conservatives champion covert coups against our own government in the interest of national security, the villains are probably widely detested on all sides. These villains have no obvious analogs in real U.S. politics (Latin America, Asia, and Europe have not been so fortunate). On the wisdom of foreign military adventures 24 is generally silent. Some of the show’s terrorists want to punish what they describe as American arrogance and interventionism—arguably a crypto-Buchananite position, but also one associated with various Left tropes—but it is not clear that we are meant to sympathize with their grievances. The show’s heroes are always loyal to the elected President, unless he turns out to have murdered his predecessor. So I am still not sure 24’s politics taken in toto conform to any existing American conservative template. I carelessly used the word “rightist” in the post to which Mr. Burns has responded, and while thinking through the perhaps less than urgent topic of 24’s politics, it occurs to me that I should probably remember that the terms “right” and “left,” which originally denoted seating patterns in the eighteenth-century French Estates General, have little if any fixed content. Defending a threatened Republic against obscurantist enemies, and doing so by any means necessary, was once a left position. Covertly or overtly rooting for the victory of viciously illiberal misogynist homophobes over the soldiers of a liberal democracy is nowadays not unknown on the left, although some rightists also take such a position. So I am a little embarrassed to have used the word “rightist” about 24, which I enjoy but find hard to take too seriously (I am pretty confident that this last is also true of Mr. Burns). I think the New Yorker article, which does take 24’s politics seriously, may be making a mistake in assuming that 24’s torture fetish will significantly affect public debate or private judgment, not least because 24’s pleasures do not include brilliant realism. This year, within a few hours of the season premiere, the show’s hero was torturing his own brother. I find it difficult to imagine any viewer for whom the effect was other than Grand Guignol.
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