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24: Right-wing propaganda or left-wing satire?

TV // Jim // 24th January 2006

The TV programme 24 has got me a bit confused. It is an undisputed fact that 24 is:
a- Blisteringly entertaining
b- A complete load of right old bollocks
c- Slightly more addictive than chocolate-covered crack

However, I am starting to feel really disturbed about the ultimate message behind the show. Is it a bunch of neo-con right-wing propaganda or an arch leftist satire? Why should I care? I don’t know, but it has got me really riled.

For the uninitiated...

...24 is a real-time thriller now into its fifth series, each episode is one successive hour of the same day in which a bunch of nasty foreign terrorists try to bomb/poison/assassinate large chunks of the American population while the heroic employees of the Counter Terrorist Unit (CTU) try to stop them.

Kiefer Sutherland in 24: Nazi?, Commie?

Chief protagonist is Jack Bauer, played by a taciturn Kiefer Sutherland. A man who literally kills or at least wounds every single fucking person he ever meets while maintaining an air of near-psychotic pragmatism and undergoing deep personal trauma usually involving his incredibly nubile daughter and/or his CTU chums.

Each series of 24 has shared the following character traits:

- Crazy split-screen action accompanied by a ticking clock, just to really ram the real-time point home.

- Near mastery of the cliff-hanger ending and surprise twist, often several times in a single hour.

- A load of ridiculous IT bollocks. All of the computer screens look like Sky Sports News with maps and meaningless info flying all over the shop. All the computer people are always yelling stuff at each other about “opening sockets” and “clearing routers”.

- High quality cameos from the likes of Dennis Hopper, usually as the bad guys. Lou Diamond Phillips even turned up at one point.

- Loads and loads and loads of shooting/stabbing/strangling/beating/decapitating etc usually perpetrated by Sutherland. The body-count per series must be somewhere in the thousands.

- A plot gradually spiralling towards the hysterical which forces the poor actors to have to utter lines such as “This morning Jack and Audrey were planning their future. Now he’s responsible for the her husband’s death and he may have to torture her brother”, with a straight face.

- Increasingly blunt product placement. In the first series geeks around the world rejoiced as the CTU guys all had groovy Mac gear while all the bad guys had nasty PCs. In subsequent series the likes of Dell, Palm and Cisco have provided the kit (and presumably large sums of money) that help save the day time and again.

- Every episode will contain at least one aimless calm-before-the-storm romantic/interpersonal interlude.

So how has this ostensibly...

...glossy and entertaining programme got me so wound up about its politics? Well it is all a question of interpretation; The following points taken “straight” could be read as advancing far-right ideals such as extreme government control/manipulation of the population for their own good, unhealthy nationalism and military fetishism.

Alternatively the whole thing could be a massive piss-take, pointing out how ridiculously paranoid and near-nazi the government and defence institutions of the USA are becoming.

Careerism
CTU is the most paranoid and careerist workplace I can remember being depicted on screen, it makes Glengarry Glen Ross look like Acorn Antiques. In the course of the average day everyone is grassing each other up to the boss to get ahead, or grassing the boss up to get them removed so that they can all move one place up the ladder.
At one point in series 2 I think that the bloke who started out cleaning the toilets was actually next in line to become President.

No personal betrayal is too low for the denizens of CTU, even people who are married will shaft each other to get a slightly nicer desk if they think their spouse is showing the slightest hint of weakness.

It’s a dog eat dog world in the CTU office and demotion is usually met with questioning, jail time or perhaps even a quick bout of torture.

Paranoia and Traitors
No programme has done more to engender the shoddily-manufactured fear of the “War on Terror” into its plot than 24. Everyone is out to get Jack and his buddies in a series of huge elaborate conspiracies usually involving nasty foreign people, venal government officials and most of CTU turning out to be evil traitors. As a result none pf the characters trust each other at all. This leads to all manner of back-stabbing and pre-emptive violence at both a government and personal level, sort of Bush era foreign policy writ large.

Torture
The earlier series had a couple of shocking scenes of what we all now know to term “extraordinary rendition” (thank you Jack Straw), at the time it was deployed as an absolute last resort.

In the later series the first thing CTU does when they arrest anyone is to call in a brute called “Richards” to administer pain drugs and nasty looking electric shocks. Such practices even receive parental endorsement at one stage in series four, truly a watershed moment in mainstream American television.

It almost always turns out that the torture is completely justified, but even when it isn’t the tortured seem fairly chipper about the whole thing, going back to work and asking for a pay rise (I’m not joking) or even heroically taking a bullet for Jack 10 minutes after he had their bollocks plugged into a light socket.

Racist depiction of foreigners
Anyone who isn’t American is not to be trusted in 24, no sir. From shifty English businessmen to shifty Arabic business people, not forgetting those crazy genocide-loving Eastern Europeans (who are a bit shifty).

In contrast most Americans are shown as stoic, patriotic heroes happy to take a bullet/virus/nuke if Jack talks to them on their mobile for five minutes and says something along the lines of “There is no other choice, the president is counting on you to get the dirty bomb as far up your arse as you can. You’ll be saving millions of lives you know”.

So there you have it,

I’ll leave it up to you to decide whether 24 is a load of pro-republican scaremongering (well it is made by Fox after all) or whether every time he garrottes an Asian (the London-born, Canadian, gun control spokesman) Kiefer Sutherland is slyly winking at the audience - providing Jack Bauer as a metaphor for the twisted state of US paranoia at the moment.

Of course, 24 fans will note that none of this really explains the (thankfully) endless shots of Elisha Cuthbert running around in a vest. Maybe that’s something for all the anarchists out there?

Some more questions about 24 that don’t really fit in with any of the above…

Who exactly is the foxy lesbian assassin woman and can I get her phone number?

When will Jack and President finally throw aside the coy “it’s been an honour Mr President”, “No, Jack the honour was mine” flirting and get all Brokeback Mountain on each other’s ass (literally)?

Who the fuck is/are division?

Is there a single major terrorist left in the world who hasn’t been granted an all encompassing pardon by the American president yet?

Tick, Tock, Links, Tick, Tock...

The 24 Wiki

Its all here in a depressingly complete sort of way

The official 24 web site

Completely ruin the point of waiting for the fifth series with this spoiler laden effort from the (gargle, spit) Fox web site.

Kiefer Sutherland bio from TV.com

A bit of a lad by all accounts