This article appears in the July/August issue
of The American Spectator. To subscribe, please click
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THE LAST WE SAW special agent Jack Bauer, he was walking into a
California sunrise and headed for the Mexican border, a classic
Western hero on the run from the corruptions of law and government.
He’s given up his identity as Jack Bauer and is, at least until the
next season of 24, the new Man with No Name. He doesn’t
have Clint Eastwood’s poncho and cigarillo, but he does have a cell
phone with a scramble filter.
As played by Kiefer Sutherland, Bauer is a character of amazing
gusto, a fall-on-his-sword patriot whose efforts to save America
involve actions that would normally be considered criminal, and
that even under the conditions in which he works are at least
morally debatable. In the 24 season just past, Bauer held
up a convenience store in order to keep tabs on a “hostile”;
temporarily quit the Counter Terrorism Unit (CTU) so that, no
longer a federal employee, he could freely torture a suspect for
information; led a commando raid on the Chinese embassy to abduct a
Chinese national with knowledge of a terrorist plot; and forced
doctors at gunpoint to abandon medical treatment for an innocent
American, the estranged husband of his girlfriend, in favor of
saving the Chinese national, who was wounded in the raid. Under the
circumstances, saving the American would have been a merely
sentimental choice.
“He’s unorthodox, but he gets results,” one of Bauer’s
colleagues says of him. “You’re going to have to trust me,” Bauer
often says. Both statements apply to 24 as well.
The show, which completed its fourth season in May, is known for
its innovative structure, its suspense, and its plot twists. Each
season represents one day during which a cataclysmic terrorist plot
is about to unfold; each episode represents one real-time hour. A
clock appears on the screen at different points to mark the time.
More striking even than its innovations, though, is the show’s
political and moral toughness. It regularly plunges into issues
like torture, deceit, and even murder as a way of getting at some
enduring truths: that war affords few opportunities for moral
purity; that we must still have the courage to make distinctions
between unpleasant options, and act on our choices; that one does
not have to be innocent to be right. As one character puts it,
“This is a dirty business, and we’re going to have to get our hands
dirty if we want to fix it.”
At least as concerns America’s role in the world, this is not a
message the left is comfortable with. But then, the left can’t be
terribly enamored of a program in which the Secretary of Defense
ends an altercation with his left-wing son by snarling, “Spare me
your sixth-grade Michael Moore logic!”
Since its plots often involve Islamic terrorists, 24
has run afoul of political correctness and some Muslim lobbying
groups. When the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), an
organization with a dubious record condemning terrorism that still
manages to get White House invites, protested, Kiefer Sutherland
taped a public service announcement urging viewers to remember that
Muslim Americans are on our side in the war against terrorism. It
is a message one urgently wishes to believe, but since the
terrorists the government is fighting in real life are Islamic,
24 is only depicting reality. Sutherland himself conceded
this point in an interview around the same time.
The protests clearly had an effect, though. A subsequent episode
featured a few Islamic Americans giving earnest speeches expressing
their desire to fight for America. No doubt such people exist, but
the script still read as if authored by CAIR. Fortunately, such
effects did not linger long. 24 is like a ring brawler who
has a few bad rounds but then comes back swinging again, apparently
rejuvenated.
The most recent season pulled no punches, for example, in its
portrayal of the terrorist mastermind Habib Marwan. He does not
turn out to be, as he might have on some other shows, a soulful
human being fighting for a cause that, in the subjectivist’s moral
universe, can be readily defended. Rather, he is a ruthless killer
who is like many jihadi front men in that he preaches the
virtues of death and sacrifice while making elaborate plans for his
own survival. He is also attuned to the emphasis liberal
democracies place on rights and due process. When one of his men is
apprehended, Marwan rings up a lawyer from “Amnesty Global,” who
quickly helps secure his release. It’s a delicious slap at the
organization that recently branded America’s efforts to detain
terrorists “the gulag of our time.”
By the time Bauer tells Marwan, “For all the hatred that you
have for this country, you don’t understand it very well,” the
effects of the CAIR protests seemed to have long since
dissipated.
THE SHOW’S RESILIENCE owes a good deal to Sutherland’s mesmerizing
portrayal of Jack Bauer. Perhaps somewhere a critic is attempting
to explain how the son of one of Hollywood’s renowned lefties has
become an iconic star by playing a fearless terrorist fighter.
Bauer is basically a superhero, but more in the fashion of Marvel
comics than DC comics — he brings the gift of freedom to others,
but mostly ruin to himself and those he loves. However over the top
his adventures may sometimes go, he is one of the most stirring
characters the small screen has ever produced, and certainly on a
short list of great TV patriots.
24 as a whole is patriotic in its honesty about the
nature of our adversaries and its refusal to indulge in the moral
equivocation favored by most critically lauded television dramas.
You never hear CTU characters wondering while perched over their
computers, “Why do they hate us?” or fretting that “we’re just as
bad as they are.” 24 is also refreshing in its lack of
interest in the standard hobby horses of gender and race. Though
some read feminism into the show’s gallery of can-do, deadly
females (others read misogyny), the show doesn’t speechify one way
or the other. Likewise, America’s political leaders are too busy
trying to stop nuclear holocausts to give potted speeches about
race. One of the program’s enduring characters is David Palmer, the
country’s first black president. His character faces all kinds of
stress, including coup attempts engineered by his own staff, but
his race is never discussed.
The most serious problems with the show are its often
implausible plot twists, like the presence of a mole within CTU
every season or the curious inability of almost any CTU commando to
survive field operations, other than Jack. Being a TV show,
24 also makes occasional stops into soap opera romance,
often at the most unlikely times. Jack is not above pausing at
high-stress moments to try patching up his always disastrous love
life over his always-charged cell phone. But most of these problems
fall within the realm of suspension of disbelief. It’s still TV,
after all, though its scenarios are distressingly real.
While 24 is becoming a pop culture institution, it
remains to be seen whether it will flourish in reruns. Its
cliffhanger nature has the immediacy of a sporting event, and as
any sports buff can tell you, watching a game on tape just isn’t
the same. There is also the matter of the program’s serial
structure, which is not compatible with the one-off format of a
typical drama or sitcom. The appeal of reruns is the ability to
flick on and flick off, getting resolution in a matter of minutes
and moving on to other things. 24 does not reward
occasional involvement.
Reruns will have to wait, though, as Fox has renewed the show
for two more seasons. Whatever its future holds, for sheer audacity
it may never top a moment from the second season.
Jack Bauer is questioning a small-time criminal who has turned
informer against a group that Bauer had previously infiltrated. The
group in turn has ties to the terrorists plotting that season’s
mayhem. Bauer realizes that he will have to re-infiltrate the group
to get information, but first he’ll need to regain their trust. He
decides that he’ll need to bring them the informer’s head. In the
interrogation room, Bauer shoots and kills the informer, to the
astonishment of his superior, CTU director George Mason. When Mason
excoriates him, Bauer replies, “That’s the problem with you,
George, you’re not willing to get your hands dirty. I’d suggest you
roll up your sleeves.”
But this is about as much pontification as we ever get out of
Jack Bauer. As befits a man of action, he immediately gets down to
the practicalities of the situation. Perched over the dead man’s
body, he looks up at George Mason and utters perhaps the show’s
most memorable line: “I’m going to need a hack saw.”
And come next season, a new name.
