|
very well-acted, good storytelling, and I have no objection to people dealing with their fears or excruciating dilemmas through fiction. Goes all the way back to Sophocles and Euripides and Greek drama--the deliberate stimulation of fear and horror, for emotional cleansing. Also, I'm a First Amendment fundamentalist: no censorship. I don't think we can easily judge the impact of fiction on anyone--even children. The famous "holocaust" psychologist Bruno Bettelheim said that children need scary fairy tales, with monsters, etc., to deal with their fears.
After a while, I got tired of 24's adrenalin rush--fun at first, ultimately tiresome--and I never liked the "blondes in peril" segments (maybe because the blondes were such annoying washouts--other roles/actors in the show were anything but dull). The way I watched it, you could just fast-forward through the "blondes in peril" parts, and I wouldn't say they dominated the show. What dominated the show was masses of people being in peril, in different scenarios, including from traitors within our own government--just Americans in peril, not others--and I suppose this could be construed as a general political statement, since our real government, at the time, was truly slaughtering a million people to get their oil, and here we were, all concerned about ourselves, and fictional scenarios of people threatening Los Angeles with nukes, etc. I don't know that that--or any of it--was intended as a political statement. God knows they won't be the first Hollywood producers to ignore the pain and death of masses of other people at U.S. hands. I tend to think that the creative artists--not the corpo moneyed interests--predominated in creating the show (partly because it was so well done), and the creative people were feeling all the fear vibes of the Bush Junta, and thus portrayed those fear vibes in fictional scenarios.
I don't know for sure. There could have been an agenda to justify our secret government, torture and extrajudicial killings, etc. But our hero, Jack Bauer--a sort of modern Clint Eastwood (individualist, action-oriented)--as often as not ran up against scumbags and traitors in our own government, including the president, and within his own highly secret, CIA-like organization. If you separate the character from the political context--and from particular brutal or illegal actions that he sometimes commits--you could conceivably say that the character was teaching people to think for themselves. I know there's a fine line here, re: "taking the law into your own hands." But what IS the law if you are tracking a nuclear bomb over Los Angeles? A difficult problem.
I think that the show adequately portrays the unreliability, crimes and bad motives of some in government, to point to the Bushwhacks' total bullshit about "the war on terror." In other ways, though, it reinforces violent "secret government" methods of dealing with threats, from within or without. Our democracy is portrayed as extraneous to these secret proceedings and struggles, and, while that may be quite accurate, as to how things really are, there is no notion presented in the show (that I can remember) that it should be otherwise. The masses are "the civilians." We are just peons, victims, "blondes in peril," whom the Jack Bauer's of this world are passionately committed to protecting. And the truth must be kept from us--we couldn't take it; we might get all fussy and whiney about civil rights and the "rule of law," and thus we would be destroyed by the bad guys. It is never suggested that democracy, when it is functioning properly, when it is real, both prevents government from inflicting harm on others (thus creating "terrorists"), and creates honest, efficient, effective policing, to deal with any such threats.
The show does, indeed, accept the premise that we need a secret government to protect us from ourselves--from our own permissiveness and liberality--and when that secret government fails, we need Jack Bauer heroes to override even them, and act on their own. But the James Bond novels and movies also have this premise, as do a host of other fictional stories. It is really not fair to blame 24 in particular for it--if blame is even the right word, since a secret government exists--it is the reality of our era, since the 1950s.
The torture thing was riveting, but it is only one series of episodes, within the larger show. And, once again, in the real world, our president and his cohorts were torturing people. So there is a certain gritty realism to it. The 24 writers, however, treat deliberate torture as rare, and as justified. It was a very, very different story with the Bushwhacks--massive torture of many innocents, and torture of possible terrorists for we know not what purpose--and the secrecy now, and shredding of tapes, etc., and the pervasive use of torture, point to ill purpose.
24 addresses the serious issue of our collective fears and dread during the Bush era. If anything, it makes you think about our secret government and what they might be up to, and have been up to. And it presents us with a hero who is able to judge things for himself, think for himself and act on his own judgement of things, despite any consequences to himself. He is physically and mentally brave. And he never does things for his own benefit. Never! That may be unrealistic, but it's not a bad heroic model.
24 has gone on too long--which successful shows tend to do. As I said, I lost interest by Season 3. It doesn't surprise me that they are stretching improbabilities now, to the breaking point--to try to enhance the "thrill" factor. But neither is that without precedent. Charles Dickens did the same thing.
|
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
