jimijams
01-03-2007, 11:48 PM
TV's torturers may be making the unspeakable acceptable
ARGUABLY the strongest moral support for the faltering coalition in Iraq comes from a fictional television series about a fictional US government unit sworn to protect the country from terrorism.
The Fox series 24 has been a runaway success since its inception in 2001. Fans of the butt-clenchingly exciting production praise its tension-filled scenarios in which Counter-Terrorist Unit agent Jack Bauer, played with square-jawed exactitude by Kiefer Sutherland, does battle with terrorists intent on blowing up large portions of the US in the "real-time" countdown of a 24-hour period.
It came as no surprise to hear series co-creator Joel Surnow tell this week's New Yorker, "The military love our show", citing a US army regiment serving in Iraq whose collection of 24 DVDs were blown up by an enemy bomb. "People in the Administration love the series, too," he said. "It's a patriotic show. They should love it."
The image of military grunts in Iraq revelling in the show's typical mise en scene of stark rooms furnished with the instruments of torture is worrying in the extreme.
Journalist Hannah Arendt coined the phrase "the banality of evil" in relation to the trial of Nazi Adolf Eichmann. In relation to 24 and its popular status as a companion piece to the war on terror, it could be rebranded "the banality of torture".
Arendt's thesis was that doing terrible things in an organised and systematic way is based on "normalisation" — the process whereby unspeakable acts become acceptable routine.
The psychology of this, of course, rests on the spectre of necessity, whether real or imagined.
Bauer and his comrades are regularly forced to make the grim call to cross the line from interrogation to torture to elicit information that will guarantee the freedom of US citizens who are blissfully unaware that they are a matter of hours from annihilation. This week's episode, which saw nuke-happy terrorists using power drills on a CTU operative, was enough to turn the most wet-eared liberal a little hawkish.
It was a salient lesson in how complexity is blown away by violence. The enemies are now almost uniformly Middle Eastern and anyone with moral objections to vilification and torture is shown to be fatally wrong. The nice, middle-class, Middle Eastern family targeted by LA lawkeepers turns out to be, surprise, surprise, terrorists.
Mining the seam between illusion and reality, 24's makers have used the all-situation defence that it is a work of fiction. Yet this ignores the fact that popular entertainment doesn't inhabit a vacuum but is very much a product of its time.
The US organisation Human Rights First, which is pressing President George Bush to reveal the fate of prisoners under the CIA's use of secret rendition prisons, has pointed out that before the September 11 attacks there were fewer than four acts of torture depicted on prime-time US TV screens annually. Now, with the help of 24, it's more than 100.
Sutherland has told interviewers he's becoming sick of acting out torture scenes. Would it be too much of a leap of the imagination that viewers are also becoming immune to them, their attention-grabbing horror becoming just another method of making sure the bad guys don't win?
It would be interesting to know what Attorney-General Philip Ruddock thinks on the matter. The pin-wearing member of Amnesty International — the group reimagined in 24 as Amnesty Global, the obstructionist stooges of the terrorists — has denied that sleep deprivation amounts to torture. The Howard Government, until recently, rejected reports of David Hicks' fragile mental state after five years in solitary confinement at Guantanamo Bay as his failure rather than theirs.
That men at the upper echelons of their governments are prepared to bend the rules to their own devices indicates an erosion of cherished standards that had torture outlawed.
And, following Arendt's thesis that the rank and file are happy to follow the program set by the heads of state, who knows how many self-styled Bauers patrol the rendition prisons and Guantanamo Bay; how many of those army rank-and-file 24 fans boasted about by the show's creator see the Iraqi population as would-be terrorists?
The Bauer defence that extreme situations require extreme responses can also be seen in domestic politics. Howard invoked it in the radical offshore approach to asylum seekers, despite 84 per cent, according to Amnesty International/Global, going on to be assessed as refugees. Perhaps he's also aware that Border Security rates its pants off.
It's ironic that while Bill Clinton was the darling of left-leaning Hollywood, its plotlines have caught up with the machismo of George Bush. The election of his Administration coincided neatly with the revival of Superman and Spiderman and their cousin once removed, Jack Bauer.
The latest revival is the 1980s military hero, Rambo, who is being disinterred for a fourth assault on cinemas next year.
Former US president Ronald Reagan was fond of invoking Rambo as a role model; Bush and Howard might secretly dream of a real-life Bauer and a world free of the pesky need for due process. As we dig further into a Vietnam-style civil war, such dangerously reductive flights of fancy continue to infiltrate the mainstream.
http://www.theage.com.au/news/opinion/is-tv-torture-making-the-unspeakable-acceptable/2007/03/01/1172338792224.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap1
ARGUABLY the strongest moral support for the faltering coalition in Iraq comes from a fictional television series about a fictional US government unit sworn to protect the country from terrorism.
The Fox series 24 has been a runaway success since its inception in 2001. Fans of the butt-clenchingly exciting production praise its tension-filled scenarios in which Counter-Terrorist Unit agent Jack Bauer, played with square-jawed exactitude by Kiefer Sutherland, does battle with terrorists intent on blowing up large portions of the US in the "real-time" countdown of a 24-hour period.
It came as no surprise to hear series co-creator Joel Surnow tell this week's New Yorker, "The military love our show", citing a US army regiment serving in Iraq whose collection of 24 DVDs were blown up by an enemy bomb. "People in the Administration love the series, too," he said. "It's a patriotic show. They should love it."
The image of military grunts in Iraq revelling in the show's typical mise en scene of stark rooms furnished with the instruments of torture is worrying in the extreme.
Journalist Hannah Arendt coined the phrase "the banality of evil" in relation to the trial of Nazi Adolf Eichmann. In relation to 24 and its popular status as a companion piece to the war on terror, it could be rebranded "the banality of torture".
Arendt's thesis was that doing terrible things in an organised and systematic way is based on "normalisation" — the process whereby unspeakable acts become acceptable routine.
The psychology of this, of course, rests on the spectre of necessity, whether real or imagined.
Bauer and his comrades are regularly forced to make the grim call to cross the line from interrogation to torture to elicit information that will guarantee the freedom of US citizens who are blissfully unaware that they are a matter of hours from annihilation. This week's episode, which saw nuke-happy terrorists using power drills on a CTU operative, was enough to turn the most wet-eared liberal a little hawkish.
It was a salient lesson in how complexity is blown away by violence. The enemies are now almost uniformly Middle Eastern and anyone with moral objections to vilification and torture is shown to be fatally wrong. The nice, middle-class, Middle Eastern family targeted by LA lawkeepers turns out to be, surprise, surprise, terrorists.
Mining the seam between illusion and reality, 24's makers have used the all-situation defence that it is a work of fiction. Yet this ignores the fact that popular entertainment doesn't inhabit a vacuum but is very much a product of its time.
The US organisation Human Rights First, which is pressing President George Bush to reveal the fate of prisoners under the CIA's use of secret rendition prisons, has pointed out that before the September 11 attacks there were fewer than four acts of torture depicted on prime-time US TV screens annually. Now, with the help of 24, it's more than 100.
Sutherland has told interviewers he's becoming sick of acting out torture scenes. Would it be too much of a leap of the imagination that viewers are also becoming immune to them, their attention-grabbing horror becoming just another method of making sure the bad guys don't win?
It would be interesting to know what Attorney-General Philip Ruddock thinks on the matter. The pin-wearing member of Amnesty International — the group reimagined in 24 as Amnesty Global, the obstructionist stooges of the terrorists — has denied that sleep deprivation amounts to torture. The Howard Government, until recently, rejected reports of David Hicks' fragile mental state after five years in solitary confinement at Guantanamo Bay as his failure rather than theirs.
That men at the upper echelons of their governments are prepared to bend the rules to their own devices indicates an erosion of cherished standards that had torture outlawed.
And, following Arendt's thesis that the rank and file are happy to follow the program set by the heads of state, who knows how many self-styled Bauers patrol the rendition prisons and Guantanamo Bay; how many of those army rank-and-file 24 fans boasted about by the show's creator see the Iraqi population as would-be terrorists?
The Bauer defence that extreme situations require extreme responses can also be seen in domestic politics. Howard invoked it in the radical offshore approach to asylum seekers, despite 84 per cent, according to Amnesty International/Global, going on to be assessed as refugees. Perhaps he's also aware that Border Security rates its pants off.
It's ironic that while Bill Clinton was the darling of left-leaning Hollywood, its plotlines have caught up with the machismo of George Bush. The election of his Administration coincided neatly with the revival of Superman and Spiderman and their cousin once removed, Jack Bauer.
The latest revival is the 1980s military hero, Rambo, who is being disinterred for a fourth assault on cinemas next year.
Former US president Ronald Reagan was fond of invoking Rambo as a role model; Bush and Howard might secretly dream of a real-life Bauer and a world free of the pesky need for due process. As we dig further into a Vietnam-style civil war, such dangerously reductive flights of fancy continue to infiltrate the mainstream.
http://www.theage.com.au/news/opinion/is-tv-torture-making-the-unspeakable-acceptable/2007/03/01/1172338792224.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap1