More On 24

James Surowiecki, one of my favorite writers, really ought to be allowed out of his gilded cage at the New Yorker a bit more often, now that he’s perfected the Financial Page (along with the Greatest Unsung Editor of Our Times, Susan Morrison). Well, at least he’s allowed to ask questions through the bars. Yesterday at Slate, he conducted a very interesting Q&A with one of “24”‘s writers, Michael Loceff. Lots of interesting information there, especially as regards the first season–which had been written, actually, before 9/11, but began airing two months later. The whole premise of the show was happily prescient, if that’s the right word.

Slate editors, who are masters of the homepage teaser, marketed the story as potentially a discussion that would address the morality of the show’s depiction of torture, which is a frequent and (frequently abominable) method used by Bauer and his federal colleagues (and, to be sure, by the bad guys too). Sadly, Surowiecki lets the “24” writer entirely off the hook on the question.

Surowiecki:

One of the places where 24 and the real world have intersected most powerfully is on the question of torture. On 24, torture is regularly used in interrogation. Some critics believe that 24 actually plays to our desire to witness torture, that it is, in some sense, “torture porn.” How do you make sense of and justify the role of torture in the show?

Loceff:

“If you look at any given torture scene in the show, you’ll find that there’s something in it that shows someone’s distaste or disgust. And Jack Bauer’s decision to torture people for information in the past has cost him, because it’s shown other people just exactly what he’s capable of. Jack himself is appalled by what he feels he has to do, but he’s also convinced he has to do it. That is a real dramatic conflict.”

It continues:

Slate: One of the familiar critiques of using torture as an interrogation technique is that it doesn’t work. On 24 it tends to be very effective.

Loceff: I don’t know that torture works, and we don’t write it because we think it works. So, I don’t think any of us are trying to make a statement about the efficacy of it one way or the other.

Slate: Back to the realism question: 24 is shot in real time, which creates a very powerful illusion of reality.

Loceff totally misses the point, and redirects the conversation. Jack feels bad about torture? And that’s it?

Jack, friendless and bereft, bounces back and the story moves forward. In every instance now for five years, the dramatic storyline proceeds. Torture pushes the plot forward, it is never a dead-end. Naturally, no one who is innocent is ever tortured. Logically, then, only the guilty are tortured… you see where I’m going with this. (When the bad guys torture the good guys, they get nothing, of course. Either becuase their victims are innocent, or dsisciplinedf federal agents.) If torture is any way a negative element of the show or its themes, then Jack Bauer is merely a martyr for the larger cause of national security. This conveniently ignores the fact that civil rights are, sui generis, a national security issue.

I don’t worry that full-throated Bush apologists would look to 24 as some kind of precedent. But I do worry about the astonishing parallels to the real world, and about Americans becoming innured to these noxious ideas. The Bush administration obviously doesn’t require precedents in any of its activities. It’s this idea that “if you were innocent, you wouldn’t have been arrested” (or it’s equivalent, as enunciated by Jonah Goldberg the other day, “we only use illegal wiretapping on obvious terrorists and their abettors”) that truly frightens me.