Yesterday's world

There's an interesting article in the current New Yorker, Whatever it Takes, about the FOX show '24.'

I've only watched one episode, the season premiere last year, but instantly disliked it--the show struck me as quintessentially Hollywood it that it tried hard to be 'real', but was actually dumb at its core because very few people in Lala land have a sense of things like politics and international relations. It simply felt unconvincing and frenetic to me, and had a clear political agenda to boot.

Based on that viewing, as I wrote about a year ago, and what I've read about the show, I think the show's actually trying to push Americans toward the Bush administration's worldview, namely that unless we both torture people who are the 'obvious' bad guys and exercise unceasing vigilance against those who say they're friends, the terrorists will win and America will lie in ruins. I'd respond it's more likely we'll pull the country down by acting un-American.

Add to this paranoid worldview the artificial device of a ticking clock, and you've made Americans comfortable with a world where driven by adrenaline and fear they're screaming at the 'good guys' to hit the bad guys harder and faster. It's pretty scary that the article finds some viewers of 24, who happen to be servicemembers serving in Iraq, not only buy into 24's worldview but have apparently tried to replicate things they've seen on the show in their day-to-day military actions.

Reading the New Yorker piece you're not surprised to learn that Joel Surnow, the co-creator and executive producer of 24, is a friend of the odious Rush Limbaugh, and a pretty vocal arch-conservative who's well aware of the effect his show has on America's pscyhe.

There's also this telling section:

This past November, U.S. Army Brigadier General Patrick Finnegan, the dean of the United States Military Academy at West Point, flew to Southern California to meet with the creative team behind “24.” Finnegan, who was accompanied by three of the most experienced military and F.B.I. interrogators in the country, arrived on the set as the crew was filming. At first, Finnegan—wearing an immaculate Army uniform, his chest covered in ribbons and medals—aroused confusion: he was taken for an actor and was asked by someone what time his “call” was.

In fact, Finnegan and the others had come to voice their concern that the show’s central political premise—that the letter of American law must be sacrificed for the country’s security—was having a toxic effect. In their view, the show promoted unethical and illegal behavior and had adversely affected the training and performance of real American soldiers. “I’d like them to stop,” Finnegan said of the show’s producers. “They should do a show where torture backfires.”

The meeting, which lasted a couple of hours, had been arranged by David Danzig, the Human Rights First official. Several top producers of “24” were present, but Surnow was conspicuously absent. Surnow explained to me, “I just can’t sit in a room that long. I’m too A.D.D.—I can’t sit still.” He told the group that the meeting conflicted with a planned conference call with Roger Ailes, the chairman of the Fox News Channel. (Another participant in the conference call attended the meeting.) Ailes wanted to discuss a project that Surnow has been planning for months: the début, on February 18th, of “The Half Hour News Hour,” a conservative satirical treatment of the week’s news; Surnow sees the show as offering a counterpoint to the liberal slant of “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.”

Ailes, of course, is the former GOP operative who in his day was, along with Lee Atwater, the media brains behind the rise of Reagan and the modern right wing.

The section on Kiefer Sutherland is also interesting:

Afterward, Danzig and Finnegan had an on-set exchange with Kiefer Sutherland, who is reportedly paid ten million dollars a year to play Jack Bauer. Sutherland, the grandson of Tommy Douglas, a former socialist leader in Canada, has described his own political views as anti-torture, and “leaning toward the left.” According to Danzig, Sutherland was “really upset, really intense” and stressed that he tries to tell people that the show “is just entertainment.”

Bono has shown how much impact a celebrity can have in the real world; I wonder if at some point Sutherland will be as vocal personally as his show is on the subject of torture.

Aside from the show's metamessage about torture, there's also, of course, the whole White Male American thing, where Jack Bauer is not only the fulcrum around which everything hangs but also presented as a loner whose America's only hope. Especially ironic given how we've all seen where cowboy politics gets you in today's world.

That aspect is pretty obvious on the screen; it becomes even more so when you look at Surnow himself.

Brian Grazer, an executive producer of “24,” who has primarily produced films, said that “TV guys either get broken by the system, or they get so tough that they have no warmth at all.” Surnow, he said, is “a devoted family man” and “a really close friend.” But when Grazer first met Surnow, he recalled, “I nearly walked out. He was really glib and insulting. I was shocked. He’s a tough guy. He’s a meat-eating alpha male. He’s a monster!” He observed, “Maybe Jack Bauer has some parts of him.”

During three decades as a journeyman screenwriter, Surnow grew increasingly conservative. He “hated welfare,” which he saw as government handouts. Liberal courts also angered him. He loved Ronald Reagan’s “strength” and disdained Jimmy Carter’s “belief that people would be nice to us just because we were humane. That never works.” He said of Reagan, “I can hardly think of him without breaking into tears. I just felt Ronald Reagan was the father that this country needed. . . . He made me feel good that I was in his family.”

Surnow said that he found the Clinton years obnoxious. “Hollywood under Clinton—it was like he was their guy,” he said. “He was the yuppie, baby-boomer narcissist that all of Hollywood related to.” During those years, Surnow recalled, he had countless arguments with liberal colleagues, some of whom stopped speaking to him. “My feeling is that the liberals’ ideas are wrong,” he said. “But they think I’m evil.” Last year, he contributed two thousand dollars to the losing campaign of Pennsylvania’s hard-line Republican senator Rick Santorum, because he “liked his position on immigration.” His favorite bumper sticker, he said, is “Except for Ending Slavery, Fascism, Nazism & Communism, War Has Never Solved Anything.”

Although he is a supporter of President Bush—he told me that “America is in its glory days”—Surnow is critical of the way the war in Iraq has been conducted. An “isolationist” with “no faith in nation-building,” he thinks that “we could have been out of this thing three years ago.” After deposing Saddam Hussein, he argued, America should have “just handed it to the Baathists and . . . put in some other monster who’s going to keep these people in line but who’s not going to be aggressive to us.” In his view, America “is sort of the parent of the world, so we have to be stern but fair to people who are rebellious to us. We don’t spoil them. That’s not to say you abuse them, either. But you have to know who the adult in the room is.”

Ah, yes--WMAs are the daddies to the world, everybody needs to know who's boss or else. No wonder the show portrays China the way it does.

Oh well; I'm curious how long 24 maintains its popularity. Already, NBC's diverse ensemble drama Heroes has been beating it head to head. America's changing; the clock's ticking against Jack Bauer and his ilk, so Hollywood's one of their last refuges.

Uncredited photo of Sutherland as Bauer found in various spots online.