BEATING THE CLOCK
The contemporary torture fantasy suggests that torture can retrieve information housed within the body of a terrorist. This information can then stop a terrorist’s plot to kill untold numbers of people. The fantasy justifies torture as the only adequate response to an imminent threat, and it inculcates us with the impression that the body contains truths that one can access directly if one knows the proper means. This torture fantasy grows out of the ideology of biopower. Prior to the emergence of biopower, torture certainly existed, but our contemporary torture fantasy did not. The depiction of this fantasy in media representations reveals the contemporary torture fantasy’s fundamental structure and the source of its widespread appeal.
The television series 24 is the perfect expression of the torture fantasy and the ideology of biopower that subtends it. All of the aspects of the series bespeak an investment in this fantasy. The series clings fervently to the idea that torture is an effective method of interrogation, and its effectiveness stems from the idea that truth resides in the body. While other aspects of the series may be complex and at times ambiguous, the torture scenes themselves are presented in a straightforwardly ideological way. Put simply: torture works on 24, especially when performed by Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland), the federal agent and hero of the series. Jack’s torturing methods procure information and always work to legitimate torture as the only possible response to the problem of national security and the threat that terrorism poses to this security. The believability of the effectiveness of torture, however, relies upon an extensive biopolitical ideological framework in 24 largely structured around a particular conception of time. The series reveals that biopolitics depends on producing a sense of urgency by emphasizing the finite amount of time that remains for us.
Premiering in November of 2001, 24 ran over eight seasons and ended in May 2010. (Due to its popularity, the series returned in 2014 with a twelve-episode season titled 24: Live Another Day. The premise and approach to torture was essentially the same.) Each season represented a single day and was 24 episodes, with each episode representing one hour in that day. The form of the show occasioned a great deal of commentary when it first came out. Reviewers and producers alike lauded the show as visionary for its form. Television critic Howard Rosenberg wrote, “What lifts 24 far above the ordinary … is that each episode covers an hour in the lives of its characters, 24 weeks of the series equaling a 24-hour period in the plot.”1 As Rosenberg’s comment indicates, the concept of tying the plot to a literal interpretation of time, to a ticking clock, challenged the conventions of television. What this meant for critics was that the show was uniquely contributing to the art of television. The idea was that 24 captured something about the potential of the televisual form that hadn’t previously been explored in an extended way in a narrative series.2
This form expressed something culturally important about contemporary society. What was innovative about the form, in fact, was that it expressed biopolitical ideology. This ideology is oriented around the body, but the body, in order to have value within the ideology, must be in danger. The chronological form of 24—the omnipresence of the ticking clock, the action taking place in real time—creates this sense of constant danger. Time is always on the verge of running out, and editing cannot elongate time, as it can in a television series with a more traditional temporal structure.
The initial support for the series centered largely on the innovativeness of the formal choice of real time and the constant presence of the ticking clock. David Nevins, executive vice president of programming at Fox said of the show, “Truthfully, I hear hundreds of pitches a year, and not often do I actually buy it in the room. But these guys came in and gave us something that moves the form of television forward. It was a bold idea.… They said the entire season of television is going to take place over one day. Before they got up off the sofa, I said, ‘We’ll buy it.’”3 This new idea about episodes tied to real time was not, in fact, just a formal one. It was an idea that emerged from the way in which time itself has become imbued with biopolitical purpose.
The form promised a clear structure, one that followed events as they unfolded in real time, but one that also allowed for a complex plot made up of a number of different subplots. As journalist Christian Smith commented, “While the actual premise of the show is a fairly typical thriller story, it’s the concept that’s the kicker.… Although the series does bear a striking similarity to the 1995 Johnny Depp film Nick of Time, which used a similar assassination/real-time concept, the idea is wholly original to network television. The real-time device, along with the gimmicky split-screen editing … all allow the audience to follow multiple overarching subplots simultaneously.”4 Smith suggests that there is something about the real-time nature of the structure of the plot that allows for audiences to follow a more complex web of subplots. 24, however, was not the first television show to introduce complex narrative strands. And many television shows’ narratives are in fact far more complex than the narrative of 24.5
What the ticking clock format did was to tie all the subplots in 24 to the clock itself, thereby suggesting a unity in these subplots and in how they should be understood. In other words, the subplots were all related to the progress of time, which was itself tied to the overarching ticking bomb plot. The ticking bomb plot varied from season to season, but always focused in some way on a crisis that threatened American citizens (sometimes thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands) and demanded urgent work on the part of the CTU (Central Terrorist Unit) agents. Although many television shows in recent years relied on a complex web of narrative strands (some of which defined characters and environments more than they contributed to a linear plot), the narrative strands in 24 were all tied carefully to the ticking clock and thus tied carefully to a ticking bomb scenario that drove the primary narrative arc of the season.
The ticking bomb scenario is the standard justification used by all apologists for torture. It begins with the premise that a terrorist has planted a bomb in a hidden location set to explode at a specific time. Authorities capture the terrorist and want to discover the whereabouts of the bomb, but they know that they have only a limited time to obtain the information. Due to these time constraints and the many people whose lives are at risk, the authorities must resort to torture to learn about the bomb.6 Though actual instances of the ticking bomb scenario almost never arise, they occur with incredible frequency on 24. The ticking bomb scenario, made omnipresent by the visible ticking clock, provides the narrative foundation for the series.
Ultimately, the narrative of 24 was less complex and more tied to linearity than it appeared. This suggests that the ticking clock and the use of the split screen signified complexity while in fact providing a quite narrow narrative and linear focus. This is a perfect metaphor for biopower itself. Presenting itself as a complex unavoidable contemporary power structure, it is in fact a relatively simple signifying system that buckles under the realities of the desiring subject. Journalists and viewers alike were thrilled by the new visual challenge of 24 as well as by the high concept nature of its form. By the time the series ended, however, the series became more known for its involvement in the debate on torture than for its original form. All the initial acclaim for the show’s formal innovation completely transformed into criticism (or, to a lesser extent, praise) concerning the show’s depiction of torture. But these are just two sides of the same coin: the twenty-four-hour clock form and the involvement of 24 in the torture debates are integrally tied to one another. When critics were praising the originality of the depiction of time on 24, they were unknowingly praising the vehicle for the justification of torture. Torture in some real sense follows directly from the chronological countdown occurring at the level of form.
The form of 24 is geared toward a sense of immediacy. This sense of immediacy begins with the twenty-four-hour clock. The clock is introduced in every episode along with the name of the series (24 depicted in numbers signifying a digital clock), the name of the episode (which is the hour it represents), and Jack’s voiceover explaining that events occur in real time. The clock stands as an indication of the amount of time left in the hour and in the episode itself, and it even accounts for commercial breaks, which suggests that the clock signifies a type of realism. 24 enacts its justification for torture by relying on the ticking bomb scenario, and the torture scenes themselves are securely anchored by it. In fact, they make sense only through the importance of the ticking clock. Analyzing how this works on a detailed formal level reveals further the ideological relationship between biopolitics and the clock (or the acceptance of torture and the presence of the clock).
One exemplary scene in season 2, episode 1 (“Day 2: 8:00 am–9:00 am”), begins with a cityscape and a subtitle that tells us the events are taking place in Seoul, Korea. The next few cuts reveal an alley and an out-of-the-way building in shadows. A subsequent cut shows blue latex gloves on dials with screaming in the background, a shot of the victim’s feet in plastic bags with yellow liquid in them, and then a shot of the whole victim’s body, revealing he is hooked up to some large, antiquated machines. The machine in this scene is administering various drugs and electricity, and there is some smaller instrument holding the victim’s eyes open. With these first few shots, we are quickly brought into a torture chamber. While not all torture scenes in 24 occur directly after the initial clock, they all are clearly linked to the urgency of the clock through the digital clock displayed at regular intervals that makes the viewer aware of how much time has passed as well as what is at stake in that time passing (i.e., the need to stop an imminent disaster).
Watching the clock constantly reminds us that CTU is literally working against the clock to save a city or the nation. Each time the clock appears, it reinforces the spectator’s sense that the subplots must be resolved before the hour is up and that the larger plot must be resolved before the season ends. This is a fundamental part of what defines the ticking clock of 24: that the plot line for the season must be resolved by the end of the season. What unifies these disparate plot lines is time and urgency. Specifically, this is time as such; in other words, the ticking bomb scenario defines time itself. The emphasis on time running out indicates the role of the ideology of biopower in the structure of 24.
This is not necessarily the case with other television shows whose audiences also enjoy the complexities of their narratives. Oftentimes, larger plot lines can continue over several seasons, and this adds to the depth of their narratives. For example, in the series Alias (2001–2006), the mystery about strange artifacts by an ancient scientist named Rimbaldi that the CIA has been looking for and their connection to the main character and CIA agent Sydney Bristow is only revealed at the end of the whole series. Similarly, the mystery in Battlestar Gallactica (2004–2009) about the fate of Earth and its relationship to the actions of Star-buck, one of the ship’s officers, only comes to a climax toward the end of the series. These long-term narrative structures allow for a great deal of complexity that is not always tied to the necessity of wrapping up the larger plot in one season. Thus they often expound upon other aspects of the series, such as character development, description of place, or philosophical crisis or questions.
And indeed not all ideologies are so heavily defined by their investment in time. The American dream, for example, relies on an idea of the future but not necessarily on the urgency of time. One must work hard, according to this ideology, but one need not work with the utmost urgency. Many other ideologies tend to minimize the importance of time in order to magnify a sense of timelessness to cultural behavior. Religious ideology, for example, relies on the idea of eternity, on the possibility of an escape from the ravages of time. And similarly the ideology of the coherent identity of the family (including its investment in ethnic and national identity) relies on an enduring progression of the family line in time. In many ways, biopower’s reliance on the urgency of time and the ending of time ruptures the idea of time within many powerful ideological structures. Biopolitical ideology’s relation to time is central to its functioning, and it is something genuinely new.
Within this biopolitical ideology, the torture fantasy relies heavily on the urgency of the ticking clock. This is why the torture fantasy requires the background of biopolitical ideology and deployment of temporal urgency. The torture fantasy links the clock to the bomb and imagines time running out and ending everything with a horrifying explosion. It is this basic idea that then becomes the reason that torture is acceptable. In other words, the constructed urgency of the clock and its link to the ticking bomb provides the reason that a suspension of political rights is acceptable, a suspension that allows for the use of and even celebration of torture.
A closer investigation into the clock as a philosophical idea can shed some light onto how this ideological collusion between torture and time might have come about. The speculation on time is certainly broad and varied, but Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time presents perhaps the most wide-ranging and substantive consideration of the impact of the clock on our lives. Of course, Heidegger wasn’t a torturer (despite his association with Nazism), but his concept of temporality actually relates to that articulated in 24. Unbeknownst to himself, Heidegger moves in the direction of a biopolitical idea of time when he criticizes our inability to take up and engage with our own finitude, a fact of our everyday life for which the clock functions as a symptom. Heidegger describes the effect of the clock in this way: “In the way time is ordinarily understood, however, the basic phenomenon of time is seen in the ‘now,’ and indeed in that pure ‘now’ which has been shorn in its full structure—that which they call the ‘Present.’”7 For Heidegger, the clock denudes the complexity of our interpretation of time by leveling off the profundity of the now.
With the acceptance of the clock and its relationship to time, the now becomes the right now, and this suggests an infinite extension of nows, an infinite that stretches both into the past and the future. Heidegger himself has two specific quarrels with the conception of time implied by the clock (rather than with the clock as such). He feels it stifles our understanding of the now, which is in fact rooted in a structure far more complex than the clock’s emphasis on a succession of “right nows.” On the other hand, however, Heidegger also finds fault with our understanding of time as infinite, which comes from the never-ending succession of “nows,” a succession that seems implicit in the very idea of a clock. He argues that this blinds us to an authentic relationship toward death, to an adequate appreciation of our inescapable finitude. An authentic being-toward-death, in contrast, would foster a much greater sense of urgency and an acute awareness of the finite. The clock is a barrier to our authenticity insofar as it suggests that we always have more time, a time that is infinite rather than constituted through our own proper finitude.
Since Heidegger wrote Being and Time, however, there have been several important sociocultural shifts in relation to the clock. Most important, there has been a philosophical shift from seeing the clock as infinitely progressing forward to seeing the clock as always counting down to something (usually destructive). Some of the broad cultural changes that have affected this idea are new technological innovations—such as the nuclear bomb and the computer—that emphasize the countdown instead of infinite progression. For example, with the advent of the atom bomb and the understanding that superpowers such as the United States and the Soviet Union could destroy the earth as we know it, the countdown to total destruction became not just present in the cultural imagination, but at times—such as the nuclear scares in the 1950s or the 1980s—a national obsession in the United States.8
This ideological shift in thinking about time can also be seen in cultural panic over end-of-the-world scenarios that were touted as having potentially real-world material consequences, such as the Y2K scare. This scare centered around the way the computer accounted for time and its potential inability to deal with a new millennium. The shift is also visible in the more mythological end-of-the-world scenario centered on the end of the Mayan calendar in December 2012.9 These last two scenarios privilege the way the clock or the calendar can no longer accommodate time itself. And all these obsessions with counting down to our destruction are linked to a visual countdown of the clock. The clock itself becomes a signifier of the coming destruction. Certainly it is also worth noting the difference between the analogue and the digital clock, since it is the digital clock that is most often the signifier of the countdown. I would argue that this shift to thinking of the digital clock as a countdown to destruction also shifts the meaning of the right now. The right now no longer signifies an infinite set of nows but rather signifies the potential end of all nows.
In this way, today, in contrast to Heidegger’s conception of finitude and the clock, a sense of finitude is connected to the clock and the right now. Heidegger believes that the clock distracts us from our finitude. The clock creates a sense that there is always more time, which is why it is not conducive to thinking finitude. But with the advent of the digital clock and the countdown, the clock ceases to have a deleterious effect on our relation to finitude. We become focused on the end (or on death). This is, of course, what Heidegger had hoped for in his call for the privileging of finitude as the only ethical position, even if it hasn’t come in the precise form that Heidegger anticipated.10
Importantly, for Heidegger, the clock is a public apparatus. He explains, “Thus when time is measured, it is made public in such a way that it is encountered on each occasion and at any time for everyone as ‘now and now and now.’”11 Heidegger refers to this public as the “they,” the anonymous force of social pressure and conformity. The clock is an essential part of the presence of the “they” and its creation of an inauthentic world. In other words, one of the ways that the “they” has a public presence is through the clock itself and the way we order our lives in relation to the clock. The clock participates in creating the social order more than by just acting as a tool to gage the revolutions of the earth. Combining the “they” and the clock, Heidegger proffers a way to understand ideology, though he never uses this terminology (and even specifically criticizes it on the final page of Being and Time). But we can consider Heidegger’s insights about the clock and its relation to the “they” as a way to understand the powerful ideological nature of the clock, especially as it is now tied to the ticking bomb scenario.
In light of other contemporary imagined and real scenarios of destruction that preceded September 11, 2001, the terrorists acts of September 11 ushered in a revitalized frenzy of the right now as the end of all nows. Following the attacks on September 11t, the constant emphasis, for example, on the national alert level (yellow, orange, red) and the immediate passage of various draconian laws (such as the Patriot Act) suggest that it was the now that was essential for securing our survival. This emphasis on the now trumped political rights and instead privileged the survival of our bodies. The torture fantasy encourages us to be completely immersed in the urgency of the “right now” while believing that the more we feel urgent, the more probable it is that we can save the future, or have a future at all. The urgency of the now, as embodied in the ticking clock, creates the sense that every moment is a state of emergency in which torturing a suspect becomes acceptable in order to avoid total annihilation. It is this clock as attached to the ticking time bomb that shaped the public discourse after September 11, 2001, and that the show 24 so adroitly hooked into.
In each season, and in many of the individual episodes, a time is given by which CTU must stop the terrorists and the clock constantly reminds the viewer that this doomsday time is approaching. Time as such feels in danger on 24. If the terrorists aren’t stopped, life as we know it will end. While most narratives implicitly create a sense of time (whether whole or broken), 24 relies on a particular concept of time to explicitly shape the narrative structure.12 The concept it relies on is tied specifically to the clock and its expression of the “they,” of ideology. The specific use of the clock in 24 is meant to eradicate all potential temporal or ideological diversity in an effort to define the terms of torture and to establish it as an unquestionable tactic.13
There are other formal aspects to the show that work to heighten this sense of urgency. The split screen, for example, suggests urgency since we have more views of the narrative development all at once. We see not only the same action from different angles or shots but also different scenes happening at the same time in different spaces that would normally be presented to us through a crosscut. In part, the viewing experience is also based on the tension between these frames (and the tension between the split-screen and the non-split-screen scenes) as much as it is defined by the sense of mastery over the scene through multiple views. The tension between the frames heightens the urgency of the clock, which is holding them all together. This editing technique adds to the flow of the plot and to the march of time that is marked by the minute-to-minute clock, as the viewer is made aware of the multiple actors racing against the clock—competing scenarios involving either the heroes or the villains.14
The ticking clock produces the sense of urgency that forces the spectator to approve of Jack’s use of torture, a use that has other narrative justifications (such as its effectiveness) as well. Almost any episode in which Jack tortures depicts the effectiveness and legitimacy of torture. A scene from the fourth season will stand in for the many successful torture scenes presented throughout the series. The plot of season 4, episode 1 (“Day 4: 7:00 am–8:00 am”) starts by revealing Jack to be working as security and liaison for the U.S. Secretary of Defense James Heller (William Devane). Up to this point in the series, Jack’s position was that of an agent for the CTU. But in this season, CTU director Erin Driscoll (Alberta Watson) has fired him. At the start of this episode, Jack has to return to CTU headquarters to discuss the secretary’s stance on their budget proposal for the following year, which places him in CTU right at the time when a known terrorist is apprehended and brought into the building.
While pursuing him, the agent in charge sends the feed of his camera back to the Driscoll’s office, which is where Jack is meeting with her. Though he is only an observer, Jack deftly suggests the right move that allows them to bring the terrorist in, and this signals Jack’s superior skills as an agent. These are not, however, the skills that define Jack, since it is torture that constitutes his signature method. While at CTU, Jack finds out that Internet chatter suggests that there will be a terrorist attack at 8:00 (within the hour). The show then cuts to the field agent questioning the suspect, who has been brought in to CTU. The agent threatens the suspect with three years “in the hole” if he doesn’t respond to the questioning, but the suspect looks completely unconcerned. The show clearly signals that mere threats have no effectiveness with hardened terrorists, and the experienced viewer of the show will laugh at this threat along with the terrorist. But then the agent leaves the room to confer with Driscoll.
After incapacitating the guard at the door, Jack bursts into the interrogation room, jams the lock, and proceeds to interrogate the suspect by torturing him. He knocks over the table to signal his capacity for violence and screams at the suspect, “I am not messing with you, you are going to tell me. WHAT IS HAPPENING AT 8:00?” Disregarding the protestations of Driscoll (who is yelling for him to holster his gun and leave the room), Jack takes out his gun and shoots the suspect in the knee. Jack screams again as he points his gun at the suspects other knee: “WHAT IS YOUR OBJECTIVE?” The man convulses in pain and is clearly frightened for his life.
As a result of his pain and fear, the suspect gives up the information. Jack learns that the secretary of defense (whom Jack works for) is the target at 8:00. Faster than imaginable, Jack procures the necessary and correct information out of this suspect, who was so clearly unmovable and unmotivated before when interrogated with nonviolent methods. Jack tortures him by causing extreme pain and threatens him with more, and the result is that Jack obtains positive results. In this particular episode, however, CTU receives the information too late, and the attack on the secretary occurs. But this failure only further justifies Jack’s methods. If he had been on the job earlier, they surely would have obtained the information with enough time to save the secretary of defense. The narrative of this episode leads up to this torture scene as the climax and emphasizes the importance of torture as a method to quickly and effectively retrieve the correct information. In this way, the episode validates the method and validates Jack himself.
Jack’s torture scenes throughout the series are varied: he performs many different kinds of torture, though most of it involves physical rather than emotional harm. From threatening the person’s life with a knife at her or his throat to hooking someone up to a high-tech delivery system of lethal drugs to shocking her or him with the wires torn from the bottom of a lamp, Jack physically beats and scares his victims into giving him information. Generally, as in the aforementioned scene, Jack’s torture is extremely efficient: it never takes very long, and it always produces information. The scenes occur in many different spaces and are shot in a variety of ways. The torture scene just discussed is shot in a stylistic way: when Jack steps into the interrogation room, the pace of the editing picks up, and when he shoots the suspect’s knee, we see two low angle views of these actions. The background of the shot is black and filled with smoke from the gunshot. The show then cuts to a split screen in which Jack is screaming at the man for information as he threatens his other knee in one frame, and Driscoll is screaming at Jack to stop in the other. In this particular case, the dramatic stylistic choices showing the torture scene further emphasize Jack’s status as hero. The heavily stylized scene heightens the tension and highlights the act of torture itself. Not all of Jack’s torture scenes are shot with this much stylistic flare, but all of them consistently prove that torture works.
What is revelatory in 24 is that the belief in the effectiveness of torture does not stand on its own but can function because it is situated within a web of narrative and formal structures. Drawing out the central tenets of this web reveals the contours of how we have come to understand torture as effective and why the idea of effective torture, despite the empirical tenuousness of this notion, has resonated so powerfully in contemporary culture. Ultimately, what emerges is a torture fantasy that brings together a certain understanding of time as constantly working against us, combined with a belief in the utmost importance of bare life. Like the belief in the effectiveness of torture itself, both these beliefs are steeped in biopower, and the political implications of biopower become fully evident through a certain understanding of time on which the torture fantasy depends.
THE AIM OF TORTURE
Theorists analyzing biopolitics rarely consider the role of the clock and the urgency that it portends. And yet, a sense of urgency, as 24 shows, is inextricable from the ideology of biopower. In order to be effective, biopower must convince us that we are running out of time and that our survival depends on our obedience to its dictates. Giorgio Agamben comes closest to exploring time when he investigates the sovereign’s use of the state of exception. When we think of a state of exception, we think of stopping a normal routine (a set relation between behavior and the clock) and entering a different set of expectations or ways of organizing our time. According to Agamben, the state of exception has become our normal state of affairs. As Agamben puts it, “in our age, the state of exception comes more and more to the foreground as the fundamental political structure and ultimately begins to become the rule.”15 This state of affairs works to secure biopower because it justifies all security measures taken to preserve life. But what Agamben doesn’t see is the role that the urgency of the clock plays in the state of exception. Rather than locating us outside time, the state of exception heightens our temporality and places us under the constraints of the ticking bomb scenario. 24 leads us to think about how our concept of time participates in this state of exception or enacts a different kind of exception that has a similar biopolitical effect to the state of exception as Agamben conceives it.
Where this signifier of televisual real time is fully employed in 24 is in developing the stage upon which torture is the logical response to plot conflict.16 On this stage, the narrative suspension of disbelief is also located in part in the ticking of the clock. It became apparent quite quickly that it seemed ludicrous that all the narrative events presented in one season of 24 could actually happen in one day. This absurdity was most clearly manifested in the experiences of Jack himself. For example, during one day he dies, is revived, and then performs heroic feats to thwart the would-be terrorists. Television critics consulted doctors to confirm the utter impossibility of this incredible recovery time. But no doctor was necessary to give the lie to Jack’s ability to travel at lightning speed. He is able to traverse Los Angeles in record time with no concern for potential traffic jams. Inhabitants of the city had to suspend their disbelief at this point in order to watch the series. But locating the suspension of disbelief at the very spot where the series prompts the viewer to read authentic real time only heightens the power of the torture fantasy.
The suspension of disbelief functions as a narrative disavowal. The viewer sees the incongruities or contradictions in the plot or a formal choice yet chooses not to believe them or to ignore them. Locating the narrative disavowal at the heart of the ticking bomb scenario that is supposed to give concrete justification for torture is the quintessential ideological gesture. It both provides a kind of marker for one point at which the ideology could unravel and also solidifies it at this flawed junction. Ironically, it also displaces where the real disavowal in torture is happening: at the heart of the act of torture itself. In other words, if as spectators we are focused on our narrative suspension of disbelief functioning so obviously at the heart of the twenty-four-hour clock, then this distracts us from thinking about why torture seems like such an easy answer to complex problems of national security.
The turn to torture itself involves an act of disavowal. Torture remains an extreme and violent response to the inaccessible nature of the subject itself. Torture ritualizes violence in an attempt to destroy something that the torturer can’t understand or see readily when just speaking to the other. But this performance, despite its pretensions, always already knows that it can never reach what it seeks—and this is the disavowal at the heart of torture. It purposely goes after what it cannot reach. It is in the act of pursuing the impossible that the torturer disavows this knowledge and proceeds to enact a violent abuse directed at the other who has so confounded her or him. In each act of torture, there is a repeated performance of this disavowal and an implicit confession of our inability to embrace this terrifying quality of the impossible to articulate the nature of the subject and its desire.
Torturers can no more reach any inner truth about the desire of the other through torture than they can understand their own desire. Certainly the torturer may be able to maim—physically or emotionally—the victim in a permanent way, but she or he can never erase that aspect of the victim’s subjectivity that disturbs the torturer (or the agent or nation that commands the torture). That is, the torturer can’t access or extract the subject’s unconscious. It is forever elusive to the torturer. But on 24 there is nothing ultimately elusive, just as there is no unconscious.
24 supports the ideology of biopower by presenting torture as effective and never presenting sexual humiliation as a tactic. This is how it strips the subject out of the act of torture. In 24, unlike at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, there is little to no sexualized torture, and the villains, even when actually Arab, are not depicted as desiring subjects. In this way, the series perpetuates the disavowal at the heart of the torture fantasy and assists in solving the problem of the other’s desire. What is revealing about the depiction of Arab characters on 24 is that they are decidedly not sexual. The show does depict stereotypical Arab villains at times, but these villains are always asexual villains.
24 depicts its Arab characters as either one-sided villains—who are marked only by their desire to destroy America—or innocent Arab characters working to save American lives. They are either on the side of good or evil, and they work diligently on whichever side they lie. This fantasy of the Arab or Arab American is a completely different portrayal then the sexual fantasies suggested by the Abu Ghraib photographs, but it is consistent with other ways that 24 betrays an investment in a biopolitical ideology. The Arab and Arab American characters on 24 are only defined by their concern for survival or destruction.17 They are presented as defined purely by their bodies, but these bodies aren’t sexual or desiring bodies because this would imply the dimension of subjectivity, which the series wants to avoid at all costs in order to sustain the torture fantasy.
The fact that the Arabs and all villains on 24 are nothing but bodies is what allows Jack Bauer to torture them effectively. The key to the perpetuation of the torture fantasy lies in the absence of desiring subjects on the series. Even Jack himself, despite his centrality in every episode, does not have the status of a desiring subject. He is a body focused on other bodies, a body completely invested in the urgency of the task confronting him. His belief in the ticking bomb scenario and the heinous acts that it authorizes defines his heroism. This heroism has nothing to do with Jack as a desiring subject. He is a calculating body who constantly engaged in utilitarian arithmetic in order to know how to act: kill one in order to save ten, regardless of who the one is or who the ten are. Jack is heroic because he successfully uses violence and torture to procure information that solves a crisis just before it will occur. As Stephen Prince points out, “In the world of 24, his willingness to torture establishes his credentials as a hero.”18 Without Jack’s willingness to torture, we would not believe in him as the heroic figure who will do whatever must be done in order to avert the crisis and save innocents.
Though the series shows that torture validates Jack’s status as a hero, it also reveals the personal cost that torturing brings with it. At times it even costs him his job. He is often shown at the beginning of a season as not working at CTU anymore for various reasons, all of them stemming from his reliance on torture that doesn’t quite fit with the sanctioned methods of CTU. Within the first or second episodes of the season, however, he is reinstated because he and his methods are needed for the emerging catastrophe.19 But, more important, torture costs him his wife, who dies at the end of the first season, and it constantly puts his daughter in danger (while also leading to an estrangement from her). It costs him any romantic life he tries to pursue in the seasons after his wife dies.
Jack’s recourse to torture leaves him a psychically damaged figure. Though enemies cause him physical harm, it is clear that all the years of torturing have taken a toll on him and left him unable to live a normal life. When he is on the verge of death in the penultimate season, he has no one to comfort him, and when he dreams of living a normal life as a grandfather in the final season, this image of him seems clearly untenable. At the end of his tenure as a torturer, he is unfit for the normal American existence he sought to defend.
24 AS PARADIGM
The similarity between the idea of torture on 24 and the Bush administration’s ideas of torture suggests that they share the same contemporary torture fantasy. Indeed even those involved in the drafting of the Yoo torture memos at times referred to 24. Professor of International Law Philippe Sands documented the involvement of Michael Chertoff in the ideas behind the memos; Chertoff was at the Justice Department at the time and was after that the second secretary of homeland security under Bush, and coauthored the United States Patriot Act. Sands explains, “Chertoff liked a tough approach and was a fan of Jack Bauer, the lead in 24, and his fictitious counter-terrorism unit colleagues, praising them for showing the kind of character and tenacity that would help America defeat terrorism. [ … ] ‘That is what we do every day,’ [Chertoff] said of 24, ‘that is what we do in the government, that’s what we do in private life when we evaluate risks.’”20 The links are clearly ideological, but there was some indication that the Bush administration eventually saw the connection as productive. The ideas presented on 24 became part of the fantasy material that knitted together the symbolic failures of actual torture. It seemed that when torture wasn’t working in real life, even members of the military turned to 24 for inspiration. As journalist Martin Miller documents, “‘Everyone wanted to be a Hollywood interrogator,’ said Tony Lagouranis, a former U.S. Army interrogator at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq who spoke to the creative teams from 24 and Lost. ‘That’s all people did in Iraq was watch DVDs of television shows and movies. What we learned in military schools didn’t apply anymore.’”21 The enhanced interrogation techniques being used at Abu Ghraib were not working, so the interrogators turned to the fictional idea of torture to augment the fantasy itself. Philippe Sands also argues that 24 contributed to making the interrogators at Guantanamo feel as though they were on the front lines of the war and thus justified why they should push their techniques further.
Jack Bauer figured prominently in this fantasy and became something of a shorthand for the torture fantasy itself. Even Justice Scalia referred to Jack Bauer to justify torture. Journalist Peter Lattman reported the now famous response by Justice Scalia. He writes, “‘Jack Bauer saved Los Angeles.… He saved hundreds of thousands of lives,’ Judge Scalia reportedly said. ‘Are you going to convict Jack Bauer? … I don’t think so.’”22 The complexity of the cultural references and assumptions here reveals that torture requires a sidestepping of the law. It doesn’t matter what crimes or atrocities Jack Bauer has committed as long as he has saved lives in the process. But this, unfortunately, is exactly what the military looking to 24 for inspiration took away from the show. The contemporary torture fantasy as a product of biopower demands a state of exception, an idea that there is a benefit to suspending the law.
The references to Jack Bauer populated political discussions as well. Tom Tancredo responded to a question during the 2007 Republican presidential primary debate by saying: “We’re wondering about whether water-boarding would be a—a bad thing to do? I’m looking for Jack Bauer at that time, let me tell you.”23 From the military, to judges, to political candidates, Jack Bauer and 24 became a shorthand reference to the idea that torture works to procure information and that it is a clean and fast method. The only real downside is that the torturer may be an outsider, but he will also be a hero whose outsider status attests to his profound patriotism.
The constant emphasis on the personal damage that torture does would seem to indicate that 24, far from endorsing torture, adopts a very critical attitude toward it. But, despite the exploration of the damage that torture does to Jack, this aspect of the show cements its adherence to the torture fantasy. Jack is simply another incarnation of the Western hero, the hero who resorts to violent means to save civilization from the forces of destruction but who cannot integrate himself or his violence into that civilization. Jack is Shane (Alan Ladd) riding away on horseback at the end of George Stevens’s Shane (1953) or Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) finding the door shut on him in the final scene of John Ford’s The Searchers (1956). Spectators understand this repeated character type and thus can interpret Jack’s loss of family, job, or freedom as only further solidifying him in the role of hero. The ticking bomb structure of the plot places this recognizable hero at the center and relies on him to continually reassert its importance. The viewer identifies with Jack’s own urgency and relation to time. The damage that he experiences testifies to the authentic nature of the urgency that he confronts.
Besides the emphasis on the radical nature of the twenty-four-hour form, the series received attention for its racial diversity. 24 was in fact the first major dramatic television series to depict a black president. David Palmer (Dennis Haysbert) is a commanding, kind, and strong president on the show. In fact, the first season seems to be more about the relationship between David Palmer, as he ascends from presidential candidate to the presidency, and Jack Bauer. It also focuses on their relationships with their families and reveals how their jobs affect their families. But as the series reacts to September 11 and the threat of future acts of terrorism, the plot deemphasizes interracial relations and increasingly suggests that unity between people occurs at the level of national security. The ticking bomb scenario becomes the glue that holds together racial diversity.24
Ultimately, the series seems unsure about its presentation of race and gender since it teeters between conservative and progressive images throughout. The series includes defenseless women who don’t know not to accept help from suspicious strangers and strong women who give their lives in defense of the country. It depicts stereotypical Arabs driven to destroy the United States as well as patriotic Arabs defying their community in order to assist in the struggle against terrorism. This farrago of character types demands interpretation, especially when we contrast it with the ideological consistency of other aspects of the series.
It is the twenty-four-clock, the ticking bomb scenario, the efficacy of torture, and Jack’s heroism (which is the result of his commitment to the torture fantasy) that the show stays utterly faithful to. Arab characters can be terrorists one minute and patriots the next because this is not where the real concern of the series lies. But 24 never wavers in its adherence to the fundamental precepts of biopower. The final torture scene of the entire series, however, goes one step further and takes biopower to its end point. Jack is torturing a suspect who won’t give up the information—names and numbers—that Jack needs. It seems as though, for the very first time, Jack really won’t be able to obtain any information from someone by torturing him. And the man has swallowed the SIM card from his cell phone, so Jack can’t get the information off his phone either.
With no possibility for effectively torturing the enemy, Jack simply kills him. After doing so, Jack hacks open the man’s body and extracts the SIM card from his stomach. Jack then wipes the SIM card off on his pants, inserts it into his own cell phone, and finds the information he’s looking for to defeat the terror plot. This final torture scene literalizes what Jack has been doing all along. It makes visible in a straightforward fashion the attitude that the ideology of biopower has toward the body. And, in some way, this sort of raw literal extraction of information from the body itself makes sense as a frustrated conclusion to the show. It is as if even the creators were saying that they were having trouble coming up with new and interesting methods of torture with which to extract information.
In Jane Mayer’s article on 24, she quotes U.S. Army Brigadier General Patrick Finnegan saying, ““I’d like them to stop,’ he said of the show’s producers. ‘They should do a show where torture backfires.’”25 There is a show in which torture backfires: Alias. On Alias, as I explore in chapter 6, torture rarely works. Instead, agent Sydney Bristow (Jennifer Gardner), the heroine of the series, relies on masquerades or aliases to discover the truth. This truth embedded in fiction rather than in the body testifies to an entirely different political structure, one that works to tear down rather than enhance the torture fantasy presented in 24. On 24, biopolitical ideology suggests that torture is the cause and truth is the effect. Considered in its entirety, however, the inability of 24 to evolve out of its reliance on the clock forces us to look at the rigidity of the ticking bomb scenario.
Originally an innovative form, the twenty-four-hour clock becomes a rigid restriction that the show must work harder and harder to overcome. As it does this, the narrative suspension of disbelief becomes more difficult and more obvious. The end of the series literalizes the information sought in torture by turning it into the information that can be stored on a SIM card. The idea that all the important information a person knows—or has experienced—can be stored on a SIM card represents the ultimate conclusion of the logic of biopower. The truly informative SIM card becomes the expression of the biopolitical body par excellence. Of course, this is also the impossible dream of biopower because what can never be transcribed onto the SIM card remains the desiring subject.