In a world of excellent television, it may be neither as shiny nor as mysterious as today’s cutting-edge, DVR-demanding serialized hits (Lost, Battlestar Galactica, Gossip Girl, Man Versus Food). Its season wrap-up wasn’t in the running for “best TV I’ve ever seen” (The Shield, The Wire, Ninja Warrior), but Jack Bauer and 24 still stand astride TV like a colossus — a hoarse, belligerent colossus that clasps men by the lapels and thrusts them floorward, but a colossus nonetheless.
If you missed this season, you missed Jack and what remains of the CTU crew confronting their most daunting enemy yet. No, not a ruthless African dictator with crack commando squats sloshing through the DC sewers — no, not John Voight or Methos from Highlander: The Series. In season seven of 24, Jack Bauer confronted the biggest threat to his existence yet:
President Barack Obama.
Twenty-four is dream-like — the ideas that matter emerge from a surreal, violent and emotionally charged collage. It’s rich with social commentary and thematic material, but we have to be careful analyzing it, because:
- Plot twists come with an absurdity* and velocity that makes them the norm, not the exception.
- It repudiates itself a few times every season by throwing bones to people who would criticize its politics.
Beware incongruous counterexamples and discussing high-level matters of form. They hide what the show is really about.
The Day 7 posse. Let's play Find the Mole!
This year, it was all about Obama. Jack Bauer rarely gets the support he needs from fictionalized government institutions, but this season was the first when he didn’t enjoy the implicit backing of the real-life federal government — and it showed.
For those of us who were on the receiving end of the last administration, it is hard to find much to trouble us about the rise of Obama, even amid considerable public difficulty. But we are not everybody, and no change is without its anxieties.
Look outside Obama Nation (excluding the right-wing hype machine) and there still remain a good number of people who have real anxieties about what it means to live in Obama’s world.
Jack Bauer is one of those people. Call them the Left Behind — not by God, not by Kirk Cameron, but by a vision of their country that collapsed around them because someone else didn’t keep the faith. In today’s America, they feel far from home.
The seventh season of 24 isn’t about this theme — it isn’t about the betrayal of America by its leadership — at least, not to any greater a degree than previous seasons of 24. This isn’t the 24 season about the end of Bush.
No, this is the season about the new world that replaced it — the culture, the shifting values, the socioeconomic trends, and the things we see in ourselves that may have been lingering for some time, but, because of the rise of Obama, can no longer be ignored or easily overpowered, and now pose a new threat, however minor by comparison to previous ones, to a certain way of life.
And while it is easy to dismiss that way of life, it is not correct, at least from the standpoint of understanding America. If that way of life were irrelevant, 24 would not exist — nor would much of pop culture, nor would much of America itself.
By any means necessary
The season started with Jack Bauer testifying as part of a Senate investigation into torture. It doesn’t get much more “ripped from the headlines” than that. There’s something snake-tail-eating about it, too — evidence shows early seasons of 24 encouraged soldiers and others who had not tortured previously to do so. Of course, that’s hardly the show’s fault: It is not a TV show’s responsibility to enforce military discipline and conduct. But at any rate, here was Jack Bauer, answering for his crimes — honestly and unapologetically. It was a strong opening.
And the rest of the season didn’t shy away from it. Doe-eyed FBI “Strong Woman” Renee Walker not-that-gradually turned from shocked, “shocked” at Bauer’s methods in action to practicing them herself, because there appeared to be no other options.
Because of the cool glasses!
Here’s the thing — Jack Bauer tortures people, but Jack Bauer is the hero of the show. Why?
As far back as the Minutemen, Americans have held onto variations on the values of Cincinnatus. When all is well, Americans are a compassionate, peaceful, hardworking citizenry. Generally unconcerned with their neighbors’ affairs, we value liberty and prefer to live and let live. But when duty calls — when extreme necessity or an evil, aggressive act is perpetrated, certain Americans in particular and the country as a whole rise up to do whatever is necessary, then — peaceably and with self-restraint — let things return to normal without seizing undue or corrupting power.
George Washington was the original American Cincinnatus — a humble, soft-spoken farmer who served as a great general in war and stepped aside and gave back power in peacetime.
Most American heroes, real or fictional, are shaped from this mold: Superman, Spider-Man, Captain Marvel, Professor X, Indiana Jones, John Henry, Luke Skywalker, John McClain, Joe DiMaggio, Ted Williams, Sgt. York, Florence Nightingale, Hawkeye, Rand Al’Thor, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the Men in Black, Henry Roengartner, Doughboy, Rocky, Daniel LaRusso, Bill S. Preston, Esq., Lassie, Ted “Theodore” Logan, Sue Ellen Crandall, Captain Kirk, the list goes on and on and on.
These characters benefit from a certain amount of moral luck. Americans have historically taken it on faith that it was certain things good Americans just don’t do: murder innocent people is one of them, torture prisoners is another. Thus, our stories don’t tend to include a lot of instances where this sort of things happen — so a character can be shown to have very little restraint in what he or she is doing, but actually exhibit restraint in certain specific matters just because of the tastes of the audience, which, around when 24 came out, were changing a little bit.
These sorts of heroes are routinely called upon to do whatever is necessary, but the story is usually crafted in such a way that torturing or murdering people is almost never necessary, so they never have to make that decision. When it does happen, it’s usually quickly dismissed by the audience as extraneous, a side story, not defining to the character. But it’s the author and audience that set this up — they help the character avoid the difficult points in his or her own morality.
Does that make them better people, that they rarely confront the option, or that they are not held accountable for it? Does Rocky think a lot about the people whose brains he’s damaged? What would Indiana Jones do if he walked in on Marcus Brody interrogating a Nazi with a hot branding iron?
Well, he’d stop it.
Fair enough, but he never does — and he would probably be rewarded in some way for doing it if he did, because it would be unacceptable for him to hold anything back in his mission unless it led to a net positive.
Stepping forward and doing whatever is necessary during times of need, especially times of war, is a big part of the American cultural ethos. Nowadays, we find ourselves as a real-life country scaling that back. Calling for less of this boldness, focusing instead on temperance, our new cultural mandate calls for more understanding, pulling more punches, healing diplomatic rifts, trying to understand each other, making more sacrifices that don’t come with obvious trade-offs attached, and asking more of each other, asking for more cooperation, doing things less independently and encouraging more people to but into each others’ business, including ours.
This has long been only one side of one balancing point in American life, but right now, the national pendulum is swinging away from aggressive independence and toward cooperation. This is not a world Jack Bauer can live in without there being consequences.
More than in any previous season, Bauer went through this season with a lot of angst, discomfort and criticism driven by this tension. Was what he did necessary? Was the rule of law more important? It is obvious at this point that Jack Bauer gets results — he is not burdened by the real-world argument that torture doesn’t work. Bauer himself names the source of his angst it as the difference between his head and his heart.
But he can’t live with the consequences of obeying the law and holding himself back in extreme times.
And I think this is fair and insightful — a lot of these fictional characters can’t exist under the kind of rules that you and I need to exist, and we are the ones who have created this space for them where they can live — where they can get away with doing what we can’t or won’t do.
In the world of Obama, that space is shrinking. Not going away, but shrinking. This central theme in our culture, which runs from Lexington and Concord through Pearl Harbor and even to Sully Sullenberger in the Hudson River, is weakening. It must weaken because its strength had been abused, but its weakness does come at a cost to our way of life and our national identity.
No matter what the dissenting characters say, the season that begins with Jack Bauer on trial for torture ends with his newest protégé about to practice it. The arc is pretty clear. The weakening of this story is not something everybody intends to go along with.
And there’s a loss there. People tend to use these cultural stories as footballs, touting them when they support their more material causes, and dismissing them when they do not.
As lovers of culture, we at OTI might be well-advised to see the intrinsic value in cultural narrative and recognize that Jack Bauer’s angst at its changing may very well be a respectable representation of an experience more common than we might first assume.
WARNING: The spoilers pick up in this section.
Cross-generational alienation is not new to 24. We’ve all had our fill of the Bauer family by this point. Kim Bauer’s return felt tedious not long after it started, although it was a lot of fun when she caught on fire. The show crossed a lot of this territory before.
This season, though, it followed a specific theme that speaks to the anxieties of the day. There were five (one is arguable) major parent/child plotlines in this season of 24:
- The President’s husband attempts to investigate his son’s murder, while accompanied by a sort of surrogate son — a young Secret Service Agent who placates him and humors him for a time, then tries to murder him.
- The President’s estranged, treacherous daughter is briefly welcomed back into her family’s good graces shortly before she effs it all up again.
- An African military officer is murdered by his commanding general while convalescing in a hospital. His unknowing son continues to fight for his murderer.
- Bill Buchanan, Jack’s surrogate father and a shadow of his former self, asks for Jack’s help in one last mission and ends up getting killed while Jack is watching.
- Jack and his surrogate son/little brother Tony Almeida engage in elaborate quintuple-crosses during which Jack is always a step behind.
The Obama/McCain election traced a lot of fissures through American culture, but perhaps the most pronounced was generational — this was, above all, an election won by younger people (say, under 40), who consolidated disparate interest groups and got a bit of a thrill from overthrowing the status quo.
“Change” is a pretty vague word. It connects much more cleanly and directly to generational sectionalism (which changes because it must — aging is not optional) than it does to the current right/left political continuum (which doesn’t match the parties well right now), or indeed to any particular issue. Many historically conservative areas (think Iowa and North Carolina) went blue not on the force of issues, but on the force of generational politics — the young mobilizing the countryside.
And the Obama/McCain election was a war. People and materiel moved thousands of miles across the country, handled by an elaborate chain of command and directed by logistical HQs that conducted all matter of simulation and analysis, all in an effort to win.
This is a very flattering picture.
Again I ask people like me to step outside themselves and consider what it is like for a parent to go to war with a child, especially if the child is powerful enough to pull off the win. Incredibly disorienting, I’d wager. Disturbing. It at once recalls mortality and the passage of time and undermines one’s one authority, self-worth and self-respect.
Now, if the parents and children were on the same side of the party divide, this probably wasn’t a problem last year, but remember that for much of the country, this was not the case. Many parents went through more than a year of political enmity with their kids.
In the Age of Obama, obedient children who support your ideals and carry through what you believe into the next generation are not going to be there — that’s the anxiety. They will take things you think are sacred, and they will destroy them, because they have grown into adults who can no longer be controlled, and because even if you could stop them, it breaks your heart to do so.
And even if they are not at war with you, the reminder is that they’re different from you. They’re separate. And it’s not coming, it’s already happened. You are going to go die at some points, and your kids will live their own lives without you. That is a more pressing concern for baby boomers at this point — facing retirement and an ascendant generation of offspring looking to remake their parents’ country in their image — than it has been for an American demographic in forty years.
It's like a Greek tragedy with flash-bang grenades.
The big cliffhanger for this season of 24 is whether Jack and Kim will survive an experimental operation to harvest stem cells from Kim and use them to cure Jack’s neurodegenerative condition (brought on by a biological weapon).
Earlier on in the season, Jack asked Kim to let him die, and I believed him.
My money is not on both of them surviving into next season, at least not unscathed. The culture war between parents and children doesn’t proceed without casualties. We no longer live in a country where children become their parents and take their place — if we ever did. Instead we live in a country where each generation revolts against the one before it, and the results are always painful.
That was how this season of 24 played it out, anyway.
Much of the season was concerned with the ultimate failure of privately administered justice and the reassertion of the power of the public sphere. Yes, the government was incompetent and awful, but its enterprising enemies, pursing either free-market goals or personal vendettas, were all destined for failure.
The Big Bad was a secret conspiracy that was nothing if not private — its members seemed as if they may have been drawn from business interests, but, more tellingly, they teleconferenced anonymously, promoted the use of wigs and disguises, and rarely met, let alone actually work together. We still don’t know what any of it was really about (part of what made the finale disappointing, if you ask me).
Even attempts to “go rogue” by Jack Bauer and others seemed destined for failure at every turn (and we might be wandering into high-level matters of form, here). Smaller teams, smaller institutions, personal relationships, none of these mattered — what ended up working was exactly what never seems to work in 24, collaboration between the F.B.I. and other branches of law enforcement. And, in the end, the President felt pretty proud of herself and her devotion to her duty — however undeservedly — which is a very rare circumstance for a 24 president to find herself or himself in.
Yes, the plain old government (not super-sexy counterspies or what have you) was incompetent, but Jack Bauer held his nose for it more than he usually does, despite the fact that it was awkward and uncomfortable, and often came with a cost.
And the most important personal relationship in the season — the relationship between Jack and Renee Walker — never went anywhere except the public sphere. That check swing, more than anything else, made this season feel relatively impersonal, and showed the strain of a Jack Bauer living in a world that no longer alternatively undermines or grudgingly tolerates his efforts, but successfully restricts them.
Yeah, being friends is fine. I love being friends with people. It's totally my thing.
Jack Bauer was strangely at peace for much of this season — accepting punishment for his crimes, accepting the disadvantaged positions he had to work from, accepting countless double-crosses, accepting his own death, accepting the end of his relationship with his daughter, and then accepting a pretty mediocre conclusion to events of the season. Jack has been operating at pretty high levels before, but he seemed to be flagging. He’s been comfortable jumping much lower bars (and then hitting guys with them).
Here, the connection is especially thematic, rather than direct. Bauer’s own role in the nation’s defense and grand strategy (which is “about 90% of it”) stands in as a proxy for American foreign policy and domestic security policy.
In 1945, the rest of the world was speckled with smoldering craters, and the United States was a largely unscathed industrial powerhouse, the only nation on earth to hold the ultimate weapon of destruction. Power and influence are relative, and it’s really hard to top that.
In fact, America has been declining in power and influence from that point for some time; that’s no great failure — it was a very atypical sort of situation, to say the least. No country should expect it will be the only one to actually get to do stuff.
But America has also burned into its cultural fabric the notion that this primacy not only still exists, but is necessary.
And the coming of Obama — on the heels of a debate about American exceptionalism — threatens to unravel that square of the American quilt as well. Threatens to bring about not the decline of the United States, but a new attitude that acknowledges and accept that this decline has already happened, and that we live in a world where a lot of the myths from the postwar and Cold War eras are no longer true, and we have to reconsider our role in the world.
This is a lot scarier to a lot of people than I think some people recognize. Because, as much as 24 is over the top in its alarmism, the world can be a pretty scary, hostile place, and accepting scary, hostile things without being able to do anything about them is a pretty bleak way to spend your time.
Hi, Dad!
Aging Baby Boomers and a fading World War II generation
Kiefer is starting to look a little bit up there in years, and for about half of this season, he was terminally ill, having tremors, looking bloated, being physically debilitated by seizures. At the beginning of next season, he may very well be dead (he’ll probably get better).
The biggest anxiety for the baby boomers in the Obama years isn’t their kids or their country — it’s their own aging. They are becoming the old people, and the process of the Greatest Generation dying out is no longer an imminent prospect, it is, very sadly, in full swing. Lots of the older people in this season (though not quite Tom Brokaw’s book older) ended up dying or being forcibly retired at one point or another, and Jack was having more trouble keeping up than he’s used to.
This may not seem political, but it definitely is. It’s much more important to voters than, say, the national debt as a share of GDP — and we’re talking about cultural context and sea changes here; what it is like to live in this world.
And it’s another thing Obama symbolizes, in his capacity as a figurehead for the inexorable march of time. This is as much a threat to Jack as the Senate hearings or a rebellious Tony Almeida — it’s going to be hard to do all that crawling around, jogging on top of things and random karate chopping if he starts losing his prime physical fitness.
This picture used to be on the right side of the page, but then it switched sides.
Think of what a huge shock it is for a generation that founded itself on the glory of youth to suddenly find itself old? As Gossip Girl ratings confirm, youth-obsession is a huge part of our culture. As that massive bulge in our demographics starts hiking its belt up a little higher, will this change? Or will the coming population surge, today’s teenagers, reassert themselves and take over?
You see, it all ties together.
And finally,
People like Jeanine Garofolo are suddenly influential and important for no reason
Nooooooooooooooo!!
Truly, this is a world turned upside down. I blame Air America.
Guys, it's over. Go get a room.
* Absurd in both in the popular sense of “laughably without reason, because it’s hack writing” and the modern sense of “startlingly, insightfully and realistically without reason, because existence is chaotic.” Twenty-Four walks this line as well as anyone, so you can never really be sure whether it’s a good show or not.