the ramble dump

[Warning: the following contains spoilers great and small for 24 Seasons 1-6, and also Redemption.]

Despite its mangled politics, occasional stink of nationalism, stockpiles of kitschy villains and recent abuse of just about every convention that made it such a gripping show in the first place, 24 remains the best thing on television. When it succeeds, which it often does, it showcases the thriller as an artform: its primary objective is to keep the viewer gripped, immersed in the story from start to finish, through whatever means it has at its disposal. When it's at its best, the creators achieve a kind of fireworks display of cause and effect: cleverly interwoven plot-threads lead to countless perilous situations, small triumphs and unexpected outcomes. We find ourself engaged with characters we can love and hate and, best of all, not really know what to think of with the more complex characters about whom we're constantly trying to make up our minds. Supported by all the cinematic magic of camerawork, split-screen boxes, music and sound effects, reactive character dynamics are played off each other and multiple storylines collide with explosive results--all with the aim of throwing us into the next episode so that we can find out what happens next.

In other words, it makes for stellar entertainment. Pandering to the audience as it does (if it didn't do that to some extent, we'd probably never have reached Season 7), 24 would probably not get many marks from, say, Oscar Wilde for artistic merit, but, pure plot-machine though it may be, true to its genre it delivers the sheer thrill of the story itself. And it is still very much capable of delivering its share of interesting characters whose predicaments, moral or mortal or both, feel worth caring about--even if during its less successful moments the whole show ends up being carried by the presence of Jack Bauer alone.

The show's writers have in the past made public knowledge their lack of planning, which means to a large extent they're making it up as they go along. Sometimes this backfires and we're left, for example, with Kim Bauer stuck in Season 2's infamous cougar trap (amongst other things), the dubious writing off of Season 3's Salazar arc, Marwan's overstayed welcome in Season 4, or, let's be honest, the majority of Season 6--but this making it up as they go along doesn't mean that the show lacks substance or isn't worth investing in. Most of the time, through equal amounts of skill and perhaps happy accident, amongst all the action and technobabble and soap opera that is generated in a standard episode, the writers have an uncanny knack for finding gold.

This ongoing generation of plot can be just as fruitful as it is frustrating; for example, Seasons 3 and 4 both feature heavily contrived storylines with the apparently sole purpose of bringing back old fan favourites: Nina Myers and Sherry Palmer in one; Tony, Michelle and David Palmer in the other. But while, in my view, the second return of Nina and Sherry does nothing but damage their credibility as characters after the decent storylines they had in the previous two seasons (and even in Season 2, Nina's reappearance had the stink of contrivance), the writers' story for reintroducing David Palmer in Season 4 inadvertently gave rise to the majority of Season 5's incredibly compelling story, and one of the most interesting and complex characters in 24 history, in the form of Charles Logan. It's worth noting--to bring Oscar Wilde's points back into play--that it's pretty much never the regurgitation of fan favourites itself that generates the good story, and indeed most missteps in 24 seem to come from being overly attentive to the audience in this way (not dissimilar to the Season 3 stories of Sherry and Nina are the completely arbitrary shock deaths of main characters in Season 6, for example). On the other hand, when the writers are paying more attention to the story than the audience and seem to do a good job of getting a feel for the characters, that's when we get the good stuff. In Logan's case, the high quality of Gregory Itzin's acting is no doubt partly responsible for that character's success, and the same is true of Jean Smart's Martha Logan; but together these characters offer many of the most gripping, believable moments in Season 5 because, whatever the reasons are for why they emerged in the first place, the writers have, so to speak, listened to the needs of the story instead of just going for what the fans want. Their brief reappearance in Season 6 was, tellingly, less convincing.

* * *

What 24 is especially good at is presenting us with those grey areas of morality: putting us in those tense and tortuous dilemmas, forcing the characters to act in various situations and make choices that most people would be horrified to even consider. Where I think it disappoints, however (and somewhat paradoxically), is in sometimes being too black-and-white in then addressing these situations, at times very blatantly appointing itself as the moral arbiter. Jack Bauer himself is the perfect example of this paradox: as the seasons progress, he becomes an increasingly unhinged character, leaving us oggling as he tortures and later massacres his way through all these people to get to where he needs to be; but his conduct is somehow never questionable. One way or another, it's always justified by the writers and there is never any point at which we're meant to view Jack as anything but a morally absolute, heroic character. A 'greater good' logic to the character's motives is not only employed by the writers but endorsed, and however dubious or valid that logic might be, in the end it undermines the talking point of these complex situations by forcing the answer on us. Torture done by Jack Bauer, for example, is meant to be shocking--at least as far as drama is concerned--but it's also meant to be perfectly excusable whenever he does it. The writers are happy to show us all kinds of horrors portrayed by Jack Bauer for the purposes of entertainment--something to 'ooh' and 'aah' at--but they're constantly acting as apologists on his behalf, leading to a very confused sense of morality for the show itself.

In addition to this, the moral arbitration is often done disingenuously: whether it's to Bauer's greater-good imperative or unhinged character that we're supposed to attribute his murder of Marshall Goren in the first episode of Season 2, the act is excused by the fact that Goren is made to be a murderer and a paedophile and, on top of that, smug and unlikeable in every possible way, right down to blowing a dirty little kiss to Michelle. The majority of villains are so single-minded as to be cartoon characters, and we don't feel bad about the hundreds of people Jack mows his way through, because they're rarely given any character or backstory at all. They're evil, mindless goons because they work for the terrorist mastermind, and we don't have to deal with any of the possible reasons why they might have ended up where they are in the first place because they're just henchmen and that's that. This fact is enough to sentence them to death, and we don't even flinch when they go down. In the end, they're really nothing more than terrorist decoration. (Go buy the boxset for the Æon Flux animated series and watch 'Pilot'--it illustrates this point perfectly.)

There are a few occasions where the writers seem unwilling to morally arbitrate because they've offered us a moral complexity that seems too difficult for them to deal with conclusively, and they instead find the easy way out, like introducing a character just to get Stephen Saunders shot dead in Season 3, or having Dina Araz executed off-screen in Season 4, or killing off reformed terrorist Hamri Al-Assad in Season 6--a mistake seeing as he was one of the very few interesting characters in that season. In these cases, the characters are too morally complex to keep on living: they've served their purpose of putting some plotworthy moral complexity on display and then there has to be a way of removing them so the writers are freed from the responsibility of judging definitively in the way they can do so easily with the cartoon goons. Similarly, Mike Novick never has to suffer the true consequences of his role in Lynn Kresge's stairwell plummet because we never find out if she lives or dies. If she did die, Mike's character might be all the more tainted in our view; if she didn't, Mike probably wouldn't be in Seasons 4 and 5. But that particular part of Mike's history is essentially voided: he gets to reappear as if Lynn really is out of the picture, but without ever having to shoulder the responsibility of his complicity in her death.

The show also has the nasty habit of taking political potshots through its characters: Season 4's 'Amnesty Global' representative is a plot complication and therefore a hindrance to the show's righteous, ever-necessary brand of Jack Bauer Justice™; and Redemption's United Nations worker is nothing but a slimy coward. The writers are dutiful enough to balance their portayal of evil cartoon Muslims/Arabs with good cartoon Muslims/Arabs (we get that amazingly cringeworthy dialogue with the Arab shop-owners in Season 4), but one suspects that this has more to do with dodging the fallout of a controversial subject rather than any attempts to seriously address the situation.

As a result of all this, the kind of verbal sparring seen between Karen Hayes and Tom Lennox in Season 6 is just painful--not because it doesn't, in its very simple way, illustrate a potential debate, but because it really has no place in this show. As much as it might be a 'political thriller' and use the War on Terror as its subject matter from Season 2 onwards, the way the writers approach political issues in 24 strikes me as, by and large, irresponsible, and as much as I might agree with Hayes' side of the argument with regards to Lennox's 'detention facilities', I think the show would be better off if it didn't try so awkwardly to align itself at all (especially as, in this particular case, it feels like another very forced, shallow effort to defend itself against claims of political bias). A writer's personal opinion is always going to seep through into his or her work, but the subject matter can be dealt with in a way that's not so heavy-handed. The writers do later redeem themselves a little by balancing Lennox's character, and he ends up being one of the season's better offerings, but it's still clear that we're supposed to get behind Karen Hayes in that debate--an inevitable result of her being portrayed as the more sympathetic character, just like we're always supposed to be on Jack's side. A viewer's sympathies are always manipulated by the way characters are represented, and this makes using them as a platform for two sides of a supposedly objective debate distorting and dishonest.

* * *

When it achieves at least some level of subtlety, 24 demonstrates expertly the virtues of the thriller's structure, the whole plot taking the form of a kind of giant iceberg, or an onion, or whatever metaphor you like for the idea that there's always, always a lot more to the events taking place than we at first suspect--that things are not what they seem, and that any moment the floor can be pulled out from beneath everything we thought we knew. We hitch onto the back of the narrative of multiple characters, all of whom may yet present previously unseen sides to themselves, and follow their stories as in gradual increments all the layers of the plot are peeled back to reveal a new perspective--possibly a whole new onion. And on whatever level we're invested with these characters, be it sympathetically rooting for them or academically detached, we share their multiple experiences as they're left to keep their heads admidst a sense of mounting absurdity, constantly trying to form a picture for ourselves in the plot's continually shifting landscape.

Thus, the recipient is constantly left to mentally parse the way in which further aspects to the plot are revealed. It is the suggestion in these revelations, the implications of these new perspectives on how we view everything else in the story, that make the thriller a valuable tool for exploration of an idea. In this way, the author is repeatedly, deliberately, overturning the audience's assumptions. And this has the potential to extend a long way. Though the author will, of course, always have their own assumptions that will no doubt show up their work, the audience is deliberately prevented from ever absolutely trusting anything that the story says is occurring at any given time, encouraging them to engage in a process of perhaps doubting even those assumptions that were unintentional.

There will obviously always be limits to this: like the author, the viewer cannot be depended on to recognise every single assumption for what it is. But there remains a huge difference between something that presents itself as a moral arbiter and something that merely suggests. 24, along with most other pulpy thrillers, doesn't make the most of its potential for exploration nearly as much as it could: it forsakes the value of ambiguity, the complexity of suggestion, by telling you exactly what you're supposed to think, having the habit of making it very clear where you're supposed to align yourself, with a tendency to stomp the first hints of doubt about an absolute perspective wherever it can and quickly replacing it with another assumption, equally absolute and unquestionable: a character, for example, is usually either good or evil at any given time, else they are treated somehow evasively (see above). At the end of a 24 story, the big picture is supposed to be very clear. At the end of a thriller that's a little less presumptuous, the picture might remain complex and hazy, but in encouraging a more active participation on the part of the recipient, it would be more valuable as an artwork. As a political thriller, 24 has always had the potential to achieve this, and it would not necessarily have lost its grip for it--in fact, its grip would probably have been all the tighter as a result. Unfortunately, ratings have always been the show's primary concern, and ratings are rarely achieved by requiring from the audience anything but the least amount of effort.

I want to add that I'm not against something that offers nothing more than escapism, as I'm sure this has benefits in itself. But the purpose of 24 becomes dubious, if not downright dangerous, because its chosen subject matter necessarily makes it political--it would do even if the creators didn't so explicitly advertise it as 'relevant' in this way--and the writers' treatment of this subject matter, for all the reasons I've mentioned above, prevents the show's politics from being as considered as they should be. There are many times when 24 demonstrates brilliance at the art of immersive storytelling, but despite its conceits of exploring morally and politically difficult situations, more often than not easy answers, morally speaking, are offered in the name of passive entertainment and pushing the story along, turning these in-story dilemmas into something of a cheap thrill.

Labels: 24, aeon flux, i am the ramblemaster, morality

# posted by Chris @ 1:53 AM 0 comments