My friend Dan wrote a couple of times on Jack Bauer and the '24' TV series. To start with my opinion on that series, I don't think it is bad (could be even exciting now and then), although I've seen much better ones and, moreover, it simply drives me crazy to see an episode stop exactly after that one hour and to have to wait for the next one etc. (this is why, if anything, I'll watch all of them when I have them on DVD or so, 3-4 episodes at once :-)).
But this post is not so much about the TV series. This is rather about serious side effects that TV series where heroes such as Bauer use, advocate for, and ultimately justify, torture, as, for instance, a means to extract information, and, crucially, where certain audiences confuse the virtual and real worlds. I've written "serious side effects" above, maybe it should have been "very serious...". See a detailed treament here. And even if you take into consideration the rather alarmist tone that many such human rights NGOs adopt (which is in the end only detrimental for their- hopefully, honest- goals, but many of them do not seem to understand that), the evidence they put forward here (in this case we are talking about the NGO "Human Rights First") looks clear-cut: inter alia, it is about the real danger of adopting Jack Bauer torture tactics among army recruits (and not only new recruits...) and de facto applying them in wars of all kinds (the latest fashion being the 'war against terror', as we all know). See also a Yahoo News synthesis of all that material. After reading this, I also think it would not be redundant if Kiefer Sutherland pointed out to everybody, in a public address, that all the Jack Bauer thing is fiction and that one should realize what the real world is and use 'The Geneva Convention relative to the Treatment of the Prisoners of War' & related applicable international treaties, and not Jack Bauer trivia , as their war-user's-manual (or well, Bible)...
2 comments:
I wouldn't be so hard on Jack Bauer:) I mean the global issue of using violence to do good is a recurrent and very old subject in Hollywood. Okay, maybe torture scenes during interrogations by the good guys in prime time shows have substantially increased since 9/11 and maybe you cand find a nuts or two in the US Army to have Jack Bauer as some kind of an interrogation role model. But it's cheap and extremely irresponsible. I mean Jack Bauer is easy to point at since he's on everybody's screen and he's explicitely fighting the bad muslim guy with his own more or less orthodox methods. (For which I must say that the producers have some guts). It's the same as saying that Marylin Manson is responsible for some shooting in a public square because the shooter was a fan.
Nevertheless it seems like a good opportunity to open a debate over the US army and their interrogation methods. Because if they have nuts who fancy Jack Bauer methods among them it means they have huge recruiting and training problems.
But I am not harsh at all :-), I did not say they should change the script or anything. The issue is that he seems to become a role model for quite some of those that CAN actually apply such methods in practice. And there is the issue. And the guy at the HRF was just stating the same, without blaming Bauer or the producers or Sutherland for that matter.
This debate you mention is on for quite some time in the USA. The latest thing is that it turns out that Kerry (who btw was and is and would always be far worse than Bush as an alternative for President in any case: this is what they had, lack of alternatives, reminds me of back home) was not so wrong, although he has no clue why, probably, about the "understanding level" (let us stop there) of the new recruits. And not because the army people would be by any measure worse, but because they lately recruited- since supply of new recruits plummeted, on the background that we know so well- really that worst possible segment, mainly young high-school dropouts, by promising them higher wages that what they would have gotten as outside option. And that is just part of the reason. I personally believe that another important part is that very intelligent, high responsibility, decision makers, also take Jack Bauer as real life model...And that is trouble, ain't it?...
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