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They Don't Know Jack
The pundits are missing what really makes 24 tick. Twenty-four is the Fox drama where one day a year Jack Bauer takes the law into his own hands and saves the republic. It's always a day when the president happens to be visiting Los Angeles, and maybe the show's real message is that the president should stay back east. But anyway, this season, 24's fifth, the pundits are descending on the show to assign it its place in the American gestalt. The reason why is clear: the premiere last month coincided with a moment when George W. Bush was telling every friendly audience he could find that a president's gotta do what he's gotta do and besides, if he does it it's legal. And here's Jack Bauer on TV once a week grimly doing the doing. Whose side is 24 on? Liberals watch the show by the millions -- should they denounce it? Is 24 happy hour for crypto-fascists? The New Yorker's Nancy Franklin had never seen 24 at all until recently, when she buckled down and watched every one of the 102 episodes that've aired since 2001. This kind of marathon does most shows no favor. You spot its tics. "I tended to notice annoying repetitions," Franklin wrote this month. "It seemed to me that Jack whispered 'We'll get through this' to his daughter, Kim . . . at least five times in every episode she was in." But Franklin was impressed. She was affected -- as are we all -- by the "cloud of existential doom" that hangs over Jack Bauer and by the way Bauer and his comrades at the LA Counter Terrorist Unit "find themselves perpetually at the crossroads of urgency and ethics." In the New York Times on February 5, Sarah Vowell hailed 24 as a liberal's guilty pleasure. Describing a recent scene in which Bauer, interrogating a treacherous aide to the president about missing canisters of nerve gas while time was, as time always is on 24, fast running out, points a knife at his face and tells him that if he doesn't talk, "the first thing I'm going to do is, I'm going to take out your right eye. I'll move over and take out your left." Vowell admits, "Sitting on my couch, under the watchful stare of no fewer than six busts of Lincoln, while wearing a sweatshirt given to volunteers at a children's tutoring center, as Bauer's knife was poised to break the man's skin, what I was thinking was: Do it." She went on to conclude, "Unconstitutional fantasies are normal (I hope), and on TV dramas they can be entertaining and cathartic. Let's just keep them off the TV news." Vowell should scratch a little deeper: 24 is not your garden-variety unconstitutional fantasy. Jack Bauer is one of the greatest TV characters because he does what needs to be done with deep regard for what the Constitution -- not to mention his conscience -- has to say about his behavior. Unlike, just perhaps, some present leaders of our government, Bauer knows what needs to be done for what it is -- evil. He spies and abducts and tortures and then gives himself up. Let me finish this one mission, he's always dolefully telling the CTU brass, and then you can take me in. We don't see Bauer praying, but then we don't see him taking a leak either. Those are things that must happen during commercials, and if his prostate's in no better shape than his soul the peeing is agony. Bauer knows he's in bad with God. He knows that doing the wrong thing for the right reason doesn't make it the right thing -- which separates him by leaps and bounds from the theologians running the country. Wussy secular humanists love Bauer because he's a moral relativist. Cowboys like him because he's an absolutist. He gets that some things are black-and-white and some things are gray. He knows the only way to distinguish the greater evil from the lesser is to measure them both against the yardstick of categorical evil, the yardstick the great religions keep in their top drawer. In a crisis Bauer is pretty quick to identify the lesser evil, but I don't think he's ever 100 percent sure, and as the lesser evil is still evil, it's pretty clear to him he's going to hell. What's not to like about Jack Bauer? He's a great example to us all because he doesn't lie about the impossible nature of his choices. Fools and demagogues do. Let's consider briefly one of the few personal crises I don't believe Bauer has faced in his five seasons on the air: what if Kim had gotten knocked up? The abortion debate has torn the country apart because neither side is honest about the choices. The debate is actually between the half of the country that thinks abortion is evil and the half that thinks it's a necessary evil. That's a divide that could be straddled. Jack Bauer could straddle it. Again, abortion must be one of those things that he talks about, if at all, only during the commercials. But in the early seasons, when Kim was a teenager, if his cell phone had rung and she'd told him in a quavering voice, "Daddy, I'm pregnant and I don't know what to do," I have no doubt what he'd have said. He'd have whispered, "The terrorists are about to spot me hiding here and then I'm going to have to kill some people so this is a bad time to talk. But I want you to know I love you. We'll get through this." Whatever he thought, whatever she decided, she'd need his strength and not his sanctimony, and he'd be there for her. And it would occur to Jack Bauer that whichever way things played out, at some point down the road he'd be as sad as could be. The Movie Wraps Before the Story Ends The curious thing about Citizen Black, a documentary on Conrad Black that makes its U.S. premiere on cable's Sundance Channel at 8 PM this Monday, is that it totally ignores Chicago. The movie was finished two years ago, when Black's media empire was beginning to splinter around him but before it collapsed. He's since been indicted here in Chicago on charges of fraud, racketeering, money laundering, and obstruction of justice and he faces trial next year in our federal court. His longtime business partner, David Radler, who ran the Sun-Times and the rest of Hollinger International's Chicago Group, has pleaded guilty to fraud and agreed to testify against him. Citizen Black offers us Black -- aka Lord Black of Crossharbour -- during somewhat happier times in other places. Filmmaker Debbie Melnyk chases him around trying to get him to agree to a formal interview, and we see enough of the banter between them to understand that Black can be a pretty witty and charming guy. |
