Archive for category tv
Jack Bauer: No More Fun
Here’s another expanded chunk of my ACMI lecture on ‘Loveable Murderers’. (You can read the first piece here.) Who knew that 24 would finally come to an end between now and then?
Back in 2007, Brigadier General Patrick Finnegan said: “The disturbing thing is that, although torture may cause Jack Bauer some angst, it is always the patriotic thing to do.” When even the military asked producers to tone down torture on 24, it’s sometimes difficult to explain why I watched all eight seasons.
In fact, I confused some of the ACMI audience by accidentally sounding so pro-death penalty. In fiction, it’s surprisingly easy to say that some people ‘deserve to die’. In reality, I’m a bleeding-heart liberal crybaby. But I still enjoyed much of 24’s car crashes and inexplicable traitors and clenched fists and, yeah, even torture scenes. I guess I’m with Sarah Vowell, who wrote back in 2006 that “…there is a jarring disconnect between what I want my real-life intelligence officers to be doing versus what I want my fake TV intelligence officers to be doing.”
My lecture mostly focused on Showtime’s Dexter as the pin-up boy for loveable murderers everywhere. (Come on, he’s pretty dreamy.) But what’s the real difference between Dexter Morgan and Jack Bauer? Is there a slippery slope between how Dexter justifies his kills with ‘Harry’s Code’ and how Jack Bauer tortures in the name of patriotism?
I asked Dr. Jessica Wolfendale. She’s an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at West Virginia University, and the author of the book Torture and the Military Profession. You can listen to her response here:
Jack vs Dexter
In essence, what separates these men is that Dexter enjoys what he does, and Jack does not.
Further, as Derek Johnson noted recently, 24 does happily suggest torture results in “actionable intelligence”, but it also shows us what it does to the torturer. “Jack may repeatedly stop terrorist attacks,” he writes, “but at the expense of his loved ones, the health of the American political institution, and ultimately, his own humanity.”
As it continued, it was fascinating to see 24 slowly begin a new war – one against its own perceived politics. Season seven introduced a barrage of ways to address qualms over Jack’s actions. Jack was called to government hearings to justify his violence; he offended and befriended an Islamic imam; he explained that while he knows that laws have to be the most important thing, his heart won’t let him stand back when he thinks something needs to be done.
The series’ final shot – Jack, staring up into the camera of a high-flying spy drone, saying goodbye – was a suitable finish. Jack doesn’t get a happy ending. No well-deserved peace. Like John Wayne, walking away from the family he’s helped reunite at the end of The Searchers, he’s got too much blood on his hands to re-enter civilization.
(And the surveillance aspect was fitting, too, considering the obsession with mediated communication required for 24’s real-time gimmick to function.)
But it’s the ending of the penultimate episode, though, that might’ve sealed Jack’s fate. Pushed too far, out for revenge, Jack gets an old enemy in the crosshairs of his sniper rifle. Just before the familiar ticking clock ends the episode, we see him smile.
Jack’s enjoying himself. Suddenly, he’s Dexter Morgan.
Blame Agatha Christie
I thought I’d put up some random, remixed selections from the lecture on ‘Loveable Murderers’ I gave at ACMI earlier this year. Relive the magic! The bloody, bloody magic! Here goes…
A random New Yorker finds a corpse. That’s the strict formula for the opening of an episode of NBC’s Law & Order. Do the math. 20 seasons, 22ish episodes a season. That’s at least 440 bodies. It’s a mountain of victims that any serial killer would be proud to claim.
And that’s without any of the Law & Order spin-offs, too. Now add in the death toll of the zillion other murder-focused TV shows currently on air. It seems reasonable, somehow, because murder isn’t like other crimes. In fact, on TV, it’s almost considered victimless – even when the victim is lying right there on the floor.
Murder is everywhere in popular culture, and it’s often presented as a clean and simple – if not bloodless – crime. When I was a kid, I’d get nervous every time there was the tiniest hint of sex on TV while my parents were in the room, but a corpse? No problem!
Take Murder She Wrote. It has ‘murder’ right there in the title, and yet it’s somehow the most family-friendly show imaginable, featuring Jessica Fletcher quietly solving crimes with common sense and folksy wisdom. But think about how many bodies she must’ve seen. Every town she visits, every holiday she takes…
The fact that Jessica Fletcher is a famous mystery novelist, of course, links her back to Agatha Christie – and Christie is emblematic of how murder often isn’t crime of passion. It’s a drawing room mystery. Her victims weren’t really people. Just puzzles to be solved. Similarly, these murder shows never contain much grief, do they? Their funerals are just informal line-ups to see who’s acting guilty.
As an aside, I can think of two pieces of fiction that turn this on its head. One mainstream, one otherwise, but both decidedly subversive. First, Mike Myer’s Austin Powers. There’s a running gag showing Austin killing a random henchman – before we cut to that henchman’s family or friends, devastated as they hear the news that their loved one has been unceremoniously killed.
Grant Morrison’s insanely experimental conspiracy comic, The Invisibles, dedicated an entire issue to the life story of a man who’d previously served as nothing but cannon fodder. We see his childhood, his motivations, his relationships – and then the issue ends back where he first appeared, killed in an instant by our uncaring heroes.
Anyway, in 1950, Raymond Chandler responding to the rise of bloodless murder mysteries with an essay called The Simple Art Of Murder. He was sick of the way that murder had become – in essence – sudoku with corpses. Praised the writing of his literary predecessor, Dashiell Hammett, he wrote:
“Hammett gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse; and with the means at hand, not with hand-wrought duelling pistols, curare, and tropical fish.”
The murderers mightn’t have good reasons to kill, but their stories sure do. Killing is a great structural gimmick. Kill someone and suddenly everything’s in motion: stakes are raised, friends are serving up big chunks of exposition, there’s a murderer to catch for dramatic tension, and so on. Twin Peaks is hardly the only soap opera to kick off with a killing.
This same storytelling principle was applied to dinner parties in real life, too. Remember the How To Host A Murder game of the mid-1980s? Everyone would be given characters and clues to be acted and read out throughout the meal. It’s an interesting thought experiment to plug other crimes into the title instead of the word ‘murder’ and see how they instantly become unacceptable.
I mean, I can pretty much guarantee that no one would have come to my lecture if it was on ‘Loveable Rapists’, would they?
Rooting For The Overdog
Now that Glee has been off our screens long enough to finaly banish its catchy pop earworms, I’ve realised something: it’ll take more than a slushie to the face to convince me that any of the cast are ‘underdogs’.
Glee prides itself on its underdog status. It’s constantly announcing that the members of the Glee Club are losers and outcasts. One promotional tagline was “A biting comedy for the underdog in all of us.” They’re even planning an upcoming competition to find new castmembers via Idolish auditions; one of the show’s creators, Ryan Murphy, told Variety that “anybody and everybody now has a chance to be on a show about talented underdogs.”
Blame my own torturous high school years, but I wholeheartedly empathised with the pain inside every single character in Judd Apatow’s Freaks and Geeks. And before Josh Schwartz’ The OC pulled off the unlikely feat of transforming Seth Cohen from a friendless nerd into a bonafide heart throb, Seth’s hatred of high school felt genuine, too.
(There’s a heartbreaking moment near the end of The OC season two where Summer – the school’s resident princess and now, amazingly, Seth’s girlfriend – is looking through their yearbook with fond nostalgia. Then she notices that Seth is friendless in every single picture, and that she’ll never understand.)
I don’t feel any actual high school angst sitting under the loser-labels that Glee loves to throw around. The show effectively mines emotion out of Kurt’s coming out to his working-class father, yes, but otherwise it relies on its powerballads as sentimental shorthand. The slushie-to-the-face is meant to be quick visual iconography for unpopularity – but it’s a mostly empty gesture.
The recent movie Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief pushes this desire for a token underdog even further. We’re told Percy’s a loser. He admits it. We get one short scene of him supposedly struggling in school and, uh, that’s it. Other than that maybe half-a-minute of film, he seems like a together, popular, even cocky teenager. The screenwriters might as well have just given him a t-shirt with UNDERDOG written on it, dusted off their hands, and considered Percy’s backstory complete.
Do we like the idea of rooting for the underdog, but find actual losers a little too… loserey?
Jennifer’s Body – the teen horror film penned by Diablo Cody and starring Megan Fox – made a massive miscalculation when it choose its victims for Jennifer’s demonic tendencies. When Carrie eviscerated her prom back in 1976, it was the bloody revenge of the powerless against the powerful. Jennifer, however, is the most popular girl in school. Where’s the joy in watching her horribly maim her unpopular classmates? That’s not fun, fantasy, or vicarious thrills. That’s just high school.
(There is, however, plenty of fun to be had in seeing Adam Brody – The OC’s Seth Cohen – all evilled and eyelinered as the film’s true villain.)
Glee is witty and good-hearted enough that I do still enjoy it, despite the hesitations above and many others, too. (Lazy writing! Haphazard plotting! Bizarre song choices with nothing to do with the scene at hand!) After all, Jane Lynch’s delivery as the surreally wicked Sue Sylvester is enough of a reason to watch.
Even if it never becomes the Heathers: The Musical like I secretly desire, I hope it lives up to its potential. Don’t stop believin’ just quite yet.
Jack Bauer Vs. Wolverine Vs. Well-Deserved Peace
Poor Jack Bauer. He managed to snatch less than ten minutes of grandfatherly bliss – in real time, no less – during the season premiere of 24 this week. Unsurprisingly, he was then dragged back into the hyper-violent patriotism that makes the show a hit.
Jack’s fate is typical of how the never-ending stories of TV series and comic books guarantee these violent heroes will never know peace for more than a few minutes or pages at a time. At the end of 24’s (admittedly terrible) season six, Jack Bauer had had enough. After all these years of torture and gunplay, he wanted his “life back”. He was told in no uncertain terms:
“Jack, simply getting your life back isn’t gonna change who you are… and you can’t walk away from it. You know that. You’ve tried it. Sooner or later you’re gonna get back in the game…”
We’ve seen this in endless Hollywood Westerns: the hero, the only one capable of Doing What Must Be Done, has to walk away from the domestic life he dearly desires. In 1992, Clint Eastwood’s meta-mythic Unforgiven bundled up every cowboy he’d ever played into the story of William Munny, dragged inexorably away from his family and back to the gun. The coda says that he returned home, sure, but I’m not entirely sure we’re meant to believe it.
At least once the credits roll, William Munny’s story comes to an end. While ratings hold, Jack doesn’t have the same option to put down his gun. Somehow I don’t think Jack Bauer: Kindly Grandpa has the same network appeal. (Opening voiceover: “The following visit to the zoo takes place between 11am and 12pm.”)
It’s worse for violent comic book characters – and aren’t they all? Wolverine, for example, is basically immortal. His mutant healing factor keeps him in fighting shape, year after year, so he looks just the same now as he did fighting in World War II. In New X-Men #148 (2003), there’s an example of how all this death has taken its toll. “All I’m good for’s killing,” Logan thinks at the telepathic Jean Grey. “If you knew what I was, you’d hate me.”
Recently, he too had a moment of peace, albeit in a story called ‘Old Man Logan‘ set in a grim possible future. And he was older, too, finally, a grey-haired pacifist and family man. But – you guessed it – he was forced away from his spartan home for one last job. It’s an utterly shameless steal of Unforgiven, except with all Eastwood’s well-earned heartbreak replaced with pointless Marvel Comics trivia for long-term fans. I don’t think William Munny would approve.
Back in regular comic book continuity, the needs of the status quo have been crueller to Wolverine than most. After his debut in 1974, he seemed to be on a decades-long character arc to a better place. He turned from an amnesiac, animalistic killer to a more noble sort of warrior: self-controlled, samurai-influenced, and even a mentor to young X-Men like Kitty Pryde. Wolverine’s readers don’t want to give up their favourite hack ‘n’ slash antihero, though, so Logan is never allowed to put his berserker rage behind him once and for all.
But Jack Bauer’s lack of a mutant healing factor is, in fact, his secret weapon. Day by day, his mortal host – Kiefer Sutherland – is getting older. At some point, suspension of disbelief will snap and he’ll be judged too decrepit to be kicking ass on 24. Only then Jack will get some well-deserved peace.