Don't Mess With Jack
Fox's '24' may be propaganda, but that doesn't make it ripe for censorship
By Mick Farren
The experience is unique. I'm defending Fox. Last week's teacup tempest over the fictional nuking of Valencia, California, at the climax of the sixth season premiere of the network's mega-hit 24 - while hero Jack Bauer looked on in helpless horror - clearly indicated that liberals can become quite as demented over TV content as any Christian or conservative.
A typical reaction came from Sut Jhally, a professor of communications at the University of Massachusetts, who, in the wake of the detonation, claimed on ABC News that the portrayal of terrorism in the show was pernicious brainwashing, and Fox was deliberately using 24 to generate an atmosphere of belligerent anxiety. "Fear has been used to paralyze people's intellects," he said. "If they can scare people, almost anything becomes possible. When people are afraid their brains shut off, and it makes you confused and want easy solutions."
Jhally, who also runs the Media Education Foundation, believes Hollywood's fascination with terrorism can have "serious political consequences," and, although he doesn't actually come out and say it, the implication is that Fox should somehow rein in 24 - with its ticking clock, casual recourse to torture, assassination, and now the suitcase terror nuke. Such curtailment is unlikely. The show is beloved by right-wingers like the Heritage Foundation, Rush Limbaugh, and Sen. John McCain, not to mention a huge audience, but Jhally's very suggestion causes me problems.
I will happily draw down on Fox News for its routine duplicity, disinformation, and deliberate attempts to confuse Obama with Osama, but when it's a matter of interfering with fiction and fantasy, I become extremely uneasy, because, no matter how the argument is couched, it is in essence an argument for censorship. And that drops us into some moral geography, part morass and part minefield. So 24 is propaganda for a particular mindset? Some of the world's most powerful art, from Voltaire to Picasso to Stanley Kubrick, has been propaganda for one mindset or another. That's how the artist engages society.
Fox's 24 may espouse a neocon-promoted worldview of lurking terror and macho disregard for the Queensbury rules, but its genre pedigree runs back through Tom Clancy all the way to the original Ian Fleming, before Bond became an implausible franchise. I have never personally hooked into the show - a matter of taste rather than politics - but I now feel obliged to move swiftly to its defense, lest some professor with a foundation start picking on the programs I like.
Tony Soprano is morally indefensible, and I know Italian Americans who would rather T and his crew were not on the air. Deadwood's Al Swearengen is a pimp and cutthroat who delivers monologues while being fellated by an unfortunate young woman for whom simple exploitation would be an improvement in life. And yet I will be devastated if I'm denied future episodes. This confusion between fantasy and reality, word and deed, is nothing new. I recall, back in the day, how my radical brothers and sisters berated me for being unacceptably entertained by Clint Eastwood in Dirty Harry. "Fuck off," I snarled, knowing that control of the individual by constricting his or her fantasies is the conceptual thin end of Thought Crime.
And when, as in 24, nuclear annihilation is tossed into the mix, the morbid titillation of the abyss makes the philosophical pitch deafeningly loud in the already cacophonous marketplace of ideas. The rising mushroom cloud is a powerful symbol in our so-called civilization - just ask Condi Rice - but the answer is still not to seek ways of curtailing the show's imaginative scope. Those who oppose 24's underlying ideology need to create and promote fantasy propaganda of their own, but with more power and greater audience appeal. This may not be easy in corporate entertainment, but, unfortunately, it's the only way - one of those irksome little inconveniences of living in a free culture.
Published: 01/25/2007
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