Big, Bad Muslims: Part One—24: Season Six

James Bond. Jason Bourne. Jack Bauer. Contemporary film and television’s top spies epitomize Anglo-physical perfection: blonde hair, ice-blue eyes, toned bodies. 24’s Jack Bauer, however, is the ideological anomaly. While Bond battles international megalomaniacs and Bourne defends himself from his country’s own agents, Jack Bauer remains quintessentially hawkish. Unlike Bond, he’s unconcerned with sex or witticisms (he tells the women in his life ‘I’ll be right there’ before running off to fight terrorists and smiles maybe once per season). Unlike Bourne, he’s unapologetic in his use of violence (when he decides to hack off his daughter’s lover’s hand to defuse a bomb in season three, he doesn’t even blink). Unlike both Bond and Bourne, he often sacrifices friends, family, and coworkers for the American good (like killing his boss to stop the spread of a lethal virus). Truly, Bauer embodies post-9/11 neoconservativism: a strong America assured of itself and uncorrupted in its ‘values’. Always, Bauer battles the ‘other’, a seditious force intent on taking American lives and civil liberties. In characterizing the villains of its sixth season, the show exploits the fear of Muslim terrorists operating freely on American soil. 24 could be accused of simply embodying the Bush administration’s homeland agenda but for its reliance on Orientalist stereotypes uses harmful parody to color its Muslim characters.

To understand 24’s conservative agenda, one must grasp its hero. In a 2005 USA Today interview, the show’s producer, Howard Gordon, said Jack Bauer “taps into the public’s ‘fear-based wish fulfillment’ of having protectors…who will do whatever is necessary to save society from harm.” This usually involves torture. “‘[Bauer] is a tragic character. He doesn't get away with it clean. He’s got blood on his hands,’ Gordon says. ‘In some ways, he is a necessary evil’” (Bauder). Calling him an anti-hero undermines Jack’s political importance in the fear-mongering Bush-era in which he was born. “The disturbing appeal of Jack the Torturer reflects a wounded and frightened national psyche, a desire to lash out at those responsible for 9/11, and the frustration of a superpower unable to defeat a ragged band of terrorists” (McCormick 17). Bauer’s dramatic core, however, is similar to the Hollywood cowboys of Wayne and Eastwood. Though a government agent, Jack distrusts politicians and bureaucracy, and operates by his own moral code. Yet, after saving the day, he most always returns to government service.

"Hey, brother. Long time no see" - Jack's brother discovers family reunions aren't what they used to be.

In post Abu-Ghraib America, 24 takes great strides to prove that for whatever diplomatic laws Jack breaks, he suffers for in his personal life. Through eight seasons and a TV movie, Bauer loses a wife, coworkers, friends, and estranges his only daughter. His politics, however, remain 24’s driving force. Jim McDermott humorously dissects Jack Bauer in America. “Yes, he tortures prisoners and shoots co-workers in the head, but he’s not a bad person. He’s just caught in a bad situation” (23). Still, the show enforces his rationale: his ends justify his means. “[Jack] demonstrates what few may care to admit: in the war on terror, the conservative movement has become willing to sacrifice principle to passion and difficult moral reasoning to utility” (Dougherty 9). Jack Bauer is not “America”. He does, however, represent values 24 believes sacred, ones entrenched in American lore: self-sacrifice, results before diplomacy, and an unbending “sense” of right and wrong opposed by those too weak to do what is “right”.

In season six, 24 cherry-picks this sense of right and wrong with abandon. A New York Times column “compared 24’s focus on domestic terror threats to the Bush administration’s focus on Iraq” (Bauder). Whether Jack Bauer is a sadistic sinner or patriotic saint, in the 24 world America is unique, and its villains need to clearly wear the black hat or else its sense of right and wrong might be complicated by nagging realism.

In Part 2, I’ll examine the villains in previous seasons of 24 and how they adhere to us vs. them U.S. geo-political archetypes.

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