Musings: Notes From My Daybook

Jerome Eric Copulsky, a prof at Virginia Tech, takes a look at our fasciniation with Jack Bauer and 24. His insightful essay is published through Sightings, associated with the Martin Marty Center and it can be read here. Though a fan of the show, he exercises a critical eye that creates some important conversations points.

For example, read Copulsky's analysis on Bauer's consistent "exception to the rules" practices:

"Early on, I hit upon the show's secret: "24" is a sustained lesson in controversial jurist and political theorist Carl Schmitt's decidedly illiberal concept of sovereignty. "Sovereign is he who decides upon the exception," Schmitt proclaimed at the beginning of his 1922 treatise Political Theology. To have this power is to stand outside the law, to decide upon the state of exception, when the normal rules do not apply. If we follow Schmitt's claim that "significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts," the human sovereign is the political analogue of the omnipotent God.

What better description could there be of counter-terrorism agent Jack Bauer, the hero of "24"? Bauer is no by-the-book agent. But when he operates beyond the law and conventional morals in order to interrogate a suspect -- employing brute force or torture to obtain crucial information -- we understand he is doing what is necessary to fulfill his patriotic duty. And when bureaucrats and politicians wring their hands or quibble about Bauer's methods, the show suggests that they are naïve or lack the will to do what is "necessary" to stop America's enemies. In the world of "24," Jack Bauer is clearly the sovereign."

This concept may make for good drama, but it really falls apart in real life. Even as Copulsky notes in his essay, some US soldiers in the field have taken to Bauer's extreme forms of torture to illicit information with decidedly negative and destructive effects.

As an on and off again viewer of 24, I must admit that every hour I do watch I find myself wrestling with the moral dilemmas that every show presents. And though it may sell advertizing to feed on our collective fear in a world tainted with global threats of terrorism, I wonder whether are seeing any constructive possibilities in the vision that Jack Bauer presents every 24 hours?