Counter-Terrorvision:
A Look at 24 as Post-9/11 Propaganda

By Dave Jesteadt (davejesteadt@gmail.com)

When the television show 24 launched on November 6, 2001--less than a month after the attacks on the World Trade Center--the pilot episode had one key change: footage in the beginning of a Boeing 747 exploding mid-flight was left on the cutting room floor.¹ Although the show was about Los Angeles' Counter-Terrorism Unit (CTU) in times of potential attack, current events seemed to trump the entertainment factor just a little too well. This would be the first and perhaps the last time 24 backed down over the specter of 9/11; successful ratings for the first season and the unexpected relevance of the storyline gave the show's later seasons a mandate to further probe the psyche of an audience uneasy over national and global security. By examining the evolving storylines and characters as well the way topical political issues such as torture, the Patriot Act and the Department of Homeland Security are treated within the framework of the show, 24 is a perfect demonstration of post-9/11 irrational social propaganda.

Each season of 24 follows CTU agent Jack Bauer during the course of a particularly trying day. The gimmick is that with 24 episodes per season, each one-hour episode plays out a "real time" hour in the day. If the viewer can suspend disbelief that the most intense plot reveals always manage to happen 59 minutes into the hour or that characters always manage to drive across town or do other mundane activities when it's time to cut out for a commercial break, then this produces the show's trademark tension.

In the first season of 24, mercenaries from Kosovo kidnap Jack Bauer's wife and daughter in hopes of forcing Bauer to aid in their assassination attempt on Presidential-hopeful David Palmer. In the end, Palmer survives the California primary and goes on to multiple seasons as 24's beloved tough-on-terror President. Because the audience response (and the show itself) became shaped inextricably by current events, the storyline and characters in the first season are far from what they become. Having the terrorists come from Kosovo seems like a particularly benign choice, joining Tom Clancy and Bill Clinton in a nostalgic Cold War fantasy of a time when the eastern bloc was still America's dependable enemy.

Kiefer Sutherland as 24's bad boy protagonist Jack Bauer.

But by the second season--the first created exclusively in the aftermath of 9/11--much of this had changed. The teaser broadcast on Fox announcing the second season described the next year's story as "ripped straight from the headlines!"² The second season of 24 focused on the prevention of a nuclear attack in Los Angeles and the political fallout of a recording implicating several Middle Eastern countries in the procurement of the bomb. President David Palmer is then faced with a hawkish cabinet that wants to declare war, and is nearly replaced by the Vice President in a political coup. The recording turns out to be fabricated by a group of businessmen hoping to invade the countries for their rich oil supplies, while another one of the subplots looks at whether a CTU agent can trust her Middle Eastern boyfriend.

The first two seasons steadily decreased the amount of Bauer's family members and friends, eliminating family drama from the show's list of possibilities. Office/agency politics became even more important, but part of the increased tension came because there was no longer an outlet for character emotions beyond aggressive options like fear and anger. Perhaps characters in 24's universe tell jokes on days when Los Angeles isn't set to explode, but because the show only focuses on these particular days, 24 has almost no sense of humor.

Of the five seasons currently produced, the second season also swung most strongly in scale of destruction, perhaps as a reactionary measure in the face of 9/11's damage. Therefore, the first season's quaint assassination attempt on a Senator was replaced with the threat of a nuclear bomb aimed at one of America's major cities. This story also posited a war-for-oil scenario that read as a thinly veiled reference to President Bush's buildup to the war in Iraq (Operation Iraqi Freedom finally launched halfway into the season). In order to keep the finale a secret, the last few episodes were shot only a month before they aired, so President Palmer's declaration to his Cabinet that true hostile intent is required in order to honestly declare war could well have been a newly-planned shot across Bush's bow.

With politics playing such a large part in the show, how does 24 end up embodying social propaganda and not political? In Propaganda, philosopher Jacques Ellul describes social propaganda as the opposite of political propaganda, which is the force most think of when they think of the word. Rather than overtly wishing to disseminate political opinion and sway the actions of listeners, sociological propaganda is "the group of manifestations by which any society seeks to integrate the maximum number of individuals into itself, to unify its members' behavior according to a pattern, to spread its style of life abroad, and thus impose itself on other groups."³ It is the calming, overriding force of society telling its members to get used to things. In the case of 24, it is the action hero Jack Bauer, who by navigating the tricky waters of global terrorism, the Patriot Act and the Geneva Convention, defeats the new threats and returns to tell us everything is back to normal in America.

Dennis Haysbert as President Palmer, the show's popular President who took firm stances on terror.

The key to sociological propaganda is that unlike its political brother, this brand of dissemination happens naturally through culture, and the intended effects cannot be accurately predicted. Hollywood and television studios are great producers of sociological propaganda, since they are major contributors to the popular culture, but the desires of television producers have little to do with the outcome. Although some members of 24's production team are self-proclaimed liberals, they cannot choose an audience's reactions, nor can they change the current events that provide an ever-shifting text against which to read the show.⁴

This is not to suggest that all the politics are suffocated or smoothed out of 24. The show exists distinctly because of 9/11, a day that occurred months after Fox network executives approved the show's pilot, but which gave 24 a spooky sense of timeliness. From the second season on, 24 found its voice as a political action drama that drew heavily on the details of life in a post-9/11 world. The third and fourth seasons had a tough time matching the nuclear threat raised in the second year, so they settled for a variety of popular theorized terrorist plots, including variations on germ warfare and "dirty bombs," destruction-via-satellites and suicide bombers.

The regression from nuclear attack to dirty bombs, germs and fanciful Star Wars-esque laser shows may have to do with the changing fears and ultimate apathy of the audience. Because President Bush declared "Mission Accomplished" for Operation Iraqi Freedom on May 1, 2003, the filming of the third season took place in the brief period of time where it seemed like America's major international conflicts might be over. So the third season of 24 started with the drug smuggling cartels and only later introduced the larger threat of bio-terrorism, still keeping the threat entirely domestic.

While the dramatic tension of the show remained the same, the political urgency in the third season began to cool. Constant background chatter on televisions and in the CTU offices frequently mentioned the Department of Homeland Security raising the threat level to orange or red or some small bit of global unrest the audience never gets to see. This is the emerging cynicism of a post-9/11 America, and a key example of 24 as sociological propaganda. Even by the second season, rather than suggesting that the day's events are an enclosed event, 24 places the situation CTU and Jack Bauer are handling within a framework of the never-ending war on terror. Hearing about domestic threats of terrorism has now been programmed into the accepted "American way of life," and just like cable news networks and statements from the White House, popular television shows like 24 do much to reinforce the notion of unrest as the new normality.

The fourth season, again taking the audience's pulse, changed the format of 24 to address not just one major attack, but numerous smaller plans hatched by a Middle Eastern sleeper cell within Los Angeles. The kidnapping and planned execution of the Secretary of Defense (broadcast over the Internet for all to see), the planned meltdown of a nuclear power plant, shooting down Air Force One... if these domestic threats had an international allegory, they could broadly represent the choices of a the decentralized Iraqi insurgency that beheaded contractors and shot down helicopters. Again, the resemblance to current events no doubt helped 24 stay at the top of the ratings week after week, and Jack Bauer's triumph continued the show's process of raising America's unsolvable demons in order to defeat them with much visual flair and emotional grit.

Jack Bauer is the counterterrorist update to very familiar television archetypes. The lone gun deputy of the Western, which became the ethically driven rogue cop in police procedurals, has now become the CTU agent with a strong sense of justice, unmatched skills in combat and a nearly impossible endurance for personal pain. Like the rogue cop, Bauer is repeatedly berated by the CTU and the President for going beyond his authority and asked to surrender his gun and badge; in the last three seasons, he's even gone far enough to be arrested and held by CTU multiple times and once was declared dead for reasons of foreign policy.

That Jack Bauer disregards rules is no great surprise; as hinted at by the legacy of archetypes before him, America's television heroes often place greater value on intrinsic values of right and wrong than the legal loopholes that allow criminals to go free. But Bauer's situation is complicated by the extremity to which he oversteps fundamental documents of right and wrong in modern civilization (like the Geneva Convention), and in doing so makes the audience complicit in the transgression. Instead of just unplugging the cameras and questioning or threatening a suspect without a lawyer present--the bad boy tactics of police procedurals--Jack is more likely to torture or kill the suspect, which an audience should theoretically balk at.

A later season features CTU and Jack Bauer teaming up torture his own secret-holding brother.

How Jack Bauer overcomes these transgressions to remain the unquestioned hero of 24 illustrates how the storyline creates sociological propaganda. While it's true that Bauer frequently oversteps his bounds in torturing suspects, the show takes great pains to make sure the end result justifies the means. In the first four seasons, torture becomes a viable and efficient methodology of obtaining information when timing is critical. This backs the conservative reasoning behind torture: what if this was the only way you could save two million lives? The alternative efforts in the episode fail, and only by using the information he received from the tortured suspect is Jack Bauer able to surprise the terrorists who thought they'd won.

What the show doesn't do, at least in the first four seasons, is debate the many ethical grey zones of torture. It's never just one life on the line (unless that person happens to be the President), so the question of how many lives on the line are necessary to morally accept torture is never addressed. Whether it's a few hundred thousand or a few hundred million, the massive scale of predicted casualties far outweighs the suspect's case, which in many instances has already been shown in prior episodes doing other bad things for which he or she ought to be punished anyway.

The use of torture is also shown to be infallible. Again and again, the first three seasons of 24 demonstrate a cause/effect scenario with torture leading to information every single time. This creates a powerful mental link that is an important piece of social propaganda in aiding the conservative effort to recognize torture as a legitimate means of fighting against terrorists. Situations are complicated later in the show's life, but the link between torture and information is never fully dissolved. For example, in the latest season, Jack tortures his girlfriend because of bad information received from another tortured source, but this is treated in the storyline as a regrettable hurdle to overcome in their romantic relationship. It was a mistake anyone at CTU could have made because the enemy's plotting was so devious and personal--all the more reason for Bauer to find them and torture them himself.

Torture is joined in the storyline by other modern methods of counterterrorism. These begin to form social propaganda not just because of the show's continuing popularity, but because 24 treats these things as "givens" in the new war on terror, even when laws like the Patriot Act are up for continual debate and their continued existence is far from certain. Wiretapping and unauthorized surveillance measures that go much further in scope and illegality than the recently revealed NSA programs are critical to CTU's counterterrorism efforts, with satellites to track all sorts of phone calls and enemy movements without warrants.

These options are vaguely related to Patriot Act guidelines, particularly if Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez had the unlimited funding and oversight he desires for the program. As it is, 24's vision of the Patriot Act out-Patriot Act's the real deal, with a scope and efficiency bordering on the classical nightmare of a Big Brother.

One of many products parodying Jack Bauer's borderline-superhero powers, from 80sTees.

Is there political value in mentioning Guatanamo Bay, wiretapping and satellite surveillance just to remind audiences they exist? Perhaps, but more than a political impact, these everyday signs of a post-9/11 world actually make statements of conservative social propaganda. Like the torture examples above, 24 never highlights abuses by the system, only the benefits. In doing so, they create a similar binary between the Patriot Act/NSA guidelines and successfully obtaining information. No character is ever misidentified or snooped on without turning out to be a bloodthirsty terrorist.

With Guatanamo Bay, wiretapping, and Bauer's renegade use of torture on suspects, the American Civil Liberties Union naturally became a key supporting actor. The second season of 24 gave two "not all Muslims are evil" episodes that tracked violent anti-Muslim riots in Los Angeles fanned by media bias, but the ACLU lawyer otherwise manages to continually play the unwitting villain. Because of the established binaries discussed above, in which questionable activities unfailingly yield results, over time the audience is trained to recognize that almost everyone who is tortured, detained or spied on in 24 is proven to be guilty later. Like a conservative talking point made reality, the ACLU is put in the position of constantly defending terrorists and murderers without a potentially innocent defendant in sight.

Dulled by sympathy and blind to the dangerous truth, these fresh-faced lawyers became the infuriating bureaucrats who always demand playing by the rules of the Geneva Convention, even with lives hanging in the balance. Jack Bauer's superiors at CTU play largely the same role, with the office politics of the show often revolving around whether or not Jack can torture villains without evidence. Whether or not he can torture at all is never an issue--CTU approves of and regularly uses chemicals and shock treatments as a method of obtaining information. This alone should raise serious alarms in the left-leaning viewer's ethical involvement with the show.

I would be just such a left-leaning viewer, as are my friends who gather every Monday night to watch the new episode of 24. Why we enjoy the show, even when it's so clearly manipulative to the trained eye (all of us have a background in film) has been a constant source of discussion during the commercial breaks. The show's greatest achievement is not just being social propaganda, but being irrational social propaganda. Regardless of political affiliation, 24 enthralls because it's so well made. Not just the gloss of expensive production values (which in turn buy many, many explosions), but the acting, editing and scripts are also some of the best in modern television.

The constant tension and violence in 24's storyline also replicates the immediate aftermath of 9/11, in which the shock and disorder drove many liberal intellectuals to claim the need for raw vengeance. Far from being a steadily progressing sense of tension, each episode of 24 prides itself on blindsiding the audience with shocking twists, which in turn leave the viewer unprepared for an adequate response. In the immediate moment, cheering for Jack Bauer as he tortures suspects and breaks into foreign embassies seems like the natural thing to do; here is a guy finally getting things done! Only after the episode ends and the thrill ride through the moral grey zone stops, can viewers like my friends and I sit back and wonder why we like such a morally repulsive show.

That is a uniquely American response to 24, which is not to say that terrorism is a uniquely American concern, only that the show's logic is firmly couched in the events and politics surrounding 9/11. Because of cheap syndication costs, American television is the most-exported content for foreign television networks, and at a time when America's foreign policy is taking an international drubbing, it would be interesting to know exactly how 24 is received worldwide. A big budget, critically acclaimed thriller doesn't seem like a tough sell, but the show also endorses a militarily aggressive stance on terrorism and a worldview destabilized not by official wars but by random acts of violence.

This may not be a problem for western European nations (who, as a conservative pundit might note, are waging their own battles with so-called "Islamo-fascists"), but presents an issue for the growing market in third world nations--some of which supply the villains for the show. An article in the Independent from 2005 noted that 24 beat Desperate Housewives to become "the most popular pirate television show worldwide," with each episode from the fourth season downloaded over 95,000 times.⁵ Beyond the Internet, DVD boxsets of 24 are popular in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Norway, Scandinavia and Australia.⁶

A foreign ad for CalorieMate demonstrates Jack Bauer's international appeal.

In the international television market, however, an expert on terrorism for the conservative Heritage Foundation worried that 24's portrayal of the government's torture-friendly attitude would "confirm some prejudices."⁷ An alternate reading of 24 might therefore be a Valley of the Wolves-style portrayal of Jack Bauer as the typical American soldier, quick to judge (and even quicker to shoot) if they hear an a Middle Eastern accent. Because Bauer is so frequently called upon exclusively to vanquish America's international competition, 24 certainly has the potential with new audiences to exhibit American xenophobia or to be twisted into anti-American propaganda.

But this pure focus on the effects of 24's aggressive neo-conservative response to terrorism in domestic and global television markets can distract from the fluidity exhibited in the show's response to audience desires. Social propaganda must create and thrive in the popular culture of the time, and because of this, 24's popularity also derives from the constant attempts to give the viewers what they want. In the first few years after 9/11, this consisted of a take-no-prisoners action hero that could decipher complex government policies and show visible results in the vague "war on terror."

But as the election year passed and President Bush faced increasingly lower poll numbers, the most recent season of 24 brought back the private industry war-for-oil scenario from the second season and made the fifth season's new top villain the President, a corrupt puppet of defense companies who ordered the assassination of the ex-President in the opening seconds of the season premiere. This shocking development, combined with the show's new treatment of Jack Bauer's violent tendencies as more manic than cool, made the fifth season one of the most fascinating in the series.

Although the show retained its tense format and arguably became even more frustrating for viewers as the crooked President pulled strings and frequently arrested Bauer to cover up his conspiracies, 24 also showed its ability to morph with the times. While still irrational social propaganda in construction and exhibition, I would hesitate to group the fifth season with its conservative predecessors. Whether this new direction is a sign of maturity in rhetoric on behalf of the writers or simply a natural reaction to popular opinion can be endlessly debated, but it furthers proves 24's important place in navigating (and often dictating) the politics of post-9/11 television.

References:

¹ "24 Episode Guide: Season One," Fox.com: Official 24 Website, 30 Jun. 2006.
² "A Look at Season 2," 24: The Complete First Season, DVD (Fox, 2002).
³ Jacque Ellul, Propaganda (New York: Random House) 62.
⁴ "Behind the Scenes: Season 2," 24: The Complete Second Season, DVD (Fox, 2003).
⁵ Ciar Byrne, "New Twist in Internet Piracy as Britons Rush to Download TV," Independent [London], 19 Feb. 2005: News 19.
⁶ "All region search: 24" DVD-Basen.dk, 27 June 2006.
⁷ Kylene Kiang. "24: A Glimpse of Reality or Total Fiction?" Cox News Service 23 June 2006.