Re: Whatever It Take: The Politics of Joel Surnow Part 1 -- La Femme Nikita Fan Fiction Message Board

[ Show ]

Support VoyForums

[ Shrink ]

VoyForums Announcement: Programming and providing support for this service has been a labor of love since 1997. We are one of the few services online who values our users' privacy, and have never sold your information. We have even fought hard to defend your privacy in legal cases; however, we've done it with almost no financial support -- paying out of pocket to continue providing the service. Due to the issues imposed on us by advertisers, we also stopped hosting most ads on the forums many years ago. We hope you appreciate our efforts.

Show your support by donating any amount. (Note: We are still technically a for-profit company, so your contribution is not tax-deductible.) PayPal Acct: Feedback:

Donate to VoyForums (PayPal):

[ Login ] [ Contact Forum Admin ] [ Main index ] [ Post a new message ] [ Search | Check update time | Archives: [1], 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 ]

[ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ]

Date Posted: Sunday, February 18, 07:54:58am
Author: Chgo
Subject: Re: Whatever It Take: The Politics of Joel Surnow Part 1
In reply to: Chgo 's message, "Whatever It Take: The Politics of Joel Surnow" on Sunday, February 18, 07:52:10am

WHATEVER IT TAKES
by JANE MAYER

The politics of the man behind �24.�

Issue of 2007-02-19
Posted 2007-02-12

The office desk of Joel Surnow�the co-creator and executive producer of �24,� the popular counterterrorism drama on Fox�faces a wall dominated by an American flag in a glass case. A small label reveals that the flag once flew over Baghdad, after the American invasion of Iraq, in 2003. A few years ago, Surnow received it as a gift from an Army regiment stationed in Iraq; the soldiers had shared a collection of �24� DVDs, he told me, until it was destroyed by an enemy bomb. �The military loves our show,� he said recently. Surnow is fifty-two, and has the gangly, coiled energy of an athlete; his hair is close-cropped, and he has a �soul patch��a smidgen of beard beneath his lower lip. When he was young, he worked as a carpet salesman with his father. The trick to selling anything, he learned, is to carry yourself with confidence and get the customer to like you within the first five minutes. He�s got it down. �People in the Administration love the series, too,� he said. �It�s a patriotic show. They should love it.�

Surnow�s production company, Real Time Entertainment, is in the San Fernando Valley, and occupies a former pencil factory: a bland, two-story industrial building on an abject strip of parking lots and fast-food restaurants. Surnow, a cigar enthusiast, has converted a room down the hall from his office into a salon with burled-wood humidors and a full bar; his friend Rush Limbaugh, the conservative talk-radio host, sometimes joins him there for a smoke. (Not long ago, Surnow threw Limbaugh a party and presented him with a custom-made �24� smoking jacket.) The ground floor of the factory has a large soundstage on which many of �24� �s interior scenes are shot, including those set at the perpetually tense Los Angeles bureau of the Counter Terrorist Unit, or C.T.U.�a fictional federal agency that pursues America�s enemies with steely resourcefulness.

Each season of �24,� which has been airing on Fox since 2001, depicts a single, panic-laced day in which Jack Bauer�a heroic C.T.U. agent, played by Kiefer Sutherland�must unravel and undermine a conspiracy that imperils the nation. Terrorists are poised to set off nuclear bombs or bioweapons, or in some other way annihilate entire cities. The twisting story line forces Bauer and his colleagues to make a series of grim choices that pit liberty against security. Frequently, the dilemma is stark: a resistant suspect can either be accorded due process�allowing a terrorist plot to proceed�or be tortured in pursuit of a lead. Bauer invariably chooses coercion. With unnerving efficiency, suspects are beaten, suffocated, electrocuted, drugged, assaulted with knives, or more exotically abused; almost without fail, these suspects divulge critical secrets.

The show�s appeal, however, lies less in its violence than in its giddily literal rendering of a classic thriller trope: the �ticking time bomb� plot. Each hour-long episode represents an hour in the life of the characters, and every minute that passes onscreen brings the United States a minute closer to doomsday. (Surnow came up with this concept, which he calls the show�s �trick.�) As many as half a dozen interlocking stories unfold simultaneously�frequently on a split screen�and a digital clock appears before and after every commercial break, marking each second with an ominous clang. The result is a riveting sensation of narrative velocity.

Bob Cochran, who created the show with Surnow, admitted, �Most terrorism experts will tell you that the �ticking time bomb� situation never occurs in real life, or very rarely. But on our show it happens every week.� According to Darius Rejali, a professor of political science at Reed College and the author of the forthcoming book �Torture and Democracy,� the conceit of the ticking time bomb first appeared in Jean Lart�guy�s 1960 novel �Les Centurions,� written during the brutal French occupation of Algeria. The book�s hero, after beating a female Arab dissident into submission, uncovers an imminent plot to explode bombs all over Algeria and must race against the clock to stop it. Rejali, who has examined the available records of the conflict, told me that the story has no basis in fact. In his view, the story line of �Les Centurions� provided French liberals a more palatable rationale for torture than the racist explanations supplied by others (such as the notion that the Algerians, inherently simpleminded, understood only brute force). Lart�guy�s scenario exploited an insecurity shared by many liberal societies�that their enlightened legal systems had made them vulnerable to security threats.

�24,� which last year won an Emmy Award for Outstanding Drama Series, packs an improbable amount of intrigue into twenty-four hours, and its outlandishness marks it clearly as a fantasy, an heir to the baroque potboilers of Tom Clancy and Vince Flynn. Nevertheless, the show obviously plays off the anxieties that have beset the country since September 11th, and it sends a political message. The series, Surnow told me, is �ripped out of the Zeitgeist of what people�s fears are�their paranoia that we�re going to be attacked,� and it �makes people look at what we�re dealing with� in terms of threats to national security. �There are not a lot of measures short of extreme measures that will get it done,� he said, adding, �America wants the war on terror fought by Jack Bauer. He�s a patriot.�

For all its fictional liberties, �24� depicts the fight against Islamist extremism much as the Bush Administration has defined it: as an all-consuming struggle for America�s survival that demands the toughest of tactics. Not long after September 11th, Vice-President Dick Cheney alluded vaguely to the fact that America must begin working through the �dark side� in countering terrorism. On �24,� the dark side is on full view. Surnow, who has jokingly called himself a �right-wing nut job,� shares his show�s hard-line perspective. Speaking of torture, he said, �Isn�t it obvious that if there was a nuke in New York City that was about to blow�or any other city in this country�that, even if you were going to go to jail, it would be the right thing to do?�

Since September 11th, depictions of torture have become much more common on American television. Before the attacks, fewer than four acts of torture appeared on prime-time television each year, according to Human Rights First, a nonprofit organization. Now there are more than a hundred, and, as David Danzig, a project director at Human Rights First, noted, �the torturers have changed. It used to be almost exclusively the villains who tortured. Today, torture is often perpetrated by the heroes.� The Parents� Television Council, a nonpartisan watchdog group, has counted what it says are sixty-seven torture scenes during the first five seasons of �24��more than one every other show. Melissa Caldwell, the council�s senior director of programs, said, � �24� is the worst offender on television: the most frequent, most graphic, and the leader in the trend of showing the protagonists using torture.�

The show�s villains usually inflict the more gruesome tortures: their victims are hung on hooks, like carcasses in a butcher shop; poked with smoking-hot scalpels; or abraded with sanding machines. In many episodes, however, heroic American officials act as tormentors, even though torture is illegal under U.S. law. (The United Nations Convention Against Torture, which took on the force of federal law when it was ratified by the Senate in 1994, specifies that �no exceptional circumstances, whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.�) In one episode, a fictional President commands a member of his Secret Service to torture a suspected traitor: his national-security adviser. The victim is jolted with defibrillator paddles while his feet are submerged in a tub filled with water. As the voltage is turned up, the President, who is depicted as a scrupulous leader, watches the suspect suffer on a video feed. The viewer, who knows that the adviser is guilty and harbors secrets, becomes complicit in hoping that the torture works. A few minutes before the suspect gives in, the President utters the show�s credo, �Everyone breaks eventually.� (Virtually the sole exception to this rule is Jack Bauer. The current season begins with Bauer being released from a Chinese prison, after two years of ceaseless torture; his back is scarred and his hands are burnt, but a Communist official who transfers Bauer to U.S. custody says that he �never broke his silence.�)

C.T.U. agents have used some of the same controversial interrogation methods that the U.S. has employed on some Al Qaeda suspects. In one instance, Bauer denies painkillers to a female terrorist who is suffering from a bullet wound, just as American officials have acknowledged doing in the case of Abu Zubaydah�one of the highest-ranking Al Qaeda operatives in U.S. custody. �I need to use every advantage I�ve got,� Bauer explains to the victim�s distressed sister.

The show sometimes toys with the audience�s discomfort about abusive interrogations. In Season Two, Bauer threatens to murder a terrorist�s wife and children, one by one, before the prisoner�s eyes. The suspect watches, on closed-circuit television, what appears to be an execution-style slaying of his son. Threatened with the murder of additional family members, the father gives up vital information�but Bauer appears to have gone too far. It turns out, though, that the killing of the child was staged. Bauer, the show implies, hasn�t crossed the line after all. Yet, under U.S. and international law, a mock execution is considered psychological torture, and is illegal.

On one occasion, Bauer loses his nerve about inflicting torture, but the show implicitly rebukes his qualms. In the episode, Bauer attempts to break a suspected terrorist by plunging a knife in his shoulder; the victim�s screams clearly disquiet him. Bauer says to an associate, unconvincingly, that he has looked into the victim�s eyes and knows that �he�s not going to tell us anything.� The other man takes over, fiercely gouging the suspect�s knee�at which point the suspect yells out details of a plot to explode a suitcase nuke in Los Angeles.

Throughout the series, secondary characters raise moral objections to abusive interrogation tactics. Yet the show never engages in a serious dialogue on the subject. Nobody argues that torture doesn�t work, or that it undermines America�s foreign-policy strategy. Instead, the doubters tend to be softhearted dupes. A tremulous liberal, who defends a Middle Eastern neighbor from vigilantism, is killed when the neighbor turns out to be a terrorist. When a civil-liberties-minded lawyer makes a high-toned argument to a Presidential aide against unwarranted detentions��You continue to arrest innocent people, you�re giving the terrorists exactly what they want,� she says�the aide sarcastically responds, �Well! You�ve got the makings of a splendid law-review article here. I�ll pass it on to the President.�

In another episode, a human-rights lawyer from a fictional organization called Amnesty Global tells Bauer, who wants to rough up an uncharged terror suspect, that he will violate the Constitution. Bauer responds, �I don�t wanna bypass the Constitution, but these are extraordinary circumstances.� He appeals to the President, arguing that any interrogation permitted by the law won�t be sufficiently harsh. �If we want to procure any information from this suspect, we�re going to have to do it behind closed doors,� he says.

�You�re talking about torturing this man?� the President says.

�I�m talking about doing what�s necessary to stop this warhead from being used against us,� Bauer answers.

When the President wavers, Bauer temporarily quits his job so that he can avoid defying the chain of command, and breaks the suspect�s fingers. The suspect still won�t talk, so Bauer puts a knife to his throat; this elicits the desired information. He then knocks the suspect out with a punch, telling him, �This will help you with the pain.�

Howard Gordon, who is the series� �show runner,� or lead writer, told me that he concocts many of the torture scenes himself. �Honest to God, I�d call them improvisations in sadism,� he said. Several copies of the C.I.A.�s 1963 KUBARK interrogation manual can be found at the �24� offices, but Gordon said that, �for the most part, our imaginations are the source. Sometimes these ideas are inspired by a scene�s location or come from props�what�s on the set.� He explained that much of the horror is conjured by the viewer. �To see a scalpel and see it move below the frame of the screen is a lot scarier than watching the whole thing. When you get a camera moving fast, and someone screaming, it really works.� In recent years, he said, �we�ve resorted a lot to a pharmacological sort of thing.� A character named Burke�a federal employee of the C.T.U. who carries a briefcase filled with elephantine hypodermic needles�has proved indispensable. �He�ll inject chemicals that cause horrible pain that can knock down your defenses�a sort of sodium pentothal plus,� Gordon said. �When we�re stuck, we say, �Call Burke!� � He added, �The truth is, there�s a certain amount of fatigue. It�s getting hard not to repeat the same torture techniques over and over.�

Gordon, who is a �moderate Democrat,� said that it worries him when �critics say that we�ve enabled and reflected the public�s appetite for torture. Nobody wants to be the handmaid to a relaxed policy that accepts torture as a legitimate means of interrogation.� He went on, �But the premise of �24� is the ticking time bomb. It takes an unusual situation and turns it into the meat and potatoes of the show.� He paused. �I think people can differentiate between a television show and reality.�

[ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ]

Replies:

Re: Whatever It Take: The Politics of Joel Surnow Part 2 -- Chgo, Sunday, February 18, 07:56:13am