A Hero in a Hurry

By Slavoj Zizek, In These Times. Posted February 2, 2006.

The fifth season of 24, the phenomenally successful Fox television series, premiered on Jan. 15.

Composed of 24 one-hour episodes, the show chronicles the workday of the fictitious L.A.-based Counter Terrorist Unit (CTU) as it desperately attempts to thwart a catastrophic terrorist attack. (In the fourth season, they stopped a stolen nuclear weapon from exploding above a major U.S. city.) The "real-time" nature of the series confers a strong sense of urgency, emphasized by the ticking of a digital clock and accentuated with hand-held camera shots and split-screens showing the concurrent actions of various characters.

Even the commercial breaks contribute to this sense of urgency: Before a commercial, we see an on-screen digital clock signalling it is "7:46." When the action resumes, the digital clock reads "7:51." The length of the break in our, the spectators', real time is exactly equivalent to the temporal gap in the on-screen narrative, as if the events nonetheless go on as we watch commercials. This makes it seem like the ongoing action is so pressing, spilling over into the real time of the spectator, that even commercial breaks cannot interupt it.

This brings up a crucial question: What does this all-pervasive sense of urgency mean ethically? The pressure of events is so overbearing, the stakes are so high, that they necessitate a suspension of ordinary ethical concerns. After all, displaying moral qualms when the lives of millions are at stake plays into the hands of the enemy.

CTU agents act in a shadowy space outside the law, doing things that "simply have to be done" in order to save society from the terrorist threat. This includes not only torturing terrorists when they are caught, but torturing CTU members or their closest relatives when they are suspected of terrorist links. In the fourth season, among those tortured were the secretary of defense's son-in-law and his own son (both with the secretary's full knowledge and support), as well as a female member of CTU, wrongly suspected of passing information to the terrorists. (After the torture, when new data confirms her innocence, she is asked to return to work. And since this is an emergency and every person is needed, she accepts!) The CTU agents not only treat terrorist suspects in this way -- after all, they are dealing with the "ticking bomb" situation evoked by Alan Dershowitz to justify torture in his book, "Why Terrorism Works" -- they also treat themselves as expendable, ready to lay down their colleagues' or their own lives if that will help prevent the terrorist act.

Special Agent Jack Bauer, played by Kiefer Sutherland, embodies this attitude at its purest. Without qualms, he tortures others and allows his superiors to put his life on the line. At the end of the fourth season, he agrees to be turned over to the People's Republic of China as a scapegoat for a CTU covert operation that killed a Chinese diplomat. Although he knows he will be tortured and imprisoned for life, he promises not to say anything that would hurt U.S. interests. The end of the fourth season leaves Jack in a paradigmatic situation: When he is informed by the ex-president of the United States, his close ally, that someone in the government ordered his death (delivering him to the wily Chinese torturers is considered too much of a security risk), his two closest friends in CTU organize his fake death. He then disappears into nowhere, anonymous, officially nonexisting.

In the "war on terror," it is not only the terrorists but the CTU agents who become what philosopher Giorgio Agamben calls homini sacer -- those who can be killed with impunity since, in the eyes of the law, their lives no longer count. While the agents continue to act on behalf of a legal power, their acts are no longer covered and constrained by the law --they operate in an empty space within the domain of the law.

It is here that we encounter the series' fundamental ideological lie: In spite of this thoroughly ruthless attitude of self-instrumentalization, the CTU agents, especially Jack, remain "warm human beings," caught in the usual emotional dilemmas of "normal" people. They love their wives and children, they suffer jealousy -- but at a moment's notice they are ready to sacrifice their loved ones for their mission. They are something like the psychological equivalent of decaffeinated coffee, doing all the horrible things the situation necessitates, yet without paying the subjective price for it.

Consequently, 24 cannot be simply dismissed as a pop cultural justification for the problematic methods of the United States in its war on terror. More is at stake. Recall the lesson of Francis Ford Coppola's "Apocalypse Now": The figure of Kurtz is not a reminder of some barbaric past, but the necessary outcome of modern Western power. Kurtz was a perfect soldier -- as such, through his overidentification with the military power system, he turned into the excess that the system had to eliminate in an operation that itself imitated the ruthlessness of Kurtz, what it was ostensibly fighting against.

Slavoj Zizek, a philosopher and psychoanalyst, is a senior researcher at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities, in Essen, Germany.

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