Hearts of Darkness

I spent three days last week watching a marathon of season 4 of 24. I can watch 24 only in marathon format; I think it would be impossible to sustain a level of suspense from week to week. We kept a tally of how many times the following phrases were uttered, although I now lack the highly scientific hard data:

"You Have to Trust Me": much fewer instances as compared with previous seasons, although Jack is never rogue in season 4

"There's Not Enough Time!": plenty, if one counts only the times Jack Bauer utters the phrase; off the charts if other characters are counted

*Chloe's sourpuss face*: tied with "There's Not Enough Time!" from Jack; has to be distinguished from other faces (Superiority, General Grumpiness, Adrenaline Rush) in Mary Lynn Rajskub's extensive repertoire for the character
"Open Up a Socket": fewer instances than season 3

Part of the way through the season, we realized we should have made tallies for "Dammit!" and something else.

As we were watching, Graham kept giving me significant looks every time a character on the show used torture, illegal or semi-illegal surveillance, and profiling to the advantage of the plot. "See!" he'd say, triumphantly or at least contrarily, "torture really does work!" or "Wire-tapping suspicious people can yield important information!" But torture and surveillance work on the show because they're functions of the script, not because they provide a practical model of how to fight terrorism. They work (or don't work) because they're supposed to contribute to the arc of the episodes. This interview with Michael Loceff, one of the head writers for the show, bears out this argument partly. Loceff argues that the show isn't "torture porn" because torture is used to tell viewers something about the characters, not to provide an argument for or against specific practices:

I think its [torture] real use in the show, aside from its narrative function, is to create dramatic conflict, conflict not just between two people but within characters as well. If you look at any given torture scene in the show, you'll find that there's something in it that shows someone's distaste or disgust. And Jack Bauer's decision to torture people for information in the past has cost him, because it's shown other people just exactly what he's capable of. Jack himself is appalled by what he feels he has to do, but he's also convinced he has to do it. That is a real dramatic conflict.

Discussing the uses of profiling and torture in season 3, Matt Feeney argues that invoking dramatic irony or character development isn't much of a defense:

In both Season 2 and Season 3, the writers set up a plot twist that hinged on the audience judging a character's ethnicity as a piece of evidence against him. But the agenda here is psychological, not political. No somber moral lessons unfold from this ethnic bait-and-switch. 24's writers are too agnostic to lecture us about ethnic profiling. Whether or not homeland security types are right to look more closely at certain ethnic groups, we instinctively latch onto such profiles ourselves, not necessarily out of racism, but as a way of coping with the darkness in which terrorists place us.

The writers of 24 grasp that when it comes to terrorism we are desperate for answers. Almost maliciously, they dangle something plausible in front of us. Then they yank it away at the last minute and replace it with something utterly outrageous, leaving us with nothing to believe in but the darkness itself.

Richard Kim makes a similar argument in an article from the Nation (December 26, 2005) when he discusses the ubiquity of torture in season 4:

In casting torture as melodrama, 24 reverses the dehumanizing mode of actual torture and replaces it with something familial and social. So blase are these victims of torture that they come as close as one can to consenting to it. Less focused on torture's instrumentality, the narrative upshot of torture in this rendition of 24 is that it troubles, deepens, and ultimately clarifies personal relationships.

Is the writers' substituting the pain of personal betrayal for the physical pain of torture a fair trade? How do other artists render the personal-political scaling of tragedy, say in Apocalypse Now, where the Vietnam War becomes a setting for larger questions about the human condition?