24: Time, Terror, Television

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24: Time, Terror, TelevisionWilliam G. Littlea

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By

William G. Little

Copyright © 2014 Taylor & Francis Group, LLCDOI: 10.1080/01956051.2013.763652

Time, Terror, Television24:

Abstract: The television program 24 is about time, terror, television, and the relays among them. It offers fantasies about hi-tech resolution of terrorism, but it repeatedly depicts the medium of television as an unresolvable other that rumbles capitalist and humanist dreams of eliminating threatening otherness—such as wasted time—in pursuit of profit and self-possession.

Keywords: anxiety, television, terror, time, 24

2

Figure1.President Obama and aides in the White House Situation Room. (Color figure available online.)

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24:Time,Terror,Television 3

ONE OF THE MOST WIDELY CIRCULATED IMAGES

associatedwithAmerica’sso-calledWaronTerrorisof

peoplewatchingtelevision.Theimageisaphotograph

ofPresidentObamaandhisinnercirclegatheredintheWhite

HouseSituationRoomtomonitorthenighttimeraidonOsamabin

Laden’scompoundinPakistancarriedoutbyU.S.SpecialForces

(Figure1).Whattheyarewatchingisalivefeedfromadrone.Yet,

theviewerofthephotographcannotseethebroadcastoreventhe

setbeingwatched.Theimageshowsonlythewatching.What,then,

makesitsocaptivating?

E t ch e d w i t h c o n c e rn a n d u n c e r t a i n t y, t h e f a c e s re v e a l n o t

o n l y t h e m a g n i t u d e o f t h e c o u n t e r t e rro ri s t o p e ra t i o n

b u t a l s o t h e u n s e t t l i n g n a t u re o f t e l e v i s i o n .

Read one way, the photograph ap-pears to provide dramatic support for the idea that the federal government works around the clock to counter ter-rorism. The image suggests that even when television is watched in the White House, time is not wasted. The image equates watching television with pursuit of national and international security. The watchers constitute a captive audi-ence—no one looks at the still camera or at another in the room—but their at-tention is held by an operation designed to rescue the national psyche, a hi-tech Western tale of the search for a savage other code-named “Geronimo.” The photograph links this anticipation of redemption to technology’s promise to transcend the limitations of bodily ex-perience, to annihilate time and space. The image depicts a select group, dis-

tinguished by their high security clear-ance and access to the most advanced communications systems, that uses televisual technology to contact special forces hidden from ordinary sight, mys-terious and awesome. The watchers are so drawn to the television as to almost be transported. The effect is heightened by Secretary Clinton’s pose, hand over mouth.

However, the photograph also func-tions as a commentary on how the medium of television complicates the technologically charged promise of re-demption. It points to the idea that tele-visual transport annihilates time and space, but it also highlights the extent to which such transport fails, just as one of the transport helicopters failed during the raid. Etched with concern and uncer-tainty, the faces reveal not only the mag-

nitude of the counterterrorist operation but also the unsettling nature of televi-sion. The watchers may have almost instantaneous access to what is taking place in real time, but their expressions suggest that they are, in agonizing ways, subject to time—both the timing of the operation and the time of transmission. Likewise, while they participate virtu-ally in the assault, the close quarters and stark setting emphasize their awareness that they are actually immobile, con-fined far from the site of the charge. The Situation Room may be an insular envi-ronment free of compromising bugs, but it is also a para-site. The unseen televi-sion constructs the watchers as parasites of a sort. They are attached to spaces (the Situation Room, the drone) that are not, properly speaking, their own, and they consume a televisual feed of un-

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4 JPF&T—JournalofPopularFilmandTelevision

invited guests infiltrating a home to at-tack a host, the resident hostile.

The photograph suggests that the message concerning the outcome of the raid has not yet been received. Left un-clear is what is happening on the televi-sion screen at the moment the shot was taken. Is the assault under way but still in doubt? Is the drone feed fuzzy? Did the link get interrupted? As the philosopher Michel Serres emphasizes, in French the term parasite also means static:

But one must write as well of the inter-ceptions, of the accidents in the flow along the way between stations—of changes and metamorphoses. What passes might be a message but parasites (static) prevent it from being heard, and sometimes, from being sent. Like a hole in a canal that makes the water spill into the surrounding area. There are escapes and losses, obstacles and opacities. Doors and windows close; Hermes might faint or die among us. An angel passes. Who stole the rela-tion? Maybe someone, somewhere in the middle, made a detour. (11)

In the photograph, the room is silent. Visions of escapes and losses. A drone passes over Abbottabad, Pakistan, a mechanical Hermes designed to deliver video. While the photograph recon-structs silence, it reproduces static; it recreates noise in the system. What, if anything, is on the television screen at the moment the picture was taken? What is the nature of the image lying on Sec-retary Clinton’s keyboard, an image dis-torted by pixels for security purposes? Why is the President not front and cen-ter? Why is he dressed less formally than his aides are? Who are all those people?

The television show 24 (2001–10) is a fictional depiction of counterterrorist activity that likewise illustrates intricate relays between terror and the televisual. As the photograph implies, television is a medium instrumental in the drive to resolve terrorism. Surveillance tech-nology such as the drone camera has become an increasingly critical means of collecting intelligence and tracking targets. Read one way, 24 functions as an advertisement for counterterrorism’s and television’s powers of resolution. In literal terms, the show’s Counter Ter-rorism Unit (CTU) uses the televisual to identify and stop terrorists operating on American soil. On an abstract level, this

technology works to elaborate a fantasy about national, economic, and communi-cation systems free of drag, whether it be the drag of subversive activity, the drag of wasted time, or the drag of “obstacles and opacities” (Serres 11) inherent in mediation. In such a fantasy, resolution entails ridding the body of parasites for good.

At the same time, 24 rumbles this fan-tasy by delivering a lengthy philosophi-cal meditation on the dangers of the drive for redeeming resolution. In the show, the televisual serves to track and neutral-ize threats, but at the same time televi-sion appears as an unsettling medium whose value and significance are not easily determined. The medium haunts counterterrorists in the show as well as viewers of the show. It is an elusive other that troubles humanism’s investment in the sovereignty of self-possession, pri-vacy, and private property. Moreover, the show’s narrative depicts the drive to resolve this kind of trouble as a threat to the social fabric. The leading char-acter, Jack Bauer, is a counterterrorist par excellence, but his techno-enhanced race to stop terrorist attacks is also an expression of hostility toward drags of any sort, including mediation. His dedi-cation to speed thus reflects philosophic, as well as strategic, concerns about be-ing in time. He demonstrates the skills of an elite agent and the frictional relation-ship to institutional authority typical of a hardboiled private eye, but his fieldwork is not just guided by a moral code. He is anxious about time, and, like the watch-ers in the Situation Room, he is anxious about how television affects the experi-ence of time. The show makes clear that his attempts to resolve these anxieties are exhilarating and terrifying.

Show Time

24’s sensitivity to anxiety about time is evident in its dramatization of ur-gency. CTU’s race against time seems to mirror capitalism’s imperative to minimize unproductive time. The ar-chitecture of CTU headquarters in Los Angeles, California, embodies this re-flection. The bilevel central interior is a panoptic space designed to ensure that no one wastes time on the job. Analysts and technicians are stationed on the main level, an open floor plan without walls and with virtually no privacy, in full view of the glass-walled director’s office on the second floor. They are pressured by the logic of mechanical time, logic made graphic to the viewer through the digital clock that renders each moment (ac)countable.

The show’s valorization of speed and efficiency is complicated by the fact that, as Christoph Asendorf points out, the very act of telling a story threat-ens the hegemony of mechanical time: “The storyteller’s time and the time of narration is, with its free choice between various temporal forms (memory, pres-ent, fiction), in a certain respect related to the unregulated time of the divine. And the factory lords directed their disciplinary maneuvers against it . . .” (146). 24 counters this threat in a clever fashion. It constructs stories about workplace elements resistant to regu-lation (e.g., arrogant bosses, slavish associates, backstabbing employees, and a certain independent-minded field agent), but it places those stories within a tightly regulated narrative framework whose structuring principle of urgency denies characters and viewers much time for reflection.

24 ’s s e n s i t i v i t y t o a n x i e t y a b o u t

t i m e i s e v i d e n t i n i t s d ra m a t i z a t i o n

o f u rg e n c y.

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Its more elaborate strategy for moni-toring disruptive, “other” kinds of time is to tell stories that expose anxieties about, and offer fantastic solutions to, terrorism’s relationship to time. Season 4 is a good example of how the show screens such anxiety. In the opening scene of the first episode, terrorists de-rail a train to steal a device that enables them to trigger a meltdown of nuclear power plants. Given that the railroad was largely responsible for the regular-ization and homogenization of temporal experience, the derailment represents an attack on a model of mechanical time. In the words of cultural historian Lynne Kirby, “The railroad provided the para-digm of a radically new time conscious-ness, for it is the railroads that gave rise to, indeed mandated, standard time the world over” (50). As Bauer succinctly puts it in the same episode, “Trains don’t deviate. They’re on a fixed course of schedule.” Likewise, the failure to stop the derailment produces a spec-tacular reminder that, in the real world, terrorism operates according to no dis-cernible schedule. The violence can take place at any time. Whereas mechanical time designs the future to be a calcu-lable, productive repeat of the present, terrorism creates a future marked by an incalculable potential for more acts of terror. Terrorism resists regulation and perverts rational speculation. The critic W. J. T. Mitchell identifies the threat as follows: “[T]errorism turns the protec-tive function of the imagination—its ability to foresee what is to come—against itself by provoking anxiety and self-destructive fantasy” (301). To il-lustrate the mind’s viral propagation of future terror, Mitchell uses the metaphor of cloning. It is a trope that equates se-rial production with monstrous experi-mentation: “[T]error works on the col-lective imagination to clone images of horror, many of which were of course already anticipated in Hollywood disas-ter movies” (301). Season 4 connects cloning, terror, and time by introducing the Araz family, an ideologically vague family-as-sleeper-cell that has been in-cubating in Los Angeles for years. Once activated, the cell replicates in the form of a series of attacks, including several that turn “protective function[s]” against

themselves: the injection of a computer virus designed to jam the Internet; the theft (from the train) and deployment of a safety mechanism called an override device for the purpose of melting down nuclear power plants; the co-option of a fighter jet and pilot in order to shoot down Air Force One; the acquisition of the nuclear football for the purpose of launching an American nuclear missile against the homeland.

Removal of a head of state. Release of warheads. The course of this vi-ral narrative is noteworthy because it raises two specters—decapitation and nuclear catastrophe—that real terror-ism conjures in order to provoke acute “anxiety and self-destructive fantasy.” Mitchell describes how one way terror-ists create such anxiety and fantasy is by disseminating imagery of the headless: “The acephalic figure has cloned itself in a wide variety of forms in the war on terror. The decapitation of hostages as a spectacle to be recorded and circulated in the mass media is only the most literal and hideous of the images” (301–02). Reflecting on the events of 9/11, Jacques Derrida argues that particular spectacles of decapitation must be understood as linked to terrorism’s abiding determina-tion to implant in the imagination mind-blowing possibilities. He describes the attacks as a concerted effort to sever the head of the “American corpus”—“It [the attacks] will have targeted and hit the heart or, rather, the symbolic head of the prevailing world order. Right at the level of the head (cap, caput, capital, Capitol)” (95)—and to trigger specula-tions of future trauma that include, at the limit of the imaginable, the scenario of a nuclear catastrophe:

There is traumatism with no possible work of mourning when the evil comes from the possibility to come of the worst, from the repetition to come—though worse. Traumatism is produced by the future, by the to come, by the threat of the worst to come, rather than by an aggression that is ‘over and done with.’ . . . The threat of a chemical at-tack, no doubt, or bacteriological at-tack . . . but especially the threat of a nuclear attack. (97)

For Derrida, a nuclear attack represents the very “worst to come” because it im-plies, at its worst, a temporal experience

that defies any cognitive containment strategy. One cannot get one’s head around it. An actual nuclear war would, at its worst, not be (merely) a mani-festation of terror within a continuum of the terrifying but would realize the “unanticipatable entirely-other” (23). This Other terror is “unanticipatable” not only because the destruction is des-tined to exceed the collective capacity to screen (i.e., symbolize) it either in advance or in the aftermath but also be-cause it is destined to occur by means, in part, of unforeseeable error (mis-guided envoys; scrambled messages; faulty deliveries; rogue missiles): “The unthinkable element offers itself to (be) thought in the age when a nuclear war is possible: one, or rather, from the outset, some sendings, many sendings, missiles that simulate the process, escape all con-trol, all reassimilation or self-regulation of a system that they will have precipi-tously (too rapidly, in order to avert the worst) but irreversibly destroyed” (29). The worst end to the serial buildup of nuclear arms is one defined by unre-claimable waste. At this end time, there is no realization of profit, no redemp-tive unveiling. At this end time, there is no show time. Such a time is, instead, “the historical and ahistorical horizon of an absolute self-destructibility with-out apocalypse, without revelation of its own truth, without absolute knowledge” (27).

24 counters the anxiety this most se-cret Other generates by staging catas-trophe. Mary Ann Doane and Patricia Mellencamp have argued that television in general capitalizes on catastrophe be-cause, paradoxically, catastrophe threat-ens to disrupt television’s systematic flow of information. A break-in on the regularly scheduled, catastrophe chal-lenges ideas of mastery and progress that structure television programming and, more broadly, mechanical time. In Doane’s words, “Catastrophic time stands still. Catastrophe signals the fail-ure of the escalating technological de-sire to conquer nature” (231). Broadcast of such failure is captivating in part be-cause, like storytelling, it points toward a time other than profit-minded time. It hints at a time marked by radical discon-tinuity, by waste, by the unscripted real.

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According to Mellencamp, desire to view catastrophe’s shocking disruption bears traces of masochism since it sug-gests a longing to submit to something that subverts lawful parameters and pe-rimeters, a death-dealing otherness over which one has no control: “We await catastrophe as the ultimate promise and noble dream of television—when time is open-ended, commercial-free, and we are helpless” (248). 24 taps into this spellbinding promise through its claim that the action is taking place in “real time” and through its buildup to catastrophe (DVD and streamed pre-sentations of the show, both “commer-cial-free” formats, contribute to the sen-sational promise). The tension is killing me. I can’t stand it. I’m out of my head. It’s virtually torture.

Yet, the concept of a buildup to ca-tastrophe reveals that the show mirrors television’s drive to neutralize real ca-tastrophe’s dead time even as it enter-tains it. Like television news, 24 flirts with catastrophe, continually countering the terror of a temporal breach by cov-ering it. One form this coverage takes is the serial dramatization of crisis. Ev-ery nuclear subplot is, to some degree, anticipatable. Anxiety about the asym-metrical, sporadic, insurgent nature of real terrorism is countered by depiction of a race to control arms in which ter-rorists bent on deployment and coun-terterrorists bent on deterrence use ad-vanced digital technologies to obtain information and streamline operations. The two sides mirror each other, like opposing states in a Cold War escala-tion. This race makes television time neither oppressively homogenous and empty nor catastrophically open-ended. As Doane indicates, “Most effective [in drawing viewers], perhaps, is the crisis

of temporality which signifies urgency and which is attached to the information itself as its single most compelling attri-bute. Information becomes most visibly information, becomes a televisual com-modity, on the brink of its extinction or loss” (225). 24 traffics in urgency, and its crises are bound up with production of information (e.g., grid coordinates, sensor readings, phone traces, evac pro-tocols) flickering across screens.

In this context, CTU analysts appear to be model television viewers. They spend most of their time in front of screens, but their viewing is productive. They are positioned as perpetually wait-ing (for information, for the arrival of catastrophe, for the resolution of crisis), but their watching-as-waiting is not a waste of time. In the words of television theorist Anna McCarthy, “[A]lthough it might be described as a state of inac-tivity, waiting—along with queues and traffic jams it engenders—is a situation we often find ourselves in at times of ur-gency, emergency, and crisis. It would be wrong, therefore to associate wait-ing solely with passivity and implicate television in this passivity . . .” (199). She describes how televisions placed in “waiting environments” such as lobbies

and queues often broadcast material with “disciplinary agendas”: advertisements designed to create consumer desire; closed-circuit surveillance feeds of the waiting environments designed to keep people in line; escapist fare designed to distract the anxious customer or patient. Thus, insofar as good CTU analysts are tuned to the urgent and trained in self-discipline, they are proper consumers, neither bored out of their minds nor scared out of their minds.

The show further capitalizes on crisis by dramatizing ethical dilemmas that involve the necessity of a choice, such as those in which a decision must be made between securing the safety of a loved one and securing the safety of a populace. The choice may be excruciat-ing for chooser and viewer, but the very concept of a decision (from GK, krisis) counters the terror of mechanical-time-in-crisis because it constructs the time of crisis as limited and contained. The show emphasizes this comforting limita-tion through its reliance on tight framing and close-ups. The latter device makes each character resemble a fictional news anchor whose face is, according to Richard Dienst, the site “where all rays of representation leave and return” (164). The face that covers (the screen, the crisis) acts as a counter to the cov-ered face (the specter of decapitation). It also acts as a counter to real nuclear catastrophe because it puts a recogniz-able other in place of ungraspable Oth-erness. As Doane puts it, “the character on the screen—dead or alive—is always definitely other . . . the screen is not a mirror” (235).

24’s coverage of catastrophe thus of-fers a fantasy of timely, unambiguous

24 c o u n t e rs t h e a n x i e t y t h i s m o s t

s e c re t O t h e r g e n e ra t e s b y staging

c a t a s t ro p h e .

T h e s h o w f u r t h e r c a p i t a l i z e s o n

c ri s i s b y d ra m a t i z i n g e t h i c a l

d i l e m m a s t h a t i n v o l v e t h e n e c e s s i t y

o f a ch o i c e …

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resolution. Similar to a CTU analyst, the viewer is jacked up on the pos-sibility of fully processing, in crisis, a considerable amount of information, of making all the pieces fit, of binding together multiple narrative threads. In short, the viewer is invited to play spec-tatorial sadist. The show intensifies the thrill of binding by means of what Lisa Nakamura calls “the spectacle of the digital sublime” (111), surveillance and mapping technologies that make radical deviance visible before it is altogether too late. Schematics are scanned, arms dealers identified. The origin, destina-tion, and capacity of weapons are al-ways made known. A telling example of such technology is Facial Recognitions System, designed to make out identity by matching or clarifying the image of a face. What makes the instrumentation spectacular is that it always resolves the visage. The head (shot) is never lost to degradation, alteration, or a power cut. The Facial Recognitions System ensures that suspects, like warheads, are never completely beyond reach. In contrast to nuclear catastrophe’s revelation without absolute knowledge, the biometric tech-nologies on display in 24 make for rev-elation with absolute knowledge:

Facial recognition technologies are used in the program [24] both for and against the US, as weapons in identi-fying terrorists and as weapons used by terrorists against the government. Yet in either case such technologies represent the sine qua non of absolute identification. They work to fulfill the fantasy of absolute knowledge of an individual gained in his or her absence and in defiance of the passage of time, of history itself. (Nakamura 118)

SpliTTing Time

While facial recognition technology exemplifies the show’s determination to resolve anxieties about terrorism, it also feeds an anxiety that, within the show, is resistant to resolution, namely anxiety about the medium of television itself. The Facial Recognitions System tech-nology is literally linked to the televisual in that it is most often used to resolve a face captured by a security camera. The software is applied to a mechanized form of sight generated and relayed from

somewhere else, so that an analyst sees what would otherwise be inaccessible. As Samuel Weber puts it, “[Television] involves a transmission or transposition of vision itself. The televisual spectator can see things from places—and hence, from perspectives and points of view (and it is not trivial that these are often more than one)—where his or her body is not (and often never can be) situated” (“Television” 116). In 24, terrorists and counterterrorists continually monitor screens. What often appears on those screens is an act of vision recorded at, and transmitted from, a site where the viewer “is not”: a satellite, a security bunker, an interrogation room, a traffic cam, a hyperbaric chamber, the cockpit of a drone, the other end of a teleconfer-ence call.

While the show illustrates how tele-vision programming works to counter the threat of wasted time, its obsessive depiction of televisual communication constitutes a philosophical exploration of television as a medium whose iden-tity is not easily resolved, an irresolution that produces considerable anxiety, if not terror. In Weber’s words: “The television screen is the site of an uncanny confusion and confounding” (“Television” 121). The medium confuses and confounds by unsettling a viewer’s relationship to time and space. It delivers distant vision vir-tually immediately, confounding the dif-ference between original stuff perceived by a remote ‘eye’ and representation of that stuff as it is recorded and transmit-ted to a receiving eye. Furthermore, what the viewer receives may be described as “live,” “delayed,” or “previously re-corded,” making potentially uncertain a viewer’s temporal relationship to the dis-tant vision. This uncertainty is inherent in television’s recording process since the transmission of even “live” televi-sion is not perfectly immediate. Like-wise, tele-vision challenges a viewer’s sense of space by troubling the distinc-tion between near and far, present and absent. The television set may be a sta-ple feature of the home, but, as the word uncanny implies, one cannot be fully at home with television:

[W]hatever we see is no longer clearly distinguishable from the distant vision being transmitted. What we see, above

and beyond the content of the images, is someone or something seeing. But that someone or something remains at an irreducible, indeterminable distance from the television viewer; and this distance splits the ‘sameness’ of the in-stant of perception as well as the iden-tity of the place in which such view-ing seems to occur. When we ‘watch’ television, we are watching out for this split, for this instant and place turned inside out. (“Television” 122)

The splitting that defines the televisual creates what might be called a crisis be-yond crisis, a crisis without resolution since it is not structured by a decision or an event. Troubling the distinction between now and later, here and there, a viewer’s own vision and another’s transmitted vision, television is a me-dium whose status is always in question. This uncertainty is compounded by new modes of reception, such as streaming video and digital video recording, which make problematic what counts as proper television. With content increasingly accessed “on demand,” what happens to the real time of a television experi-ence? According to Weber, television is an “undecidable other” (“Television” 121). It doesn’t have a clear face. So while 24 routinely decides the identity of a terrorist other, using the rationale of urgency to cut off the other’s voice, background, and story (not to mention to cut the body during interrogation), a close look at how the show handles television-as-medium reveals that it ani-mates this undecidable other in creative, sophisticated ways. Unlike a conven-tional show, 24 entertains television as a ghostly presence.

In one respect, the show depicts television as a critical tool in the fight against terrorism. The televisual facili-tates decision making by enabling coun-terterrorists to see what is geographi-cally and temporally at a distance. This farsightedness is evident whenever an analyst uses transmissions from a dan-gerous site to guide an operative. Click-ing or zapping from one feed to another, a figure in office looks ahead on behalf of a figure in the field, identifying tar-gets, hot spots, possible escape routes. In another respect, though, the dynamic hints at tele-vision’s “inside out” effect because the character working in CTU

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is, in some sense, closer to the action and more tied to the place in question than the character out on point.

The effect appears to have a substan-tial impact on the show’s characters, for many of those situated in front of screens are depicted as watchers of screens. They may simulate proper consumers of television, but at the same time they exhibit the spectatorial wariness watch-ing implies, a posture reinforced by the fact that they are never shown viewing a television show. When a conventional television set appears, it is almost al-ways tuned to the news. The absence of a show-within-the-show casts the fictional viewer as a figure reliant on the televisual but not riveted by it, not drawn to a self-contained, aesthetically significant artifact worth seeing. This quasi-detachment is also highlighted by the fact that the fictional viewer’s space is neither clearly private nor public. For terrorist and counterterrorist, what ap-pears on a personal screen is always, at some level (of clearance) available to others, over the shoulder, at another ter-minal, or, in Season 8, through redirec-tion onto a wall-size screen that domi-nates CTU (Figure 2). In all of these scenarios, viewing is accompanied by social interaction, dividing the worker’s attention between here and there, desk

and deployment zone. In her analysis of how viewers negotiate multiple and/or overhead television monitors in public spaces (such as a bar or an airport gate), McCarthy argues that this arrangement produces an attention split:

We hesitate between two modes of spa-tiality—distance and proximity—so that mediated images can seem more “live” than the person with whom we are sitting. . . . On the one hand, the [viewing] subject is interwoven with image-based networks of long-distance exchange and information transmis-

sion, on the other he or she is a rational, discursive, copresent citizen of a space, of a conversation, of a social relation-ship. If spectatorship is a subject posi-tion that offers a kind of “virtual mo-bility,” then the paradoxical effect of the multiscreen apparatus is to anchor us in place, making us unable to take off. (124)

The character that most clearly exhibits such hesitation is Chloe O’Brian, Bau-er’s trusted analyst. An expert monitor of screens, she is awkward in the pres-ence of other people and struggles to

Tro u b l i n g t h e d i s t i n c t i o n b e t w e e n

n o w a n d l a t e r, h e re a n d t h e re , a

v i e w e r’s o w n v i s i o n a n d a n o t h e r’s

t ra n s m i t t e d v i s i o n , t e l e v i s i o n i s a

m e d i u m w h o s e s t a t u s i s a l w a y s

i n q u e s t i o n .

Figure2. The full-size wall screen in the Counter Terrorism Unit in Season 8 (2010). (Color figure available online.)

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perform rituals of social exchange. In certain respects, the person to whom she is closest is Jack—she describes him as a friend and is fiercely loyal to him—although, ironically, the majority of her contact with him comes at a distance. Her facility with the televisual and her relationship with Bauer suggest that she is someone for whom mediated images are as alive as the people by whom she is surrounded.

24 pushes to an extreme the anxiety television-as-indefinable-other creates by repeatedly presenting scenarios in which terrorists use television to sow terror. Illustrating Derrida’s idea that real terrorism entails “autoimmuntary aggression” (Borradori 95), terrorists turn the protective mechanism of tele-vision coverage against the fictional viewer, drawing the viewer near only to make him or her feel helplessly distant. This effect is often produced by visual transmission of a hostage situation. In Season 5, Chechnyan rebels take over Ontario airport in southern California, demand that President Logan repudi-ate an anti-terrorism accord about to be signed with the Russians, and, when the demand is not met in time, execute a hostage on live TV (Episode 3). In Season 8, Omar Hassan, the president of an Islamic state who is working with President Alison Taylor to negoti-ate a peace treaty, is taken hostage and executed on screen. This act of terror is compounded by the fact that recipi-ents of the broadcast (President Taylor, watching from a conference room; Jack Bauer and partner Renee Walker, clos-ing in on the transmission site) assume the transmission was live, only to dis-cover it was previously recorded. The rescue team arrives too late. The terror-ists have played terrifying head games. They nearly decapitate Hassan and, at the same time, they flaunt tele-vision as an instrument that unsettles the con-cept of being in time. A bullet-shattered, full-length mirror looms behind Walker in the execution room, symbolizing the viewers’ psychological dislocation (Figure 3). No wonder that when Presi-dent Taylor leaves the conference room to inform Hassan’s wife and daughter of the death, she delivers a command

rarely heard on the show: “And clear the screens” (Episode 16).

In Season 2, Bauer goes so far as to combine television with hostage-taking for the purpose of torturing a suspect. Determined to discover the location of a bomb, he places in front of a suspect named Syed Ali two television sets, each of which shows a supposedly live feed of Ali’s wife and two sons held cap-tive in their homeland by U.S. Special Forces (Figure 4). When Ali refuses to cooperate, Bauer orders the oldest son executed. After viewing the execution, Ali confesses. It is then revealed that the death was staged, facilitated by techni-cal trickery. The broadcast that flips the terrorist turns out to be doubly split. Not only are there two sets, each providing a different angle on the suspect’s fam-ily, but the set on which the fake death plays has been physically and tempo-rally divided between a live feed of the

younger son and a previously recorded feed of the older son’s ‘execution.’ The set-up is so disorienting that even Bauer needs to get his bearings: “Reroute the satellite back to its normal feed. Yes, I want confirmation” (Episode 12).

24’s repeated, creative use of a split screen further explores the impact of television’s split. Presenting multiple distant visions at once, the split screen would seem to bear the mark of the sublime, an ecstatic vision of space and time annihilated. It even promises abso-lute knowledge of a single space when-ever it presents, simultaneously, differ-ent views of action occurring within that space: multiple angles on a particular movement; shots and reverse shots of face-to-face conversation; a shot of a character watching a screen and a shot of the screen being watched. In short, the split screen would seem to eliminate all sorts of waste.

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Figure3.Renee Walker (Annie Wersching) in Season 8, Episode 16 (2010). (Color figure available online.)

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However, the split screen also makes graphic television’s capacity to displace. Critic Deborah Jermyn describes how the split screen makes the show’s viewer feel intensely there, immersed in the di-egetic world by means of access to mul-tiple narratives at the same time (and in “real time”), but also reminds the viewer that he or she is here, in front of a screen, watching television: “24 is a text rich in complexity and contradiction; one which uses split-screen to draw us into a spectatorial position which arguably aligns us with the characters (and hero in particular), while simultaneously ma-nipulating the screen in a manner which draws attention to its own status as a constructed televisual text” (53). Fur-thermore, the split screen makes it dif-ficult to set one’s sight properly. Like a board of security camera feeds, a bank of televisions screens (a resemblance frequently bolstered by placement of a diegetic television in one of the frames), or a computer screen with multiple open windows, the split screen makes it dif-ficult to know where to look. The impli-cations of this difficulty are dramatized in a scene from Season 7, Episode 12. The episode opens on the silhouette of a figure watching a television set, tuned to cable news. The screen-within-a-screen displays night-vision footage of U. S. troops entering the African nation of Sangala to displace a repressive regime. 24’s screen then splits, the original im-

age of the footage now accompanied by two frames, one in which President Tay-lor is revealed to be the figure watching the television set, the other in which the show’s credits roll (Figure 5). A repor-torial voiceover on the diegetic televi-sion intones, “Swift and decisive is how the Pentagon describes the U.S. inva-sion now underway,” but it is unclear whether the footage is live. The foot-age gives way to a transmission of San-galese General Benjamin Juma issuing a statement defiantly denying the inva-sion’s success. The reporter claims the statement was delivered on “state spon-sored television,” though an American network logo is stamped on the broad-cast. President Taylor turns to Admiral Smith, who has also been watching. The credit-filled frame remains, paired now with a close-up shot of the President and an over-the-shoulder shot of her ad-dressing the Admiral. She asks, “When do we think this was made?” As is fre-quently the case in 24 (not to mention in the photograph of President Obama and others following the raid on Bin Laden’s compound), the President is cast as a representative watcher of television. Her struggle to establish a temporal re-lation to what she is watching (and, by extension, to establish the whereabouts of Juma, who will soon appear in the nation’s capital to take her hostage in an effort to displace or decapitate her) parallels the viewer’s struggle to sort the

televisual material presented on the split screen and, given the simultaneous dis-play of credits and narrative, to identify the show proper, its “real time.”

Television’s capacity to deterritori-alize and destabilize is also reflected in the show’s setting. The most com-mon physical sites—docks, industrial parks, warehouses, conference rooms, office buildings, bungalows—lack dis-tinguishing features that would tie them to specific landscapes or communi-ties. The result is that, as Christopher Hight suggests, each architectural space seems to be less part of a real city than a cybernetic world: “The show operates through a massively linked non-scalar networking topology: ‘small worlds’ linked to each other via the co-valent bonds of electronic infrastructures that unlink propinquity, propriety and prox-imity from territoriality. . . . [24] offers a temporal montage of an urban condi-tion in which flows of vehicular mobil-ity have been supplanted by the inertia of simultaneity and the flow of infor-mation, where there is no exterior but rather a vast network of interiors” (380). New “molecular” spaces are introduced, but they are all wired more or less the same way. Like the split screen images that replicate on screen, each of whose appearance is timed to the ticking of the show’s digital clock, the geographical spaces are virtual clones of one another.

One might even say that in 24 the me-dium of television resembles a clone. It looms as a shadowy, serial presence that threatens the integrity of the humanist subject. Splitting the viewer spatially and temporally, as well producing “the inertia of simultaneity,” television in 24 is bewildering. In this context, it is tell-ing that the show draws on the genre of the captivity narrative. Bauer repeatedly runs errands into the wilderness in an effort to redeem women or effeminate figures taken hostage by terrorist sav-ages that have launched attacks on the weakly fortified settlements of home and workplace. The narrative would seem to cast Bauer as a masculine pri-vate “I” who compensates for what Susan Faludi calls the “shaming mem-ory” (215) of failed American male pro-tectorship, memory traceable to colonial

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Figure6.Facial Recognition System being used in Season 6, Episode 7 (2007). (Color figure available online.)

Figure4. Jack Bauer (Keifer Sutherland) tricks Syed Ali (Francesco Quinn) into giving information in Season 2, Episode 12 (2003). (Color figure available online.)

Figure5. President Taylor (Cherry Jones) in Season 7, Episode 12 (2009). (Color figure available online.)


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terrors about native attacks and reacti-vated by the 9/11 attacks. Like a blade runner, he makes hi-tech walks down the mean streets of the urban jungle (including, in Seasons 7 and 8, with the ironically named Renee Walker), yet he appears oddly remote from its currents and spaces. He expresses no personal interest in money (and never uses it), consumer goods (most of the time he is not even wearing a watch), or . . . tele-vision. He speaks intermittently of de-votion to family and nation, but his real cause may be to rescue the humanist self from a fate worse than death. His mis-sion to save time is also an elite agent’s attempt to transcend the post-human world contemporary television has helped to create. He may embody the demands of mechanical time that struc-ture capitalism, but he seems to want out of this world.

Perhaps the best illustration of Bau-er’s mission to realize a redemptive no time is his ferocious treatment of bodies. In the show, bodies are rigged to func-tion like objects. At one level, bodily ac-tion is bound up with technology so that, in effect, the body becomes a prosthetic extension of the networks into which it is plugged. At another level, bodies are also constantly being acquired (i.e., bribed, kidnapped, held hostage), ex-changed (in negotiations), and replaced (in the office and in the terrorist cell); the circulation of bodies resembles the circulation of information. The rigging serializes bodies, a phenomenon made graphic by the rows and columns of body icons that appear on a CTU screen to represent casualty estimates. The body in 24 is projected as something made—an artifact, a representation—and Bauer, despite the fact that he is, in some ways, an example of self-making (season 6 reveals that he declined to en-ter his father’s business, broke with the family, and entered the military), races against time to try to make bodies sig-nify naturally, immediately.

This determination is on full display in his acts of torture. In each case, Bauer is faced with a figure not immediately leg-ible. The resistant captive is deceptive, an embodiment of the noise inherent in the systems with which he engages. In response, he endeavors to take the sub-

ject out of circulation, to remove the fig-ure from the world. Then, in an effort to make the body function as a transparent sign, he literally breaks through it, striv-ing to extract undistorted Truth. Digging into the body, he sets out to conquer the wilderness. It is agricultural work (Ger. bauer = grower, farmer) with an anticul-tural aim. More than once he cuts open a body to extract a piece of technology (e.g., a data disc hidden under the skin [Season 7, Episode 10]; a swallowed cell phone SIM card [Season 8, Episode 21]), violent efforts to make the body im-mediate. He uses torture the way CTU uses Facial Recognitions System, to achieve timeless mastery by acquir-ing absolute knowledge. The two means of obtaining information overlap in a scene where Bauer is interrogating his corrupt brother, who is hooked up to a lie detector complete with a screen that projects thermal scans of the sibling’s face (Figure 6). Translating the orange glow emanating from these heat sensi-tive head shots, Burke, the technician, recognizes in the face a legible sign of the brother’s determination to stall for time, to remain illegible: “Expiration and temperature patterns indicate de-ception” (Season 6, Episode 7).

The show may depict Bauer’s inter-rogation methods as successful because they save time, but it portrays his quest to preserve the humanist self as a failure. This failure is exemplified in a televisu-ally dense scene from the final season that bears traces of both an interroga-tion scene and a captivity narrative. A would-be suicide bomber locks himself in a hyperbaric chamber in a hospital. Bauer wants the young man, Marcos Al-Zacar, to open up, literally and figu-ratively, in order to reveal where a radio-logical device destined for Manhattan will be detonated. The matter is urgent, in part because Al-Zacar is rewiring his suicide vest, a weapon remotely disabled by CTU. Unable to access the body di-rectly in time, Bauer conducts the inter-rogation via a two-way video monitor in the chamber wall. At the same time, the exchange appears on split screens (additional images come from surveil-lance cameras in the chamber) watched by CTU agents and by terrorists tap-ping into the feed. Complicating matters further, Al-Zacar is American. Young, soft-faced, doe-eyed, and hesitant, he resembles a feminine captive in need of rescue. Eventually he agrees to talk, after Bauer brings his mother to the hospital

Figure7.An angry Jack Bauer (Keifer Sutherland) in Season 8, Episode 11 (2010). (Color figure available online.)

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and threatens to expose her to contami-nation should the blast occur.

In a number of ways, Al-Zacar is a parasite, embedded in the body of the hospital and the terrorist group. Burned by the outside world—his Arab father was unjustly imprisoned in the U.S. and later committed suicide as a result—he seeks sanctuary in an oxygen chamber and in self-destruction. Burrowing in, he undertakes a type of cloning, replicating the hosts’ hi-tech wiring by literally re-wiring the exterior of his own body:

To avoid the hostility of the host, it [the parasite] sometimes copies some of the cells of the surrounding tissue. Thus it minimizes its risks by lightly trans-forming its own body, changing hostil-ity into hospitality, exchanging outside for inside. Outside it meets challeng-ers; it can be destroyed by the climate that is variable, by history that is im-probable; it can die from an absence of hosts, be they intermediate or de-finitive. The set of these constraints—deadly ones—winds up pushing it into another type of relation. It thrives and develops by leaving the battle. It in-vents a life with minimal risk. Rather stable. (Serres 195)

This embedding generates considerable noise in the system, not least for Bauer,

disturbances that cannot be immediately resolved: “The parasite intervenes, en-ters the system as an element of fluctua-tion. It excites or incites it; it puts it into motion or it paralyzes it” (Serres 191). The parasite incites Bauer in part be-cause he can’t extract it from the tech-nological matrix of which he is a part. He can’t dig it out from under his skin. The parasite’s intervention paralyzes the private “I” enough that he requires a fe-male figure—a mother no less—to help with the extraction/rescue. Al-Zacar eventually emerges, but even then Bauer is unable to free the body altogether. He cannot remove the suicide vest before the terrorists, wired to the scene by the televisual, trigger a failsafe mechanism. He cannot secure a “rather stable” re-deeming real. No wonder that, desper-ate to reduce static, desperate to access the pure air of the perfectly unmediated, Bauer looks into the (split) screen of the video monitor that links him to, and separates him, from Al-Zacar and rages: “Look in my eyes” (Season 8, Episode 11; Figure 7).

While this terrorist crisis chronicles Bauer’s failures to redeem and be re-deemed, its status as television spectacle would seem to redeem the viewer. Like the show as a whole, it promises relief through delivery of a repeated rush. It simulates a redemptive experience to the extent that the viewer loses track of mechanical time, gets swept up in the show’s “real” time. The show’s spectac-ular use of time resembles what Weber describes as the spectacular treatment of terrorism by Western mainstream news. While media coverage of terrorism may

provoke a sense of anxiety about per-sonal security and integrity, it ultimately produces in the viewer a sense of “de-sired unity” by localizing and distancing the threat, by turning it into a spectacle:

The viewer is encouraged to look for-ward and simultaneously to forget the past; encouraged to identify with the ostensibly invulnerable perspective of the camera registering the earthbound destruction as blips tens of thousand [sic] of feet below. Such a position seems to assure the triumph of the spectator over the mortality of earth-bound life. (“War” 457)

Read this way, television proves deci-sive. It doesn’t leave the self displaced or split. Insofar as 24 invests in urgency, pressuring the viewer to look forward and forget the past, it fosters such an “invulnerable perspective.” However, the show’s complex portrait of Jack Bauer constitutes a challenge to the as-sumption of transcendent assurance.

This challenge is made acutely evi-dent in the show’s final season, when Bauer’s pursuit of redemption becomes increasingly disturbing. Renee Walker, already traumatized by her undercover work within a terrorist cell, allows her-self to be retaken captive by its sadistic leader. She then frees herself by killing her captor, after which she is murdered in Bauer’s apartment just as he thinks they have left the field, fled the wilderness for good. Having failed to rescue and pro-tect her, he embarks on a quest to find her killer and unmask the international conspiracy that resulted in her death. In his rage, he comes to resemble a suicidal terrorist. He attacks former President Logan’s motorcade wearing full body

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armor that renders him a terrifying, face-less figure, an ambulatory hyperbaric chamber (Figure 8). Soon after, he plans to assassinate Logan for his involve-ment in the conspiracy. Like a martyr, he makes a video justifying his actions.

Where does this portrait of the pro-tagonist position the viewer? The show’s final scene is telling. President Taylor speaks with Bauer by telephone, expressing remorse for participating in a cover-up of the conspiracy he has been bent on revealing. She grants him a par-don, thereby saving him from execution by a black ops team. At the CTU head-quarters, O’Brian and other analysts watch his image, courtesy of a drone’s televisual transmission, projected on the wall screen. Simultaneously justi-fied and guilty, he is difficult to resolve. As he says to the President: “We’ll both have to live with the things we’ve done.” The undecidability is reinforced by foot-age from the drone, which frames him from above (Figure 9). This meta-tele-visual move serves as a reminder of his complicity with the televisual, but at

the same time it makes him resemble a target of the televisual, subject to its ethically fraught power to facilitate counterterrorist surveillance and strikes. Likewise, although the drone’s lofty perspective seems to promise “the tri-umph of the spectator over the mortality of earthbound life,” the camera zooms in, drawing the viewer to a face that, also framed in close-up by the show’s ground-level cameras, reveals an aging actor. Throughout the show, Bauer has been humanized by the passage of time (e.g., his lost time in a Chinese prison;

his becoming a grandfather by the fi-nal season). Now, determined to elude forces still after him for his actions, Bauer lets slip an intimation of his own mortality, asking O’Brian, “How much time have I got?”

Abetting Bauer in his need to go dark, she commands that the drone footage be erased, stating, “Whatever happened here didn’t happen.” Read as self-reflex-ive commentary, the statement seems to offer the viewer of 24 reassurance that the whole show is pure escape, that its “real time” is a time when nothing re-ally happens, certainly nothing pro-foundly unsettling, that show time is, in the end, a redemptive no time in which viewers assume a hover mode beyond the entanglements and terrors of the ma-terial world. However, Bauer’s image remains on screen, and the show’s final shot, in which he looks directly into the drone’s camera, does not let the viewer off so easily. He’s a ghost in a ghostly machine, a parasite whose staticky na-ture is made visible by the shot’s even-tual dissolution, a reversal of the clari-fication produced by facial recognition software. Look me in the eyes. Why have you been watching? Did you want tele-vision to save you? Did you want to be saved from television? Were you hoping to kill time?

WORKS CITEDAsendorf, Christoph. Batteries of Life: On

the History of Things and Their Percep-tion in Modernity. Trans. Don Renau. Berkeley: U of California P, 1993. Print.

Borradori, Giovanna. Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jurgen Haber-mas and Jacques Derrida. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2003. Print.

Derrida, Jacques. “No Apocalypse, Not Now (Full Speed Ahead, Seven Missiles,

T h ro u g h o u t t h e s h o w, B a u e r h a s

b e e n h u m a n i z e d b y t h e p a s s a g e

o f t i m e …

Figure8.Jack Bauer (Keifer Sutherland) in full-body armor in Season 8, Episode 22 (2010). (Color figure available online.)

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Seven Missives). Trans. Catherine Porter and Philip Lewis. Diacritics 14.2 (1984): 20–31. Print.

Dienst, Richard. Still Life in Real Time: The-ory After Television. Durham: Duke UP, 1994. Print.

Doane, Mary Ann. “Information, Crisis, Ca-tastrophe.” Logics of Television: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Ed. Patricia Mel-lencamp. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990: 222–39. Print.

Faludi, Susan. The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007. Print.

Hight, Christopher. “Inertia and Interior-ity: 24 as a Case Study of the Televisual Metropolis.” Journal of Architecture 9.3 (2004): 369–83. Print.

Jermyn, Deborah. “Reasons to Split Up: Interactivity, Realism, and the Multiple-Image Screen in 24.” Reading 24: TV Against the Clock. Ed. Steven Peacock. London: I. B. Tauris, 2007: 49–58. Print.

Kirby, Lynne. Parallel Tracks: The Railroad and Silent Cinema. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1997. Print.

McCarthy, Anna. Ambient Television: Visual Culture and Public Space. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2001. Print.

Mellencamp, Patricia. “TV Time and Catas-trophe, or Beyond the Pleasure Principle of Television.” Logics of Television: Es-says in Cultural Criticism. Ed. Patricia Mellencamp. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990: 240–66. Print.

Mitchell, W. J. T. “The Unspeakable and the Unimaginable: Word and Image in a Time of Terror.” ELH 72.2 (2005): 291–308. Print.

Nakamura, Lisa. “Interfaces of Identity: Oriental Traitors and Telematic Profil-ing in 24.” Camera Obscura 24.1 (2009): 108–33. Print.

Serres, Michel. The Parasite. Trans. Law-rence R. Schehr. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1982. Print.

24. Season 2. Fox. October 29, 2002–May 20, 2003. Television.

———. Season 4. Fox. January 9–May 23, 2005. Television.





Weber, Samuel. “Television: Set and Screen.” Mass Mediauras: Form, Tech-nics, Media. Ed. Alan Cholodenko. Stan-ford, CA: Stanford UP, 1996: 108–28. Print.

———. “War, Terrorism, and Spectacle: On Towers and Caves.” The South Atlantic Quarterly, 101.3 (2002): 449–58. Print.

William G. Little is a Senior Lecturer in Me-dia Studies at the University of Virginia. He is the author of The Waste Fix: Seizures of the Sacred from Upton Sinclair to The Sopranos (Routledge, 2002). He has also published ar-ticles on American film and American litera-ture. He teaches film courses, including one titled “Screening Terrorism.”

Figure9.Chloe O’Brian (Mary Lynn Rajskub) communicates with Jack Bauer (Keifer Sutherland) via drone in Season 8, Episode 24 (2010). (Color figure available online.)

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24: Time, Terror, Television

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Transcript of 24: Time, Terror, Television