The depraved heroes of 24 are the Himmlers of Hollywood
Slavoj Zizek
Tuesday January 10, 2006
The Guardian

On Sunday, the fifth season of the phenomenally successful television
drama 24 will start in the US. Each season is composed of 24 one-hour
episodes and the whole season covers the events of a single day. The
story of the latest series is the desperate attempt of the LA-based
Counter Terrorist Unit to prevent an act of catastrophic magnitude and
the action focuses on the unit's agents, the White House and the
terrorist suspects.

The "real-time" nature of the series confers on it a strong sense of
urgency, emphasised by the ticking of an on-screen clock. This dynamic
is accentuated by technical tricks, from the use of hand-held cameras
to split screens showing the concurrent actions of characters.

Almost a third of each episode is taken up by commercial breaks, which
contribute to the sense of urgency: the breaks are part of the one-hour
temporal continuity. Say the on-screen clock reads "7.46" before the
break, we return to the series with the clock saying "7.51" -
indicating the real length of the break, as if a live transmission has
been interrupted. It is as if the continuity of the action is so urgent
that it cannot even be interrupted for advertisements.

Such a sense of urgency has an ethical dimension. The pressure of
events is so overbearing, the stakes so high, that they necessitate a
kind of suspension of ordinary moral concerns; displaying such concerns
when the lives of millions are at stake means playing into the hands of
the enemy. The CTU agents, as well as their terrorist opponents, live
and act in a shadowy space not covered by the law, doing things that
"simply have to be done" to save our societies from the threat of
terrorism. This includes not only torturing terrorists when they are
caught, but even torturing members of CTU or their closest relatives if
they are suspected of terrorist links.

In the fourth season, among those tortured are the defence secretary's
son-in-law and son (both with his full knowledge and support), and a
female member of the CTU wrongly suspected of passing on information to
terrorists. (When her innocence is revealed, she is asked to return to
work immediately and accepts.) The CTU agents, after all, are dealing
with the sort of "ticking-bomb" scenario evoked by the Harvard law
professor Alan Dershowitz to justify torture (why not torture someone
who knows the location of a bomb that is jus about to kill hundreds of
thousands of people?).

The agents treat themselves as expendable, ready to put their lives at
stake if this will help to prevent an attack. Jack Bauer, (the agent
and central character, played by Kiefer Sutherland), embodies this
attitude. He not only tortures others but condones his superiors
putting his own life at stake.

In the fourth season, Bauer agrees to be delivered to China as a
scapegoat for a CTU covert operation that killed a Chinese diplomat. He
knows he will be tortured and imprisoned for life but promises not to
say anything that might damage US interests. When he is informed by the
ex-president of the US that someone has ordered him to be killed, his
two closest CTU friends fake his death. Both terrorist and CTU agents
operate as examples of what the political philosopher Giorgio Agamben
calls homo sacer - someone who can be killed with impunity since, in
the eyes of the law, their life no longer counts. While they continue
to act on behalf of the legal power, their acts are no longer
constrained by the law. It is here that we encounter the series'
ideological lie: in spite of the CTU's ruthlessness, its agents,
especially Bauer, are warm human beings - loving, caught in the
emotional dilemmas of ordinary people.

24 should not be seen as a simple popular depiction of the sort of
problematic methods the US resorts to in its "war on terror". Much more
is at stake. Recall the lesson of Apocalypse Now. The figure of Kurtz
is not a remnant of some barbaric past. He was the perfect soldier but,
through his over-identification with the military, he turned into the
embodiment of the system's excess and threatened the system itself.
The problem for those in power is how to get people do the dirty work
without turning them into monsters. This was Heinrich Himmler's
dilemma. When confronted with the task of killing the Jews of Europe,
the SS chief adopted the attitude of "somebody has to do the dirty
job". In Hannah Arendt's book, Eichmann in Jerusalem, the philosopher
describes how Nazi executioners endured the horrible acts they
performed. Most were well aware that they were doing things that
brought humiliation, suffering and death to their victims. The way out
of this predicament was that, instead of saying "What horrible things I
did to people!" they would say "What horrible things I had to watch in
the pursuance of my duties, how heavily the task weighed upon my
shoulders!" In this way, they were able to turn around the logic of
resisting temptation: the temptation to be resisted was pity and
sympathy in the presence of human suffering, the temptation not to
murder, torture and humiliate.

There was a further "ethical problem" for Himmler: how to make sure
that the executioners, while performing these terrible acts, remained
human and dignified. His answer was Krishna's message to Arjuna in the
Bhagavad-Gita (Himmler always had in his pocket a leather-bound
edition): act with inner distance; do not get fully involved.

Therein also resides the lie of 24: that it is not only possible to
retain human dignity in performing acts of terror, but that if an
honest person performs such an act as a grave duty, it confers on him a
tragic-ethical grandeur. The parallel between the agents' and the
terrorists' behaviour serves this lie.

But what if such a distance is possible? What if people do commit
terrible acts as part of their job while being loving husbands, good
parents and close friends? As Arendt says, the fact that they are able
to retain any normality while committing such acts is the ultimate
confirmation of moral depravity.

So what about the response to this hair-splitting? Some argue that at
least the US is now more open and less hypocritical about its behaviour
towards terrorist suspects. To this, one should reply: "If US
representatives mean only this, why are they telling us? Why don't they
silently go on doing it, as they did it until now?" What is proper to
human speech is the gap between the enunciated content and its act of
enunciation. Imagine a couple who have a tacit agreement that they can
have discreet extramarital affairs; if, all of a sudden, the husband
openly tells his wife about an affair, she would have good reason to
wonder why he was telling her. The act of publicly revealing something
is never neutral; it affects the reported content itself.

The same goes for the US's recent admission that it is using torture.
When we hear people such as Dick Cheney making statements about the
necessity of torture, we should ask ourselves why he has decided to
make a public statement about it. The question to be raised is: what is
there in this statement that made the speaker decide to enunciate it?
This is 24's real problem: not the content itself but the fact that we
are being told openly about it. And that is a sad indication of a deep
change in our ethical and political standards.

• Slavoj Zizek is the international director of the Birkbeck Institute
for the Humanities
szizek@yahoo.com