Other critical fans of 24 there:
http://www.highclearing.com/archivesuo/week_2005_01_09.html#005796
<< The Weekend in Torture - The new season of 24 started tonight, and started with a dramatization of one of those contrived hypotheticals used to justify torture. Jack Bauer shoots off the kneecap of a detainee and threatens to shoot off the other one to make him talk, because there are only ten minutes until a terrorist strike. Later he threatens to tell the President that the current boss of the Counter-Terrorism Unit "had the suspect for half an hour and couldn't break him." As a "realistic" fictionalization of intelligence work, this is balderdash - breaking suspects without torture can be the work of days or weeks, when successful at all. "Successfully" breaking someone with torture is a matter of hours or days when dealing with a trained, committed subject. A real trained Islamist terrorist operative in that situation is going to crank up the prayers, prominent among which will be the phrase "just ten more minutes!" It used to be that the CIA concentrated on enabling its own assets to hold out for 24 (or 48) hours - after that they could say anything they liked.
A trained, committed Islamist terrorist down one kneecap with one to go would almost certainly have the presence of mind to lie in that situation, too. That might make interesting television, you know? Hotshot counterterrorism officer cuts corners to force information out of a suspect, gets bamboozled and, gosh, this stuff isn't so simple. Previous seasons of 24 have been all about selling at least the image of Isn't So Simple. It looks very much like, in this one at least, ISS may have degenerated into one more action thriller about the tough investigator who knows you have to throw out the book to catch the bad guys. Hijinx ensue. >>
<< 24 Little Hours - Matt points out something I hadn't properly appreciated, because I am slow: the internal inconsistency of the story:
If you can really get the bad guys to fess up in 90 seconds by putting a bullet in someone's knee, then Bauer should be torturing people all the time and not pussyfooting around with all this satellite surveillance, deception, etc.
Even where fictions deliberately diverge from the laws of the reality we know, such as how long it really takes to make someone talk, readers, critics and writers themselves generally prize internal consistency. That may be a hard sell, though, for John Cole, who taketh not kindly to Matt's - and presumably my - poking and prodding at the holes in the script's logic:
You know why Jack Bauer shot one guy and not another? Because it was in the fricking script.
I hate to have to say this, but based on the tone and tenor of your previous posts, it may be necessary. At any rate, I think you need to know- Kiefer Sutherland really didn't shoot anyone. It was all fake- so when you get done analyzing 24, please don't call the California State Police with information about some gruesome shootings you saw on television.
He also writes that
'24' is a fictional television series. That means it is made up, and is intended to be broadcast for entertainment purposes.
Indeed. (Hm. Cool word. Maybe I'll try to work it in more often, make it a kind of signature. Nah. It'd just become a tic.) But where was I? Oh yeah. I wasn't entertained. Or, more accurately, such entertainment as I got was the "wrong kind" of entertainment. Specifically, it was the enjoyable contempt one can take (for awhile) from stupid things. I felt compelled to explain why I didn't like it. How come? The writing thing. It's kind of a reflex any more.
This gets to the inescapability of esthetic judgment, I think. John is trying to make criticism irrelevant by placing "entertainment purposes" beyond its bounds. But he can only do that by tacitly promoting an esthetic that things that are "made up" shouldn't be judged on the basis of internal consistency or on a genre-inflected correspondence with reality. Now, I don't think he really believes this. If, frex, Jack Bauer grabbed evil terrorist Kalil by the hair, only to have his neck open like a jar lid to reveal a tiny alien foreign service officer in his miniaturized command center guiding "Hassan" like a robot, I don't think John would like it, though it would still be made up for entertainment purposes. He might even think it "stupid."
If so, my guess would be that it would be because he thought the tiny alien represented a betrayal of the dramatic contract the series seemed to be making with the viewer. That's my own complaint with the new season, and I think Matt's too. 24 doesn't just sell "slam-bang non-stop action!" It sells moral dilemmas torn from today's headlines! Fox promotes the new season by, among other things, running segments on its news shows tying the series to current events. Given that kind of setup, the result seems like a cheat. To me. And not only to me, obviously. I think John just has a different threshold of what "feels like cheating" when it comes to this particular show, and that's fine. But the kind of cheat isn't vanished by 24's status as a "made up" thing.
Meanwhile, Drizzten gives the made up show now quarter in "24: A Libertarian Nightmare." (Spoilers abound.) I'm particularly intrigued by his conclusion:
It would be a nightmare to be a bystander and get caught up in these plots and whether the bystander acknowledges it or not, the roots of the nightmare start in the libertarian objections to those plots.
But what America wants to know is, where is Polytropos at this critical point in our nation's esthetic history? Oh. >>
http://www.highclearing.com/archivesuo/week_2005_01_09.html#005796
<< The Weekend in Torture - The new season of 24 started tonight, and started with a dramatization of one of those contrived hypotheticals used to justify torture. Jack Bauer shoots off the kneecap of a detainee and threatens to shoot off the other one to make him talk, because there are only ten minutes until a terrorist strike. Later he threatens to tell the President that the current boss of the Counter-Terrorism Unit "had the suspect for half an hour and couldn't break him." As a "realistic" fictionalization of intelligence work, this is balderdash - breaking suspects without torture can be the work of days or weeks, when successful at all. "Successfully" breaking someone with torture is a matter of hours or days when dealing with a trained, committed subject. A real trained Islamist terrorist operative in that situation is going to crank up the prayers, prominent among which will be the phrase "just ten more minutes!" It used to be that the CIA concentrated on enabling its own assets to hold out for 24 (or 48) hours - after that they could say anything they liked.
A trained, committed Islamist terrorist down one kneecap with one to go would almost certainly have the presence of mind to lie in that situation, too. That might make interesting television, you know? Hotshot counterterrorism officer cuts corners to force information out of a suspect, gets bamboozled and, gosh, this stuff isn't so simple. Previous seasons of 24 have been all about selling at least the image of Isn't So Simple. It looks very much like, in this one at least, ISS may have degenerated into one more action thriller about the tough investigator who knows you have to throw out the book to catch the bad guys. Hijinx ensue. >>
<< 24 Little Hours - Matt points out something I hadn't properly appreciated, because I am slow: the internal inconsistency of the story:
If you can really get the bad guys to fess up in 90 seconds by putting a bullet in someone's knee, then Bauer should be torturing people all the time and not pussyfooting around with all this satellite surveillance, deception, etc.
Even where fictions deliberately diverge from the laws of the reality we know, such as how long it really takes to make someone talk, readers, critics and writers themselves generally prize internal consistency. That may be a hard sell, though, for John Cole, who taketh not kindly to Matt's - and presumably my - poking and prodding at the holes in the script's logic:
You know why Jack Bauer shot one guy and not another? Because it was in the fricking script.
I hate to have to say this, but based on the tone and tenor of your previous posts, it may be necessary. At any rate, I think you need to know- Kiefer Sutherland really didn't shoot anyone. It was all fake- so when you get done analyzing 24, please don't call the California State Police with information about some gruesome shootings you saw on television.
He also writes that
'24' is a fictional television series. That means it is made up, and is intended to be broadcast for entertainment purposes.
Indeed. (Hm. Cool word. Maybe I'll try to work it in more often, make it a kind of signature. Nah. It'd just become a tic.) But where was I? Oh yeah. I wasn't entertained. Or, more accurately, such entertainment as I got was the "wrong kind" of entertainment. Specifically, it was the enjoyable contempt one can take (for awhile) from stupid things. I felt compelled to explain why I didn't like it. How come? The writing thing. It's kind of a reflex any more.
This gets to the inescapability of esthetic judgment, I think. John is trying to make criticism irrelevant by placing "entertainment purposes" beyond its bounds. But he can only do that by tacitly promoting an esthetic that things that are "made up" shouldn't be judged on the basis of internal consistency or on a genre-inflected correspondence with reality. Now, I don't think he really believes this. If, frex, Jack Bauer grabbed evil terrorist Kalil by the hair, only to have his neck open like a jar lid to reveal a tiny alien foreign service officer in his miniaturized command center guiding "Hassan" like a robot, I don't think John would like it, though it would still be made up for entertainment purposes. He might even think it "stupid."
If so, my guess would be that it would be because he thought the tiny alien represented a betrayal of the dramatic contract the series seemed to be making with the viewer. That's my own complaint with the new season, and I think Matt's too. 24 doesn't just sell "slam-bang non-stop action!" It sells moral dilemmas torn from today's headlines! Fox promotes the new season by, among other things, running segments on its news shows tying the series to current events. Given that kind of setup, the result seems like a cheat. To me. And not only to me, obviously. I think John just has a different threshold of what "feels like cheating" when it comes to this particular show, and that's fine. But the kind of cheat isn't vanished by 24's status as a "made up" thing.
Meanwhile, Drizzten gives the made up show now quarter in "24: A Libertarian Nightmare." (Spoilers abound.) I'm particularly intrigued by his conclusion:
It would be a nightmare to be a bystander and get caught up in these plots and whether the bystander acknowledges it or not, the roots of the nightmare start in the libertarian objections to those plots.
But what America wants to know is, where is Polytropos at this critical point in our nation's esthetic history? Oh. >>
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