{"id":1049,"date":"2013-01-18T11:11:42","date_gmt":"2013-01-18T15:11:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/?p=1049"},"modified":"2013-01-18T17:42:28","modified_gmt":"2013-01-18T21:42:28","slug":"tv-and-torture-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/?p=1049","title":{"rendered":"TV and Torture"},"content":{"rendered":"

I wrote an e-mail to gush to one of my favorite authors not too long ago, expressing my appreciation for his book. \u00a0He wrote back that he\u00a0is not sure whether he now agrees with himself on much that is in that\u00a0book. \u00a0Another friend said something to me once a while back, about\u00a0how writing is a conversation, not a soliloquy. \u00a0I routinely tell my\u00a0beloved doctoral students that a dissertation is merely the first\u00a0draft of a book, not the final draft of anything.<\/p>\n

As I allow Kara to post this essay, I am struck by how scared I have\u00a0been to send this out into the world. \u00a0I hated watching these shows,\u00a0and then I hated myself for caring so much about the people in them.\u00a0As I went out and about in my usual manner, loudly telling people that\u00a0I hated these shows, I found more people who love them, which also\u00a0made me depressed. \u00a0So, I had to make myself write through a haze of\u00a0ick — the ick of the violent and violating images, the ick of knowing\u00a0I was criticizing people I love, the ick of the sense that maybe my\u00a0reading was shaped too much by my own pain . . . But, if scholars keep\u00a0only to pretty topics, that seems quite off. \u00a0And if scholars keep\u00a0only to topics that will not offend people they love, that seems not\u00a0quite right, either. \u00a0And, if each one of us waits until we are\u00a0unequivocally healed from the wounds of our lives, then, well . . . we\u00a0are probably going to keep from writing a darned thing. \u00a0Either that,\u00a0or we will lie to ourselves, brazenly or subtly telling ourselves that\u00a0our perspective is totally wholesome. \u00a0I am not sure how to write a\u00a0wholesome essay about torture.<\/p>\n

Just as a teaser, I intend to keep trying to sort out themes of gender\u00a0and power on American television. \u00a0I just read a fabulous send-up of\u00a0Downton Abbey in the New Yorker. \u00a0Kara and I both confess (right,\u00a0Kara?) to being a bit hooked on the show. \u00a0[It’s true. – KNS] But I also, simultaneously,\u00a0loathe that show, for multiple reasons, and am ticked-off at the\u00a0popularity of such schlock. \u00a0I wrote to a friend who likes Game of\u00a0Thrones that I may try to write an argument for why Downton Abbey is\u00a0arguably even worse, in the ways that the violence is beautifully\u00a0sublimated. \u00a0I need to sort that out for a while . . . What sticks in\u00a0my head is a quote from Adin Steinsaltz, one that I have repeated\u00a0again, and again. \u00a0What we may need from popular media today is\u00a0“useful trash.” \u00a0I don’t think 24, Game of Thrones, or Downton Abbey\u00a0is useful trash. \u00a0I think each one is hurtful trash. \u00a0If I had to\u00a0recommend some useful trash on gender and power these days, I think my\u00a0bet would be on Eastbound and Down, although I am only halfway into\u00a0the first season. \u00a0Wish me luck.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n

TV and Torture<\/h2>\n

Amy Laura Hall, Associate Professor of Christian Ethics, Duke University,\u00a0rev.al.hall@gmail.com<\/a>,<\/p>\n

Click the links below to jump ahead to each numbered section.<\/em><\/address>\n
    \n
      \n
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          \n
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              \n
            1. Torture-Culture?<\/a><\/li>\n
            2. Television as Cathedral<\/a><\/li>\n
            3. “Get Your Hands Dirty” on 24<\/em><\/a><\/li>\n
            4. “Winter is Coming”<\/a><\/li>\n
            5. Inconclusive Postscript from Homeland<\/em><\/a><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/ol>\n<\/ol>\n<\/ol>\n<\/ol>\n<\/ol>\n

              What exactly, we must ask ourselves, is missing from our world that we should require spilled blood and incinerated flesh, and the fear such havoc and loss create, to feel alive?<\/p>\n

              Corey Robin, Fear: The History of a Political Idea<\/i> (23).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

              Many scholars of American culture see our national preoccupation with female rescue as mere cover story, a pretext employed to justify the sanguinary pleasure our pioneers took in the slaughter of the continent\u2019s natives and the decimation of the wilderness . . . But what if the reverse is also true?\u00a0 What if the unbounded appetite for conquest derives not only from our long relish for the kill but from our even longer sense of disgrace on the receiving end of assault? \u00a0. . .\u00a0 What if the deepest psychological legacy of our original war on terror wasn\u2019t the pleasure we now take in dominance but the original shame that domination seeks desperately to conceal?<\/p>\n

              Susan Faludi, The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9\/11 America<\/i> (213).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

              Although much of this book details how easy it is for ordinary people to begin to engage in evil deeds, or to be passively indifferent to the suffering of others, the deeper message is a positive one.\u00a0 It is by understanding the how and why of such evils that we are all in a better position to uncover, oppose, defy, and triumph over them . . .<\/p>\n

              Philip Zimbardo (creator of the landmark Stanford Prison Experiment), The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil<\/i>, Forward (viii).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

              <\/a>1. Torture-Culture?<\/h2>\n

              Part of Abdullah Antepli\u2019s anti-torture appeal in 2011, which appears in this volume, was for participants to risk the moral injury of viewing real footage of torture.\u00a0 In this, he and I shared an assumption.\u00a0 We assumed that most citizens had been avoiding such viewing.\u00a0 As conference organizer Matthew Elia explained in the months leading up to the event, the planning team thought we were asking people to make a shift \u2013 to \u201cturn their eyes in this direction\u201d and pay attention to what was being done in the name of American security.\u00a0 But, during the course of the conference, it became clear that there was a sizeable, and not idiosyncratic, segment of the population that wanted<\/i> to view torture.\u00a0 American eyes had already been looking in the direction of interrogation since 9\/11, turning to Fox each week as Jack Bauer did \u201cwhatever it takes\u201d to keep us safe.\u00a0 Robin Kirk named this pattern specifically in her talk, here in essay form: Why did a significant part of the country wish for scenes of torture?<\/p>\n

              \"2011-09-11-ap-towersjpg-6be5ddc322d0f239\"<\/a>This question assumes that it does not lie within a default pattern of human behavior to seek out images of another human being suffering.\u00a0 Working with that assumption for over a year after the conference, I am willing to venture an interpretation.\u00a0 It is by no means a novel one, but it is one that I think bears repeating.\u00a0 9\/11 involved a mass spectacle of violation that continues to shape American conceptions of gender, sexuality, and safety.\u00a0 One need not be steeped in Freudian analysis to perceive the visual of the felled towers as emasculating, and several generations of viewers watched the grand display of cruelty and vulnerability on screen, together, also watching one another\u2019s reaction to American impotence.\u00a0 For a segment of the population, the horror was not only unimaginable, but it threatened basic notions of the home and family.\u00a0 That is, the spectacle of American castration was repeated as children watched adults in immobilized fear, as they watched the screen, and adults perceived the critical, confused gaze of children, who were watching them watch the screen.\u00a0 With Susan Faludi, I believe that the event tapped into anxieties about masculine authority, and, following her lead, I suggest here that torture on television (specifically, 24<\/i>) provided a kind of collective catharsis \u2013 a way many Americans sought manageably to endure violation and also to recalibrate a myth of afflicted, but yet still potent, masculinity.[1]<\/a>\u00a0 I also interpret the widely-popular spectacle of violence in Game of Thrones <\/i>better to understand the work 24<\/i> did for viewers.\u00a0 By watching characters suffer and die in horrific ways, viewers may have been trying to form a kind of affective callus to cover over past fears, to harden current fears of vulnerability, and to steel themselves for potential, future loss.\u00a0 I posit in closing that such viewing, while seemingly therapeutic, may leave a generation of viewers less capable of both self-dignity and empathy toward the designated enemy.<\/p>\n

              This question has confounded me to such an extent that I will not even attempt to untangle two related questions.\u00a0 First, who is to say who makes up the \u201cwe\u201d and the \u201cour\u201d for any reading public?\u00a0 The authors of the opening quotes above use first person, plural pronouns.\u00a0 In Faludi\u2019s The Terror Dream<\/i>, she works through American myths and memories, and the ways that these shape \u201cour\u201d imagination.\u00a0 It is fair to say that she does not seek to analyze or give voice to non-dominant myths and memories, except inasmuch as she recounts how white women\u2019s resistance to dominant myths were squelched.\u00a0 Corey Robin writes about the \u201cunspectacular, quotidian fear\u201d that permeates the lives of Americans by considering the multiple permutations of domination that make up what appears \u201cnormal\u201d to us \u2013 the forms of fear that constitute the \u201cAmerican way of repression.\u201d[2]<\/a>\u00a0 Robin does tell stories of resistance, but his appeal of \u201cwe\u201d is to a particular, book-reading segment of Americans.\u00a0 Philip Zimbardo, as a social psychologist, attempts both to cut through and diagnose the particularity of torture-culture, and to delineate scientifically the collective conditions that made up Abu Ghraib in a way that can warn peoples across the specificity of time and place.\u00a0 I appreciate each focused effort to understand \u201courselves,\u201d and I here limit myself to beginning the sufficiently confounding task of sorting through the desire for scenes of torture, with little attention to counter-narratives and sub-narratives of resistance.<\/p>\n

              Again, this is an imposing enough question to begin asking here:\u00a0 How did people I know and love, people who consider themselves loyal Democrats as well as those who are passionately, evangelically Republican, come reliably to partake of storylines in which torture seems to secure the homeland?\u00a0 Why did \u201cwe\u201d make torture part of \u201cour\u201d lives?\u00a0 24 <\/i>seems to have functioned as a kind of romantic bond for some of its fans.\u00a0 Over the course of this research, I personally heard about a couple who took the first six seasons of 24<\/i> on their honeymoon, and about a couple whose weekly date nights consisted of watching each episode.\u00a0 These two couples might have eschewed one another at any social gathering, but they had in common a few decades, their race (white), and a basically Christian upbringing.<\/p>\n

              Regarding the second unanswered query, I will not try to solve the chicken and the egg question of whether a) we get what we want from<\/i> the media, or b) we are told what to want by<\/i> the media.\u00a0 Mostly, I will ask questions about a).\u00a0 But, regarding b), permit me a long, preliminary remark.\u00a0 It is now considered politically-aware, common sense that mainstream media, after 9\/11, made torture appear a customary component of national security.\u00a0 Fox News<\/i>\u2019s unapologetic pro-torture commentary is overt, but the New York Times<\/i> and National Public Radio<\/i>\u2019s reticence to use the term \u201ctorture,\u201d much less offer an ongoing account for the prohibition of torture, has done its part in acclimating us to a culture of torture as well.[3]<\/a> \u00a0I hope eventually to probe the various ways that the effort at equating torture with everydayness has been concerted.\u00a0 The Rupert Murdoch scandal in 2011 forced a reckoning with the well-organized, power politics of Western media, but that pattern is far from new.\u00a0 For the skeptical, I will cite a salient example.\u00a0 Recently, On the Media<\/i> featured a historical piece entitled \u201cWhite House Meddling in First Film about the Atomic Bomb,\u201d noting how MGM and political architects of the Manhattan Project sought one another out to sell and tell a particular story about atomic weaponry.\u00a0 As Greg Mitchell explains in the radio interview, General Leslie Groves was given script approval authority, with the goal of shaping public perceptions of \u201cThe Truth\u201d:<\/p>\n

              One of his main goals was to downplay the impact of radiation, so there was a portion of the script that was rewritten to show that radiation wasn’t that big a deal. Each variation of the script adhered more and more to the official Hiroshima narrative, that there was no choice but to use the bomb and that the President not only made the right decision but there was really no controversy around it . . . One of the planes in the attack, they changed the name on the side of the plane from Boxcar to Necessary Evil, which I love the blatant nature of that. In the explanation in the movie, both in what Truman says and what others say, continually talk about Hiroshima being basically one big military base, which was not true at all. There was a military base there but 95 percent of the casualties were civilians, mainly women and children. He claims that they dropped warning leaflets on Hiroshima beforehand, which was – it was completely false. The film also does not mention Nagasaki at all.[4]<\/a><\/p>\n

              There are many more such stories.\u00a0 Might some enterprising thinkers in the euphemistically-named \u201cintelligence community\u201d have colluded to create the television series 24<\/i>, or to shape the plotlines once the show was off and running?\u00a0 We would be underestimating their capacity for counter-terrorism if we did not at least allow for the possibility.[5]<\/a>\u00a0 But I would wager that even the brilliant men and women of Special Operations could not have successfully created desire in the viewer out of thin air.\u00a0 The popularity of television depictions of torture tug on the pain and pleasure impulses in the mix of \u201cour\u201d current culture.\u00a0 It is incumbent on \u201cus,\u201d as Zimbardo urges, to \u201cuncover, oppose, and defy\u201d the pro-torture memes that have shaped our imaginations.[6]<\/a><\/p>\n

              <\/a>2. Television as Cathedral<\/h2>\n

              On December 12, 2012, the Stephanie Miller show replayed footage of a right-leaning television commentator, as he appealed to left-leaning commentators not to politicize the school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut.\u00a0 He argued, \u201cTelevision is the cathedral where the American public goes to mourn after an event like this.\u201d\u00a0 It seems a helpful phrase.\u00a0 Although there are an infinite variety of options on the screen for distraction from what counts as national news, there are only a few choices for partaking of and sorting through the official, common-sense account of what counts as national news. There was a need, the commentator argued, for an atmosphere of structured, common purpose to be presented to a viewing public suffering from trauma and stricken by grief.\u00a0 The cathedral is a useful heuristic, I believe, for thinking about the function that widely popular television shows serve.\u00a0 Until the splintering of the Protestant Reformation, the general population in Western European cities attended the liturgies that marked particular feast and fast days in cathedrals. \u00a0And there, through words, bodily practices, static and moving images, and music, they were influenced to perceive their daily lives and human history in particular ways.\u00a0 When, years ago, one of my Yale Divinity professors noted that our own American culture had no narratives in common \u2013 that we had lost a sense of common story \u2013 I (irreverently) began singing the theme song to \u201cGilligan\u2019s Island.\u201d\u00a0 Everyone in the seminar except the two international students hummed along.\u00a0 There are common, meaning-making narratives in American culture, many of them televised.<\/p>\n

              \"A<\/a>

              A non-fictional Predator drone<\/p><\/div>\n

              So, in 2012, when President Obama said that Homeland<\/i> was among his favorite television series, he did not have to justify an eccentricity.\u00a0 The show features America\u2019s darling, who previously struggled with adolescence on My So-Called Life<\/i>, now, as an adult, attentively tracing and then tearfully raging against plots of terrorism. This image has become an icon in the cathedral that is television.\u00a0 In the first season of the show, millions watched our screens as actress Claire Danes watched a potential terrorist on her own screen, in an unsubtle joining of voyeurism and arm-chair (or couch) military intelligence gathering.\u00a0 As one reviewer notes, it is a perfect terrorism serial for a purportedly egalitarian administration conducting remote drone attacks.[7]<\/a>\u00a0 Our heroine bests her on-site male colleagues with her stationary, off-site screen sleuthing.\u00a0 The creators of Homeland<\/i> had accomplished cultural iconography a decade prior, with another blonde darling of a previous generation, Kiefer Sutherland and Fox\u2019s 24<\/i>.<\/p>\n

              Television is a meaning-making medium, and the form of that meaning matters.\u00a0 In 2002, Gregory M. Lamb, staff writer for The Christian Science Monitor<\/i> wondered at the precipitous increase in television violence after 9\/11: \u201cSo much for media critics’ expectations that grisly fictional violence on TV would abate after the sobering events of Sept. 11. Instead, scenes of torture and sadism appeared on network entertainment TV at a rate nearly double that over the previous two years.\u201d[8]<\/a>\u00a0 The piece names in particular a Parents Television Council (PTC) study, the same organization that, in 2008, characterized 24<\/i> as the biggest offender:\u00a0 \u201cA Parents Television Council review found that 24<\/i> showed 67 scenes of torture in the first five seasons. Jack Bauer has been involved in more than 160 separate instances of violence since the show began (all six seasons) and has killed at least 71 individuals.\u201d\u00a0 But other television programming was keeping up: \u201cthere were 110 scenes of torture on prime time broadcast programming from 1995 to 2001. From 2002 to 2005, the number increased to 624 scenes of torture. Data from 2006 to 2007 showed that there were 212 scenes of torture.\u201d[9]<\/a>\u00a0 Why?\u00a0 Lamb gives one clear answer, and, by way of a metaphor, a helpful interpretive tool.\u00a0 He quotes Jamsheed Akrami, communications professor at William Paterson University:\u00a0 \u201cViolence, as odd as it sounds, can have a sort of cathartic effect on people. When they are exposed to violence there is something of a vicarious element … [of] participation that could have a soothing effect on them.\u201d \u00a0Lamb also likens the increase in violence with \u201cthe proverbial frog in a pot of warming water.\u201d[10]<\/a><\/p>\n

              Was there a desire on the part of many in the television viewing public, after 9\/11, to partake of violence in a controlled, scripted manner, and, more specifically, to view torture as a form of cultural catharsis?\u00a0 As the PTC study notes, there was not only an increase in the number of torture and sadism scenes, but there was a shift.\u00a0 The supposedly \u201cgood guys\u201d were practicing torture and sadism.\u00a0 And, by watching \u201cour own\u201d \u201cgood guys\u201d torture again, and again, and again, saving \u201cour own\u201d women and children, were we like frogs, with the temperature rising just slowly enough that we were eventually willing to accept as par for the safety course the images of naked, hooded prisoners piled in a pyramid?\u00a0 I mean, at least the interrogators at Abu Ghraib had not severed the prisoner\u2019s heads, right?\u00a0 That\u2019s what Jack Bauer did to one recalcitrant informant early in the second season of 24<\/i>, after all, and saved the entire West Coast as a result.<\/p>\n

              Susan Faludi builds her hypothesis in The Terror Dream<\/i> by linking example after example of erroneous but gripping storytelling after 9\/11.\u00a0 The firefighters who entered the building died, in large part, due to an ill-funded force with faulty radio-equipment. In the post-9\/11 narrative, however, they became superheroes who died saving vulnerable women and children, even though the victims of the 9\/11 murder were overwhelmingly male.\u00a0 As a rule, the widows of those male victims were not eager to become domestic heroines, holding down the suburban fort with apron and cupcakes, but there was a concerted effort to have them tell such a story, again and again.\u00a0 Faludi shows how the actual survivors of the trauma \u2013 the ones whose lives were directly shaped by the murders \u2013 were resolutely trying to deal with reality. \u00a0Meanwhile, those of us who were surviving the trauma from a distance, trying to go about our daily lives while intermittently viewing scenes of horror, seemed eager to buy (literally) a story written as a familiar, domestic myth of effective male protection and female vulnerability. \u00a0Why?\u00a0 Faludi suggests that the hero\/damsel myth was a well-worn way to deal with the shame of an unspeakable national failure, a well-worn set of gender myths built up after the prolonged period of conflict with Native Americans under American expansion:<\/p>\n

              We perceive our country as inviolable, shielded from enemy penetration.\u00a0 Indeed, in recent history the United States has been, among nations, one of the most immune to attack on its home soil.\u00a0 And yet, our foundational drama as a society was apposite, a profound exposure to just such assaults, murderous homeland incursions by dark-skinned, non-Christian combatants under the flag of no recognized nation, complying with no accepted Western rules of engagement and subscribing to an alien culture, who attacked white America on its \u201cown\u201d soil and against civilian targets.\u00a0 September 11 was aimed at our cultural solar plexus precisely because it was an \u201cunthinkable\u201d occurrence for a nation that once could think of little else. It was not, in fact, an inconceivable event; it was the<\/i> characteristic and formative American ordeal, the primal injury of which we could not speak, the shard of memory stuck in our throats.\u00a0 Our ancestors had already fought a war on terror, a very long war, and we have lived with its scars ever since.[11]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

              I believe it is helpful to apply Faludi\u2019s hypothesis to interpret the popularity of shows that have depicted escalating torture as an efficacious and necessary means of preserving (or saving) the social body.<\/p>\n

              I will also go one step further, to suggest that the gender politics of such shows may take their form from the same cultural impulse that led to the ritualized emasculation of Muslim prisoners in places like Abu Ghraib.\u00a0 Why were prisoners not only intimidated, but sexually violated, when study after military study has shown that such methods are ineffective for securing intelligence information?\u00a0 As Zimbardo explains in detail (using government reports) in The Lucifer Effect<\/i>, the story that sexually intimidating and violating practices at Abu Ghraib were the result of the unique depravity of the \u201cAbu Ghraib Seven,\u201d is disproven repeatedly: \u201cThis thorough investigation [the Jones\/Faye report] by two Army generals should lay to rest any claims that the MPs on the night shift of Tier 1A abused and tortured the prisoners solely out of their personally deviant motivations or sadistic impulses.\u00a0 Instead, the picture that is emerging is one of complex multiple causality.\u201d[12]<\/a>\u00a0 One of the causes, according to The Schlesinger Report, was the toxic mix of institutionalized dehumanization that Zimbardo himself had documented in his Stanford Prison Project. \u00a0And, as Zimbardo explains, the Schlesinger Report highlighted in particular the ways that nakedness had been used to dehumanize the prisoners, rendering them violable within a system of perpetual fear of attack, unlivable filth in an overcrowded torture facility (that the U.K. military command had tried to condemn as obviously unusable), and the overall disorientation of the Iraq war.\u00a0 Dealing daily with their own vulnerability, and the pressure to produce \u201cintelligence results\u201d that would \u201csave American lives,\u201d military police officers dehumanized and violated the prisoners under their watch.[13]<\/a>\u00a0 I believe it possible to view American viewing habits after 9\/11 in a related way.\u00a0 Due in part to the shame of violation, we desired a narrative of necessary, controlled, and effective violation.\u00a0 By this reading, the treatment of Muslim men suspected of terrorism involved their standing in not only for the terrorists who got away, by dying on 9\/11, but all of the original, Native American terrorists in mythic, American memory, who had repeatedly rendered male colonists, settlers, and pioneers impotent.<\/p>\n

              <\/a>3. \u201cGet Your Hands Dirty\u201d on 24<\/i><\/h2>\n

              This section title comes from a key scene in the second season of 24<\/i>.\u00a0 The first episode of the second season opens immediately with a scene that is unambiguously, blatantly of torture.\u00a0 A man is stretched across a table, while his torturers, all of some unspecified Asian descent, administer electric shock to break his silence.\u00a0 He \u201cbreaks\u201d and tells the interrogators what they were seeking, and they walk down the hallway to tell the US military officers the news.\u00a0 It is the first extended, obvious torture scene in the series, and it is important to note that the foreign torturers seem to have been hired to do the repugnant work for the US military.\u00a0 Viewers sitting in their living rooms have to choose whether to watch the torture scene or, like the fastidious men in the other room, avoid the spectacle.\u00a0 Are you \u201cman\u201d enough to watch what must be done?\u00a0 This is the implicit question posed, already, in the very first scene of the second season.\u00a0 Soon after this, in case viewers had not gotten the point, Jack excoriates a key character with the Counter Terrorist Unit for just such squeamishness: \u201cThat\u2019s the problem with you, George.\u00a0 You want results, but you never want to get your hands dirty.\u00a0 I\u2019d start rolling up your sleeves.\u201d\u00a0 Jack then uses a hacksaw to sever a man\u2019s head from his body, right there in a CTU board room.<\/p>\n

              \"jackbauer\"<\/a>

              Jack Bauer is a man with a gun.<\/p><\/div>\n

              I avoided shows like 24<\/i> not because I am morally superior, but because I am morally nauseous.\u00a0 Watching violence makes me physically ill.\u00a0 When my first daughter was a baby, I gave up television, and I have not looked back.\u00a0 After 9\/11, I intentionally stayed away from visual images of the horror, hearing only news reports on the radio.\u00a0 They were enough to make me never want to fly again. But, in the midst of the fear, I absolutely was uninterested in watching a show that involved people inflicting pain on other human beings, for any reason.\u00a0 So, in preparation for this essay, I had to watch from scratch, so to speak, the first two seasons of 24<\/i>, along with multiple episodes of Homeland<\/i>, and Game of Thrones<\/i>.\u00a0 I like to fancy myself the ideal, na\u00efve, interpreter.\u00a0 I have become so unused to television that all of the tricks work on me.\u00a0 I became hooked on all three shows and had to swear off of further watching in order to avoid more nightmares.<\/p>\n

               <\/p>\n

               <\/p>\n

              In case any other readers have been able to avoid 24<\/i>, this basic summary, from Jane Mayer\u2019s piece on 24<\/i> creator Joel Surnow may be helpful:<\/p>\n

              Each season of 24<\/i>, which has been airing on Fox since 2001, depicts a single, panic-laced day in which Jack Bauer–a heroic C.T.U. agent, played by Kiefer Sutherland–must unravel and undermine a conspiracy that imperils the nation. Terrorists are poised to set off nuclear bombs or bioweapons, or in some other way annihilate entire cities. The twisting story line forces Bauer and his colleagues to make a series of grim choices that pit liberty against security. Frequently, the dilemma is stark: a resistant suspect can either be accorded due process–allowing a terrorist plot to proceed–or be tortured in pursuit of a lead. Bauer invariably chooses coercion. With unnerving efficiency, suspects are beaten, suffocated, electrocuted, drugged, assaulted with knives, or more exotically abused; almost without fail, these suspects divulge critical secrets.[14]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

              As Mayer recounts later in the article, the man at Fox who secured the series for the network explained to her, \u201c[It] doesn\u2019t have much patience for the niceties of civil liberties or due process.\u201d\u00a0 \u201cExtreme measures,\u201d he explains, \u201care sometimes necessary for the greater good.\u201d The showfeatures a repetitive liturgy of moral meaning, and it draws on different storytelling genres \u2013 cliffhanging serial, soap opera, film noir \u2013 to pull the viewer into a world where the lived details of family, kinship, local and national politics, are all set on a precipice, dependent on the charisma and potency of one man.\u00a0\u00a0 A colleague told me, when I explained I was going to watch as much of the series as I could stomach, that he thinks 24<\/i> is \u201cScooby-Doo for grownups.\u201d\u00a0 The show is that formulaic.\u00a0 The resolution of the besetting conflict does not come until the end of the season, whereas for Scooby-Doo and pals the resolution comes at the end of each episode. \u00a0But the comparison is useful, down even to the predictable musical score.\u00a0 I came to foresee fairly quickly which sort of music would accompany which kind of scene.\u00a0 As with Scooby and Shaggy, Jack Bauer\u2019s snooping around where he wasn\u2019t wanted came with an initially creepy, but, after so much repetition, eventually reassuring type of score.\u00a0 And 24<\/i> routinely plays Wagnerian-Important music when Jack Bauer must c-o-n-c-e-n-t-r-a-t-e to keep his cool, much as Scooby-Doo played bubble-gum pop tunes when Shaggy and Scooby had to stop running in place and actually RUN.\u00a0 One big difference: the series Scooby-Doo, Where are You<\/i> was intentionally created as a non-violent alternative to the usual children\u2019s television programming at the time:\u00a0 a team solving a mystery without weapons.<\/p>\n

              \"Scooby-doo-meddling-kids-1970\"<\/a>

              “I would have gotten away with it too, if it weren’t for you meddling kids!”<\/p><\/div>\n

               <\/p>\n

              People who think about the meaning of television as a story-telling device explain that \u201cthe basic mechanisms of following a story are not \u2018natural\u2019 or simply automatic. We must learn how to process the fragmented camera shots, multiple streams of auditory material, and conventions of visual composition, turning them into a story that typically appears \u2018realistic\u2019 even though we never experience the real world through such devices.\u201d\u00a0 Jason Mittell continues, \u201cViewers learn to comprehend media by building mental schemata, or cognitive patterns, that process visual and aural information into recognizable conventions that can be applied to any moving-image example.\u201d[15]<\/a>\u00a0 And, in a serial, the writers are able to repeat these cognitive patterns in such a way as to shape cognition itself.\u00a0 One of my most rudimentary, teaching examples on this point involves the game of checkers.\u00a0 After playing the game for hours, I found myself thinking of pieces of furniture, people, whatever object, as set up in a pattern to allow for a good move on the board.\u00a0 When taught repetitively to think in a pattern, many of us maintain that pattern in other, totally unrelated arenas of life.\u00a0 (If this example does not work, I ask students to consider how often they wish they had a \u201cmute\u201d button to apply to a live person.)\u00a0 The creators of 24<\/i> well matched form with content for a show on terrorism and US counter-terrorism policies, in that their use of various serial, even soap-opera, motifs allowed for what one teacher called \u201can indefinitely expandable middle.\u201d\u00a0 Tania Modleski continues the interpretation of soap operas, explaining that \u201csuccessful soap operas do not end.\u201d\u00a0 Indeed, \u201cthey cannot end.\u201d[16]<\/a>\u00a0 24<\/i> works like a soap opera, in that it is set up for repeated non-resolution, formally identical to the \u201cWar on Terror\u201d which cannot end either.\u00a0 Homeland<\/i> continues the 24<\/i> soap opera, for a new administration.<\/p>\n

              Something that struck me quickly with the first season of 24<\/i> is the anxiety over marriage, motherhood, sex, and fatherhood.\u00a0 The series is well-constructed to attract female as well as male viewers, and not only because it periodically shows an aesthetically normative Kiefer Sutherland.\u00a0 Faludi seeks to understand why the murders of 9\/11, ostensibly by an anti-Western, anti-feminist movement, became a catalyst for anti-feminist, pro-maternal and downright paternalistic ideology in the US.\u00a0 One quotation she cites, from a May 10, 2004, piece by Kay Daly, \u201cHappy \u2018Security\u2019 Moms Day,\u201d is helpful to hear the tone:<\/p>\n

              On a clear September morning in 2001, the most basic instinct of mothers \u2013 protection of home and family \u2013 took top priority over any other concerns.\u00a0 In an instant, all other concerns outside the realm of survival seemed trivial.\u00a0 Suddenly, the enemy had not only invaded our nation, but the realities of everyday life.[17]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

              The storylines in both of the first two seasons of 24<\/i> intertwine a terror threat around issues within<\/i> the family:\u00a0 marital conflict and struggle between children and parents, most specifically around paternal authority, female sexuality, and feminine vulnerability.\u00a0 On the packaged DVD set of the first season, the background image for the concluding episodes is helpfully obvious.\u00a0 It shows an overlaid collage of Jack Bauer hugging his wife and daughter, with their heads visually muted into the outline of the continental US.\u00a0 The fate and future of the family is tangled up with the fate and future of the nation, and vice versa.\u00a0 What Anthony N. Smith writes about HBO\u2019s series, The Sopranos<\/i>, is true of 24<\/i>, although 24<\/i> heightens the importance beyond an exotic, ethnic sub-culture in New Jersey: \u201cit is likely that one storyline in a Sopranos<\/i> episode will feature domestic concerns, while another graphic violence,\u201d and, \u201cthe utilisation of this traditional technique of cutting between disparate story-strands frequently presented Chase [the Sopranos<\/i> creator] with many opportunities to cut between beats presenting mob violence [or, in our case, intelligence\/terrorist violence] and beats documenting everyday suburban living.\u201d[18]<\/a>\u00a0 Smith suggests, along with many others, that this back and forth allowed for the wide-spread popularity of a character as deceitful as Tony Soprano, and, I would suggest, a similar rhythm in 24<\/i> appealed to viewers anxious not only about national security, but about the ways that traditional, male authority within the homeland had been undermined after 9\/11.\u00a0 After all, although Bauer was able to save the nation by the end of the first season, he still was unable to save his own wife.\u00a0 While critics at the time marveled at this turn in the storyline, I would suggest that Jack\u2019s failure to save his own wife may have been as visually therapeutic to viewers as the earlier scenes in which he tortured his wife and daughter\u2019s master-mind tormentor.\u00a0 Viewing Jack\u2019s helplessness may have allowed a kind of reassurance that even a hero can massively fail, and still return the next season to fight.<\/p>\n

              The conflict between Jack Bauer and his wife and daughter, and the conflict within the soon-to-be presidential Palmer family, is vital for setting up the arc of the 24<\/i> storyline.\u00a0 First, I will try briefly to relate the drama regarding the Bauer family. \u00a0A key scene in the first episode of the first season involves Jack failing to be present when his own teenage daughter seems on the verge of having sex with a boy she has just recently met.\u00a0 Against the backdrop of the literally ticking time bomb is the race to save his daughter\u2019s virginity \u2013 not to mention, as it turns out, the ticking of his wife\u2019s ovaries.\u00a0 When Jack\u2019s wife searches a furniture warehouse for their daughter, who has gone on an escapade (turned kidnapping) with a girlfriend and two teenage boys (who turn out to be thugs-for-hire), the girlfriend\u2019s father (who, it turns out, is not really her father) helps Jack\u2019s wife find a condom package . . . wait for it . . . torn open<\/i>.\u00a0 It is obvious, at that point, that one of the teenage girls has had sex.\u00a0 At this point, Jack\u2019s wife tries desperately to reach him, to give him the news that his daughter may have had sex.\u00a0 But, sadly, Jack is too busy saving the nation to save his daughter\u2019s virginity.\u00a0 Another aspect to this ongoing search drama in the first series is the viewer\u2019s expectation that Jack\u2019s wife, who is increasingly distraught and feeling abandoned by her super-intelligence-anti-terrorist husband, may turn to the other girl\u2019s (single) father for intimate solace.\u00a0 Within the first three episodes, the writers have interspersed anxiety about (protected) teen sex, and anxiety over what appears potentially to be (perhaps justified) impending marital infidelity with the first scene of dismemberment.\u00a0 Jack Bauer removes the extended finger of a dead man, chopping it off in a way that is quite unsubtly phallic.<\/p>\n

              The first scene of torture in the first series may not, at first, read as torture.\u00a0 But I would argue it is not only torture, but torture related to female sexuality.\u00a0 Jack Bauer\u2019s daughter has been kidnapped, in part due to her girlfriend\u2019s lack of judgment about teenage boys.\u00a0 Her girlfriend, as the viewers know, is the foolish one who has had sex in the furniture warehouse, and, after their kidnapping, the bad girl eventually ends up unconscious in the hospital.\u00a0 Jack has, in the meantime, figured out that his daughter\u2019s disappearance is likely linked to his role in the ongoing terrorist plot of the season, and he (finally) contacts his wife to tell her to watch out, lest the one person (his daughter\u2019s girlfriend) who can tell them about their daughter\u2019s whereabouts be silenced by someone posing as benevolent.\u00a0 So, the viewers, who are as clueless at this point as Jack\u2019s wife, watch as a new doctor enters the girl\u2019s room and administers shocks to resuscitate her.\u00a0 The question is left excruciatingly open.\u00a0 Was the girl actually in cardiac arrest, or was the entire thing feigned, so that she could be shocked to death by a counter-agent posing as her doctor.\u00a0 The first scene of possible torture is to the \u201cbad\u201d girl, who chose foolishly to have sex, and who, it turns out, will be eventually suffocated, while whimpering, at the hands of the man who has been impersonating her father.<\/p>\n

              I assert that this scene is the first torture scene, in part due to the fact that it repeats itself in the second season. \u00a0Here, another young woman, barely out of her teens, is also submitted to electrical shocks, even as the doctor insists it might kill her \u2013 all because she may be able to remember computer codes that can help Jack Bauer trace the mystery of the season.\u00a0 In the latter case, it is obvious within the storyline that this young Counter Terrorist Unit (CTU) employee suffers bodily violation for the sake of the cause.\u00a0 There is no question about the motives of the people ordering the shock treatment.\u00a0 They are the \u201cgood guys,\u201d willing in this case to dirty their hands even when it comes to a person for whom they have real affection.\u00a0 Both scenes are linked to a key part of the storyline in the second series, regarding the willingness of the President of the United States to countenance the torture of a colleague, through the same shock method, this time administered to his brain. \u00a0Finally, to close the loop, although Jack Bauer\u2019s own daughter has avoided illicit sex, and, perhaps thereby avoided the fate that the series writers meted out to her bad friend, Bauer fails to protect his own wife from being raped in his daughter\u2019s stead.<\/p>\n

              The end of the first season thus ends with a \u201csecurity mom\u2019s\u201d nightmare.\u00a0 Jack ensconces his wife and daughter in what he hopes will be a \u201csafe house\u201d in the suburbs, complete not only with a male guard hiding out in a cherry-picker outside, but also a male guard mowing the lawn.\u00a0 When the viewer discovers that the terrorists have invaded the domicile, the camera shows . . . again, wait for it . . . the lawn mower is unoccupied.\u00a0 The good men have been shot, and the women eventually must, again, fend for themselves.\u00a0 By the end of the season, Jack\u2019s wife is not only pregnant, possibly by her rapist, but she is also dead, shot by Jack\u2019s former lover, a CTU rogue who returns in the second series to endure torture at Jack\u2019s hands.\u00a0 The themes of sex, marriage, torture and terror are obviously and explicitly intertwined, in ways that reveal a brilliant writing feat \u2013 the \u201cWar on Terror\u201d is not only about ticking time bombs and torture.\u00a0 It is about real families living with the daily struggles of teen sex, infidelity, and paternal impotence.<\/p>\n

              Intertwined with the Bauer drama is the Palmer drama, as David Palmer, candidate for President (and, eventually President) must reckon with the past lies of his wife, who has deceived him ostensibly to save her children and his political career.\u00a0 To go through the serpentine details of this plot-line would test the reader\u2019s patience, so I will concentrate on one contrast.\u00a0 Whereas Jack Bauer\u2019s wife is thin (arguably anorexic), helpless, and relatively clueless, David Palmer\u2019s wife is hale, resourceful, and brilliant.\u00a0 But, a key aspect of the first two seasons is Mrs. Palmer\u2019s manifestation of what one friend called \u201cpure evil.\u201d\u00a0 Mrs. Palmer, who is, we should note, African-American, serves as the stereotype of an emasculating matriarch, even masterminding a plan for her husband\u2019s infidelity so that she can potentially control him through the compliance of a younger, female aide.\u00a0 While the first season ends with Jack holding his dead wife, as he weeps and repeatedly apologizes for his inability to protect her, it also ends with David Palmer dismissing his<\/i> wife in steely-resolved, humiliating fashion, stating that \u201cYou\u2019ve lost touch with what it is to be a parent, a friend, a wife.\u201d \u00a0Finally, in front of the secret-service agents assigned to protect them, he tells her through clinched teeth, \u201cI just don\u2019t think you\u2019re fit to be First Lady.\u201d\u00a0 The viewers have been prompted, by this point, to cheer him on.<\/p>\n

              In a New York Times<\/i> essay entitled \u201cNormalizing Torture on \u201924,\u2019\u201d Adam Green notes a pattern in subsequent seasons:<\/p>\n

              What is most striking about torture on 24<\/i> is how it affects not only politics but also emotional and professional relationships. The C.T.U. data technician Sarah Gavin, interrogated with tasers to discover if she were a terrorist mole, subsequently returns to work showing no signs of trauma. Indeed, she marshals the clarity of mind to renegotiate her terms of employment with her superior, who approved her interrogation just hours earlier. The war-protester son of Secretary of Defense Heller, more alienated than ever after a session of sensory deprivation in a C.T.U. holding room, receives a strikingly paternal lecture from his father about why that treatment was appropriate. Even Audrey’s husband, Paul, somehow rises above his grievance to view his erstwhile tormentor as a buddy, helping Jack extract documents from a defense contractor and fend off attack – and even loyally taking a bullet for him. In all of these interactions, torture doesn’t deaden the feelings between people, rather it deepens them.. . . It is often noted that torture goes against the tenets of human community in two fundamental ways. Because torturers deny the basic humanity of their victims, it’s a violation of the norms governing everyday society. At the same time, torture constitutes society’s ultimate perversion, shaking or breaking its victims’ faith in humanity by turning their bodies and their deepest commitments – political or spiritual belief, love of family – against them to produce pain and fear. In the counterterrorist world of “24,” though, torture represents not the breakdown of a just society, but the turning point – at times even the starting point – for social relations. Through this artistic sleight of hand, the show makes torture appear normal. [19]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

              And torture is not just normal.\u00a0 Submitting to the suffering necessary to secure the safety of one\u2019s loved ones is a key part of a torture scene early on in the series (as I noted above) when the young female computer tech is submitted to electrical shocks to allow her to resume consciousness just long enough to regurgitate the code that might save the storyline.\u00a0 Soon after, as the doctor predicted, she dies. \u00a0She is a heroine, albeit unconscious and involuntary, for suffering at the hands of her comrades.\u00a0 And, those who are willing to sacrifice their own friends for the sake of the cause may be even more brave than those who endure the torture itself.\u00a0 Affliction for the good of the group elicits love.<\/p>\n

              As a Christian ethicist, I must note that this may be read as a kind of macabre reversal and re-distribution of what some Christians call the Eucharist, in which the wound that saves the faithful is distributed back out to the faithful. \u00a0Here, brothers and sisters willingly suffer the letting of their own blood, and the taking of one another\u2019s blood, because the blood of the Christian savior, Jesus Christ, was insufficient to bring about national security.\u00a0 24<\/i> presents a kind of pilgrimage by way of violence, in a narratively compelling, if formulaic manner.\u00a0 Slavoj \u017di\u017eek names this starkly in a 2006 piece about the series:<\/p>\n

              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. . . 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.[20]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

              \"This<\/a>

              This is the opposite of torture.<\/p><\/div>\n

              There are also sacrifices that do not bond but mutilate.\u00a0 The writers have intertwined suffering for one another with suffering that severs ties.\u00a0 Two families come apart at the seams in the second series, with a case of unambiguous domestic violence and a case whereby a young, elite Californian blonde woman turns against her family, and her Muslim fianc\u00e9, in order to serve the cause of her adopted terrorist group.\u00a0 A young man who attempts to help Jack\u2019s daughter in the second series breaks off their relationship over the phone, from the hospital.\u00a0 On the other end of the telephone line, she is confused, but the viewer watches as the camera rises to show him recovering in the bed, having had one of his legs severed.\u00a0\u00a0 The writers of 24<\/i> give a simple answer to terrorism, again, and again, and again, intertwined with a complex set of stories that ask viewers to trust that all of the carnage will, eventually, lead to the remembering of all who have been dismembered.<\/p>\n

              <\/a>4. \u201cWinter is Coming\u201d<\/h2>\n

              As the study I noted above cites, the rise of television violence has been precipitous since 9\/11.\u00a0 The increase in scenes of torture is set within a larger pattern of increasing \u201csadism,\u201d as the study names it.[21]<\/a>\u00a0 I believe it helpful to think through the work of violence in 24<\/i> by considering another, currently popular show that also features routine acts of violation.\u00a0 This section\u2019s sub-heading serves as the motto of the family line for which many viewers are to cheer in the HBO series Game of Thrones<\/i>.\u00a0 A horrific winter is coming, and there is only one family in the series apparently capable of toughening themselves for the impending disaster.\u00a0 Several former students suggested to me that I had also to view this series, if I am to begin to interpret the allure of television violence and sexual domination.\u00a0 When I posted online that I was fairly certain that something was amiss in the revival of medieval gore and supposedly \u201crealistic\u201d sexual hierarchy and exploitation in the series, I was inundated with the defensive comments of fans \u2013 men and women, African-American and Anglo.\u00a0 It turns out that this is a wildly and widely popular series, with parents of my daughters\u2019 school-mates and with colleagues across disparate walks of life.\u00a0 \u201cThe stories just pull you in!\u201d I heard again and again, in some form or another.<\/p>\n

              \"Brace<\/a>

              Brace yourself…<\/p><\/div>\n

              There are formal similarities to 24<\/i>, even while the two shows are from different genres.\u00a0 Game of Thrones<\/i> is fantasy, and, although any military analyst will tell you 24<\/i> is fantastical, it is not strictly within the \u201cfantasy\u201d genre. \u00a0As with 24<\/i>, the violence is intertwined with sexual and gendered themes.\u00a0 I watched the show in part to consider how gender and violence interact differently or similarly to 24<\/i>.\u00a0 In this case, many of its admirers suggest that the repeated scenes wherein women are sexually violated are warranted, because they are \u201crealistic\u201d to the vaguely designated time period in which the fairy tale is set, that is, once upon a time, in a land far, far away. . . .\u00a0 As with the case of another popular television show of the new millennium set in an earlier era, Mad Men<\/i>, the abominable treatment of women seems to provide a kind of masochistic\/sadistic viewing pleasure justified somehow by a kind of purported, historical accuracy.\u00a0 If 24<\/i> is like Scooby Doo<\/i> for grown-ups, Game of Thrones<\/i> is like the game Dungeons and Dragons<\/i>, combined with online porn for people who also love the novels of J.R.R. Tolkien.\u00a0 Game of Thrones<\/i> is much more prone to show women naked and men dressed in large, metal armor than is 24<\/i>.\u00a0 The contrast between naked, female vulnerability and male strength is both more overt and more complicated than on 24<\/i>.\u00a0 \u00a0But I would argue that ultimately the messages similarly undergird a gender binary of strength\/vulnerability, encouraging a kind of emotional distance and preparing the viewer to suffer loss.<\/p>\n

              The depiction of violence in the two shows is similarly graphic, repetitive, gendered, and vital.\u00a0 Men and women must variously muster the strength to endure their own and their loved ones prolonged suffering and dismemberment.\u00a0 In both shows, characters are presented with complex personalities and motives, but, in each show, human beings are also presented as \u201cmere meat,\u201d to use a phrase popular in post-modern film studies.[22]<\/a>\u00a0 A key question in 24<\/i> is whether or not viewers will have the courage to watch, endure, and commit the torture necessary to protect the nation.\u00a0 As noted above, the series implies that a telling dynamic within a culture of torture is whether or not one is willing to endure suffering at the hands of one\u2019s own comrades, for the sake of proving his or her loyalty. \u00a0And, in reverse, is one willing to commit torture, not only on one\u2019s clearly demarcated \u201cenemy,\u201d but on one\u2019s ambiguously designated, potential loved one?\u00a0 Game of Thrones<\/i> continues this question in a different form, presenting the challenge for viewers to endure, to watch, the deaths of characters designated as real human beings.<\/p>\n

              Richard Hofstadter suggested in his classic 1964 essay on \u201cThe Paranoid Style in American Politics\u201d that \u201cIt is hard to resist the conclusion that this enemy is, on many counts, the projection of the self; both the ideal and the unacceptable aspects of the self are attributed to him.”[23]<\/a>\u00a0 I believe there is a kind of boomerang effect in American culture during a time of perpetual fear, whereby there is an urge to enact retributive violence on those who serve to symbolize our past and potential violators, but also a desire to endure a controlled viewing of our own suffering.\u00a0 Within the politics of fear after 9\/11, there seems again to be a theme of self-sacrifice, and the necessity of sacrificing one\u2019s own attachments, for the sake of facing the monstrosity of terrorism and, perhaps in the midst of an economic recession, also the specter of fratricide during drastic austerity.<\/p>\n

              This, then, is the set-up in Game of Thrones<\/i>, which (like 24<\/i>) plays on themes of temporality.\u00a0 The opening features not a map of the continental US and a digital clock-face (as in 24<\/i>), but an intricate, moving, miniature map of the fantasy-land and a medieval-esque globe-dial, resembling an astrolabe, spinning toward the resumption of another brutal, indefinitely enduring winter.\u00a0 Yet again, the clock is ticking.\u00a0 It is a time of urgency, when men and women must act to save the future.\u00a0 The first season sets up a world-view where kinship and friendship connections are simultaneously crucial, and necessarily, often violently, relinquished in the face of the preparations for winter.\u00a0 In the midst of impending apocalypse, viewers are themselves drawn in to see the unique vulnerabilities and gifts of even cursory characters, and compelled to watch while these individuals are killed.<\/p>\n

              The severing of heads from bodies seems particularly important in the series, and the symbolism fits.\u00a0 If one\u2019s face involves one\u2019s capacity to think, then the removal of head from body enacts the disconnection of individuality and relationality from a body.\u00a0 Within the very first scene of the very first episode, there are multiple beheadings, including one that sets up a central premise of the show.\u00a0 A member of the monastic military guard called The Night\u2019s Watch has just narrowly escaped the land from whence monsters and savages come.\u00a0 He has just viewed the brutal murders of two of his friends, but, having run away from the scene, he is considered a deserter and must, by the king\u2019s law, have his head removed from his body.\u00a0 But, before he is executed, he calmly but vulnerably avers his honesty \u2013 he has indeed viewed the monsters from the north.\u00a0 His desertion was not one of cowardice, he explains, but borne of the amoral chaos inflicted by what he has viewed.\u00a0 The youngest son of the hero\u2019s family, still a child, must watch this execution.\u00a0 He is told by his brother that their father will know if he looks away.\u00a0 He is told this not unkindly, but with compassion combined with stoicism.\u00a0 In order to prepare to be a man, he must watch as an honest man has his own eyes closed, by having his head chopped off.\u00a0 The viewer is given a similar challenge.\u00a0 Will we have the nerve to continue watching, even while, eventually, the hero himself is beheaded at the end of the first season?\u00a0 And, just to be clear, this is not a gender-specific challenge.\u00a0 The hero\u2019s oldest daughter must not only watch her father\u2019s beheading, but later view his severed head on a spike.<\/p>\n

              The relationship between sexual desire and violence is fraught in this series in ways similar to 24<\/i>.\u00a0 Both series simultaneously present sexually explicit scenes and punish those whose sexual desires reveal their vulnerability.\u00a0 And, again, beheading is a part of the symbolism.\u00a0 In one of the most cited, graphic scenes, a brutally successful knight who is felled during a joust stands up after his horse has thrown him, pulls out his massive sword, and chops off the head of his whinnying horse.\u00a0 (This is all shown in excruciating detail, please note.)\u00a0 The viewer soon learns that the dismembered horse has failed his master due to the fact that the other knight\u2019s mare was in heat.\u00a0 The cost of sexual distraction is death.\u00a0 Soon after this episode, the hero\u2019s most trusted guard, called on to protect him as they attempt escape from their enemy\u2019s compound, is momentarily distracted by the alluring gaze of one of the show\u2019s many naked prostitutes.\u00a0 This is the first sign of this man\u2019s humanity, as he is both tempted and visibly embarrassed by the woman\u2019s recognition that she has distracted him.\u00a0 It is the first scene in which the viewer sees him seeing, and being seen back, as an embodied person, rather than as a mere tool for protection of his master.\u00a0 Immediately afterward, when he walks out of the door with his master, this guard is killed by another swordsman, by receiving a knife through the eyes.\u00a0 The viewer watches as a person who has been caught viewing is punished with death by blindness.<\/p>\n

              It is not incidental that the unequivocal, unambiguous heroes of the first season are soldiers sworn to monastic celibacy.\u00a0 And, following scene after repetitive scene of naked, female love-slaves, the heroine of the season first must suffocate her rapist-husband turned (we are asked to believe genuine) lover to his death, and then emerge naked but unscathed from a fire, a fire in which another, older woman is ritually burned to death (while screaming for mercy, no less).\u00a0 If the question left at the end of the first series is whether one, like the youngest son in the first scene of the first season, has the courage to continue watching as people we have come to care about are disemboweled, raped, tortured, and impaled, I declare failure.<\/p>\n

              I would suggest, following Faludi\u2019s thesis, that both 24<\/i> and Game of Thrones<\/i> represent a kind of ritual, visual, cultural self-cutting, whereby viewers not only want to view with vengeance, but to master the violent loss and perpetual fear of future loss, whether such fear is conspiratorially promoted (which I believe it is) or viscerally, psychologically wired (which is perhaps also is the case).\u00a0 Regardless of the cause and effect (which I warned I would not try to answer) the spectacle continues to be widely, wildly popular, streamed reliably into the moral imaginations of American citizens.<\/p>\n

              Both Abdullah Antepli and Ingrid Mattson\u2019s presentations at the 2011 conference appealed to the common humanity of their listeners.\u00a0 They each appealed to our common sense of connection through our love for kin \u2013 through our capacity to relate to and empathize with our neighbors.\u00a0 If, through the viewing of violent suffering in shows like 24<\/i> and Game of Thrones<\/i>, Americans are not only learning to hate our neighbor, but also practicing a kind of liturgy of self-sacrifice and loss, then what will happen to such appeals for empathy?\u00a0 If we are practicing a stoicism born of shame, what will happen to our capacity for relationship?\u00a0 With deep sorrow, I now hear Abdullah Antepli\u2019s call for us to risk the viewing of torture as coming from within my own world of isolated idealism, a world where people actually experience a moral shift usually known as empathy when they view another human being in pain, rather than experiencing some kind of solace or affective armor through such viewing.<\/p>\n

              <\/a>5. Inconclusive Postscript from Homeland<\/i><\/h2>\n

              In a comment posted on the feminist site Jezebel<\/i>, under a whimsical blog relating Homeland<\/i>\u2019s main character to another eccentric character in a comedy series, \u201cLarHar\u201d states: \u201cI am usually not into the whole, CIA, Military, Terrorist series, but I am hooked on Homeland. I didn’t think I would like it, and now I freaking love it! I think Claire is brilliant.\u201d[24]<\/a>\u00a0 By shifting the anti-terrorist operative to female, and by rendering her a non-threatening, typically feminine form of unstable, the former writers of 24<\/i> continue the soap opera of the perpetual War on Terror, which replaced the perpetual Cold War.\u00a0 Rather than being unhinged by necessary violence toward others and needing anger-management therapy (as did Jack Bauer), Homeland<\/i>\u2019s heroine is hysterical and needs to be protected from her own worst, self-harming impulses.\u00a0 She is a reassuring warrior for a new era of fighting the designated enemy of radical Islam.\u00a0 Writer Stan Goff names with his usual analytical clarity a Hollywood phenomenon he calls using \u201cdecoys.\u201d\u00a0 In his interpretation of the film Man on Fire<\/i>, Goff names Denzel Washington as the perfect \u201cdecoy.\u201d\u00a0 By writing an African-American man as the cowboy savior who must use supposedly effective interrogation techniques like anal rape to save a young girl, the writers distract viewers from the racial context of America\u2019s current wars.[25]<\/a> Similarly, I would suggest that the camaraderie between the hero and heroine of Homeland<\/i>, portrayed by Claire Danes and Mandy Patinkin, as they work together to make the Western world safe from Muslim terrorists, distracts viewers from the gendered nature of selling war today.\u00a0 Homeland<\/i> actually bests stories like Man on Fire<\/i>, in that the writers have embedded concerns about female vulnerability into the storyline about a woman fighting terrorism.\u00a0 Claire Danes remains perpetually a version of the adolescent girl she played in her television debut, needing Patinkin\u2019s fatherly protection and also, repeatedly, eliciting the protective affection of the audience.\u00a0 She is brilliant but unstable, eventually giving herself \u201ctotally\u201d over to the man viewers have been cued to perceive as a threat.<\/p>\n

              \"homeland-50b40fbf578b1\"<\/a>I also believe it is no small matter when, in the first season, our heroine realizes a crucial piece of the terrorism puzzle just as she self-sacrificially submits to her own ritualized torture through electro-convulsive therapy.\u00a0 In doing so, she submits to her own pain, and through her acceptance of suffering, lying horizontal, strapped down to a bed, she gains her wisdom.\u00a0 This cannot be what Susan Faludi had in mind when she calls, at the end of The Terror Dream<\/i>, for Americans to draw on \u201cthe talents and vitality of all of us equally, men and women both.\u201d[26]<\/a><\/p>\n

              Finally, I want to close with an appeal from Kalman Bland\u2019s essay in this volume, his paraphrase of the Jewish proscription of torture, as a prayer.\u00a0 If torture in America is in part a ramification of shame, may these words be of some use, to women as well as to men.\u00a0 Rather than steel ourselves, preparing for self-sacrifice, loss, and possibly the call to sacrifice our beloveds, may we be willing still to believe sufficiently in love.[27]<\/a><\/p>\n

              Consequently, we are meant to hear God saying something like this: I know how humans tend to react to adversity. Precisely because you have been the victims of injustice and torture, your hearts are hardened and you are inclined to commit those acts yourself, for injustice and torture perpetuate themselves by scarring the soul, making it more difficult to empathize with the other. Physical violence and psychological abuse in one generation are among the major causes for reproducing abuse and violence in the next generation. I weep for your pain, with you I am lost in exile, but knowing the scars in your tormented collective consciousness, I command you, my people, to be extraordinarily vigilant in resisting the abominations and crimes of torture. Don\u2019t let your oppressive history have the last word. Overcome it. Don\u2019t commit atrocities. Don\u2019t torture.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

              Amen.<\/p>\n

              \n

               <\/p>\n

              \n
              \n

              [1]<\/a> S. Faludi, The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9\/11<\/i> (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

              \n

              [2]<\/a> C. Robin, Fear: The History of a Political Idea<\/i> (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 20.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

              \n

              [3]<\/a> See G. Greenwald, \u201cThe NYT\u2019s nice, new euphemism for torture,\u201d Salon (June 6, 2009),<\/p>\n

              http:\/\/www.salon.com\/2009\/06\/06\/nyt_5\/<\/a>.\u00a0 Also, for examples of NPR avoiding the term \u201ctorture,\u201d see this website:\u00a0 http:\/\/nprcheck.blogspot.com\/search?q=torture<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

              \n

              [4]<\/a> \u201cWhite House Meddling in the First Film about the Atomic Bomb: Transcript,\u201d On the Media<\/i> (August 13, 2010), http:\/\/www.onthemedia.org\/2010\/aug\/13\/white-house-meddling-in-the-first-film-about-the-atomic-bomb\/transcript\/.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

              \n

              [5]<\/a> The reverse has been documented, in that numerous Bush administration officials were explicit in their appreciation and emulation of the show:<\/p>\n

              According to British lawyer and writer Sands, Jack Bauer-played by Kiefer Sutherland-was an inspiration at early “brainstorming meetings” of military officials at Guantanamo in September 2002. Diane Beaver, the staff judge advocate general who gave legal approval to 18 controversial interrogation techniques including waterboarding, sexual humiliation and terrorizing prisoners with dogs, told Sands that Bauer “gave people lots of ideas.” Michael Chertoff, the\u00a0Homeland\u00a0Security chief, gushed in a panel discussion on 24 organized by the Heritage Foundation that the show “reflects real life.”\u00a0 D. Lithwick, \u201cThe Fiction Behind Torture Policy,\u201d Newseek<\/i> Vol 152, Issue 5 (Aug 4, 2008), 11.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

              \n

              [6]<\/a> \u00a0P. Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil<\/i> (New York: Random House, 2008).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

              \n

              [7]<\/a> R. Beck, \u201cThreat Level: Against Homeland,\u201d n+1<\/i> (Dec 3, 2012), http:\/\/nplusonemag.com\/threat-level<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

              \n

              [8]<\/a> G. Lamb, \u201cTV\u2019s higher threshold of pain,\u201d The Christian Science Monitor<\/i> (Aug 23, 2002),http:\/\/www.csmonitor.com\/2002\/0823\/p13s02-altv.html<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

              \n

              [9]<\/a> \u201cParents Beware of 24<\/i>,\u201d Parents Television Council<\/i> (Nov 21, 2008), https:\/\/www.parentstv.org\/PTC\/publications\/emailalerts\/2008\/wrapup_112108.htm<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

              \n

              [10]<\/a> G. Lamb, \u201cTV\u2019s higher threshold of pain,\u201d The Christian Science Monitor<\/i> (Aug 23, 2002),http:\/\/www.csmonitor.com\/2002\/0823\/p13s02-altv.html<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

              \n

              [11]<\/a> S. Faludi, The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9\/11<\/i> (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007), 208.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

              \n

              [12]<\/a> P. Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil<\/i> (New York: Random House, 2008), 397.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

              \n

              [13]<\/a> See especially P. Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect<\/i>, 362, 346, 333.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

              \n

              [14]<\/a> J. Mayer, \u201cWhatever It Takes: The politics of the man behind \u201824\u2019,\u201d The New Yorker<\/i> (Feb 19, 2007), http:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/reporting\/2007\/02\/19\/070219fa_fact_mayer.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

              \n

              [15]<\/a> J. Mittell, \u201cFilm and Television Narrative.\u201d In The Cambridge Companion to Narrative<\/i>, ed. D. Herman. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007),163,164,167.<\/p>\n

              [16]<\/a> D. Porter, \u2018Soap Time: Thoughts on a Commodity Art Form\u2019, College English <\/i>(Apr. 1977), 783. Quoted in: T. Modleski, \u201cThe Search for Tomorrow in Today\u2019s Soap Opera.\u201d In Loving With a Vengeances: Mass Produced Fantasies for Women<\/i>. 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2007), 29-40, 29.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

              \n

              [17]<\/a> S. Faludi, The Terror Dream<\/i>, 160, from K. R. Daly, \u201cHappy \u2018Security\u2019 Moms Day,\u201d GOPUSA<\/i> (May 10, 2004), http:\/\/www.gopusa.com\/commentary\/kdaly\/<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

              \n

              [18]<\/a> A. N. Smith, \u201cTV or Not TV? The Sopranos and Contemporary Episode Architecture in US Network and Premium Cable Drama.\u201d Critical Studies in Television<\/i>. 6.1 (2011), 36-51, 44, 45.\u00a0 Please note British spelling in the original.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

              \n

              [19]<\/a> A. Green, \u201cNormalizing Torture on \u201824\u2019,\u201d New York Times<\/i> (May 22, 2005), http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2005\/05\/22\/arts\/television\/22gree.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

              \n

              [20]<\/a> S. \u017di\u017eek, \u201cThe depraved heroes of 24 are the Himmlers of Hollywood,\u201d The Guardian<\/i> (Jan 10, 2006), http:\/\/www.guardian.co.uk\/media\/2006\/jan\/10\/usnews.comment.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

              \n

              [21]<\/a> Lamb, \u201cTV\u2019s higher threshold of pain,\u201d The Christian Science Monitor<\/i> (Aug 23, 2002),http:\/\/www.csmonitor.com\/2002\/0823\/p13s02-altv.html<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

              \n

              [22]<\/a> For a helpful overview, see W. Brown, \u201cMonstrous Cinema.\u201d New Review of Film and Television Studies<\/i> 10.4 (2012), 409-424.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

              \n

              [23]<\/a> R. Hofstadter, \u201cThe Paranoid Style in American Politics,\u201d Harper’s Magazine<\/i> (Nov 1964), http:\/\/karws.gso.uri.edu\/jfk\/conspiracy_theory\/the_paranoid_mentality\/the_paranoid_style.html.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

              \n

              [24]<\/a> M. Davies, \u201cCarrie on Homeland Is Actually Charlie on It\u2019s Always Sunny in Philadelphia,\u201d Jezebel<\/i> (Dec 7, 2012), http:\/\/jezebel.com\/5966734\/carrie-on-homeland-is-actually-charlie-on-its-always-sunny-in-philadelphia?tag=homeland.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

              \n

              [25]<\/a> S. Goff, Sex and War<\/i> (Lulu.com, 2006), 18-20.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

              \n

              [26]<\/a> S. Faludi, The Terror Dream<\/i>, 296.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

              \n

              [27]<\/a> I would like to thank Kara Slade, Matthew Elia, Isaac Villegas, and the people at the National Religious Campaign Against Torture for organizing the conference that helped me finally to begin trying to write on this issue.\u00a0 Kara Slade continually helped with thinking and editing.\u00a0 I am grateful to my co-editor, Danny Arnold, for helping me process the misery of watching these shows, and to his brilliant wife, Kate Roberts, for her gender analysis of all things pop-culture.\u00a0 Thanks to my pastor Ryan Quanstrom, for the Scooby-Doo reference, to Namaan Wood for many helpful articles pertaining to media analysis, and to several friends and former students who allowed me to question them mercilessly about shows that they love.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

              I wrote an e-mail to gush to one of my favorite authors not too long ago, expressing my appreciation for his book. \u00a0He wrote back that he\u00a0is not sure whether he now agrees with himself on much that is in that\u00a0book. \u00a0Another friend said something to me once a while back, about\u00a0how writing is a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1049","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ethics"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7EotM-gV","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1049","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1049"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1049\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1104,"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1049\/revisions\/1104"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1049"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1049"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1049"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}