Life During Wartime

Kiefer Sutherland as Jack Bauer. Courtesy Global TV.

It was one of those whoosh-down-the-rabbit-hole moments that make prime-time television watching such a bumpy ride. Early in a recent episode of 24 an ad came on for Oral-B Brush Ups. Grinning collegians danced into a subway; pausing for a moment, the leader shoved a spearmint splint onto a finger and gave her teeth a scrub. Off-screen singers chimed in: “Rip-zip-brush-ahhhh!”

Kiefer Sutherland, star of Fox’s 24 (Global in Canada) then re-appeared. This season, Sutherland’s Jack Bauer is battling Islamic terrorists. In the last few episodes, tan assassins have derailed a train, kidnapped the U.S. Secretary of Defense and are now about to blow six American cities sky high.

But wait, this was a commercial, too. “Hi, I’m Kiefer Sutherland,” the Canadian actor said. Although terrorism is a pressing threat, he continued, “It is important to recognize that the American Muslim community stands firmly beside their fellow Americans in denouncing and resisting all forms of terrorism.”

With halitosis and hate crimes out of the way (“Only in America,” as fight promoter Don King likes to say), we were finally hurled back to 24. For those who’ve never spent a day with Jack Bauer, the show goes like this: Jack is an anti-terrorist operative employed by the U.S. Counter Terrorist Unit (CTU). Each season is 24 hours in Jack’s life – one momentously bad day on the job. First season, he stopped a presidential assassination in 24 hours. Year two, he was notified that a nuclear bomb was set to go off in L.A. – again inside a day.

Today, or season four rather, we’re approaching late afternoon – high tea for some, but right now Jack is holed up with his married girlfriend, sorting through evidence of an impending nuclear holocaust. Making matters worse, Islamic terrorists are gunning for him. They want Jack dead. They want a lot of Americans dead, in about 16 hours … tick, tick, tick …

The January re-launch of 24 excited lots of furious commentary for its alleged anti-Arab American sentiment. Fox responded with Sutherland’s public statement. Didn’t help, it seemed. The show continued to be denounced as further proof of “the Republican network’s” blatant jingoism. I’m not so sure. Though its cable news division is militantly conservative, Fox comedies are the most subversive fare on American TV. Consider, for instance, the network’s Sunday medley of dysfunctional families; The Simpsons, King of the Hill, Malcolm in the Middle and Arrested Development.

A few hours in, it became evident that the new season of 24 is far trickier and more daring than detractors led us to believe. For one thing, “good” and “bad” guys often behave in an identical manner. The Islamic terrorist ringleader recently turned on his Americanized teenager. And in that same show, the U.S. Secretary of Defense (William Devane) wrote off his own son, a peacenik who had succumbed to “sixth-grade Michael Moore logic.”

The terrorist ordered his son killed. Convinced he was hiding something, the defense secretary okayed the torture of his boy by CTU interrogators.

The current 24 chase has also demonstrated a few misdirection plays worthy of the Super Bowl champion New England Patriots. For weeks now a slinky high-tech sophisticate within CTU has been leaking secrets to the enemy. Jack Bauer smelled a rat. A trap was laid and sprung. A battalion of CTU security operatives marched through the intelligence complex. The traitor stiffened … then relaxed as the patrol stormed past to seize a co-worker she’d set up.

“Please stop! There’s got to be an explanation for this,” the innocent employee called out moments later, as an unflinching interrogator zapped her in the temple with a spark-shooting stapler. “You’ve got to give me time here,” she screamed.

He didn’t. The scene ends with the sobbing woman screaming for a sympathetic witness on the other side of a one-way mirror. Her bosses look on, dully swapping shop talk.

Kiefer Sutherland and Kim Raver in 24. AP Photo by Isabella Vosmikova.

Probably the most disturbing aspect of 24 is that it concedes partial victory to terrorists. In the current issue of Atlantic Monthly, Richard Clarke, a former counter-terrorism operative himself, imagines a sobering doomsday scenario. It is now 2011 and a North American Al-Qaeda is taking out transportation lines and invading America’s cyber infrastructure with cancerous viruses. In response, political despots – Super Patriot Missiles in human form – are wiping out personal freedoms everywhere.

Clarke could well be describing this season’s 24. The enemy has landed and is now everywhere and nowhere. With each episode, Jack machine-guns a score of Islamic terrorists, only to face twice as many shooters the following hour. At the same time, traitors are multiplying within the Homeland Insecurity community, where all are subject to the ultimate lie detector test – torture.

America’s only hope is 24’s greatest strength, Jack Bauer – star and executive producer, Kiefer Sutherland. Like his father, Donald Sutherland, who matured into a lead actor with an eerily haunting presence, Kiefer has graduated from playing brat pack eccentrics to becoming a commanding character actor. It could well be that 24 is his Klute or Don’t Look Now, for movies are no longer much interested in worried men.

Jack Bauer is the most worried man in America, and why not? In the last three years he’s fought off presidential assassins, a biological plague and heroin addiction; now six cities in America are on the verge of disappearing, just like his murdered wife. At times, we see him looking at the married co-worker he loves (Third Watch alumna Kim Raver) and know that deep in his cold, cold heart Jack understands that she’ll soon be gone, too. Such is life during wartime.

Sutherland’s weary grace gives 24 much-needed gravity. Otherwise, the feverish melodrama might spin into comic-book lunacy. The series boasts another intriguing character this season. Iranian actress Shohreh Aghdashloo (House of Sand and Fog) plays the wife-mother caught in the middle of the fight over America between her terrorist husband and son. Watching her tortured playing, we understand that season four of 24 is much more than a Muslim skeet shoot for NRA fundamentalists.

Stephen Cole writes about television for CBC.ca.