call out the cavalry

Well - not the cavalry, exactly. American Brigadier General Patrick Finnegan has met with 24's producers to talk about their ever-escalating torture content.

We have pretty much stopped watching 24 in Baroque Mansions, and if les petites watch now it is with a running commentary from me - because the truth is that exposure does de-sensitise. DUH.

James Donaghy in the Guardian reports:

As Finnegan said: "The disturbing thing is that, although torture may cause Jack Bauer some angst, it is always the patriotic thing to do."

We shouldn't be surprised by this - after all, protagonist Jack Bauer decapitated a paedophile and presented his head in a holdall as a goodwill gesture to terrorists he was infiltrating. Nonetheless, what was once a rollercoaster ride of cliffhangers is increasingly becoming a video-nasty gore-fest. Torture used to be a last resort on the series where all else failed, but by season four, innocent civilians were being tortured when they weren't actually hiding anything. It could be snapping fingers, assaults with sanding machines and defibrillators, or mysterious nerve-frying injections - 24 has been turning into A Clockwork Orange, to the point where, in a recent episode, Jack tortured his own brother by suffocating him with a plastic bag.

Partly, this is because the stakes have increased with each series - chemical warfare, bio-terrorism and nukes have hit Los Angeles in quick succession. A bigger threat demands a bigger response and, if you can save 20,000 lives by breaking a metatarsal here and there, then history will likely forgive you. But given the show's popularity with the American military rank and file, the normalisation of torture is not something to be taken lightly.


Stop press: Normblog has published a post on the same subject. Read and see if it resonates!