Neoliberal Politics, Convergence, and the Do-It-Yourself Security of 24

Many scholars have been rightly skeptical about arguments that deploy the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, as a means of understanding media texts, concerned that they too often fall into the trap of identifying a singular catalyst for culture instead of developing more nuanced claims that recognize a host of interrelated social, industrial, and historical phenomena in which culture emerges. Premiering in the immediate wake of 9/11, the Fox network television series 24 (2001-2010) provided a lightning rod for such arguments and concerns. As it repeatedly rehearsed a "ticking clock" scenario, in which hero Jack Bauer prevents an imminent terrorist attack on American soil, 24 tempted many to read it as the urtext exemplifying the relationship between television, post-9/11 America, and the so-called war on terror. From this perspective, 24 has been commonly and often too simply understood as either a direct reflection of American anxieties, a piece of propaganda serving the interests of the conservative institutions driving American security response, or a shaper of American opinion and behavior in the course of that war.

For example, in depicting struggles between American protagonists and terrorist antagonists on television—and finding continued Nielsen ratings success between 2001 and 2010—the series has been claimed to tap into a consensus of fear, and a shared desire for decisive action, encouraging a popular acceptance of torture.¹ The simplicity of such a claim lies in misrecognizing partial, selective representation as reflection, and in ignoring that while the ongoing series was certainly influenced by the war on terror, the development and production of the program began significantly earlier than September 11, 2001; 24 was not invented as a specific response to post-9/11 conditions. Of course, Bush administration officials and other conservatives very much wanted Americans to see the series as the social truth of a post-9/11 world, with Homeland Security's Michael Chertoff arguing that 24's presentation of counterterrorist action "reflects real life."² Combined with the public visibility of archconservative superfans like Rush Limbaugh, the political discourse surrounding co-creator Joel Surnow, and the industrial proximity between Fox and Fox News within the media empire of conservative Rupert Murdoch, this partial, selective representation of reality seemed to serve the political economy of post-9/11 conservatism.³

Yet this approach denies the participation of nonconservatives in production of the series (such as showrunner and registered Democrat Howard Gordon), as well as the significant economic incentives for a conservative media company to nevertheless accommodate socially liberal audience segments. Alternatively, instead of considering 24 as a definitive reflection of reality (or conservative views of reality), other claims have been made about reality's increasing reflection of 24, thanks to its effects on the war on terror and public opinion post-9/11. In 2007, for example, Newsweek columnist Dahlia Lithwick identified Jack Bauer as "the prime mover of American interrogation doctrine," as his torture of fictional enemies on-screen offered "inspiration" and "gave people lots of ideas" for security policy in the wake of 9/11.⁴ Both waterboarding and Abu Ghraib could be understood as effects of an administration and a public trained by television fantasy to accept torture as a legitimate policy. How and why 24 had the singular power to do this remains unclear; Lithwick herself offers an alternative interpretation of Bauer that deploys him as evidence of the folly of legalized torture, not grounds for its justification.

With cultural icons like Jack Bauer frequently figured as either the cause or the effect of post-9/11 politics, it is easy to perceive some kind of significant cultural dynamic at work, but neither one-way effects models nor structuralist critiques nor reflection theories suffice to capture the more complex relationship between 24 and the politics of post-9/11 America. Instead of trying to identify a causal relationship between the two (which risks positing a chicken-or-egg question in which we attempt to fallaciously explain which phenomenon drove the other), we should instead take a more productive, nuanced approach that seeks to identify...