24: High Tech Misogyny

OK, I wrote this several years ago, but it's the first time it's ever seen the light of day. Figure I'd use my blog as a clearinghouse for this kind of thing. Please pardon its dated quality:

Near the end of the first hour of Fox's suspense series 24, a female mercenary (Mia Kirshner) seduces a hapless political photographer on a cross-country flight for a tryst in the airliner's bathroom, stealing his security clearance card in flagrante delicto. For her grand exit, and to make sure the photographer doesn't make it to LA, she sets a bomb inside the passenger jet, blows its doors, uses the rush of air out of the cabin to eject herself as the bomb explodes, and parachutes to safety as hundreds perish. She dispatches her duties with such cool and sexy James Bondian aplomb that even post-September 11th audiences may have forgiven her utter ruthlessness and actually cheered her unscathed descent into the Mojave Desert. She immediately strips naked and builds a fire - all the better to provide a TV-friendly silhouette of her form - then buries the ID card with a homing device so her lesbian lover can later retrieve and hold the coveted item in escrow against her untrustworthy employer. This is what those in the television biz call "realism."

One may certainly imagine ways of stealing a man's identity that require less spectacle, and less nudity, but despite its claims to "real-time" verisimilitude, 24 is spy vs. spy fantasy at its most thrillingly absurd. One cannot describe the plot of the series without making it sound daffy: a federal agent becomes a puppet assassin for evil Serbian terrorists bent on revenge against a presidential candidate, himself blackmailed by a conspiracy of shadowy businessmen. It's shamelessly ridiculous, and lots of fun. For such an over-the-top, unapologetically exciting ride, one can forgive a lot of logical transgressions, and indeed one must forgive them in order to enjoy its gleeful implausibility. It is more difficult to forgive its misogyny.

While not forgetting that Mandy, our intrepid hired-gun, has shown no remorse in her slaughter of innocents for personal financial gain, she ironically emerges as one of the only winning female characters we'll see during the show's 24 hour season. By the end of the second episode, in what could be a twisted alternate ending to Thelma & Louise, Mandy chooses to murder her sister-in-crime to protect her underworld cred, and the clash of crushing heartache and steely determination in this scenario recalls the tragic grandeur of a cold-as-ice Clint Eastwood anti-hero. Unfortunately, Mandy's role in the series is through by the time the ubiquitous ticking clock hits 2 AM, leaving us for 22 uniterrupted hours with some of the flattest and most ethically questionable constructions of femininity assembled for any one TV show in years.

The last half-decade has seen the long-overdue exaltation of the female action hero. Since the debut of Buffy the Vampire Slayer in 1997, network prime time has hosted several smart, sassy, and, above all, strong women warriors. Though the quality of some of these shows has been spotty, they've each contributed to an important neo-feminist discourse: how does the modern woman reconcile her struggle against an oppressive patriarchy with her desire to take pleasure in her femininity? Buffy must juggle her nightly demon hunting with dating and school. Sydney Bristow on Alias jets around the world subverting an evil spy syndicate while attempting to navigate the murky emotional waters of early adulthood. The secret identity thing has always complicated the lives of superheroes, but only recently have mainstream artists appropriated those themes as particularly valuable to a feminist project. Writers like Joss Whedon and J.J. Abrams give tired action genre conflicts new spin by constructing the physical trials to mirror or complicate their hero's personal crises; Buffy's vampires and demons metaphorically resemble her emotional challenges, and Bristow has recently learned that the greatest enemy of all is her own mother.
The fall 2001 television season saw networks struggling to bring something new to an action landscape glutted with female protagonists, and many found the best way to do so was to bring back something old: the male action hero. So the WB brought a fresh take to the ultimate male superhero in its Superman-as-troubled-teen series, Smallville. And in 24, Fox introduced us to Counter Terrorism Unit agent and ex-special forces renegade Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland). They seemed to be gambling on the possibility that the popularity of female action heroes was due to the novelty of seeing our expectations reversed, and that audiences were ready to get back to business as usual and root for men. So the genders changed, but both series did betray an influence to the girl power shows that came before. Clark Kent and Jack Bauer are family men who must not only save the planet but also keep their houses in order, and in fact the latter is seen as necessary for the former. But while Smallville seems satisfied to harmlessly riff off of teen angst themes, many already explored by Buffy, 24 takes its father-as-savior template in a far more traditional direction. Though nothing is particularly wrong with Jack Bauer himself, aside from the fact that he's something of a cipher, the world created for him is a pre-feminist anachronism.

If a character like mercenary Mandy were introduced on Buffy, she'd already have her antithesis in Buffy Summers. Buffy would embody, or come to embody, a compromise between forces that threaten to tear strong women apart. There is no such analog on 24. Any joy we take from watching Mandy must come from an appreciation of her physical skills and her stoic adherence to mercenary principles. She wields power, is confident, and survives, but there is little else for her. For the other female characters on the show, there is even less. One potential female ally after another betrays Bauer. First, we meet Jamey Farrell (Karina Arroyave), who is originally cleared as one of the few people at CTU that Jack could trust, but is later revealed to have sold classified information to the very mercenaries attempting to assassinate both Jack and the presidential candidate he is sworn to protect, Senator David Palmer (Dennis Haysbert). When confronted with her crimes, and the threat that her son will learn of her treachery if she doesn't cooperate, she breaks down emotionally and must be violently coerced to give up information upon which lives depend.

We soon learn that emotional fragility is endemic to the show's females. When one of the Senator's aides (Kara Zediker) discovers she's being manipulated by a would-be assassin masquerading as her mysterious European lover, she's recruited to turn the tables on him by planting a transmitter in his wallet. When they next meet she plants the bug, but ultimately cannot control her anger and stabs him in a fit of rage, blowing her simple assignment and ruining Jack's chances to unravel the terrorist conspiracy once and for all. The implied lesson: Hell hath no fury blah blah blah.

Then there's Jack's wife and daughter, Teri (Leslie Hope) and Kimberly (Elisha Cuthbert). To think that its creators may actually consider these characters the strong feminine centers of the show is a disturbing notion. While the writers allow them brief flashes of intelligence and resourcefulness, they remain serially, and to a comic degree, damsels in distress. Kimberly is a lying brat who sets the wheels of the terrorist plot in motion by sneaking out of her house with her equally idiotic friend and a couple of kidnappers. We almost grow to like her by the end of the season thanks to her display of quick thinking in a couple of situations, but the only way the writers can make us regret our hating her mother is by subjecting her to constant suffering ending in death, but by then the damage has been done. Teri's reactions to the admittedly Sisyphean trials of the day run the gamut between hysteria and paralysis. Jack loves her and risks his own life, and the lives of his coworkers, to save her, so committed is he to rebuilding his family after a bitter separation. We understand his abstract matrimonial obligation, but don't quite get why he returned to this exhausting dysfunctional unit in the first place.

When 24 isn't showing us weak women it's showing us how incapable they are of intelligently wielding power. After Jack's actions in the field are misinterpreted, CTU mucky-mucks replace him with Alberta Green (Tamara Tunie), who makes it her mission to arrest Jack despite her staff's pleas. Conversations between Jack's aides make it clear that she is considered a sycophantic hack. I kept expecting her to surprise her doubters and come through for Jack in the end. Though that kind of development wouldn't have been the apex of creativity (seemingly-bitchy boss turns out to be perfectly fair, just misunderstood), it would have been less nauseating than what did happen: she gets her comeuppance upon Jack's return and is expelled from the office, and hence the show. Another career woman put in her place. Duplicitous, power-drunk women infect the parallel story as well. Senator Palmer's untrustworthy, Lady Macbeth of a wife, Sherry (Penny Johnson), is constantly scheming behind his back to undermine his moral turpitude. While his good-hearted son expresses righteous indignation about political compromises, his wife is willing to do anything illegal or immoral to further his career, which she justifies as a means of protecting her family. By the end of the season, she has recruited a clueless, starry-eyed speechwriter (Tanya Wright) to seduce her husband "for his own good," but really so the underling can serve as her spy. This relationship perfectly congeals the dual conceit of the show: the dumb weak woman deceived by the evil bitch. Of course, the senator doesn't take the bait. He refuses her advances and fires her, cementing his infallibility.

The greatest disappointment is the revelation in the penultimate episode that the mole working against CTU from the beginning is the one woman who otherwise might have escaped the show looking both strong and virtuous: Jack's right hand woman and former lover, Nina Myers (Sarah Clarke). Given the show's track record by the point she is revealed, and the fact that plot twists in thrillers tend to make villains of those we least expect, I wasn't terribly surprised, but I was disappointed that the show would so completely shut out the possibility that a female character could be as trustworthy as a man. It was also discouraging to note that just as much as the show seems to hate women, it also demonizes sexuality. All of the sexual acts depicted or discussed in the series are either violent (Palmer's daughter is a rape victim, Jack's wife gives herself to a mercenary in order to protect her daughter) or part of a strategic betrayal. From Jack's dalliance with Nina to a pre-homicidal roll-in-the-hay for Kim's dumb friend, no sex act goes unpunished.

The charge of misogyny should not be levied lightly. Misapplied, it can reduce the complexity of an interpretation and reinforce an aura of stifling political correctness. It is, of course, not the responsibility of the show's producers to fill an unspoken quota of acceptable female characterizations. If we truly believe in gender equality, we must admit that women can be just as fallible as men. It's possible that the writers are just trying to buck PC convention by allowing the female characters to be just as unlikable as some of the male characters, and indeed the show has its share of unlikable men: some of Jack's superiors and fellow operatives, many of Senator Palmer's campaign staff, and the primary villains themselves. One might even praise the show for its lack of likable characters, for having the courage to present a vision of humanity usually considered too bleak for television, like a 24 hour Stanley Kubrick film. But 24 wants us to care about its characters, especially Jack and Palmer, two struggling fathers whose attempts at enforcing moral order are undermined at every turn by alternately incompetent and nefarious women. One might still argue for a less binary interpretation. Maybe they're trying to say that it takes a few great people like Jack and Palmer, who just happen to be men, to combat the exceptionally wicked and the mediocre masses. But the goodness of the good characters is so tied up in their masculinity, while the evil that women do takes the form of weaknesses traditionally attributed to femininity: emotional imbalance and hysteria, wrathful jealousy, inability to lead, lack of intelligence. The contrast between the characterizations of David and Sherry Palmer perfectly reflect this bias. While David's presidential potential is depicted as a natural extension of his sage fatherly concerns, Sherry's motherly instincts manifest themselves in a manner comparable to a threatened animal protecting her young. On 24, fatherhood is lofty and Apollonian, signifying strength, incorruptibility, and reason. Motherhood is base and animal, evoking wrath and deception. Sure, these same associations were beautifully described in some of Shakespeare's works, but even Hamlet's father warned the troubled prince not to attack his mother, and hopefully our understanding of the differences between women and men has evolved since the 16th century.

Still, it's kind of hard to get angry at a series that is so fabulously ridiculous. When I watch the show, the dearth of interesting female characters doesn't infuriate me, it just makes me frustrated, annoyed even. Annoyed that a show so potentially ground-breaking due to its form and style is fundamentally derailed by laughably ancient attitudes towards femininity. The reason why 24 fails at greatness is that despite thrilling plot twists, a novel formula, and whiz-bang techno-spectacle, it's hard to really care about the show. Even if you believe that there is no absolute political or cultural responsibility to write interesting and honest female characters, it's certainly a dramatic and aesthetic necessity, especially in light of how other shows have grown our expectations. Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a great show not just because its mythical structure has unfolded in a way both exciting and fairly unique to television, but also because it has proven equally engaging in its exploration of character and gender. We can't expect every action series to champion only female superheroes. There is certainly room for strong and interesting men in the televisual spectrum, but 24 is proof that philosophical progress in pop culture is extremely tenuous. If the culture speaks to itself through movies and television, as some have suggested, its discourse is in danger of regression. Some critics were frustrated that 24 was not the unambiguous hit with audiences that they almost demanded it should be, but maybe audiences just demanded more.