A Jack Bauer Moment

I don't watch 24. In fact, I cannot watch 24; I find it offensive beyond measure. It feeds into the idea of finding terrorists under every bed, and into the idea that just a little torture from the right man can make it all turn out okay.

As I note in the Author's Introduction, I wrote Dark Underbelly well before 9/11. It contained some of my notions about authoritarian states and what it can do to people, especially the best people. And, deep in the background, is a vision of an authoritarian state that is necessary, as necessary as the authority of a captain at sea, in vessel that has taken on water, and which only harsh and decisive leadership has a hope of saving the ship and those aboard her.

All this is through the opposite end of the telescope, of course. All you get to really see at first is the wreckage of one human life, someone permanently damaged and trying to act as if his every moment, waking or sleeping, is something other than a fight with himself and his own desire to end it all.

I'm pimping a little for the story at this point because there is now enough of it to grasp, and because the protagonist, Ed Honlin, has just maimed three men (who, at least, did not fail to deserve what was done to them), and has interrogated someone using methods that are, by any reasonable meaning, torture. He has threatened a man's life in order to obtain information.

Is this a paradox? Is this a "Jack Bauer Moment" and have I created just an SF version of 24?"

I do not think so, and I do not think that my reasons are rationalizations, but I recognize that this sort of scene might appeal to those who also find 24 appealing. Still, I know where my own inspiration came from, and a lot of it was Mickey Spillane, whom I have lauded before, and who was more sophisticated than usually given credit for.

Part of the distinction is pretty obvious: Mike Hammer and Ed Honlin (and Dave Robichaux and Matthew Scudder, to name others) are both in the "fallen knight" tradition. They are not government operatives—although Hammer gets what is basically a CIA ticket at one point, and Honlin is operating as a "special consultant" to the police. But no one is really fooled here. They are rogues.

But so was Dirty Harry, and you can still make that case for Jack Bauer. Sure. So the distance isn't that large, still, is it?

However, I will point to the important thing about Chapter 13 in Dark Underbelly, and that is this: very little information is gained in the interrogation. Honlin, the protagonist, is primarily verifying information that he already knew was there, and getting answers to questions that could have been answered by more conventional means. In short, he is terrorizing someone because he wants to, in fact, because he needs to, just as he needed to go out and find a fight in the previous chapter, entitled I'm from the Goddam Planet Krypton.

As I note in the Introduction, Something Very Bad happened to the protagonist before the book begins. It takes rather a long time to find out what happened, and for very good reasons. But there are other questions and other mysteries and other things to discover along the way. And because this is science fiction, rather retro science fiction at that, the protagonist is a wish fulfillment fantasy of a sort, but it is not a "happily ever after" fantasy, because that is not the kind I write. And anyone who thinks that Ed Honlin (or Mike Hammer, or—especially—Jack Bauer), is someone they'd like to be, or even emulate, is mistaking fantasy for reality, and I write the kind of fantasy that tries to make its position very clear, even when it is morally ambiguous.

A Few Brief Observations Concerning Black Snake Moan

To immediately undercut my own essay title, let me first say that much of this is going to be observations about commentaries I’ve read about this movie, starring Samuel L. Jackson and Christina Ricci, two actors who could probably sell any story, no matter how implausible or preposterous. So we begin with the acknowledgement that the old Hollywood Magic is in overdrive here, and I find nothing wrong with that.

Second, let me stipulate that, as with all of the estimable Jon Swift’s Amazon.com book reviews, I Have Not Actually Seen This Movie. This, in fact, is one of the ongoing arguments that have erupted on multiple comment threads seemingly everywhere. One must See the Movie to have a valid opinion, at least so say a goodly many people, people who, I imagine, have nevertheless formed opinions about foreign countries they have never lived in (or even visited), wars they have not fought in, drugs they have never taken, sexual practices they have only imagined, and celebrities they have only read about.

And let me be very clear about this, I have upon occasion judged books by their covers, bands by the names of their songs, people by their appearance, and movies by their reviews, advertising, and interviews in Entertainment Weekly. Call me shallow. Or possibly concede that popular culture is a grand interconnected archipelago of information, with islands that are often observable from other islands, without the need to set foot on their shores to count the number of trees thereon.

But enough: here is the basic plot of BSM, known to anyone who has watched television or read the entertainment section of a newspaper within the past two weeks.

Ricci plays Rae, a girl who was sexually abused by her father, and whose boyfriend has just left for the National Guard. She’s sexually compulsive (aka a “nymphomaniac”), gets gang raped then beaten to unconsciousness, after which she is found by Lazarus (Jackson), and taken to his house where he chains her to a radiator for many days, during which the transference bond that forms between them cures her of her compulsions.

I just slipped the “transference” thing in; usually it’s called “tough love” or some such drivel.

Okay first interesting thing about the comments I’ve seen so far. They’re all about the chains, the radiator, and the interracial aspect. For some reason, these rank higher than the gang-raped-and-left-for dead part. Why is that?

One possibility is that we’ve seen that so many times in modern cinema that it’s become unremarkable. Another is that if follows the course of “normal” morality; get high, screw a lot of guys, well, hey, you’ve got to expect a certain amount of brutal beatings along the way. Goes with the territory.

I think I’m going to go with the interracial bondage explanation, though. Black man, white woman in chains. That’s certainly what they’re selling in the print ads, which say “Everything is Hotter Down South.” Gotta go duck huntin’ where the ducks are.

Okay, just a speculation mind you, but what do you think would happen in “real life” to a sex-and-drug compulsive young woman who had been gang-raped and beaten, then found by an ordinary kind citizen who called 911 and she’d been taken to a local hospital? One good chance is that she’d have been treated, then released, then found again a few days later in similar condition (or dead, but that ends the story prematurely). After a time or two of this, she’d have been involuntarily committed as “a danger to herself or others” (the latter as a possible vector for STDs—this does happen). If she became "intractable," she’d then be, at the very least, tied to her bed at night, and probably given some fairly powerful medication to make her more “tractable.”

Or possibly, at some point she’d commit some petty crime and be just jailed.

If she were really, really lucky, she might be given medication for bi-polar mood disorder (part of the “lucky” thing is that this would be a correct diagnosis; it’s at least a plausible one), and there would be some brilliant therapist who accidentally came to be working for a county hospital for a while, who could effect the transference cure on her long enough to turn her life around.

I know, this is only slightly less implausible than the movie scenario. She wouldn’t look as good as Christina Ricci in any case.

My point here is that Jackson’s character is actually doing what movie characters do all the time: acting as a vigilante and taking the law into his own hands, except here he’s being a sort of “vigilante therapist.” It works because in Hollywood Magic, vigilantism always works, provided the hero’s heart is pure and intentions are good. After all, what are a few chains and a thong between friends?