Saturday, Sep 6, 2008
Fox's tough and complicated "24" ends its terrifying season by reminding us that the political nightmares of the last few years -- the Clinton impeachment, Bush vs. Gore, 9/11 -- really happened.
May 21, 2003 | "Could I resist its glow? or even that, could I withstand its pressure? ... I shrank back -- but the closing walls pressed me resistlessly onward."
-- Edgar Allan Poe, "The Pit and the Pendulum"
When Frank Rich claimed in the New York Times last year that more and more people seemed to be getting their political news from late-night TV comedy shows, the reaction in many quarters was a sort of contemptuous disbelief. "How could people be so silly?" But those of us who hung on every hour of the Fox TV drama "24" this season may feel an instinctual kinship with those people. It's not that, in the case of "24," fiction is stranger than truth but rather that this fiction feels more real than what the media has been telling us is true.
The thrill and the awfulness of this second season of "24" has been in the way that it seemed to be one of the only outposts in the media to take the full measure of the last five years of American political life and tell us, no, you weren't dreaming, things really have been as bad as you thought. The show was an extended bad dream that promised -- and provided -- no relief. Week by week, it began to seem an ever more accurate mirror of the real world.
This has little to do with the last half of the season's main plot mechanism: nefarious oil tycoons plotting to trick the U.S. into declaring World War III on the Middle East so their shares of Caspian Sea oil will skyrocket. That's a cheap pulp mechanism, born of left-wing conspiracy theories and too much time spent listening to Rage Against the Machine, swallowing Noam Chomsky's inhuman rationalist simplifications of America the Evil and knocking back double espressos.
The power of "24" has been in the way that it synthesizes every one of our most recent political nightmares, from the attempted right-wing coup against Bill Clinton to the Supreme Court's stealing the election for George W. Bush to Sept. 11 to the way the (necessary) war on terror has become the administration's excuse to trash civil rights to the rush to war in Iraq on faulty evidence and the still-unknown consequences of that war. As the bombs went off this past week in Riyadh, in Casablanca, in Israel, and as the terror alert goes to orange, the free-floating dread we've done our best to deny has become palpable. The aim of "24" this season has been to connect us with that dread, to give it shape and weight. At times, watching "24" has made you feel as if you were Johnny Rotten climbing over the Berlin Wall at the end of "Holidays in the Sun," both eager to see the worst, and knowing that the worst will be worse than you could have imagined.
It requires a bit of exegesis to explain how an action serial, even one as ingeniously and complexly written, directed, acted and edited as "24," comes to feel as if it were trumping newspaper reports and network broadcasts week after week. The best place to begin may be the media's current indignation over the falsifications of Jayson Blair. It's not that the media are wrong to be enraged about Blair (or that other odious little con man, Stephen Glass, trying to worm his way back into good graces with his manure pile of a novel "The Fabulist") or are exaggerating when they say he has damaged the trust between readers and newspapers. But in condemning Blair, the media (with the exception of Hendrik Hertzberg in this week's lead New Yorker editorial) has ignored the far worse falsifications it has presented as straight-faced fact.
Last week in Salon, Joe Conason reported that Joseph Lelyveld, executive editor of the New York Times when the paper ran its first Whitewater story in 1992, managed to get major facts about that case wrong in his New York Review of Books review of Sidney Blumenthal's "The Clinton Wars." (Lelyveld, claiming Blumenthal leaves out details and incidents that are in fact in the book, appears not even to have read the book he is reviewing.) And Blumenthal's book itself lays out a virtual horror show of mistakes and falsifications by a host of reporters and broadcasters, among them the Times' Jeff Gerth, the Washington Post's Susan Schmidt, Newsweek's Michael Isikoff and ABC's Jackie Judd. Blumenthal presents a sideshow of rumor presented as verified fact, full exonerations reported as if they proved the guilt of the accused.
Meanwhile, with all the current breast-beating about journalism's need to maintain the trust of the public by adhering to the facts, the American media have largely ignored the BBC documentary that claimed it swallowed the Pentagon's false story about the rescue of Pvt. Jessica Lynch. (The only mention I could find of the story in last Sunday's New York papers was one line in Liz Smith's gossip column.) If the media has more and more come to seem as if it were acting out an agreed-upon script rather than reporting the news, then why shouldn't fiction seem more real?
The source of inspiration in this season's "24" was its realization that the most consistent truth of American political life since 1998 has been that the unthinkable is real. In one of the show's most daring and inspired twists, President David Palmer (Dennis Haysbert, who was majestic in the role), convinced that the audiotape of three Middle Eastern governments plotting to detonate a nuclear bomb in Los Angeles is a forgery, is deposed by his vice president and Cabinet, who want the bombing of those countries to proceed. Conflating the failed coup against Clinton and Bush's ascension to the presidency without the will of the electorate, the show seemed to be savor the outrage of those two events, unwilling to let them simply recede into history.
That they should recede is the view expressed by Time this week in Lev Grossman's review of the Blumenthal book. The utter failure of American journalism to get the Clinton story is summed up by Grossman's claim that Blumenthal's case for "a right-wing political cabal that manipulated the media and the legal system to make mountains out of dunghills" is "surprisingly convincing." Is this what journalism has become? After the revelations about the Arkansas Project, about David Hale and Richard Mellon Scaife; after right-wing operative David Bossie turned up as an aide to Republican Congressman Dan Burton and was fired when it was discovered he had doctored transcripts of taped conversations between Web Hubbell and his wife to remove exculpatory evidence about Hillary Clinton's involvement in Whitewater, Grossman is still surprised.
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