I'm trying to figure out Jack Bauer.  Simple, you'd think, to analyze a man with few emotions and one simple goal.  Jack Bauer, despite his history, despite his current situation, still only wants to do his all to protect his country.  He does this at all costs, risking his life and others.  Jack Bauer, this unblinking, Machiavellian super-hero, is harder than hard, especially in 24's current seventh season.  He's toughened with age and hardship.  He has every reason to hate the United States, but he keeps putting his life on the line for it, almost a robot with no ability to resist the call of callous heroism.  While Jack's motivations are simple, his actions decisive and clear, what 24 is trying to tell us about ourselves and our country isn't.  What does Jack Bauer represent?  Has it changed on this season of 24?  What are the marks of the post-Bush Jack? 

The politics of 24 have long been discussed, with accusations that the 24 writers are hard-core right wingers, big fans of torture who hold an out and out hatred of liberal sensibilities.  This is all nonsense, of course.  Joel Surnow, the creator and former executive producer of 24, is, in fact, a big time conservative, a close friend of radio gas bag Rush Limbaugh, and the mastermind behind the Fox News Channel's disastrous response to The Daily Show, The ½ Hour News Hour.  However, despite Surnow's inevitable stamp on 24's story-lines, the writers' room has always featured a diverse group, containing people of all political bents.  But, really, serious politics and 24 just don't go together – a story has to be told every season and any political agenda espoused is secondary to the superficially exciting adventures of Jack Bauer. 

That's not to say that Jack hasn't represented, at times, certain world views attributed to different political views.  The torture issue, in regards to 24, has been beaten to death.  While it'd be naïve to suggest that 24 hasn't, at times, portrayed torture in a positive light, that's not the point.  The situations that Jack Bauer finds himself in (the various “Ticking Time Bomb” scenarios) have been debunked by all sorts of pundits as a product of TV fantasy.  Torture, to me at least, is one of the least interesting aspects of Bauer's symbolism as a character.  It's a device for entertaining television, agenda-less, and there only to increase the heart rate of the viewer. 

No, what's interesting to me is what Jack Bauer represents in regards to our culture, and how that representation has changed as our country has gone from 9/11 to the disastrous Bush years and, finally, segueing into the hope and proposed change of the Obama administration.  24's first season premiered weeks after 9/11 and I believe part of the show's initial success was a result of Americans needing an outlet for their (momentarily justified) xenophobic anger.  A patriot like Jack taking out anger on foreign terrorists was a valve of release.  Jack Bauer was our cultural Id, relatively emotionless, focused on specific goals, clinically, violently precise and always keeping the good of the country as his number one priority. 

As the country's confidence in its government began to waver in the years after 9/11 and the War in Iraq was outed as an indefensible quagmire, Jack Bauer came to symbolize something different, even if the character was largely unchanged.  He was hardened, more cynical, but only by degrees.  He was still Jack, still a patriot, still a hero.  What changed were the circumstances around him and his exploits.  Where, initially, Jack was a tool of a just government, an appreciated employee, doing the work of the people, protecting the country from faceless, vaguely foreign enemies whose existence was a result of tyrannical nations who “hated us for our freedom,” he eventually emerged as a character whose existence was a necessary product of the times.  That is, to say, that Jack Bauer was not an appendage of a harmonious body of government, but a weapon unleashed to clean up the monstrous mess that the US had helped create in the world. 

As hardened and seemingly bitter as Jack has been this season, I actually found him to be more emotionally tortured in seasons five and six of 24.  Those seasons aired during the nadir of Bush's presidency (a nadir that, unfortunately, lasted for the better part of Bush's second term), and Jack was the symbol of defeat, a last line of defense whose continued existence was necessitated by a horrible foreign policy that created enemies across the globe.  Jack's patriotism always remained intact, but as we saw in season 6 (especially in its final episodes), Jack questioned his place in the world.  Why was he doing what he was doing?  Was it all worth it?  Should he have to do these things for the country he loved?

This current season, at least symbolically, has provided a very apparent tonal shift.  The first half or so of season 7 was written in 2007, before the writers' strike hit, so it's hard to give the writers' credit for anticipating an Obama presidency (though, given the gender of President Taylor, we can assume that they were anticipating a Hillary Clinton administration).  However, we can bet that they saw the writing on the wall, that the country would seek change in a post-Bush world.  To reflect this change, they put Jack Bauer in a a particularly prescient situation: after years of being deployed secretly by a government that supported his work, maybe not the particulars (torture, etc.), but the end results, Jack found himself as the scapegoat for the actions of previous administrations.  President Palmer, President Logan, President Daniels – we never knew a whole lot about their various political stances, and we can thus use them as cyphers for President Bush, at least from a larger symbolic standpoint.  In the world of 24, Jack was singularly held responsible for how those presidents dealt with terrorists and terrorism. 

If you take away all the specific plot points of the current 24 season, I believe you find a particularly hopeful new stance taken by the writers.  Just like what Obama has already tried to accomplish with bi-partisan cooperation during the early months of his presidency, Jack Bauer's continued patriotism in the face of criticism and outright disgust from members of the government is a grapevine to conservatives.  What the 24 writers are saying is that, even if you fundamentally disagree with the current government, even if you have severe disagreements with how the government should be run, with how terrorists are dealt with, you should remain faithful and support the idea of our country.  It doesn't mean that you or Jack Bauer should be happy about it.  What it does mean is that being a patriot, being a hero, means that you have to be supportive all the time, not just when you think the government is in the right. 

You may not believe in this line of thinking.  Hell, I might not be fully on board with the idea of blind patriotism.  But, for a show that generally plies its trade in gross generalities and unforgiving violence, this subtle shift in world views is a hopeful and somewhat significant change in directions for 24.  Jack Bauer might not be as simple as we all assumed.


-Oscar Dahl, BuddyTV Senior Writer
(Image Courtesy of FOX)