The “Blame America’s First Amendment First” Crowd
By Thoreau
Last night I had a good chuckle when Colbert mixed in some Jack Bauer speeches with speeches by media and political figures arguing in favor of torture. (Just past 3:00 in this video.) I chuckled, because I distinguish between reality and fiction, and I can enjoy watching fictional characters do things that would never be excusable in real life. It’s pathetic that some people can’t.
Still, I have to admit that there are people who do see 24 and numerous other works of fiction as validation for their repugnant beliefs and practices. We’ve argued about this before, but I guess I would like to generalize rather than obsessing over the details of one show. Are artists responsible for people who feel validated by their works? Are they responsible for people who fail to see the nuances in their works? What if we were talking about gangster rappers instead of Kiefer Sutherland?
Comment by Eric the .5b —
January 20, 2009 @ 2:35 pm
Eh, I just look at art that supports some thing as the same as someone speaking in favor of some thing. If an episode of 24 makes torture look effective and necessary, that’s an argument (which can certainly deserve and get condemnation), not mind control.
Comment by Keith —
January 20, 2009 @ 3:19 pm
Artists, like everyone else, cannot be held accountable for the feelings or thoughts of others. If you watch 24 or Batman or porn and your neurons fire off in weird directions, it is not the fault of Keifer Sutherland, Christian Bale or Jenna Jameson. That’s between you and your brain chemistry.
Comment by Gary Farber —
January 20, 2009 @ 5:31 pm
“Are artists responsible for people who feel validated by their works?”
No.
“Are they responsible for people who fail to see the nuances in their works?”
“What if we were talking about gangster rappers instead of Kiefer Sutherland?”
No.
Another edition of easy answers….
Comment by Cello —
January 20, 2009 @ 8:42 pm
There is evidence that 24 was viewed by some at Guantanamo as a form of training video. Diane Beaver, the military lawyer in charge of Guantanamo Bay, told Philippe Sands, author of Torture Team:
Obviously this doesn’t mean anyone should ban 24. But I don’t think it’s inappropriate to recognize that ideas presented in a fictional work can be pernicious.
Comment by dhex —
January 21, 2009 @ 1:53 am
a lot of things are pernicious in the hands of idiots, to be sure.
“Another edition of easy answers…. ”
oh man someone call the smithsonian, we’ve found a smug liberal! alive, no less!
no one’s ever captured one of these in the wild before…what a great leap forward for science.
Comment by VikingMoose —
January 21, 2009 @ 9:36 am
Tim S over at [forgets where] used Batman to justify his war support. twas precious!
dhex – indeed.
Comment by Picador —
January 21, 2009 @ 10:38 am
Thorieau, like I said last time, this is a disingenuous argument. The actual question is: “Are artists responsible for people who feel validated by their works, when the works have been calculated, crafted, and green-lighted for production and broadcast largely by people seeking to validate exactly those sorts of sentiments?” You made some noise about how not EVERY producer on the show was a hard-right GOP propagandist, but for a show like that to get made for FOX, you can bet that the people making the ultimate decisions had a very specific agenda.
Comment by Doctor Science —
January 21, 2009 @ 10:50 am
Let me be the contrarian here.
Some of the people involved in “24″ are artists, but that doesn’t mean “24″ isn’t propaganda (see: Leni Riefenstahl). “24″ is in many ways *less* of a work of art than “Triumph of the Will”, because episodic television shows have no single creator whose vision is being presented.
For TV, what ends up on your screen is the moving average of lots of different people’s visions, with extra random factors thrown in (”those shots were ruined! We don’t have time to re-shoot! oh, leave that scene out, we’re at 45:20 already” etc.).
The artist (if any are involved in “24″) isn’t responsible for the audience’s feelings or conclusions, but part of hir job as a communicator is to look at the audience reaction and see what seems to be being communicated. It was perfectly clear from early on that the message the audience was getting from “24″ is “torture is sometimes necessary and even OK”. The fact that TPTB didn’t change what they were trying to do is to me proof that that was what they were trying to communicate.
So yeah, I blame them. I think they were propagandists and war-and-torture-mongers. Part of it IMHO was an actual conviction, and part (which may be worse) was that war and torture make for good stories.
Comment by Thoreau —
January 21, 2009 @ 10:58 am
Whatever might be said about 24 and torture, they are NOT war-mongers. The plot of season 1 was about blowback from covert ops. Season 2 was about an oil company using terrorists as pawns to get the US to invade the Middle East. Season 5 was about another plot to start a war in an oil-rich region. Season 7 seems to be about a dictator getting his weapons from a senior US official.
Comment by dhex —
January 21, 2009 @ 11:26 am
i’ve never seen 24, but i also get the feeling its strongest critics have also not seen 24 all that much, either. either that or the good doctor is way off in his assessment, which seems unlikely.
Comment by StuTheSheep —
January 21, 2009 @ 12:08 pm
Yes, which is why I’ve always been so upset about historians ignoring the greatest Nazi of them all: Richard Wagner.
Comment by Uncle Kvetch —
January 21, 2009 @ 1:21 pm
Artists, like everyone else, cannot be held accountable for the feelings or thoughts of others. If you watch 24 or Batman or porn and your neurons fire off in weird directions, it is not the fault of Keifer Sutherland, Christian Bale or Jenna Jameson. That’s between you and your brain chemistry.
I’m not so sure. I’m reminded here of the fact that Bruce Springsteen didn’t intend for “Born in the USA” to become an anthem of Reagan-era jingoist chest-thumping, but that’s exactly what it became. Is that his “fault”? Yes, in the sense that he tried to express something, and did such a shitty job of it that people overwhelmingly heard something different.
(Yes, I just criticized Bruce “Friend of the Working Man — Available Exclusively at Walmart!” Springsteen. I am now prepared to be banned for life from polite society. It was worth it.)
Comment by Keith —
January 21, 2009 @ 1:56 pm
Uncle Kvetch:
The Boss was pissed at Reagan for appropriating his song. It was Reagan (or some dim bulb on his staff) that only listened to the chorus and not the verses. Again: the fault lies in the audience, not the artist. In this case, an audience that wasn’t really even paying attention, which is even worse as it piles laziness on top of disingenuous sentiment, hypocrisy and a feckless disregard for authorial intent.
Comment by dhex —
January 21, 2009 @ 3:36 pm
“I am now prepared to be banned for life from polite society.”
if by “polite society” you mean “people who think applebee’s is good food” then you’re probably ok.
Comment by Eric the .5b —
January 21, 2009 @ 5:09 pm
GO USA!
So, artists are clearly responsible for both the mind-controlling influence of their works and people not actually paying the slightest attention to their works and casting them as something else. Despite the mind-control.
Comment by Happy Jack —
January 21, 2009 @ 6:44 pm
I’ve always wondered if The Flintstones were responsible for the pet rock craze of the seventies.
Comment by Gary Farber —
January 22, 2009 @ 3:37 am
FWIW, a longer version of my views here, along with those of Thomas Nephew.
I persist in suggesting that people are confusing responsibility for one’s work, which anyone may be condemned for, and responsibility for other people’s views.
Leni Riefenstahl is responsible for the Nazi-supporting nature of her films. She’s not responsible for what other people think.
Ditto the producers of 24, who are responsible for the pernicious views of torture on their show in the past (I dunno what the current season will do, but I’m guessing Janeane Garafalo didn’t sign up to be a major cast member because she’s suddenly become a torture supporter), but are not responsible for what random viewers think.
“Artists, like everyone else, cannot be held accountable for the feelings or thoughts of others.”
Just so. And thinking otherwise is relieving people of responsibility for their own thoughts and ability to think.
YMMV.
Comment by ajay —
January 22, 2009 @ 8:00 am
So: if Harriet Beecher Stowe writes a hugely popular book about how bad slavery is, she doesn’t deserve any credit at all from the abolitionist movement?
Comment by dhex —
January 22, 2009 @ 3:46 pm
random factoid: uncle tom’s cabin is often held up by many has having unintentionally held back race relations as well as introducing a number of racial stereotypes into play.
Comment by Gary Farber —
January 22, 2009 @ 9:53 pm
“So: if Harriet Beecher Stowe writes a hugely popular book about how bad slavery is, she doesn’t deserve any credit at all from the abolitionist movement?”
Sure she does. But the people who read her get credit for changing their own minds. They didn’t change because Stowe mind-controlled them.
Comment by dhex —
January 22, 2009 @ 11:24 pm
you never read “uncle tom’s tin foil hat”?
it’s…good…very…gooooooood
Comment by Randolph —
January 23, 2009 @ 3:32 am
If the work is blatant propaganda, of course. It continues to amaze me how many people treat ideas they find in fiction–often very bad fiction–as truth from on high.
Comment by David H. —
January 23, 2009 @ 7:23 am
That bit with Jack Bauer in it was part of Bill O’Reilly’s show, Colbert did not insert that. O’Reilly was trying to defend torture on his show and Colbert was ridiculing him for using an overwrought TV show as part of his argument.
Comment by catastrophile —
January 24, 2009 @ 1:38 pm
Even if 24 is intended as right-wing propaganda — and I’m on the fence about that — to me it makes entirely the opposite argument about torture that everyone seems to read into it.
I haven’t started watching the current season yet, but consistently over the course of the show:
-Bauer tortures people because he knows for sure that they have information that he needs to save lives — not just in case they have such information; and
-He does this knowing that there will be consequences if he’s wrong.
Advocates for legalizing torture in US policy, and many critics of the show, seem to miss entirely the point that Bauer does it on his own initiative, because it needs to be done. Bauer must rely on his own judgement to justify his actions, not the shield of some government policy allowing preventative torture.
I’m pretty sure that somebody in Bauer’s position, in a scenario like those depicted on the show — the type of scenario that practically never happens in real life — would do what they felt needed to be done. That’s not an argument for letting the government indiscriminately round people up and torture them on the off chance they know something, and letting torture advocates use it as such just feeds into their sadistic delusions.