just another broken heart, another barrel of a gun, just another stick of dynamite night after night

Interesting little article here about the portrayal of torture in popular culture, and the program 24 in particular. 24 has had 67 torture scenes in its first five seasons, mostly ones in which the ‘good guys’ use violence and intimidation to get information out of the ‘bad guys’.

The Washington Post calls 24 “a conservative Disneyland” because

24 is a tough-guy cop show, and tough-guy cop shows have appealed to conservatives for decades. Jack Bauer is basically an updated version of Dirty Harry, the poster boy for conservative backlash against urban crime in the early 70s.

The New Yorker notes the similarities between the fictional use of torture on television and the Bush Administration’s use of extreme methods in the real world:

For all its fictional liberties, “24” depicts the fight against Islamist extremism much as the Bush Administration has defined it: as an all-consuming struggle for America’s survival that demands the toughest of tactics.

Members of the US Military have actually met with the makers of 24 to raise concerns with the portrayal of torture in the program, and in particular that US personnel have been imitating the tactics used in the show during service overseas. At least the star of the show seems to have a reasonable grasp on the usefulness of torture in reality, and the importance in distinguishing between fiction and real life – Kiefer Sutherland remarked that:

You torture someone and they’ll basically tell you exactly what you want to hear, whether it’s true or not, if you put someone in enough pain… Within the context of our show, which is a fantastical show to begin with, the torture is a dramatic device to show you how desperate a situation is.

One might argue that in a program like 24 we are left in no doubt as to the guilt of those suffering at our hero’s hands, which (perhaps) removes one of the moral obstacles to the use of torture presented by real life. On the other hand, this arrangement promotes a dangerously black-and-white view of the world where someone is always good and someone else always evil (although it is notable that the President was arrested for faking a terrorist attack in one series of 24, so it’s not all scary Islamofascists).

So, does the use of torture by hero characters in popular entertainment normalise such behaviour or increase our tolerance for it when it occurs in real life? Or is this just the same old debate about the effect of violent TV on viewers?