In a recent episode of the FOX network’s long-running and weirdly-addictive real-time action drama 24, Agent Jack Bauer (a squinty-eyed, growling Kiefer Sutherland) of the fictitious Counter Terrorism Unit, races toward the Los Angeles office of a defense contractor suspected of selling nerve gas to terrorists.  Needing a phony ID to get into the building, he dials Chloe, his loyal sourpuss of a computer geek, and tells her to hack the defense contractor’s personnel records.  In less time than it would take most of us to order the Arctic Monkeys CD from Amazon, Chloe has pulled up an employee directory, opened the file of a worker with high-level access, and replaced the worker’s mug shot with one of Jack.  When Jack reaches the reception desk a minute later and a guard orders him to present his thumb for an ID scan, the doctored photo pops up on the guard’s screen and Jack is in, one step closer to stopping a terrorist plot to release deadly gas at civilian sites around the United States. 

Remarkably, the totalitarian regime of V seems actually to have less information about its citizens at its fingertips than the flawed-but-benign government of 24.  Several storylines over the course of 24’s five seasons have used corrupt feds as villains -- earlier in the current season, one of the president’s advisers was unmasked as a conspirator in the nerve-gas plot -- but in the world of 24, the government itself is always portrayed as a noble institution that maintains vast amounts of personal information about everyone for our own protection. This phrase, favored by despots through the ages, echoes throughout V as well: Signs posted on surveillance cameras and scrolling beneath 1984-style public vidiwalls read, “For Your Protection,” while a bloodless female phone-operator voice ends public-address curfew announcement by saying, “Curfew is for your protection.”

These diametrically opposed perspectives are dramatized more directly by the actions each entertainment’s heroes.  While some film critics have chided V for grappling with issues of grave and current concern (as good science fiction has always done) in a “comic book movie,” I believe V-the-movie’s moral ambiguity is intentional.  The flick asks and doesn’t attempt to answer a very big question:  Is V someone we should root for?  To be sure, the rebellion he stages is against a government that desperately needs one:  It’s fascistic and genocidal.  While V’s origins remain mysterious, we do learn he was once imprisoned and tortured at a concentration camp where the government conducted bioweapon trials on human subjects.  So he’s got good reason to be angry.  And indeed, to kill, as when he rescues Evey, (Natalie Portman), a young woman caught outside after curfew, from rape by a squad of plainclothes policemen.  When V blends revolt with vengeance, searching out and executing each of the high officials who ran the camp where he was held, we feel little sympathy for any of them.   But he also blows up buildings, as you no doubt know from the television spots attempting desperately to sell this thoughtful film as an action picture.  (The film’s posters are far more tasteful and intriguing.)   When V tells Evey, “Sometimes blowing up a building can change the world,” the opening-night audience at Washington, D.C.’s famed Uptown cinema gave a dry laugh more of shock than of amusement.  V’s targets (the Old Bailey, and in the film’s climax, set one year later, the Houses of Parliament) are of course symbolic.  His aim is less to overthrow the regime by force than to inspire the docile Britons, whom he chides for their silent acquiescence in a pirate broadcast over the state-controlled TV network, to confront their government’s lies and brutality.  This movement is nicely visualized in the film’s climax when a sea of protesters, dressed, like V, in white theatrical masks of the 17th century British dissident Guy Fawkes, march on Trafalgar Square.  The film’s most wistful moment comes when the protesters march through the line of soldiers deployed to stop them.  The commanding officer orders his men to lower their weapons, and the protesters brush past them, without violence on either side.

Nothing else in the film is as comforting.  I first read V when DC Comics published it as 10 monthly comics in 1988-89.  When I heard, more than a decade later, that V was destined for the big screen, the element of the story I thought least likely to survive the translation was the major subplot wherein (SPOILER ALERT) Evey is captured.  She is imprisoned and tortured for an unspecified period, though it must be several months as the action of the film, we’re told, takes place over the course of one year.  When an interrogator offers her a final chance to save herself by informing, Evey calmly tells him she’d rather die.  “Then you have nothing more to fear,” he replies, at which time the interrogator – and the author of Evey’s torture and imprisonment – is revealed as V himself.  “I wanted to free your mind,” he tells her, in a line reminiscent of the Wachowski’s earlier Matrix films.   

It’s all a bit much for some viewers, and for some critics.  For those who prefer their violence without murky moral questions, there is always 24, where the hero’s righteousness is never in question.  As embodied with steely-eyed conviction by Kiefer Sutherland, (looking more weathered like his father, Donald, every day) Jack Bauer is an endlessly capable and self-sacrificing protector of the weak.  In thankless service to his country, he has endured (in more more less chronological order) the abduction of his wife and daughter, the murder of his wife by his double-agent former lover, torture, heroin addiction (!), and finally, a bogus murder rap that required him, naturally, to fake his own death and cease contact with his daughter.  Jack speaks only in whispers or barks, and by my unofficial count has not smiled once in  more than 100 hours of television.  (V’s face is hidden behind that mask, but we can tell from Hugo Weaving’s remarkable vocal performance that he smiles quite frequently.)  Somehow, we still like Jack, despite the fact that viewers like me have been watching him commit horrific acts of violence on a weekly -- Oops! I mean hourly! -- basis for going on five years.  In the most recent episode, when it became apparent to Jack that shooting the aforementioned bad defense contractor in the leg would not persuade him to talk, Jack cooly turned and shot the guy’s wife instead.  (“I shot her above the knee, but if I have to shoot her again she’ll be in a wheelchair for the rest of her life!”)  Naturally, the defense contractor was a former supervisor of Jack’s, one Jack had fired on corruption charges.  (Jack ratted out his boss in the first season, too.  One of 24’s enduring pleasures has always been that no matter how fucked up politics are in your office, things at CTU HQ are always waaaaaaay worse.)  Even more memorable was the incident earlier this season, when, confronting the president’s corrupt adviser -- in the Oval Office, in the presence of the Commander-in-Chief himself -- Jack put the dude in a headlock, held a knife to the man’s eye and threatened to cut his eye out if he didn’t give up the location of the missing nerve gas.  Through all of this, President Charles Logan (Gregory Itzin) looks about as interested as the real president looked in that video of him being briefed by FEMA officials the day before Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans.

The makers of 24 get a lot of dramatic mileage out of Jack’s leg-shootin’, eye-slicin’ commitment to his mission, but their aim is of course simply to excite.  (To be fair, they do occasionally have Jack say something like “God damn you for making me do this!” when he’s torturing someone, just so we know he’s not getting off on it.)  When asked, most Americans claim to reject torture as an acceptable method of interrogation, but public anger over the Abu Ghraib scandal or the ongoing legal undeath of detainees at Guantanamo Bay has been slow to build, and still hasn’t reached a level that would require our leaders to do something.  What seems safe to assume is that most Americans would support the use of torture if authorities knew for a certainty that a tight-lipped suspect had information that could help thwart a terror attack.  This, perhaps, is why viewers have never wavered in their loyalty to Jack: When it comes to knowing who really has the info and what it will take to get it from them, Jack bats .1000.  Of course the President’s aide knew the location of the nerve gas.  Of course he gave it up as soon as Jack brought out his knife.  This information later turned out to be false, but only because some of the aide’s coconspirators had betrayed him.  Perhaps this was the 24 writers’ way of acknowledging that information derived through torture is usually wrong -- at some point, a victim will say anything simply to make the pain stop -- but I doubt it it.  The more likely explanation is that it takes a lot of bogus leads and red herrings to fill out a real-time 24-hour season.

But if Jack is never wrong, his real-life counterparts are.  Considering that more than one-third of the 600-plus  “enemy combatants” held in the legal Phantom Zone of Gitmo have been released, they’re wrong a lot.  Shockingly little has emerged in the media about the hundreds of men the U.S. has held for three or four years in subhuman conditions on suspicion of terrorist involvement, then, with little fanfare, set free.  President Bush has said these men “were scooped up on a battlefield trying to kill American troops.”  That’s true of only five percent of the men held at Guantanamo, according to a review of the Pentagon’s own public case files on the Gitmo conducted by law students at Seton Hall.  No less an authority than Army Maj. Gen. Michael E. Dunleavy, who was operational commander at Guantanamo Bay until October of 2002, complained in 2002 that he was receiving too many “Mickey Mouse prisoners” who in their sheer numbers were hampering his efforts to extract information from the detainees more likely to have information that could prevent attacks.  (A 2004 New York Times investigative report put this number at between 12 and twenty.)  The Seton Hall review revealed that 86 percent of the detainees at Gitmo had been handed over to the U.S. by Pakistan or the Norther Alliance.  Rear Adm. John Hudson, a retired Judge Advocate General, told radio reporter Jack Hitt this is because the U.S. was paying bounties of $5,000 or $10,000 for alleged terrorists.  Imagine how much money that is in a place like Pakistan and it becomes very easy to see how, in the absence of any concern for the legal rights of the accused, Gitmo could quickly fill up with “terrorists.”

It now appears that few of the terror suspects he Bush Administration actually believes present a threat made it to Guantanamo Bay at all.  The ones the Administration thinks are terrorists are now held in secret prisons in Europe.  (Interestingly, ghost detainees and secret prisons were used as a plot device in 24’s first season, 2001-2, wherein perennial on-call baddie Dennis Hopper played a Slobodon Milosevic-like Eastern European despot held in unofficial but maximum-security captivity by U.S. authorities.  The illegal abduction and detention of a Middle Eastern national was also the inciting incident of The Siege, a 1998 terrorists-in-Manhattan thriller that would seem frighteningly prescient three years after its release.)

The American people, of course, would know nothing (instead of virtually nothing) about the secret prisons had news of their existence not been leaked in 2004.  (The New York Times broke the story about these “black sites” in November 2005 after witholding it, at the request of Administration officials, for more than a year.)  The President has refused to deny the existence of the CIA prisons, but has pledged to redouble his efforts to stop leaks. The revelation of the secret prisons came only one month after Vice President Dick Cheney and CIA Director Porter J. Goss asked Sen. John McCain to exempt CIA employees from a popular bill McCain had authored, and that 89 other senators had endorsed, that would bar cruel and degrading treatment of prisoners held in U.S. custody.

Rational people will agree that the weight of the threat should determine the severity of the response.  That, perhaps, is why anything goes on 24. Despite CTU’s apparently endless resources, the terrorists they’re chasing are unfailingly just as well-organized and well-equipped as they are.  (They’re also far less hampered by internal squabbles.  One of 24’s well-established conventions is the slow reveal of the villain behind the villain behind the villain, a journey through the chain of command that usually takes the form of a baddie knifing a subordinate who’s displeased him.  This efficiency of structure, unfortunately, is an advantage the fake terrorists of 24 probably share with their real-life brethren.)  Indeed, the world of 24 is nothing if not a dramatization of the world exactly as the Bush Administration tells us it is:  The terrorists are already here!  They already have nuclear and biological weapons! Presumably 24’s speculation about a terrorist-abetting turncoat among the president’s inner circle would be laughed off as fiction by White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan.  But virtually nothing else on 24 comes off as farfetched in light of the claims of terrorist hegemony that Vice President Cheney and other high officials offer up in their defense on the rare occasions a reporter dares to ask them about bogus WMD claims, or detainee abuse, or domestic wiretapping without a court order. 

Though V for Vendetta is set exclusively in England, it is not entirely absent news of “the former United States.”  Through glimpses of state-controlled TV, we hear tell of food riots in the midwest and outbreaks of avian flu.  (These replace the comic’s use of a nuclear war that left “the colonies” an irradiated ruin.)  We don’t know whether these broadcasts reflect truly the mid-21st century state of our nation, or whether they are simply more propaganda intended to make an enslaved populace grateful for the fascistic order that prevails in England.  It’s worth noting however, that in 24’s frequent visits to the President’s office, big flat-screen TVs are always tuned to to Fox News in the background. 

FURTHER READING:  Why Alan Moore asked to have his name removed from the credits of V for Vendetta,  and why it may not even appear on future editions of the comic.