'24' Producers Get Notes From Human Rights Group Hoping To Make Show 'Less Torture-y'
Both The New Yorker and the LAT are online with stories about a recent meeting between the torture-happy producers of 24, military officials, and actual interrogators organized by the Prime Time Torture Project of advocacy group Human Rights First, in which the show's writers were politely asked to consider (they're anti-torture, so no defibrillator paddles, bamboo shoots, or knotted ropes suitable for repeatedly striking a truculent story editor in the genitals while sitting naked upon a bottomless chair were used) more accurately depicting the use of physical coercion in intelligence gathering on their hit series. From the LAT:
The East Coast crowd didn't fly into town to pitch another quasi-military action series, but rather to advance a simple plea — Make your torture scenes more authentic.
By that, they did not mean bloodier or more savage. Instead, they wanted "24" to show torture subjects taking weeks or months to break, spitting out false or unreliable intelligence, and even dying. As they do in the real world.
"We're not opposed to having torture on television, but 98% of the time when it is shown it's 'Bing, bang, boom,' and it works," said David Danzig, director of the Prime Time Torture Project for the New York-based organization Human Rights First. "Frankly, it's unrealistic and it's kind of boring." [...]
"The meeting was an eye-opener," said "24" executive producer Howard Gordon. "We hadn't really thought a lot about torture as anything more than a dramatic device."
And in The New Yorker, Gordon explains the challenges of keeping the brutality fresh, so that bored viewers don't roll their eyes and sigh, "Ugh, is Jack gonna cut off another terrorist's head this week?"
Howard Gordon, who is the series' "show runner," or lead writer, told me that he concocts many of the torture scenes himself. "Honest to God, I'd call them improvisations in sadism," he said. Several copies of the C.I.A.'s 1963 KUBARK interrogation manual can be found at the "24" offices, but Gordon said that, "for the most part, our imaginations are the source. Sometimes these ideas are inspired by a scene's location or come from props—what's on the set." He explained that much of the horror is conjured by the viewer. "To see a scalpel and see it move below the frame of the screen is a lot scarier than watching the whole thing. When you get a camera moving fast, and someone screaming, it really works." In recent years, he said, "we've resorted a lot to a pharmacological sort of thing." A character named Burke—a federal employee of the C.T.U. who carries a briefcase filled with elephantine hypodermic needles—has proved indispensable. "He'll inject chemicals that cause horrible pain that can knock down your defenses—a sort of sodium pentothal plus," Gordon said. "When we're stuck, we say, 'Call Burke!' " He added, "The truth is, there's a certain amount of fatigue. It's getting hard not to repeat the same torture techniques over and over."
It remains to be seen how the 24 team might incorporate the Torture Project contingent's notes, but with the entire series predicated upon the idea that CTU interrogators have only minutes to obtain crucial information from tight-lipped malefactors, the best implementation they can probably hope to see involves the Mr. Burke character disclaiming, "Sure, I can shoot him full of chemicals, but it might take weeks for him to spit up even a false lead," an unacceptable evaluation that prompts Jack Bauer to pick up a nearby belt sander and hiss, "We don't have time for your dramatically untenable techniques. Don't worry, after I smooth off all the rough edges on his America-hating face, he'll break."
