PRESENT TENSE:A NEW SERIES of 24 kicked off this week, within days of Slumdog Millionaire arriving in our cinemas. Will Barack Obama watch both? Slumdog, definitely. And just as doctors watch ER and drug dealers watch The Wire, you have to expect that US presidents watch 24 (once they've exhausted The West Wing box set), writes Shane Hegarty
24 is the hawks-versus-doves debate condensed into frenetic hour-long chunks. This is the show’s seventh series and the doves haven’t won one yet. In fact, if it was a wrestling match, the doves’ legs would be wrapped around their heads, and their feathers put in places where feathers should not be. The thriller long ago developed a reputation for using torture to hurry along the plot. “Where’s the bomb?” hero Jack Bauer will ask. “I’ll never tell you,” the terrorist will spit. “Then I’ll use your eye as a cocktail olive,” Bauer will counter. “It’s under the bed,” the terrorist will say. It’s a kind of fantasy Guantanamo.
Responding to the US audience’s diminishing stomach for brutality, this series immediately dealt with the criticism in the way only it can. In the opening double episode, Bauer (played by Kiefer Sutherland) faced a committee set up to investigate his agency’s use of torture. This allowed him to deliver the first of two “I did those things to save American lives, so back off” routines. And whenever Bauer had even a minor disagreement with another character, they would stare at him and mock, “what are you going to do? Torture me?” At least once, his answer was in the affirmative.
24’s plots will continue to be a bit all over the place, but whoever is in the White House, one thing will not change: every 15 minutes Jack will threaten to a pull a guy’s lungs out through his ears. This will get him answers, save lives and the makers of 24 will remain unrepentant. You don’t like it? Then go watch an Amnesty recruitment video instead.
Underpinning 24’s plot is the decision by its fictional president to ignore the posturing of the UN and unilaterally invade an African country. Not for oil; not for the hell of it; but to stop an ongoing genocide. Its president is female, which is in keeping with a show that has previously featured not one, but two black, principled presidents, as well as an old white president who was a cross between George Bush and Dick Dastardly.
The problem with its female president, though, is that it looks a little out-of-step, as if the scriptwriters made a wrong call about Hillary Clinton’s chances. It’s a bad sign when its challenge at the beginning of the Obama-era is to not quickly become a relic of the Bush-era.
Anyway, as 24 was returning, Slumdog Millionaire’s Golden Globes success was being toasted. It was touted this week as the first movie of the Obama years. It is open-hearted and optimistic; much of it is in Hindi; and it features a Muslim hero. It has been praised for avoiding the Merchant Ivory approach to India. Its only white characters are dollar-wielding tourists who treat the slums as a tourist attraction. And the movie’s themes and its commercial success, according to some, have mirrored Obama’s own journey from underdog to president. A Forbes columnist called him the “Slumdog President.”
Slumdog Millionaire’s attitude has not come out of nowhere. Even for US audiences its “foreign” setting, poverty and subtitles follow a path trodden by the likes of Traffic (from the tail end of the Clinton years) and Babel, with its clumsy, we’re-all-linked narratives. What gives Slumdog more integrity is that it isn’t utterly reliant on white characters to guide us, unlike, say, Babel in which the greatest plot flaw isn’t that Cate Blanchett’s character is shot in dusty Morocco, it’s that she isn’t shot enough times to finish her off early.
Slumdog Millionaire is very good at times, but some of the reviews have been quite over-the-top. It is, after all, a very good Danny Boyle film, a director who has previously revealed only hidden shallows, and whose eye has always been for production design over character, set-piece over plot. The opening minutes of Slumdog Millionaire even include a homage to the breathless opening sequence in his own Trainspotting.
Some of the critical acclaim being directed at Slumdog Millionaire is possibly a response to the idea of the film rather than its execution. Its success certainly reflects the audience’s new-found thirst for optimism and idealism. But it would be premature to declare it the first movie of the Obama years. Indeed, it will be a couple of years before we get a handle on Obama-era cinema. As far as 24 goes, however, we may know within weeks if it is among the last blasts of Bush-era television.
shegarty@irishtimes.com