24: the Facts & the Truth

"All things are subject to interpretation. Whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth."
Friedrich Nietzsche

"We do not deal in definites. All we can do is maximise probability."
Michelle Dessler

"I'm going to need a hacksaw."
Jack Bauer

Ask a CTU agent whether truth is an absolute or a relative quantity and she’ll thrust a severed livewire against your neck and demand the location of the bio-warhead. Ask him whether truth is an assertion of power or the one thing power can't squash and he'll break your fingers one by one until you blubberingly tell him who you work for. Facts, not truth, if you please.

In Series 4, Acting President Charles Logan, holed up anxiously in his bunker, asks Michelle Dessler if she thinks they’ll catch "the man behind today's attacks". Her reply is that they do not deal in definites. All they can do is maximise probability. In other words: facts do not equal omniscience, Mr scaredy-hidey President.

In Series 2, a nuclear bomb is exploded on US soil. The mechanisms of power demand catharsis in the form of a violent and decisive response. Bring us an enemy, let us crush them! The apparatus of US military might rolls inexorably into motion, increment by increment. A forged recording incriminating several Middle Eastern countries provides the required casus belli. Doubters - Jack Bauer and President Palmer amongst them - are deemed to be outside of the law. Their powers of office are removed. World war is inevitable, unless the evidence is somehow discredited: two truths wrestle for control of the future. One truth has the wires and protocols and tanks and telephones of the government in its thrall. The other is what actually happened. But which is more real?

A sofa-based Dawkins would speak through a mouthful of crisps of a bloody shoot-out between memes, a pause-button-happy Nietzsche of a bitter, asymmetrical war of interpretations. But Bauer, a veteran practitioner of realtime realpolitik, is concerned with blood and war in their most literal senses. And (unlike the mother of his children) President Palmer likes to think that power is a function of truth, and not vice versa.

24’s narratives have a question at their core. From the suspicious Series 2 thug running an online background check on Bauer to the darkly manipulative arts of Sherry Palmer, it's there, summoning the tension, igniting the intrigue. The question is: what is truth? Oh, and where can it be found? Oh, and how, whether absent or present, can it be abused? It's a subject that has fascinated people for thousands of years. And then they invented television.

The OC - an impenetrable clique

One has to feel some sympathy for new characters entering the OC. It’s pretty much a given that, however good the actor, they won’t be around for long as they will never be able to infiltrate the two quadripartite cliques that are the very core of the show: the Kids (Ryan, Seth, Marissa and Summer), and the Adults (Sandy, Kirsten, Julie and ‘Jimmy/Caleb’ (essentially one person)). The best they can hope for is to be featured every now and again in future episodes like Kirsten’s ‘used-to-be-a-tear-away-but-now-seems-a-bit-more-sensible’ sister Hailey. The OC then differs radically from a drama Like ER, whose survival as a top-rating show is completely dependent on its ability to introduce new characters and make them integral to the show without losing viewers. When Clooney left the show it was bad news, but there were so many characters that the plots revolved around, that getting an angry Croat in to replace him worked just fine.

In contrast, whereas ER will easily continue without Noah Wiley’s ‘John Carter’ character, the OC is essentially the same eight core characters carrying the storyline each week, which means that if one of them left the show it wouldn’t survive. Okay one could argue that ‘Jimmy/Caleb’ contradicts this, but I would suggest that (t)he(y) are both old-school, original OCers, easily interchangeable (or were until Jim Robinson croaked it), and an essential (often comedic) foil to Julie Cooper, reining in her wicked witch-like machinations regarding world (Newport) domination and preventing her character from seeming (completely) ludicrous. More importantly it works having the same(ish) eight characters every week, so to throw a new character (temp) into the dynamic on a permanent basis would be bring an odd imbalance, which is why they never stick around for more than six or seven episodes.

This doesn’t stop the temp from trying, however. The desperation of Oliver Trask to be accepted in to the Newport massive has never been matched by any other temp for sheer bonkersness. As soon as Marissa befriends him, in the next few episodes, in no particular order, he: creates an imaginary girlfriend called Natalie, goads Ryan into punching him, gets busted at a concert for trying to buy 3 grams of coke from an under cover cop, spies on Seth & Ryan’s house, takes an overdose of pills, takes Marissa hostage, threatens to blow his brains out and – incontrovertible evidence of his whack-job status - invites everyone on a golfing holiday. Someone who stood a much better chance of becoming a regular character was Anna Stern. As Seth says of her at one point, “it’s like we share the same brain”. She was smart, funny, attractive in a mouth-packed-full-of-teeth kind of way, got on well with Marissa and Ryan, and even got them together at one point. She could be, however, never more than a vehicle for Seth to meet his true destiny: Summer. And after they got it together, well, let’s be honest, what was the point of her sticking around?

Lindsay Gardner was another who seemed groomed for long-term status given that Marissa and Ryan were no more and the latter needed some new love interest. But alas, yet again she proved to be just another character providing a major storyline (and quite a stupid one). The revelation that Caleb was her dad made things awkward. Her real downfall, however, was that she looked and dressed like someone’s mum and was extremely annoying, begging of the viewer the question, ‘Ryan, what the hell are you doing, dude?’ That she didn’t return for Caleb’s funeral says it all.

More than any other temp, however, it’s Alex Kelly who seemed destined to stick around. Being manager of the integral-to-plotlines Peach Pit, and the fact that she was extraordinarily attractive counted for nothing, however, when she made the mistake of not just coming out of the closet, but taking Marissa with her (there was no way she was going to stay gay forever with the Lindsay-less Chino’s libido on the loose). And so, as Ryan’s impressive giant lolly-stick equine blazed on the beach in Alex’s last episode, one could not help but think of it as a metaphor for the way she had so admirably tried, and failed, to gain entry past the impenetrable and hallowed walls of the OC microcosm in a Trojan horse of homosexuality. She now lives with her mum, and in Newport, life goes on.

DH: "Friends close, enemies closer"

Edie's advice to Lynette on how to deal with the ex who was once again vying for Tom's affections, was this, "Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer"

This phrase originates from the following excerpt of Sun Tzu's military treatise The Art of War:

21. The enemy's spies who have come to spy on us must be sought out,
tempted
with bribes, led away and comfortably housed. Thus they will become
converted spies and available for our service.

22. It is through the information brought by the converted spy that
we are able
to acquire and employ local and inward spies.

23. It is owing to his information, again, that we can cause the
doomed spy to carry false tidings to the enemy.

24. Lastly, it is by his information that the surviving spy can be
used on appointed occasions.

25. The end and aim of spying in all its five varieties is knowledge
of the enemy; and this knowledge can only be derived, in the first instance,
from the converted spy. Hence it is essential that the converted spy be treated
with the utmost liberality.

Read the full text

The OC: Ryan – A Reluctant Hero

In keeping with great cinematic tradition (Ford, Hawks, et al) we see Ryan take on a role that runs deeper than that of bad boy turned good.

Orange County, lauded as the pinnacle of achievement, the apex of the American Dream has everything - wealth, beauty, status. But gone are the puritan ideals that made America – hard work, honesty, the pioneer spirit. Greed and Vanity have turned this paradise into a broken dream.

Enter Ryan. Part Shane, part Man with No Name. From the wrong side of the tracks, representing the rugged individualism of the frontier, he has entered the tainted idyll that is the OC. With Ryan comes a reminder to all of where they’ve come from, a life toiling on construction sites, a time when all they had were aspirations.

But he is clearly a man uneasy with his own position – accepted in to the bosom of OC life , he wrestles with the duality of his existence. He is, in the spirit of Barthes and Lévi-Strauss, a second level semiological signifier. He embodies and mediates conflict within our own society - between the viewer’s aspirations to live life like the OC and the burden of guilt they feel about desiring unbridled luxury. By standing between both worlds Ryan makes the OC tangible, as a mythical character he allows us to live with the hypocrisy that wants Julie Cooper’s lifestyle, yet despises her for her opulence.

The entry into the fray of Trey (Ryan‘s brother) serves to highlight both how far he has come from his rough and ready past, but also how far he has to go, were he to become a true OC’er. He truly no longer belongs to either society - in some eyes emasculated, in others empowered – and poignantly ends The Brothers Grim (season 2 episode 17) arm in arm with both his past (Trey) and his future (Marissa).

What remains to be seen is whether, like the disenfranchised cow hand of the 1950s, Ryan will ride off into the sunset.

Kaleidosoap is born...

Through the prism of the TV soap, the minutiae of all of life...