Fox's beat-the-clock crisis show pushes stereotypes

By DEBROAH HORNBLOW of The Hartford Courant

“Team America: World Police” started it.

Now the contagion has spread to “24.”

Yes folks, the American entertainment industry has begun to shift into combat mode.

The enemy of our current wartime nightmare is popping up on screens big and wide.

In last year's mad marionette political satire “Team America,” creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker depicted evil in the form of Islamic extremists, puppets offensively rendered as literal “towel heads.”

Now, on the Fox network's new season of its beat-the-clock crisis jamboree “24,” America's evil du jour appears in the person of the jihadists next door. Inside a swell suburban home in America lurks a Turkish family whose hearts belong to an extreme form of Islamic fundamentalism. They may share your zip code, your paperboy, your cable line and your lawn-care specialist. But behind closed doors, they are plotting to bring America to its knees.

“This year we deal with it,” the show's co-creator Joel Surnow told Frank Rich of The New York Times.

“This is what we fear — Islamic terrorism. This is what we are fighting.”

What strikes you about Surnow's comment is not so much its relationship to the truth, which cannot be argued, but its combat readiness.

Call it state-of-siege license.

In choosing to capitalize on Americans' fears of Islamic fundamentalists, the “24” creators have accomplished two things: One is to draw a critical outcry from interest groups, including the Council on American-Islamic Relations. The other is to boldly lay claim to America's (and the rest of the world's, for that matter) not-so-proud history of demonizing various ethnic groups for the sake of our national amusement.

Although the Turkish family and their partners in crime on “24” are given the dignity of being referred to as individuals with names and not by an ethnic pejorative, their treatment at the hands of America's entertainment industry thus far is not so different from what was accorded this country's enemies of yore.

In service to story lines calling for “bad guys,” America's film and television industries have made cardboard savages of blood-thirsty Apaches, devious Mexicans, Japanese bomber pilots, goose-stepping Nazis and wise-guy Italians, each of whom represents a new wave of fear, cultural bias and the resulting vilification — some richly deserved, some exaggerated for dramatic purposes.

Generations of actors have been cast not to play a character but to speak lines while exhibiting their DNA and everything audiences believe it to stand for.

In Westerns from 1939's “Stagecoach” to 1950's “Rio Grande,” and in war movies from 1943's “Bataan” to television's 1976 series “Baa Baa Black Sheep,” enemies were two-dimensional beings whose ethnic profiles corresponded to those we most feared. Lines of dialogue like “those dirty Japs” and “Hit the Apache, and burn him out” raised nary an eyebrow.

But that was then, and this is now.

Or is it?

Americans had only barely come to terms with ideas fostered by globalism when terror struck. And what a little fear can do.

As our government initiated a war on terror and created the Department of Homeland Security, screenwriters who struggled through the politically correct years of peacetime and who ritually demonized Nazis, aliens or monolithic corporations to avoid antagonizing specific ethnic groups suddenly have at their disposal a new face of terror. Ethnic typecasting is back in style.

The actors hired to play the villains on this season's “24” have Middle Eastern complexions. They have dark hair. Some speak with pronounced accents. The actors, including Oscar-nominated Shohreh Aghdashloo of “House of Sand and Fog,” were cast as much for their talents as for their racial profiles, which match those of our new foe. They provide a visual link to the 9/11 hijackers, Osama bin Laden, the insurgents in Iraq and our imaginings of terrorist cell members who may be living among us while plotting our destruction.

In an age of multiculturalism, “24” is taking some heat. Aghdashloo, addressing critics recently in Los Angeles, said things are not always what they appear. There are suggestions that before the “24” season ends, some of the show's bad guys will redeem themselves and, therefore, the Muslims they represent.

So perhaps Aghdashloo's loyal Lady Macbeth-scale murderess will betray her fanatical husband (Nestor Serrano), or perhaps their teenage son, who two weeks ago suffered the execution of his non-Muslim American girlfriend for the sake of the jihad, will find enough strength or madness in grief to turn on his parents.

But what of the meanwhile?

Each week, Americans are tuning in to see their biggest fears unfold in carefully selected colors. As the spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations worries about a show that is “casting a shadow of suspicion on ordinary American Muslims,” Americans of paler complexion don't seem to mind too much. If they do, they are not speaking up very loud.

“Don't watch it,” one friend said. “Why support it?”

But, the requirements of my job aside, changing channels does not fix the problem.

Other people are watching. The representation of Muslims in our popular culture is an exhibition of American insensitivity and bigotry, false antidotes to the climate of fear and retribution that have sprung up in the aftermath of 9/11.

So into a vacuum where the few Muslims visible in our culture are generally seen under FBI wanted signs, “24” has dared to tip the scales by feeding the fears of a worried population. The structure of “24” — with its ticking clock and frenetic pacing — is an unlikely format for a nuanced portrait of “the enemy.”

Even if the end result of this “24” season is to balance the representation of Muslim characters, it can be argued that, culturally speaking, we are retrograding.

What is in danger of being lost is a sense of fairness. In any honest story line, villainy almost always has more than one face, and human evil or error is never confined to one side, one faith or one skin type.