The ticking time bomb

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Harrison Ford & the Ticking Time Bomb


What does Hollywood think about torture?

The answer isn’t as obvious as you think. Sure, as a political force, Hollywood is against torture, which ranks somewhere in the parade of horribles ahead of SUV ownership and perhaps even voting Republican.

And to be fair, the Hollywood crowd isn’t alone. Back here in Washington, the issue of torture has largely united liberals and divided conservatives. One of the main disagreements is what people mean by torture. If you mean hot pokers in unwelcome places, pretty much everyone is against it, save perhaps in the famous “ticking-time bomb” scenario.

But the meatier part of the argument is in the more nuanced area of “coercive measures,” “stress positions,” and what one unnamed official once described to the Wall Street Journal as “a little bit of smacky-face.” Some, such as Republican Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham want even that stuff banned (but acknowledge that if it comes to a ticking-time bomb situation, well, “you do what you have to do,” as McCain put it).

Others go even further than that. Naturally, human-rights groups are appalled by the suggestion harsh treatment is ever justified. Similarly, blogger Andrew Sullivan dismisses the ticking-time bomb as a “red herring” and argues that you “you cannot raise or lower the moral status of mass murderers with respect to torture. The only salient moral status with respect to torture is that the mass murderers are human beings.”

In other words, it doesn’t matter what the person you are coercing did or why you are coercing them in the first place. Torturing an evil man to save innocent lives is no greater a sin than torturing a noble man in order to snuff out innocent lives, or just for the fun of it. The way Sullivan and those who agree with him see it, torture is torture is torture — and torture is always wrong, even when defined as intimidation and “smacky face.” “Not in my name,” is their rallying cry, often with the sort of sanctimony and self-righteousness which suggests that those who disagree must admire cruelty.

And that’s where Hollywood comes in. Politically, Hollywood is fairly two dimensional in its liberalism. But artistically — and to its credit — Hollywood seems to grasp that life can be morally complicated. After all, tactics which qualify as torture for the anti-crowd shows up in film and television every day.

In Patriot Games, Harrison Ford shot a man in the kneecap to get the information he needed in a timely manner. In Rules of Engagement, Samuel L. Jackson shot a POW in the head to get another man to talk. In the TV series 24, the heroes regularly use torture and cruelty to get results. They even mistakenly tortured an innocent woman.

And the audience is expected to cheer or at least sympathize with all of it. Now, I know many will say “It’s only a movie” or “It’s only a TV show.” But that will not do. Hollywood plays a role in shaping culture, but it also reflects it. It both affirms and reflects our basic moral sense (which is one reason why it dismays some of us from time to time).

The issue here is context. Coercion of the sort we’re discussing is used by good guys and bad guys alike — in films and in real life. Just as with guns and fistfights, the morality of violence depends in large part on the motives behind it (that’s got to be one of the main reasons so many on the left oppose the war: They distrust Bush’s motives. Very few of Bush critics are true pacifists).

American audiences — another word for the American public — understand this. A recent poll by AP-Ipsos shows that some 61 percent of Americans believe torture can be justified in some cases. Interestingly, roughly half of the residents of that self-described “moral superpower” Canada agreed, as did a majority of French citizens and a huge majority of South Koreans.

My guess is that when presented in cinematic form, even larger numbers of people recognize that sometimes good people must do bad things. I’m not suggesting, of course, that the majority is always right. But it should at least suggest to those preening in their righteousness that people of good will can disagree.

http://www.nationalreview.com/goldberg/goldberg200512090853.asp

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