24CHRONO
Worshipers of 24h Chrono - at all exaggeration to use the word worship as the consent raised by this TV series - are millions around the world. There are hundreds of websites and weblogs focused on this series. 24H Chrono is a true television phenomenon.
The basic principle of the series is simple: the events take place in real time and a season covers one day. 24 one-hour episodes (each of which includes 18 minutes of advertising) covering 24H hours a day.
Apart from this general principle of the series, on closer inspection, it is not built in a unique way. Total absence of flashbacks, total lack of digressions, intrigues that take place in parallel in a clear manner without never give rise to ambiguity. Everything that happens, the viewer sees it unfold before his eyes. The situation, therefore, is perfectly known, but it is the amazing sequence of twists that creates tension in the viewer, who knows from experience that, at any moment, may be the radical reversals. This constant expectation of reversal, in an extremely complex and intrigue while perfectly understandable, it is certainly one of the factors which enabled the series to achieve the success it enjoys.
But there are many aspects of 24H which can give rise to reflection.
Let's start first by history.
24H Chrono (arrived currently in its third season, or its third day, if we are) about the adventures of Jack Bauer (played by Kiefer Sutherland), Los Angeles Counter Terrorism Unit agent responsible for neutralizing terrorist threats of a different nature. In the first series
Jack Bauer must stop an attack on the presidential candidate of the United States. The second has to defuse a nuclear bomb that may explode in Los Angeles, while the third series is the threat of biological terrorism: a virus that, left free to move, would cause an epidemic of global dimensions.
from first to third season we see an escalation in the texture of the terrorist threat. A man, a city, town, or even the entire planet. One wonders what they could still pull off the brilliant writers of the series, in other words, what can never be more terrible than a global epidemic?
It 'obvious that the charm of 24H is related to the staging of the fears, conscious or unconscious, of the American spectator, before, and then Europe. And if, perhaps, in contrast to American viewers, at a European audience the possible assassination of a candidate for president of the United States does not raise special fears, the nuclear threat oo fear of diseases related to unknown viruses and planned, is the nightmare of every citizen belonging to the world industruializzato.
The staging of this fear is counterbalanced by two basic and opposing each other.
On the one hand, the viewer may rely on intuition, sense of sacrifice and extraordinary abilities of the hero, agent Jack Bauer on the other cutting edge technology in the anti-terrorist unit is equipped. Why Jack Bauer is not your typical loner hero, Harry Callaghan has nurtured decades of American cinema. Jack Bauer is constantly attended by a team of computer data analysts, experts decryption, image satellite, remote, assisting him in his fight. The audience, background, nourishes the constant assurance that somehow technology is able to foil the plans of the most audacious terrorist enemy. That he can be identified, watched, monitored, followed by a looming Big Brother, which, in this case, is cleverly induced to justify the invasion in the privacy of citizens.
anti-terrorist unit, the CTU (Counter Terrorism Unit) is the main environment in which the events take place. Hundreds of computers, satellite phones, video imaging, controlled by a team of young, male and female, highly capable, devoted and absolutely tireless, who are the characters in the drama side dish. Place
aseptic, the CTU, glass and metal, as are the aseptic characters who inhabit it.
none of them know life outside of CTU. We know hardly anything of their past, have no idea what their wishes or their passions, not even remotely as we imagine to be their home.
communications between members of the CTU, when done via computer, are dried, reduced to a minimum, and without any personal note or sentimental. Although relationships exist between some of their love or affection, the space of the latter is reduced to a minimum and almost always they are functional to the unfolding of events.
The viewer is constantly communicated the idea that the world is threatened by the worst disasters of the evil forces of different origin but that the technology we have, combined with intuition and sense of duty superhuman hero, will always save us.
But at what price?
This is the most interesting of the series.
At first glance, (more in the first season and gradually less and less with the passage of a series to another) some of the values \u200b\u200bthat are conveyed through drama values \u200b\u200bare breaking with tradition.
The President of the United States is a Unom color, medium-low social class.
women in the film, often replacing the man, compete with him in the quest for power and often even the fight. Sherry Palmer, the wife President, refused the role of wife and mother, and intriguing scenes to satisfy his personal interests rather than the national interest. The figure of the wife is absent from the series. At the end of the first season of Jack Bauer's wife, disappeared, murdered. While the members of the CTU, Michele Dessler, Tony Almeida's wife, one of the management are required as a woman of brains and action, totally detached from his duties as a wife.
It is, however, elements peripheral to the profound philosophy that underpins the drama.
which can be summarized in this sentence: There are no ethical limits or democratic principles that can be defended in the event of a terrorist attack. The end of that justifies the means, in the most mundane and immediate, is the background to each item.
It 'necessary to hear a terrorist or one of his supporters? The CTU will not hesitate to use torture, as aseptically. The torturer will be credited to the appearance of a doctor, and no sadism in the eye, but the knowledge that the gadgets in his briefcase contained metal in any sense a noble cause.
E 'need to sacrifice a member of the same OTC to take time and more chances to identify terrorists? You will do a performance in cold, which will implement Jack Bauer, the hero of good, even with the consent of the same forced victim conscious that there are other possible solutions.
citizens are heard, radiographed, followed, monitored by Big Brother, and there is nothing to say. E 'evidence in itself, justified by historical contingency. From which we can understand why the introduction of the Patriot Act in the U.S., forcing, for example, the librarians to provide the police lists of books that those who attend law libraries, has not raised those protests that we would have expected.
The press, the mass media in general, are seen as the black beast, and the Chairman, and those who fight against terrorism. In the second set did not hesitate to kidnap a journalist to stop him from revealing that the city of Los Angeles is under the threat of a nuclear explosion.
There are also reminiscences of film noir, in this series. Nina Myers, Jack Bauer's alter ego, embodied the prototype of the woman predatory, immoral, dangerous and at the same ambivalent and fatal. And as in film noir, even in 24H are brown to embody evil and duplicity, while the angelic blondes. When, in the second season proves that Mary Warner is a terrorist, you see it in black wig, no longer with his blond hair and angelic as Kim Bauer in the third season, to replace the daughter of a terrorist, she also wears a wig dark.
In both cases, the passage to coincide with this metamorphosis.
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