Jack Bauer: The Smart Warrior's Faustian Gift

Abstract

Jack Bauer of the television series 24 is a highly charged contemporary mythic character who exists in powerful relationship to past and present real-world and fictional figures. If Rambo was a classic Reagan era cinematic ‘hard body’ (Jeffords, 1994), Jack is the archetypal Bush ‘smart warrior’ in a post -Patriot Act era. Like Rambo, Reagan's displays of bravado were decisive and successfully staged; however, George Bush has faced a multiplying set of uncertainties. This sets up a more complex set of relations between Jack, George W. Bush and contemporary masculinities than those presented by the Reagan era. Jack is both an emblem of unimpeded presidential will and a parable of its Faustian consequences.

Presidentialism, Political Fiction, and the Complex Presidencies ofFox's24

“…Jack Bauer, in this context, works as “a figure of heroic masculinity untroubled by the old relativism of identity politics” (Carroll , 47). O'Donnell () sees in Jack Bauer the embodiment of “two mythic stories central to American identity” and that both of those stories (“the story of the apocalyptic and the story of the frontier”) “give rise to particular versions of masculinity” (33). Intriguingly, O'Donnell links Bauer's masculine identity to specific narratives of presidential authority.…”