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2010 Exceptional TV: Post-9/11 Serial Television and American Exceptionalism Erika Johnson-Lewis

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COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES

EXCEPTIONAL TV:

POST-9/11 SERIAL TELEVISION AND AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM

ERIKA JOHNSON-LEWIS

A Dissertation submitted to the Program in Interdisciplinary Humanities in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Awarded: Spring Semester, 2010

______Leigh H. Edwards Professor Directing Dissertation

______R.M. Berry University Representative

______David Johnson Committee Member

______Amit Rai Committee Member

______Jennifer Proffitt Committee Member

Approved: ______John Kelsay, Director, Program in Interdisciplinary Humanities

The Graduate School has verified and approved the above-named committee members.

This dissertation is dedicated to my parents, Judy and Mel, my husband, Alan, and my little man, Gareth.

iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This dissertation was completed with the help of many people. First, I would like to thank my advisor, Leigh Edwards, for all her help, encouragement, and impromptu training sessions in American studies. Her guidance and thoughtful comments were indispensible to me throughout this process. She always encouraged me to have confidence in myself and for that I am grateful. I would also like to thank all of my committee members, Jennifer Proffitt, Amit Rai, Ralph Berry, and David Johnson for their patience and support.

Many friends have helped me throughout this process. I want to acknowledge Katheryn Wright for keeping me focused. Our long conversations about Starbuck, Dexter, and Al Swearengen helped me work through many of the ideas and arguments expressed in this dissertation. I wish to also acknowledge Erin DiCesare; her tireless work ethic inspired me to drive on and work hard. Other friends, old and new, have supported me over the years, and without them this dissertation would not have been possible.

Most importantly, I wish to express my heart-felt gratitude for my family, to whom this dissertation is dedicated. To my Mom and Dad who always encouraged me to be my best; their mutual love and respect for each other and their belief in me has made me who I am today. To my loving husband Alan Lewis, without whom this project would have been impossible. He spent countless hours watching television shows and listening to me rattle on about them incessantly. He read many drafts as the project changed and grew. He made me coffee and kept me sane. And last to my little man, Gareth Johnson-Lewis, who always reminded me it was okay to take some time to have fun; he is my inspiration and my world.

iv TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT ...... vi

INTRODUCTION...... 1

1. THE EXCEPTIONALIST MATRIX...... 11

2. RE-IMAGINING THE FRONTIER ...... 43

3. TELEVISION, TORTURE, AND THE TICKING TIME BOMB ...... 80

4. STATES OF AMERICAN EXCEPTION ...... 115

CONCLUSION ...... 149

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 154

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ...... 170

v ABSTRACT

This dissertation seeks to understand how a re-invigorated sense of American exceptionalism circulated within the texts of several prime time serial television programs. American exceptionalism has functioned as a foundational mythology and a justifying discourse that works to create a sense of national unity through participation in rituals of national belonging. Television is a cultural site where rituals of national belonging are experienced and shared. As such, it is important to examine how television texts engage with and participate in the creation, cultivation, and circulation of nationalist mythologies, ideologies, and discourses. To understand serial televisionʼs engagement with exceptionalist themes and myths, I begin in chapter one by offering a history of American exceptionalism as it emerged through the institutionalization of American studies as a discipline. Chapter two looks at HBOʼs Deadwood and CBSʼs Jericho and examines how they engage with foundational exceptionalist tropes such as destiny, frontier, and the jeremiad. Chapter three engages with the Fox series 24 and the Showtime series Dexter, to describe the intersection of American exceptionalismʼs history as a justifying discourse and the legal construction of the state of exception in the discourse of the ticking time bomb scenario as it was deployed to legitimize the use of torture. The final chapter analyzes how ABCʼs Lost and SyFyʼs Battlestar Galactica negotiate with American exceptionalism in terms of both the state of exception and the ticking time bomb as well as with the foundationalist tropes of mission and destiny, the frontier and the garden.

vi INTRODUCTION

On September 20, 2001 President George W. Bush declared that on the evening of September 11 “night fell on a different world.”1 It has become a commonplace truism that after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001 the world became a radically different place. In a 2004 New York Times article Joan Didion referred to this as a “new normal.” She explains:

September 11 […] had created a “new normal,” an altered condition in which we were supposed to be able to see, as The Christian Science Monitor explained a month after the events, “what is—and what is no longer—important.” […] The “new normal” required that we adopt a “new paradigm,” which in turn required, according to an internal White House memo signed by President Bush, ʻnew thinking in the law of war,ʼ (Didion).

But, what is it that has changed and how? Whose interests are served in the continued assertion that “everything has changed” and for what end? In 9/11 The Culture of Commemoration, David Simpson argues that, the United States, as a culture, has been too quick to make pronouncements about our new “post-9/11” world, in which the United States is locked in a struggle with pre-modern, primitive, barbaric terror(ists) determined to destroy the “American way of life.” The brave new world found at the center of post- 9/11 rhetoric trades on a fear that life stands at the brink of annihilation and that nothing less than the existence of the nation itself is at stake. The present is understood as existing in a state of permanent crisis. The United States is allegedly waging an epic battle against a nameless, faceless, and yet all encompassing enemy. The state of emergency is daily declared through a steady stream of possibly catastrophic threats:

1 The abbreviation 9/11 will be used to refer to the terrorist events of September 11, 2001 throughout.

1 terrorism, bioterrorism, global climate change, financial crises, the “Clash of Civilizations”, culture wars, torture, evolution, all pointing their deathly fingers towards an uncertain and monstrous future. The narrative of the presentʼs radical newness creates a problematic equivalence between “civilization” and the United States, which is indicative of what I will refer to as the “exceptionalist matrix.”

At the same time the United States (and the world) was experiencing a supposed inauguration into a new historical period, the media landscape was also changing in response to developments in new media and digital culture. The Internet, through the proliferation of broadband access, continued its encroachment into territory previously dominated by television and film. New media outlets provided new spaces for the production and consumption of multifaceted immersion experiences and new possibilities for human interaction. The age of Web2.0, social networking, and online content (legal and otherwise) has chipped away at the television audience, and just as online downloading of music began to change the music industry in the late 1990s, the television industry has found that it must also change.

Changes occurred across the industry in production, content, and distribution. Different strategies were employed to address the diminished and increasingly fragmented television audiences. One such strategy was an increased focus on the prime time serial. For example, 24 (2001-2007), Six Feet Under (2001-2005), and Alias (2001-2006) all began their runs in 2001 and Lost (2004-2010), Veronica Mars (2004- 2007), and Battlestar Galactica (2004-2009) began in 2004. These different series employed varying levels of serialization, but all of them included season or series long narratives. Additionally, some networks have also attempted to incorporate transmedia strategies by incorporating cross media content into the narrative of various series.2 For example, ABC launched the “Lost Experience,” an “alternate reality game” in the summer of 2006 that made use of television commercials, websites, and newspaper to retain viewer interest in the series through the summer hiatus. For their series Heroes,

2 See Henry Jenkinsʼ book Convergence Culture for an in-depth discussion of transmedia forms and strategies.

2 NBC released online graphic novels that expanded the story seen on the aired episodes.

This dissertation will establish that the supposed “new normal” of the post-9/11 American condition did not represent a dramatic rupture with the past, but instead that this period saw the reinvigoration and deployment of the mythology and discourse of American exceptionalism.3 American exceptionalism is a foundational and nationalist discourse predicated on the notion of an implicit and shared consensus that is enacted through rituals of national belonging. The exceptionalist narrative covers over the lived multiplicity of the nation. The resurgence of the discourses of American exceptionality occurred in a wide variety of cultural, political, and social spaces, and this dissertation will examine exceptionalismʼs appearance on a variety of prime time serial television programs: HBOʼs Deadwood (2004-2006), CBSʼs Jericho (2006-2008), Foxʼs 24 (2001- present), Showtimeʼs Dexter (2006-present), ABCʼs Lost (2004-2010), and SyFyʼs Battlestar Galactica (2004-2009). These series critically engage with the discourses of exceptionalism, at times rejecting or questioning them, while other times accepting and reinforcing them.

The general approach to this project is to read prime time serial programs in light of the “post-9/11” U.S cultural landscape. I will balance close readings of specific episodes and larger readings of season and series-long narrative arcs in order to analyze the circulation of exceptionalism in a contemporary popular culture context. To contextualize these readings, I looked to previous American studies scholarship that has sought to understand American exceptionalism by reading its history through literature and folk culture. This approach seeks to place the study of television content at the intersection of American studies and media studies. This projectʼs central focus will be television programs as cultural artifacts and the socio-historical context in which they exist and to which they speak. It seeks to understand television relationship to

3 The use of the terms “America” and “Americans” to refer to The United States of America and its residents has been called into question by the critical American studies tradition. I use the terms “America” and “American” to underscore the normative and ideological function they serve in relationship to exceptionalism as a normative discourse.

3 exceptionalism as a historical discourse, the persistent role television plays in mediating and creating a sense of a national American identity, and televisionʼs place as a possible site of contestation to the homogenizing discourses of the exceptionalist national identity. Additionally, this analysis will be completed in light of the changing production context of what Amanda Lotz has called “post-network” television. Television texts are always conditioned by their production contexts. The full implications of serial televisionʼs resurgence in relationship to the changes across the industry is beyond the scope of this dissertation, but the analysis is done with the knowledge that these texts are also informed by the specific economic dictates of the American culture industry, of which television is only a small part.4

To understand 9/11 one must understand its existence as a televisual event as much as an historical one. As a televisual event it was dominated by a tyranny of the image over meaning. The now iconic images of frantic people running through the streets of New York, commercial jetliners flying through a clear blue sky smashing into the twin towers were transmitted through television screens and repeated on an infinite loop. I do not wish to suggest that 9/11 only exists as a televisual event. I do, however, want to underscore the centrality of television in the experience, circulation, and

4 This approach is informed by Julie DʼAcciʼs “circuit of media study” model of cultural analysis. Her model builds and refines earlier models such as Stuart Hallʼs “circuit of culture.” Hallʼs model is used to trace a cultural artifact as it moves through the circuit of culture; DʼAcciʼs model differs in that it seeks to trace how a question or idea travels through the circuit. The circuit of media analysis has four main sites of the study: production, cultural artifacts, reception, and sociohistorical context. It is impossible to illuminate the full depth and reach of oneʼs research question into each of these four sites. DʼAcci notes,

a four-site model does not mandate that each site be examined fully for each and every analysis or research question; [… ] the operations and effects of each should be considered when designing any project, fashioning any research question, evaluating any claims, or making any conclusions (434).

My research questions could be mapped onto the circuit in any number of ways. For example, the question of the serial could be placed in either the production site or the cultural artifact site depending on whether Iʼm addressing the economic or creative production aspects or examining the formal narrative aspects, which I would place under the cultural artifact site. Likewise, the question of post-9/11 America could also be placed under multiple sites, most obviously in the socio-historical context, but also in the reception context by asking how television reception changed in the post-9/11 environment. As one can see, each component of my research question can be addressed in many ways.

4 construction of the event. Coverage of 9/11, as an event, worked to produce an overwhelming sense of national unity. Lynn Spigel observed that, “televisionʼs almost week-long uninterrupted coverage of the attacks reminded the nation of televisionʼs role in creating a symbolic citizenship by constructing an image of Americans as a unified nation public” (Spigel 277, 2008).5

For many critics, television is a medium of sound bites and an unrelenting presentness characterized by its ephemeral and unreflective qualities. For example, David Simpson notes that “in the summer of 2005, novels, plays, and films that take 9/11 as their narrative occasion are beginning to appear; these are products of a reflection that was not instant and at sound-bite speed” (12). Simpsonʼs argument creates a dichotomy between the literary/theatrical/cinematic and the “sound-bite speed” of the implied televisual. Simpsonʼs binary speaks to the convention of dismissing television as incapable of anything resembling contemplation. Television has been associated with the convention of liveness or the “this-is-happening-nowness” of the event. One only has to think of the never-ending series of “breaking news” stories that litter the 24-hours news networks. These events are obsessed over, repeated, and emptied of any contextual meaning; they exist only as momentary blips on a screen that ceaselessly flickers. Mary Ann Doane argues that television coverage of catastrophic events is emblematic of televisionʼs presentness. She writes, “television deals not with the weight of the dead past but with the potential trauma and explosiveness of the present” (222) and “what is at stake in the television catastrophe is not meaning but reference” (233). These arguments are limited in their scope because they embrace a totalizing conception of television by addressing only a small fraction of televisionʼs content, for example, in Doaneʼs case, a specific kind of news coverage. Or one leaves aside content altogether, focusing instead on televisionʼs industrial imperative to cultivate consumers for the advertisers who generate their capital.

5 Of course, individual people experienced the event separately, but the narrative construction of 9/11 has been one that has emphasized the collectivity of the national experience.

5 One of the primary examples that this dissertation addresses is the question of the relationship between American exceptionalism and the use and justification of torture, most notably in the so-called “ticking time bomb scenario. Spigel contends that post-9/11 television, across genres, did the work of returning the country back to “ʻnormalcyʼ—that is, to commercial entertainment and consumer culture” (241). Following these characterizations of television, it would appear that television is the ideal medium for disseminating and encouraging a perspective on the “war on terror” that champions the frantic thinking of the ticking time bomb scenario. This dissertation seeks to complicate the characterization of television as a medium of the present, by reading serial narratives as sites of tension, particularly as it pertains to the issue of torture. Time, or a lack of it, is central to the internal logic of the ticking time bomb scenario, which posits that an imminent attack on the nation can only be circumvented by resorting to the use of torture, or in the language of the Bush administration “enhanced interrogation techniques,” to gain information on how to stop the attack. Torture is necessary because there isnʼt enough time to solve the problem any other way, but the assertion “there isnʼt enough time,” begs the question, time for what? What is that we donʼt have time for?

Serial narratives present a facet of television that destabilizes the image of it as a medium of immediacy. Though television is particularly suited to long narratives, serialization was often relegated to soap operas (daytime and prime time), while closed episodic narratives tended to dominate prime time. The television sitcoms, and the many variations on the hour long procedural, exist in a kind of perpetual now. Hairstyles and cars may become outdated, but the events always occur an idea of the present and viewer comprehension and enjoyment are often predicated on knowledge of the formula; one can, theoretically, jump in at any moment during an episode or a season and understand what is going on.6 These conventions emerged in part as a response to economic structure of network era television. Unlike the perpetual present of the daily news, and its conventions that either refuse or deny the benefits of memory, or the

6 I do not wish to imply that sitcoms and procedurals have no relationship to their contemporary sociohistorical contexts.

6 familiarity of episodic narrative conventions, serialized television allows for sustained engagement that can provide a narrative space suited to reflection.

Serial narratives defy the logic of nowness. The serialʼs longer story-arcs—which can last across a few episodes, seasons, or an entire series—provide narrative spaces in which to explore intricate issues, and often ask more questions that requires the audience to fill in the gaps and make judgments. Serials often make use of episodic conventions in addition to using serialized story telling to create, what Glen Creeber calls in his study, Serial Television: Big Drama on the Small Screen, the “flexi-narrative” form. He articulates that “the ʻflexi-narrativeʼ form better responds to and reveals the complexity, ambiguity and lack of closure that typifies the contemporary world” (5). Creeber celebrates “narrative indeterminacy, character density and thematic ambiguity” and the serialʼs power to “give voice” to more perspectives. It is this, what Jason Mittell has described as “narrative complexity” (33) that makes the prime time serial an ideal place in which to interrogate what has changed in this supposed radically new world. This use of seriality undermines claims that emphasize televisionʼs ephemeral nature. Serials thrive on memory rather than function in the absence of memory as Doane suggests (227). The form of the serial narrative is predicated on an attention span that must be maintained over weeks, months, and even years as the narratives unfold.7 Serial narratives provide a televisual space that counters the sound-bite quality of television news. The use of seriality, specifically its reliance on memory, provides a narrative space in which to examine not only the present, but also the presentʼs relationship to the past and the future. In the serialized narrative spaces of the six series discussed in this dissertation, the post-9/11 American present is placed in relationship to its past and future, through deep engagements with the discourse of American exceptionalism.

7 Narrative redundancy, a byproduct of the network era episode form, is often employed to fill the viewer in on what had happened prior to the commercial break or to reintroduce main characters to new viewers often in the form of the “previously on” introduction to each episode or in the case of Lost or Battlestar Galactica special episodes designed to update the viewer on previous seasons.

7 Given the increasingly fragmented televisual landscape, is it still possible to point to a national television culture? In televisionʼs broadcast era (1950s-early 1980s)8 television did the cultural work of creating and presenting a unified national identity.9 How does television retain its status as national medium? Lotz proposes the concept of “ʻphenomenal televisionʼ as a particular category of programming that retains the social importance attributed to televisionʼs earlier operation as a cultural forum” (37). She explains “themes, topics, and discourses that appear in multiple and varied outlets indicate a form of phenomenal television” (37). The reoccurrence of the macro themes of American exceptionalism and the micro question of torture and the ticking time bomb across six different series indicates their cultural significance across a wide variety of audiences. Lotz continues to explain, “ideas appearing in multiple shows—particularly different types of shows—might indicate concerns relevant to the broader society rather than distinct subcultures” (37-38). In addition to their thematic content, the use of seriality demonstrates a kind of phenomenal television predicated on a particular use of form.

Due to the vast array of television series that have aired since 2001, it would be impossible to cover all of them here. My criteria for choosing took into consideration aspects from the simply temporal: prime time, hour-long, serials, to more specific concerns about wanting to have a representative sample of programs from network, cable, and premium cable outlets. These series represent a wide variety of genres. Lost and Battlestar Galactica fall into the fantasy/science fiction genre; Deadwood is a historical western; 24 is a conventional spy/action series; Dexter plays on the traditional detective/police procedural; and Jericho is an odd combination of post-apocalyptic science fiction, family drama, and action/adventure. Each of these genres have different target or niche audiences, but together they represent the wide variety of serialize

8 Lotz refers to the mid 1980s-2000 as the “Multi-channel transition era.” During this period, cable and satellite television gained prominence. 9 See Feuer 1995, Spigel 1992, 1997, and 2001.

8 programs produced from 2001-2010. As of this writing, 24 and Lost are airing their final seasons. All the other series have been canceled.10

The themes associated with American exceptionalism appeared in a number of different series. Before turning to an examination of how Deadwood, Jericho, 24, Dexter, Lost, and Battlestar Galactica engaged with exceptionalist themes and the cultural work they performed, chapter one, “The Exceptionalist Matrix,” will provide a historical framework for chapters two, three, and four. In it I describe the “exceptionalist matrix.” American exceptionalism functions both as a foundational mythology and a justifying discourse. As a foundational mythology is provides a unified picture of the nationʼs past, which was predicated on its difference from European history. American exceptionality is grounded in temporal metaphors such as destiny, choseness, and divine providence and in spatial metaphors such as wilderness, garden, and frontier. As a justifying discourse American exceptionalism works to validate expansionist and imperialist “errands in the wilderness.” Though there has been a marked shift in American studies since the 1970s away from discourses of exceptionalism and towards a critique of it, the mythology of exceptionalism persists in the popular imagination and provided a vocabulary through which to construct the events of 9/11, the creation of the “war on terror,” and the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Once the cultural history of exceptionalism is established, chapter two, “Re- imagining the Frontier,” looks at the HBO series Deadwood and the CBS series Jericho. I begin with these two series because of the six under investigation in this dissertation they engage directly with the mythology of American exceptionalism, particularly the concept of frontier as a liminal space in which the American identity emerged. My analysis of Deadwood examines its construction of civilization as a violent movement from order to chaos and its negotiated representation of destiny and mission that undermines the myth of consensus by representing those Americans who are ignored by exceptionalist discourses and thereby excluded from the participation within the

10 The perils of U.S. prime time television are such that, serialized programs are cancelled before their narratives have a chance to be resolved. Both Deadwood and Jericho were cancelled without proper series finales. Lost and Battlestar Galactica had narrative closure.

9 nation. In discussing Jericho I argue that it functions as a televisual jeremiad that attempts to call the nation back to its roots by re-enacting the ritual of consensus.

Chapter three “Television, Torture, and the Ticking Time Bomb,” addressed Foxʼs popular series 24 and the Showtime series Dexter to examine how the discourse of American exceptionalism was knit to the legal “state of exception.” I focus on the popular construction of the “ticking time bomb” scenario to understand how the imbrication of American exceptionalism with the state of exception works to justify the use of torture and the role television has played in the unfolding of the debate over the use of torture. I argue that the ticking time bomb scenario relies on and re-imagines the discourse of exceptionalism from the conception of destiny to the notion of the frontier. Both 24ʼs Jack Bauer (a counter-terrorist agent) and Dexterʼs Dexter Morgan, a serial killer with a code, defend their legal transgressions by appealing to what they believe to be a higher standard of justice. Some have argued that the American use and justification for torture is completely new to the post-9/11 landscape, but this higher standard appeals to the same justifying logic of American expansionism and other dubious forays of American errands in the wilderness.

In the fourth and final chapter, “States of American Exception,” I turn to ABCʼs successful series Lost and SyFyʼs cult hit Battlestar Galactica. This chapter combines together chapter twoʼs focus on exceptionalism as a foundational mythology and chapter threeʼs focus on exceptionalism as a justifying discourse. Though both series attempt to negotiate with or even reject exceptionalismʼs false universality and claims of divine providentiality, both also reaffirm exceptionalist mythologies at the same time. They each address the question of torture and the ticking time bomb scenario demonstrating its prevalence. Lost engages with exceptionalism via the motif of the garden and its promise of redemption. Battlestar Galactica engages with exceptionalism by re-imaging the wilderness of space as a deteritorialized state of exception and interrogates justifying discourses that rely on just-so narratives of choseness and destiny to assert, “Itʼs not enough to survive. One has to be worthy of surviving” (“Resurrection Ship: Part 2” 2.12).

10 CHAPTER ONE THE EXCEPTIONALIST MATRIX

The idea of exceptionalism has been an ideological force since the days of European expansion.11 The discourse of exceptionalism emerged very early in the colonial period and is perhaps most famously encapsulated in the sermon given by John Winthrop aboard the Arabella shortly before arriving in the New World when he asserted that their new colony in America would be “a shining city on a hill” to which all of civilization would look and see the fulfillment of Godʼs kingdom on earth. Initial manifestations of American exceptionalism were profoundly religious, specifically Puritan, in nature and relied heavily on Biblical prophecies concerning the origins of the world and the eventual (and at times imminent) end of days. During the Revolutionary period, the Enlightenment emphasis on the perfectibility of human knowledge through the systematic application of rational thought commingled with the earlier Puritan notions of mission and destiny.12 The mixture of Puritan and Enlightenment discourses merged creating a hybrid exceptionalism that retained its sacred religious inflections even as it embraced secular reformulations about human destiny and progress. In response to a perceived identity crisis engendered by the catastrophic events of 9/11, the invocation and deployment of American exceptionalist mythologies were used to shore up hegemonic notions about American national identity. American exceptionalism was reinvigorated and expressed most saliently in the Bush administrationʼs construction of the “global war on terror” and to justify their neo-imperialist errands in the Afghani and Iraqi wildernesses. The purpose of this chapter is to offer a survey of the central role exceptionalism had and continues to have within both the creation and study of American culture and

11 This tradition extends back even further, as exceptionalist rhetoric builds on earlier European appropriations of the Troy myth that were used to provide legitimacy for imperialist exploits. 12 As Anders Stephanson notes in Manifest Destiny “Visions of the United States as a sacred space providentially selected for divine purposes found a counterpart in the secular idea of the new nation of liberty as a privileged ʻstageʼ […] for the exhibition of a new world order, a great ʻexperimentʼ for the benefit of humankind as a whole” (5).

11 history. At its core, exceptionalism is a highly tautological concept; America has been successful because it was providentially ordained to be successful, and we know this success was providentially ordained because America has been successful. It is precisely because of this circularity that exceptionalism becomes both reassuring in times of crisis and useful for the justification of expansionist or imperialist pursuits.13 Exceptionalism functions discursively at two distinct yet related levels. First, exceptionalism serves a mythological purpose; it is a foundation narrative. It explains who or what “America” is, the character of “the American people,” where it came from, and where it is destined to go. As a nationalist mythology it works to cover over and diminish heterogeneity within the nation by emphasizing consensus over conflict. This mythology was codified and legitimized within early American studies scholarship.14 Second, the narrative framework of exceptionalism, particularly the construction of a special American destiny that has framed the relationship America has to the world and humanity, is employed discursively to legitimize first expansionist and later neo- imperialist foreign policies. Together these two axes form something one could identify as the exceptionalist matrix. Presently exceptionalist discourse has begun to appropriate and incorporate the legal concept of the “state of exception” extending and engendering a possibly more destructive and insidious iteration of exceptionalism with in the twenty-first century. This chapter first traces the establishment and characteristics of foundational exceptionalism primarily through an analysis of early American studies scholarship. This analysis will focus on how exceptionalism has answered the following questions; where did America come from and where is it going? In other words, I will examine how exceptionalism functions as an origin and eschatological narrative of the nation through its construction within American studies. The purpose of this chapterʼs exegesis of exceptionalism is to establish the hegemony of exceptionalist discourse through which I shall read the television series

13 “Exceptionalism has always offered a mythological refuge from the chaos of history and the uncertainty of life” (Madsen 166). 14 More recently American studies scholarship has done the work of interrogating the exceptionalist framework as hegemonic. This critique of the dominance of exceptionalism within American studies will be taken up later in the chapter.

12 under investigation in chapters two through four.15 The official discourse of President Bush and his administration appropriated and reinvigorated the language of exceptionalism in an attempt to foreclose on any possible understanding of 9/11 as an event outside the bellicose discourse of revenge and retribution. Exceptionalismʼs powerful associations with destiny, mission, and the eventual triumph of America as world savior provided a vocabulary with which to assuage the sense of uncertainty that permeated the post-9/11 cultural landscape. The “War on Terror” took its place within the flow of American history as the next task America had to face in her struggle for redemption.16 However, the moral certitude of the “war on terror” was undermined by shocking images from Abu Ghraib, revelations about secret prisons and the practice of extraordinary rendition, the rise of casualties in Iraq, and the practice of “enhanced interrogation techniques.” Prime time serialized narratives became a cultural site where the full implications of the “war on terror” were explored. These series provided a space in which both characters and audiences where asked to examine and evaluate official exceptionalist discourses that were deployed to justify a radical re-evaluation of supposedly fundamental American values from the right to privacy, to claims about the dignity of human existence, to the justification and use of torture. To understand how these televisual texts achieved a complex and thoughtful engagement, one must first understand how deeply rooted exceptionalism is within American culture.

WHAT IS THE EXCEPTIONAL MATRIX? In the introduction to this chapter I noted how the two different discursive functions of American exceptionalism came together to create what I called the exceptionalist matrix. This matrix provides the structure within which one can understand and articulate the role the notion of exceptionalism has played with in the constitution and continual reinvention of “America” as an idea. Nations are ideas, and as ideas their meanings are contested and struggled over. The meaning and relevance of

15 Exegesis should be read here as retaining its religious inflection. Exceptionalism in many respects functions as a national religion. In the discourse of American exceptionalism, America (as idea and place) is imbued with supernatural powers of transformation and enlightenment. 16 My language here is deliberately nationalistic.

13 exceptionalism has thus also been contested. Exceptionalism, both as a foundational narrative and justifying discourse, informs and constrains how the idea of America circulates as a political, historical, and cultural concept. Since it became a primary touchstone in the construction of the “war on terror” and the idea of America in a post- 9/11 context, it also forms an important touchstone in the narratives of prime time television. At the heart of American Exceptionalism is the belief that America is a nation/place guided by destiny. According to the American exceptionalist framework, America is a New Israel, a nation unlike any other, founded by a unique “chosen” people who wanted to be free, and as a nation and people it has a special providentially determined destiny. Within the exceptionalist matrix America exists outside of the normal flow of time, immune to the tides of History, and is a nation where the landscape is itself exceptionally suited to the cultivation and expansion of freedom and liberty. Historian Walter Nugent offers a concise description of how the exceptionalist matrix has shaped Americaʼs compulsion toward expansion, which he calls the “exceptionalist impulse”; he explains:

that the nation has been divinely or providentially favored and stands for a morally good polity worthy of export; that its territorial and imperial successes demonstrate that; and that therefore the nation may countenance or even demand further imperial enterprises (7).

Exceptionalist mythology has persisted, such that, to understand America, its history and purpose, is to understand the exceptional in something like itʼs platonic state, pure and pristine. This belief has deep roots in both the American popular imagination and academy.17 As Donald Pease explains:

17 The phrasing “popular American” imagination is itself a function of exceptionalist thinking; it covers over heterogeneity by calling into being a coherent homogeneous entity “the popular,” or “singular,” American imagination. Exceptionalism is as much a habit of thinking about the world as it is an explanatory mythology of it.

14 exceptionalism supplied scholars of U.S culture and society with the horizon of intelligibility that shaped their research practice; as an interpretive paradigm […] it codified the attitudes and beliefs through which ʻAmericanistsʼ […] practiced their mode of national belonging (“Exceptionalism” 108).

The discourse of exceptionalism works to codify, define, and constrain the meaning of American identity, and because of exceptionalismʼs enduring pervasiveness as a habit of thinking, even when one wishes to critique xenophobic and imperialistic expressions of exceptionalism, one often does so from within the discourse of exceptionalism.

American Civilization Early twentieth-century Americanist scholars were eager to define “American Civilization” as essentially different from that of Europe.18 There were two primary lines of thought that dominated the discussion of American exceptionalism within American studies; some emphasized the temporal and others emphasized the spatial. The Puritan ideology of choseness, covenant, and destiny underscored the temporality of Americaʼs exceptional destiny, and the “fact of the frontier” emphasized the importance and ideology of the frontier that accentuated the spatiality of the national landscape. Americanists did the work of codifying and indexing what had previously been an amorphous nationalist mythology and through this work, exceptionalism as an explicitly foundational mythology emerged. To push the metaphor, the early Americanist and later the myth and symbol school acted as priests of the national religion decoding and interpreting for the masses the meaning and mission of America.19

18 Pease notes, that this was done in response to the threat of socialism and communism in Europe. If the U.S did not have the history of feudalism and class then the progress of history in the Marxist sense would never come to pass in the U.S since “the absence of class conflict from a liberal capitalist order had rendered impossible the emergence of socialism” (109). 19 The work of the myth and symbol school helped in “generating an imaginary homogeneity out of discrepant life worlds […] every moment of historical time constituted the occasion for the potential repetition of the sacred time of the nationʼs founding” (Pease and Wiegman 16).

15 The Puritan mythology of a sacred mission enacted by a “chosen people” was combined with the Revolutionary secular progressive notion of progress to create an “unmatched ideological consensus” that managed to mix “nationality and universality” together (Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad 176). This Americanist interpretive work congealed into what Sacvan Bercovitch has called the “consensus myth” of American exceptionalism. This consensus myth explained the “meaning of America” in highly ahistorical terms which leant exceptionalist discourse an air of the mythical that is necessary for the construction of nationalist origin stories. As an origin story, the mythology of exceptionalism focuses on the founding of the colonies and persistence of Puritanism to the centrality of metaphors about the American landscape (as wilderness, as frontier, as Eden). The arguments made by early Americanist scholars have come under warranted critique in American studies since the 1970s, as critics have called into question the methodologies of the myth and symbol school and the ideology of American exceptionalism, especially as it worked to cover over the barbarism of American expansion, slavery, oppression, and genocide. Despite these critiques the idea of American exceptionalism retains its power as an organizing discourse remarkably central to the construction of American identity. In order to appreciate the power exceptionalism has and the extent to which it is employed, and contemporary televisionʼs engagement with it, it is necessary to go back to the foundation myths and tropes to understand fully the implications critique of exceptionalist American narratives found in the serialized texts of prime time television.

The Puritan Matrix The importance of the Puritans, their understanding of themselves and the sanctification of them and their mission, cannot be underestimated when considering exceptionalism. In his book Manifest Destiny, Anders Stephanson uses the term “Puritan matrix” to describe foundational conceptions that have informed the exceptionalist American identity since its beginning in the early colonial period. This Puritan matrix emphasized the predetermined nature of history and that the world existed as a manifestation of God. The Puritans appropriated the Exodus story and

16 “reinvented Jewish notions of choseness, migration, redemption, spatial segregation” (Stephanson 10). The establishment of the Puritan colonies in New England coincided with a “millennial fervor” of reformation Europe (Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad 35). The Puritans saw Europe as a fallen land; America was the new space where humanity may be redeemed. This new society, established by the Massachusetts Bay Colony Puritans, would work on behalf of all humanity, saving European civilization by preparing the way for the return of Christ and the end of days. The Puritans understood their “errand into the wilderness” in terms of the progress of a sacred history that originated with Godʼs creation of the world. As Deborah L. Madsen notes, “within the terms of salvation-history this community had been charged with a special destiny—to establish the conditions of a pure and uncorrupted church that would ensure the salvation of all Christians” (3). Why, however, was it necessary for the Puritans to leave England to fulfill their divinely ordained destiny? Why was the flight into the wilderness necessary? On the one hand it provided an analogue to the Exodus of the Israelites from Egypt through the wilderness to the promised land, on the other, it also conformed to Elizabethan conceptions of the New World in which it was primarily understood as a garden, new Eden, or paradise overflowing with abundance (Marx, The Machine in the Garden 36-40). The physical space of the New World was itself pure and uncorrupted. It had not been witness to the decay of civilization, thus the land itself, like the mission, was exceptional. The space of the wilderness was one in which the enactment of something like a “state of nature” could be staged; “[t]his image of America inspired English colonial organizers with the dream of creating through conscious instrumental human planning and action a New Jerusalem or a New Eden” (Greene 360). Through the course of American history the Puritan errand gave way in the nineteenth century to the idea of Manifest Destiny, “the right of our manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole continent which providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty and federated self government” (OʼSullivan, “Annexation” 5). Stephansonʼs term “Puritan matrix” highlights the priority often given to the religious origins of exceptionalism onto which secular ideas are later mapped and in this

17 he is following the work of American studies scholars who have emphasized the importance of Americaʼs Puritan origins over and above any other influences. Though one cannot overstate the role Puritans play in the foundation of exceptionalist mythology, American exceptionalism is a much broader discourse; its roots extend beyond sacred (Puritan) origins. The second foundation myth central to exceptionalist discourse is one that emphasizes Americaʼs secular origins in the rationalist discourse of the Eighteenth centuryʼs “Age of Reason.”

Errand in the Wilderness Perry Miller, in his essay “Errand into the Wilderness” establishes a primary starting point for highlighting the importance of the Puritan conception of the errand in the wilderness within the narratives of American exceptionalism. Miller focuses on the idea of the “errand” and teases out what he argues is its double meaning; an errand can be defined as something one does for someone else or as something one does for oneʼs self. In the first sense of term, the Puritans were on an errand for the soul of Europe. They conceived of themselves as an “elect” who were charged with a duty to “establish the conditions of a pure and uncorrupted church that would ensure the salvation of all Christians” (Madsen 3).20 The achievement of universal redemption required the establishment of a theocracy in the pure and empty space of America, which they could then bring back to Europe in order to save Europe, which had begun to backslide into decadence and decay (Miller 12).21 Second generation Puritans, however, were forced to re-conceptualize their errand in light of the ostensible failure of original settlers. Miller writes, “Their errand having failed in the first sense of the term, they were left with the second, and required to fill it with meaning by themselves and out of themselves” (15). The purpose of taking

20 The establishment of the Puritan colonies in New England coincided with a “millennial fervor” in Reformation Europe (Bercovitch 35). This context is important, in that, it helps to explain the Puritan expectation that the end of the world was an event that was reasonably expected to occur within their lifetime. Puritan millennialism, Deborah L. Madsen argues, emerges out of a popular belief in the Tudor period that “[h]istory is conceived as an epic conflict between Christ and Antichrist […] between the church of the elect and the Papacy” (8). 21 The fact that America was not actually an empty space had no effect on this conception.

18 on the errand shifted away from fulfillment for another and towards self-fulfillment. Only once the errand became the creation of distinctly American identity rather than a displaced English or European identity could it be understood as an errand in the second sense. Though the idea of the Puritan errand shifted under the weight of historical change, the notion of the errand always managed to retain its teleological imperative and ideal of fulfillment. Miller argues in the essay “The End of the World” that by the nineteenth century “the course of empire meant […] the steady advance of American farmers and artisans across the continent. Thus the nineteenth century was completing the seventeenthʼs errand into the wilderness” (236). The fruition of the original Puritan errand was that of the new American errand which was an errand “without an end” (237). The expansion of the nation through the policies encompassed in the doctrine of Manifest Destiny, Miller is suggesting, represented, at some level, a fulfillment via metamorphosis of the original errand into the wilderness. What this change allowed for, was the reconfiguration of the errand away from the limits of the continent into the wider wilderness of the entire world in late nineteenth and twentieth century imperialist discourse and expansion. The Puritans understood their mission, or errand, in terms of the fulfillment of sacred history that began at the origins of the world. The ideas of mission, errand, sacred duty, and destiny form the core foundation of American exceptionalism. Mission and destiny provide a prefabricated set of goals towards which one can align oneself (or in this case align the nation) and destiny adds the allure of its inevitability. This sacred mission of America is of “redeemer nation.” From the Puritan errand in seventeenth century, the Revolution in the eighteenth century, Manifest Destiny in the nineteenth century, to the fight against the “Evil Empire” in the twentieth century, the national obsession with a special destiny has remained relatively constant as an organizing and foundational mythology. By answering the question, “what is the nationʼs purpose?” with the answer, “savior of the world,” the mythology of the exceptional American destiny provided a ready-made justification for expansionist and imperialist forays into various wildernesses, and since God, natural law, or democracy decrees this mission, it carries with it a pre-constituted moral justification. In much the same way that the law of divine

19 right functioned by appealing to the authority of divine sanction, the American exceptional destiny is likewise divinely (providentially) or naturally sanctioned. What of the American errand in a “post-9/11” or even “Post-American” world? 22 The last decade of the twentieth century saw the decline of the nation-state and the U.S remained as the only superpower. In some respects the triumph of the U.S and capitalism over the Soviet and communist “Evil Empire” was taken as a fulfillment of Americaʼs errand in the wilderness. The language of exceptionalism became the language of completion and fulfillment. America no longer needed to invoke its special destiny; it had become the city on the hill. What existed previously as a distant or hoped for future had become the present. Perhaps this is why the events of 9/11 came as such a shock. The events of 9/11 did not fit within the pre-constituted exceptionalist narrative. Like all catastrophes, it was world destroying. As a nation that has always understood itself as blessed by God, the horror of 9/11 would be unbelievable. When the planes smashed into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, they also smashed (so the exceptionalist narrative goes) the nationʼs foundational myth of itself. The nation was not safe from the terror of the outside world. It had invaded. In answer to the crisis, the nation turned back to the foundational mythology of exceptionalism to help explain and give order and meaning to the seemingly inexplicable present. This is not to suggest that 9/11 was singularly responsible for the resurgence of exceptionalist mythologies; instead it only highlights how 9/11 was initially cast as incomprehensible within the exceptionalist matrix, and how it was subsequently brought back into the matrix in and through its use in a reconstituted errand in the wilderness. Thus, new errands emerged, primarily the protection of “civilization” against the agents of “terror” in which America could take up, once again, its divinely ordained role of “world savior.” This conception of the errand “without end” remains central to the contemporary deployment of exceptionalist discourse; America once again has something it must achieve, attain, or fulfill. This is then echoed in narrative television in the proliferation of “quest” or “errand” narratives. For example, the three seasons of

22 See Fareed Zakariaʼs The Post-American World. New York: W.W. Norton, 2008.

20 Deadwood trace the movement from “camp” to “community” and SciFiʼs Battlestar Galactica follows the human remnant on a sacred errand to find “Earth.” These televisual errands fit within Millerʼs conception of the legacy of the Puritan errand in that in taking up the errand theses series attempt to work through the creation of distinct identities. It can therefore be very productive to read these televisual errands against or with the resurrection of the American errand in the wilderness that formed a core component in these post-9/11American foreign policy and identity formations.

The Jeremiad and the Ritual of Consensus Sacvan Bercovitch in The American Jeremiad responds to and reconsiders Millerʼs thesis in “An Errand into the Wilderness.” Bercovitch takes a more critical and skeptical stance toward the construction of Americaʼs exceptional destiny, which is a position that reflects his placement within American Studies at a moment when the primacy of exceptionalism was coming into question for its universalization of white, male, middle class, and Protestant American culture. He investigates exceptionalismʼs faith in progress, characterized by Miller as the Puritan errand, primarily through an examination of the literary form of the jeremiad, “the political sermon–what might be called the state-of-the-covenant address” (Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad 4). The jeremiad is generally understood as the form through which what Miller described as “the errand in the wilderness” was consolidated and expressed. The American Jeremiad has served many purposes; here I highlight how the jeremiad is employed to unify sacred and secular conceptions of history and how it is employed to reassure the polity often, paradoxically, through the cultivation of anxiety that America is indeed Godʼs chosen nation. These are important themes in that both are employed during periods of national crisis to retain a sense of national unity and purpose, as the Bush administration demonstrated in their employment of the form and rhetoric of the jeremiad in their response to the events of 9/11. Likewise, it is this assuredness of mission and purpose that comes into question in the television series I will discuss in later chapters.

21 The jeremiad was not an American invention; what distinguishes the American jeremiad from its earlier European counterpart is that the European jeremiad was a “lament over the ways of the world” (7) whereas the purpose of the American jeremiad was to reassure the people, that in spite of any present crises they may be experiencing, they were, in fact, chosen by God to carry out a sacred mission of world salvation. Unlike the European Protestants who maintained an absolute distinction between sacred and secular history, the American Protestants explicitly married the sacred with the secular. The intertwining of the one with the other sets up the foundation upon which an equivalence between the nation and the absolute was established and then continually fostered throughout American history (29).23 Supplemental to the conflation of sacred and profane history, the jeremiad was utilized to incite the community toward the fulfillment of the sacred covenant of Godʼs promise. However, the commingling of sacred and secular created a gap between an individualʼs experience of personal suffering and the universal promise of the covenant; instead of rejecting the sacred in response to the daily hardship and suffering which appeared to undermine it, the Puritan jeremiahs utilized a rhetoric which emphasized that Godʼs punishment and their continued suffering was a confirmation that “Godʼs American people had His pledge that the desert would blossom like the rose” (46). Suffering became a kind of marker for choseness and eventual salvation.24 The author of the jeremiad would

23 “Here [in America], as nowhere else, the wheel of fortune and the wheel of grace revolved in harmony” (47). 24 This is a tradition that has deep roots in European understandings of the progress of civilization. Richard Waswo describes the use of the Troy myth to explain the movement of civilization “from Virgil to the present day”(543). Since Virgil European origin myths have fixated on Troy. Waswo argues that the Troy myth was useful because

[t]o fix on Troy, however, was to impose an origin that was always already destroyed, and hence required a narrative of displacement, exile, and reconstruction. The story is therefore structured as a journey, the search for a predestined and permanent home. The story thus presents civilization as that which comes from somewhere else. Specifically, it is borne by exiles from the east to the west. There, it is imposed by force on the indigenous population, who may or may not be given the opportunity to assimilate themselves to it. In any case, should they resist, they are wiped out (546).

The Puritan mythology of the errand re-enacts this same narrative, from a predestined homeland, civilizationʼs progress west, the self-conscious characterization of themselves as exiles to their subsequent treatment of the Amerindian population. Despite claims to the contrary it would appear that

22 emphasize that though the world as it exists may be fraught with many trials and tribulations, the future holds within it the promise that any present suffering will come to an end if the community continues to work towards it, often going so far as to insist that any present “punishments confirmed their promise” (8). The centrality of a crisis encouraged a conception of the present as existing within a permanent state of crisis; “anxiety was [the jeremiadʼs] end as well as its means. Crisis was the social norm it sought to inculcate” (23). The purpose of the jeremiad then is to both reassure (that the covenant holds) and to produce a kind of collective and social anxiety, which then fosters a need for continual reassurance. This rhetorical reassurance was achieved through a re-conceptualization of history that worked to unify sacred (heavenly) time with profane (earthly) time. “The American jeremiad was born in an effort to impose metaphor upon reality” (62). The metaphor was the coming heaven on earth and the salvation of the world; the reality was Godʼs and the worldʼs unyielding infliction of suffering. Herein lies the origin of the American dream, which has produced within the American mind (as something collective yet intangible) a stubborn refusal to recognize the gap between the ideal, the promise of America, and its reality. “It [the jeremiad] was nourished by an imagination at once defiant of history and profoundly attuned to the historical forces that were shaping the community” (62). The tradition of the jeremiad, as a “state-of-the-covenant address” continues, most recently in President Bushʼs post-9/11 state of the union addresses in which he attempted to harness the forces of history, the events of 9/11, to defy Americaʼs imbrication within them. The catastrophe and resultant shock of the events thrust the U.S into the complications of history. Rather than acting as the shaper of history, the nation found itself being shaped by events it felt were beyond its control. The events of 9/11 were characterized as world-shattering, creating a meaning vacuum wherein the prevailing understanding of America as creator of history—which has deep roots in the exceptionalist tradition of conflating sacred and secular time—was

thereʼs nothing all that special about American exceptionalism after all. William Spanos similarly notes how the American promise/fulfillment structure mirrors that of Virgilʼs Aneid (American Exceptionalism 392).

23 completely undermined. Yet, despite the shock, the events of 9/11 were completely subsumed into the reassertion of a “Pax Americana” in which the US is again placed outside of history in the sense that it creates events rather than being created by them. Denise Bostorff has analyzed how President Bush utilized the form of the jeremiad and the rhetoric of covenant renewal in “explaining the events that had taken place [on September 11th], creating and sharing a sense of national community, and demonstrating his leadership,” (294). She argues that Bush employed the language of mission and covenant to reassure the American people that though the nation had been attacked by “evil men” that this, as in the jeremiads of the 17th century, was a confirmation of Americaʼs mission and purpose. The events of 9/11 were not, as some Christian Evangelicals suggested, an indication or warning that America had lost Godʼs favor. Bushʼs rhetoric highlighted that America was attacked not because it had done anything wrong, but because it was a pinnacle of human freedom; Bush asserted, “[t]hey hate our freedoms, our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other […] [t]hese terrorists kill not merely to end lives, but to disrupt and end a way of life” (“Address Before Joint Session”). Therefore the nation should not despair. In this respect Bushʼs rhetoric conforms to the jeremiadʼs purpose by fostering an anxiety that could be reassured by citing the cause of their anxiety, in this case the terroristʼs war against American freedom, and it confirmed, that if, as Bostdorff convincingly argues, the nation rallies together as it did during the age of the “greatest generation,” in the future America “would blossom like the rose” once again. The circular logic of the jeremiadʼs crisis/assurance form reiterates the larger theme of exceptionalist discourse that tautologically asserts that Americaʼs success is proof that it has been chosen by God to be successful. That Bushʼs rhetoric of anxiety and renewal was usurped to justify an imperialist foreign policy only further demonstrates its conformity to the American exceptionalist matrix. In the Post-Revolutionary period and throughout the nineteenth century the jeremiad continued to be used in the cultivation of the American national identity as chosen people. To achieve this the American Revolution was pulled into the narrative of sacred history. Along with the Puritan forefathers the Revolutionary founders entered

24 into the pantheon of American prophets and saviors; the idea of Revolution itself was inserted into the progressivist and redemptive ideology of errand, mission, and covenant. As with the Jeremiad, the American conception of revolution became central to its national identity in a way that distinguished it from its European counterparts:

The ʻAmericanʼ community, on the contrary [to European nationalisms], defines itself by its relation to the Revolution and the promised future; or more accurately, by a continuing revolution based on a ʻconception of the future as the presentʼ (154).

Again the mythology of the mission provided the communal cohesion needed to sustain the nation, though it now utilized the Enlightenment discourse of progress instead of the biblical discourse of salvation. The Puritan forefathers were canonized, thus establishing them as ur-Americans. This new iteration of the American past had the myth of the Israelites exodus folded within it. The scriptural trace was not obliterated; it was, however, mixed with Enlightenment values (religious liberty, condemnation of tyranny, libertarianism, etc.).25 The essentials of mission, exodus, and providence remain fairly consistent and the biblical Revelation is appropriated to justify the American Revolution: “the long awaited apocalyptic moment had arrived with the American Revolution” (127), thus more firmly entrenching the foundational belief that America was the savior of the world. Both the biblical and revolutionary constructions of Americaʼs sacred promise problematically underscore the gap between the promise of an ideal and redeemed future, where all men are free and God and men live in harmony, and the reality of the present. As noted before, the purpose of the Jeremiad was to emphasize the promised future over a present marked by inequalities and strife. This continues in the hackneyed truism that Americaʼs promise always exceeds its reality. The American dream is a

25 “[W]hat passed for the divine plan lost its strict grounding in Scripture; ʻprovidenceʼ itself was shaken loose from its religious framework to become part of the belief in human progress” (93) and “translated fulfillment from its meaning within the closed system of sacred history into a metaphor for limitless secular improvement” (94).

25 dream necessarily deferred, but it is precisely the promise of a redeemed future that supposedly binds the nation together through what Bercovitch calls the “ritual of consensus.” This consensus is the tacit agreement that “Americans” are, in fact, “the chosen people” as opposed to “the people” as commonly understood. The elision between the people and the chosen people is relevant to problems that emerge in the discourse of universal human rights, which can only be guaranteed within the particular of the nation; it exposes the paradox inherent in the exceptionalist articulation of its universalist discourse. It is through the construction of the “American,” as chosen, that “bounds and tames” (154) the lived diversity of the American people:

Only in the United States has nationalism carried with it the Christian meaning of the sacred […] of all symbols of identity, only America has united nationality and universality, civic and spiritual selfhood, secular and redemptive history, the countryʼs past and paradise to be, in a single synthetic ideal (176, emphasis in original).

The American ideological consensus is so complete that even those who would seek to place themselves outside the consensus as critics of it do so as “keepers of the dream” (180). The initial errand/promise—the redemption of the world—remains intact, and those who stand outside the consensus of American middle-class culture to critique it, tend to actually do so from within it. They critique the “false Americanism” of exclusion and the failure to live up the original promise without questioning the very notion of the promise which is itself exceptionalist and exclusionary. Movements such as the early feminist and abolitionist in the nineteenth century and the Civil Rights movements in the twentieth, sought the inclusion of more people within “the (chosen) people” but did not question the pre-established consensus upon which their exclusion was based, demonstrating the power and allure the idea of “America” had and continues to have. The adherence to the belief in American exceptionality is therefore not correlative to oneʼs position on the right or left of the American political spectrum. There may be a disagreement about what the mission and destiny are (sacred or secular), but the

26 assumption that there is a mission and destiny to fulfill and that itʼs Americaʼs specific and providentially ordained role to fulfill it, goes unquestioned. The emergence of the red state/blue state divide is an expression of the sacred/secular tension in that each side claims to be the “real” America by either emphasizing that “America is a Christian nation” (Puritan errand) or that “America is a nation founded on the ideals of equality and democracy” (revolutionary errand).26 The continuation of this tradition can be found in then candidate Barak Obamaʼs rhetorical construction of “One-America” that began in the speech he delivered at the 2004 Democratic convention. Obama stated:

I say to them tonight, there's not a liberal America and a conservative America; there's the United States of America. There's not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there's the United States of America. The pundits, the pundits like to slice and dice our country into red states and blue States: red states for Republicans, blue States for Democrats. But I've got news for them, too. We worship an awesome God in the blue states, and we don't like federal agents poking around our libraries in the red states. We coach little league in the blue states and, yes, we've got some gay friends in the red states. We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America. […] Hope in the face of difficulty, hope in the face of uncertainty, the audacity of hope: In the end, that is God's greatest gift to us, the bedrock of this nation, a belief in things not seen, a belief that there are better days ahead. (“Transcript: Illinois Senate Candidate Barack Obama”).

According to Obama, pundits are trading in a false Americanism that is predicated on division, and that division denies the “bedrock of this nation” which is implicitly the

26 The dichotomy of blue and red states is, of course, a vague generality that does the work of covering over the vast diversity of ideas and positions that constitute the reality of American experience; however, the consensus matrix of American exceptionalism was consolidated to codified precisely to “[generate] an imaginary homogeneity” (Pease and Wiegman 16).

27 consensus myth that Americans are “chosen.” Obama takes the position of “dream keeper” and attempts to call the nation back to itself through his explicit appeal to the foundational belief that the future and promise of America are what hold the nation together, not the distracting divisions of a tumultuous present. The reality of the present or the existence the tumultuous past pales in comparison to an unwavering “belief in things not seen and that there are better days ahead.” Obama employs the anxiety/assurance form in his appeal to overcome the Red/Blue state divide in the same way Bush employed the crisis/assurance mode in his attempt to construct a national understanding and response to the events of 9/11. Ideologically then, to declare oneself an “American” is to always commit allegiance to the idea of the original dream of America as some kind of world redeemer (Bercovitch 181). The dangers of this are that when one conceives of oneʼs purpose (in this case the nationʼs purpose) as a preordained fulfillment of sacred history one sees any obstruction of the goal as expendable (Stephanson 11). This commitment to the sacred mission has fostered at one extreme a willingness to “take care” of those who oppose its mission/destiny to a tendency towards fatalistic resignation and passivity; for example, those who opposed the violent and oppressive means through which new territory was gained during the expansionist 19th century didnʼt do much to combat it because there was a pervading sense that, ultimately, this was what providence willed and must therefore be acceptable since, in the end, the progress of civilization would be achieved (50-53). This tactic of justification was revived again and again; for example the Vietnam war needed to be fought to keep South Asia safe for democracy and civilization and more recently as the secondary justification for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, after the original justification that Saddam Hussein had “weapons of mass destruction” came to naught.

Taming the Wilderness The previous section focused primarily on the construction of Americaʼs exceptional relationship to time and history. In this section, I turn to the construction of America as an exceptional space and place. Not only was the idea of the American

28 nation that of a reconstitution of Godʼs new chosen people on a preordained mission of world salvation, but that the space of the American nation was the site of a new Israel. From wilderness to frontier and from virgin land to the American pastoral the exceptional matrix not only constructs a special history of America, but also an exceptional, chosen, special landscape as well. This section takes each of these iterations of the exceptional American landscape to explore how they augment and intensify the exceptionalist matrix as explored in the previous section.

Frontier Frederick Jackson Turnerʼs address “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” has had a lasting impact on the study of American history and culture. His investigation is informed by an assumption that America has experienced history in a fundamentally different way from its European cousins due to its different relationship to space. Turnerʼs argument privileges space over time or history. In contrast to Millerʼs or Bercovitchʼs arguments which claim that the change in a specifically Puritan discourse lead to a uniquely American relationship to history, Turner argues that the European experience of the American landscape fostered the shift to a uniquely American understanding of history. Turnerʼs argument is deterministic in that the geography of America and the abundance of “empty” land directly caused the cultivation of democracy and individualism. Though this kind of geographical determinism is overly simplistic, Turnerʼs conception of the frontier as a sacred American space continues to reverberate. Turnerʼs central claim is that American history and identity was predicated on its expansion into a continually shifting western frontier. Turnerʼs frontier is not an Eden or an escape from the wilderness of the world. Instead his thesis is filtered through a secular progressivist frame that envisions the progress of humanity originating in a simple state of nature and working through to a complex industrial society. Turner conceives of the frontier as the site in which this progress is re-staged; the cultivated “European,” who embodies civilization, confronts the savage wilderness of the uncultivated landscape. To survive on the frontier, the cultivated European “strips off the

29 garments of civilization” (33) in a symbolic regression to a state of nature, which is a state of purity, from which a new civilization will emerge. In the space of the frontier this noble American savage moves slowly back towards civilization, and as he does, the space of the frontier itself becomes the space of civilization. This process, according to Turner, served as the organizing matrix through which the events of American history beginning with settlement on the Atlantic coast occurred, and with each passing phase of expansion America moved further away, figuratively and literally, from Europe (34). The frontier effectively turned Europeans into Americans. For Turner, the objective existence of the frontier cultivated and supported an individualism that promoted democracy (53); the frontier was the space of progress and freedom as such. Turnerʼs articulation of American exceptionality turns on his characterization of the American landscape as uniquely suited to the cultivation of individualism and democracy.27 Unlike Europe, which was trapped by its ancient and closed geographies, the frontier provided a space in which “true” equality could unfold and grow. The character of the land itself allows for the flowering and continued progression of society. This is why, Turner argues, the “closing” of the frontier would be a pivotal turning point in American history and identity. Folded within Turnerʼs argument is a secular iteration of the Puritan sacred errand predicated on geographical determinism. Turner understands the history of America as a microcosm or mirror of all human progress from “savage” to “manufacturing organization,” (38) and this progress is predicated and made possible through a specific relationship to the landscape. “America” in his formulation comes to represent, in the sense of to stand in for, “humanity.” The land of the frontier was “inert” before the advent of civilization (41). Of course a vast civilization had thrived on the American continent for centuries; Turnerʼs conception only further erased the existence of any claim to the land the Native Americans had to it. The reduction of the land to an empty or “inert” (virgin) wilderness is central to the mythology of the frontier in that, only

27 Though he does note possible “anti-social” tendencies (53) and a “lack of civil spirit” (55) engendered by frontier individualism, he emphasized that “each frontier did indeed furnish a new field of opportunity, a gate of escape from the bondage of the past; and freshness, and confidence, and scorn of older society” (59).

30 through envisioning the land as uncultivated does the project of American expansion become one of the morally justified progress of civilization instead of mass oppression and genocide. Turner argues that the influence of Europe receded with the continued movement of the American westward, and the movement westward falls in line with Bercovitchʼs articulation of a ritual of consensus as explained in the previous section. As various European ethnicities shared the experience of moving westward into the frontier, they came together and became Americans (47). The mythology of the 1960s television series Star Trek is an explicit extension of Turnerʼs thesis. On Star Trek space is the “final frontier” and the implied conflation of American with human in Turnerʼs narrative is made explicit; the particular American mythology of westward expansion becomes universalized as a homogenous human experience.28 Star Trek as a cultural touchstone has set the parameters of what Science Fiction (SF) looks like on American television, as opposed, for example, to the way Doctor Who established the SF genre on UK television. Contemporary SF series such as Battlestar Galactica, Lost, Bablyon 5, and even non-SF series such as Deadwood and 24, are in dialogue with the mythology of expansion and the progress of civilization as established on series like Star Trek. All of these series are similar because they take for granted the specificity of the American experience (which is itself also multiple) for a universal one. The manner in which sacred history (or the use of sacred history), as articulated in the Puritan conception of salvation-history, is often left out of discussions about the Enlightenmentʼs (secular and progressive) conceptions about human progress such as Turnerʼs. The Enlightenment idea of creating a heavenly city on earth is often characterized as a rejection of religious history (through its inversion) rather than as a re-telling/re-conceptualizing of previous Christian beliefs. A primary difference then between American conceptions of progress and European ones is the continued relevance of the original religious connotations. The rejection of the sacred in favor of the secular during the Enlightenment (as well as other geographical and historical

28 Star Trek is very much a reworking of the Western, which is also a narrativization of frontier mythology.

31 factors; Iʼm not suggesting this is the only cause of the difference) emphasized its fallibility and frailty (since it was to be completed with human rather than through divine work), which is then taken up in the late Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries. The specificity of the Christian was replaced by the generality of humanity (rhetorically and discursively at least—if not in the actual colonialist and racist practices of European empires), whereas in the U.S the specificity of the Puritan is replaced by the specificity of the American, who works for the good of humanity. America becomes a stand-in; in much the same way Jesus, as messiah, sacrificed himself for the world. This is the essence of American exceptionalism, that it exists in and is of the world while simultaneously existing outside of it as its savior, working within the world to “redeem” it. It is the conflation of “American” with “human” and the particular American destiny as universal world redeemer so central to the construction of an exceptionalism that is at once particular and universal and transcends its various origins (from frontier to errand), that emerges as a question within the narratives of prime time serials.

The Garden In The Machine in the Garden Leo Marx examines the exceptionalism of being of the world while also residing outside of it in his construction of American pastoral. He argued that much nineteenth-century American literature attempted to work through a perceived tension between the reality of civilization and the pastoral ideal, or in Bercovitchʼs terms the gap between the promise and reality. Marx was interested in examining the tension between a pastoral ideal in which technology (or art) works in harmony with nature and a progressive ideal which foregrounds the triumph of technology (art) over nature. This tension was epitomized by the image of “the sudden appearance of the machine in the garden” (Marx, Machine 229). Marx was “devoted to exposing in literature the cultural clash of America's ʻTwo Kingdoms of Forceʼ: the natural, organic, life-affirming embrace of the pastoral and the abstract, dehumanizing, polluting juggernaut of the technological” (Meikle 152). Marx claims that the American pastoral landscape served as a place of refuge from the industrial civilization of the city and as haven from the brutality of the untamed

32 wilderness. This landscape was timeless, existing in a perpetual present and safe from the vagaries of history, and where the Jeffersonian yeoman farmer, dependent on no one, could live in idealized harmony and communion with the land and his essential human nature. In the pastoral garden there is no alienation from oneself; it is a space of fullness and completion. Once again one can identify the theme of the redemption or purification of European civilization, which echoes Turnerʼs assertion of the power the American landscape has in determining an exceptionalist American destiny. The American landscape, in this respect, was exceptional from the European landscape that had been overtaken by the encroachment of industry and the enclosure of previously common spaces. Afraid of the effects industrialization had in Europe, “a central theme in the ideology of American industrialism [was] the capacity of the New World environment to ʻpurifyʼ the system” of its ʻfeudal residuesʼ” (Marx, Machine 158).29 All that was made profane by Europeʼs decline was made sacred again through the cleansing power of the redemptive American pastoral landscape.30 Marxʼs larger argument, in which he casts the pastoral as struggling against the onslaught of technology, is relevant here because it articulates a tension between sacred and secular conceptions of time and space within the American national imagination. Marx, though he claims to not be engaging in a reactionary primitivism (which he opposed to the more sophisticated pastoral) participates in a sanctification of the pastoral. The pastoral landscape is a place of fullness partway between the stark and inhuman wilderness and the encroaching inhumanity of an increasingly technologized civilization. In this respect, Marxʼs construction of the pastoral again echoes Turnerʼs frontier. The American pastoral nestled at the edges of the frontier is a haven for humanity. It is a space outside of history. But what does it mean to assert that

29 “[T]he sentiment rests at bottom upon the idea that the factory system, when transferred to America, is redeemed by contact with ʻnatureʼ and the rural way of life it is destined to suppliant” (Marx, Machine 159) 30 However, later in the mid nineteenth century the machine, particularly the steam locomotive, supplanted the privileged pastoral and came to embody the progress and triumph of civilization over the wilderness; “the American machine has become a transcendent symbol […] It rolls across Europe and Asia, liberating the oppressed people of the Old World—a signal, in fact, for the salvation of mankind” (Marx, Machine 206). Despite this favorable view of technology and Americaʼs relationship to it, writers like Twain, Hawthorne, Melville, and Fitzgerald, were skeptical of the valorization of technology and its seemingly unfettered progress.

33 the pastoral resides outside of history and yet, is also its fulfillment? To begin with the latter assertion, the pastoral as envisioned by Marx resonates with the earlier Puritan characterization of the American continent as site of the fulfillment of biblical prophecy: “The millennium, consequently, could now be given a location, and it lay in the New World, the place for the end of ends of history” (Stephanson 10, emphasis in original). Likewise, the American revolution was itself also understood in similarly revelatory terms, “[t]he historical meaning of the American Revolution chiefly is allowing predestined liberty to breakout into the open revealing it” (16, emphasis in original). The revolution was meant to fulfill the promise of freedom as bestowed by natural law, which can be understood as a state of fullness in the same way the Puritan exodus and establishment of a community of saints was to fulfill the promise of a “land of milk and honey” as promised by God. Therefore, the end of the secularized Enlightenment notion of historical progress, as fulfillment or redemption, was to be hoped for in much the same way that the apocalypse was to be hoped for by the Puritans. What makes the apocalyptic hope for the end of history specifically American and not just a continuation of European historical narratives was the instance that the American land somehow held within itself the unique capacity for fulfillment precisely because it was a wilderness unencumbered by the weight of history. This wilderness, or Virgin Land, was constructed as inviolate, and the inviolability of the American landscape and errand is absolutely essential to American exceptionality. It works in conjunction with the conflation of the particular American destiny and the construction of a universal human one.

Manifest Destiny The conflation of preordained errand with sacred landscape in the creation of American exceptionalism is most ideally expressed in the concept of Manifest Destiny. John OʼSullivan coined the phrase “Manifest Destiny” in his article “Annexation” which appeared in The United States Democratic Review in 1845 in response to European objection to the American annexation of Texas. “The right of our manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole continent which providence has given us for the

34 development of the great experiment of liberty and federated self government” (OʼSullivan, “Annexation” 05) was necessary, OʼSullivan argues, to make room for the growing population and that “[Texasʼs] incorporation into the union was not only inevitable, but the most natural, right and proper thing in the world--and it is only astonishing that there should be any among ourselves to say nay” (7-8). In an earlier article published in The United States Democratic Review in 1839, OʼSullivan articulates the divine American mission:

We must onward to the fulfillment of our mission—to the entire development of the principle of our organization—freedom of conscience, freedom of person, freedom of trade and business pursuits, universality of freedom and equality. This is our high destiny, and in nature's eternal, inevitable decree of cause and effect we must accomplish it. All this will be our future history, to establish on earth the moral dignity and salvation of man—the immutable truth and beneficence of God. For this blessed mission to the nations of the world, which are shut out from the life-giving light of truth, has America been chosen (“The Great Nation of Futurity” 430).

For OʼSullivan the American destiny is inevitable, eternal, and universal; the expansion of America is the expansion of freedom and the salvation of the world. Manifest destiny encompasses all aspects of the exceptional matrix, the Puritan errand of world salvation, its sanction by God, and its placement within the geographical confines of the North American continent. Bush took up this tradition when he used 9/11 and the “war on terror” to re- invigorate Manifest Destiny under the guise of spreading democracy and freedom. In his article, “The Global Homeland State: Bushʼs Biopolitical Settlement,” Donald Pease reads Bushʼs post-9/11 rhetoric as it worked to make the seeming unintelligibility of 9/11 legible in relationship to the nationʼs understanding of itself, particularly how the myth of “Virgin Land,” the notion that the New World was a “Virgin Land,” inviolate, pure, and

35 uninhabited erased the fact of the indigenous population in order to render the American population innocent (3), its replacement by the image of “Ground Zero” and the institution of the “Homeland” (2). Peaseʼs description of the Virgin Land myth is related to Millerʼs characterization of the Puritan errand and the desire to create in the New World a society that would redeem European civilization and “[t]he metaphor turned the landscape into a blank page, understood to be the ideal surface onto which to inscribe the history of U.S. Manifest Destiny” (4). The events of 9/11 fell outside the explanatory power of the exceptional matrix. Exceptionalism places America outside the grasp of profane history; the event of 9/11 forcefully pulled the U.S into the present and undermined the inviolability of the American landscape. To subvert their incommensurability the attacks were folded into the exceptionalist matrix by reading them as an attack on the idea of America, and therefore its exceptionality. Taking up exceptionalism and Manifest Destiny to fill in the gap created by the catastrophic event made it understandable in recognizable and familiar terms such as mission, destiny, unity, promise, and consensus. In “The American Habits of Empire, and the Cases of Polk and Bush,” Walter Nugent traces the similarities between Polkʼs waging of the Mexican American war and Bushʼs waging of the war in Iraq. The specifics of the similarities point to what Nugent refers to as the U.Sʼs “habit of empire.” This habit of empire is characterized as a kind of masculine pursuit to “vigorously assert […] control, hegemony, rule—call it what you will—over substantial portions of not just North America any more, but the globe” (6). Nugent argues that the habit of empire was fostered by American exceptionalism:

the exceptionalist conviction: that the nation has been divinely or providentially favored and stands for a morally good polity worthy of export; that its territorial and imperial successes demonstrate that; and that therefore the nation may countenance or even demand further imperial enterprises (7).

36 For both Polk and Bush the spread of liberty, democracy, or freedom justified any action they may take in its pursuit (10), and Nugent suggests that the success of the nationʼs previous imperialist projects caused “us” to “think of expansion and empires as normal and natural” (23). Nugentʼs argument demonstrated the persistent power exceptionalism has as a normalizing and foundational discourse across American culture, history, and in the example of Polk and Bush, in foreign policy. In the Twentieth century, the naturalized mythology of the exceptionalist matrix continued to work as an organizing and consensus-building discourse, and it was in this century that the American destiny began to look outward away from the specificity of the American landscape into the wider world, becoming a fully realized imperial imperative. Woodrow Wilson used the language of mission, destiny, and moral right when he said that Americaʼs “mission, then, was ʻto be the mediator of peace,ʼ to be ʻthe light of the world,ʼ and ʻto lead the world in the assertion of the rights of peoples and the rights of free nationsʼ” (qtd in Stephanson 116). As has been discussed, exceptionalist rhetoric tends to be accompanied by a sense of urgency through the cultivation of crisis; if the “right choice” is not made, if anyone is allowed to backslide, the redemption of the entire world hangs in the balance. Because of this sense of urgency and unmitigated feeling of certainty that oneʼs (Americaʼs) position is the correct one, opposition to the American position is quickly and easily cast as dangerous, evil, and in dire need of eradication; therefore any fight against the dangerous and evil position is righteous and just.31 This urgency and moral right was manifested in Americaʼs role as redeemer nation during the Cold War as it struggled against Communismʼs “Evil Empire,” taking on the mantle of leader of the free world. Indeed, American studies itself emerged within this Cold War context. Janice Radway highlighted that:

the American Studies Association was a product of a Cold War context that produced a desire to delineate what was exceptional about U.S

31 “The symbol of America magnified the culture into a cosmic totality: hence the euphoria of its adherents. But the same process of magnification carried a dangerous correlative: if America failed, the cosmos itself—the laws of man, nature, and history, the very basis of heroism, insight, and hope—had failed as well” (Stephanson 190).

37 culture at a time when public debate was structured by the perceived opposition between the aggressive empire of the Soviet Union and the supposedly disinterested, democratic republic of the United States (4).

This point underscores also the complicity of the disciplinary discourse of American Studies in the cultivation and circulation of exceptionalist discourses. Carolyn Eisenberg notes that:

revisionist historians […] have produced a formidable literature to demonstrate that the terms containment and deterrence are ideological constructs that have neatly masked an aggressive foreign policy in the language of national defense. In actuality, American interventions around the globe—whether in the form of rigged elections, military training and assistance programs, covert operations against undesirable governments, or the deployment of half a million troops to Southeast Asia—grew out of a bold, expansive agenda for organizing the world along principles favorable to the United States (76).

William V. Spanos argues that the Vietnam War is a “specter” that haunts American exceptionalist discourse. The Vietnam War complicates the narrative framing of the Cold War as an exceptionalist struggle. Americaʼs failure in Vietnam undermines the certainty of the preordained progress of the American destiny by highlighting the barbarity and violence inherent in the imperial expansionism of manifest destiny.32 Spanos argues that the “triumphalist” attitude that permeated American culture at the end of the Cold War, epitomized in Francis Fukuyamaʼs The End of History and the Last Man (American Exceptionalism 3) sought to forget the American failure in Vietnam in favor of the seeming success of “Americaʼs exceptionalist global mission” (Spanos,

32 “Americaʼs brutal conduct of the Vietnam War precipitated the hypothetical self-destruction of the myth of American exceptionalism and the metaphysics that is its source and justification” (Spanos, “Neo-Con Men” 49).

38 Neo-Con Men” 50). Spanosʼs argument exposes the paradox at the heart of American exceptionalismʼs totalizing narratives that carefully articulates how violence perpetrated in the name of democracy, freedom, liberty, destiny, etc., ultimately undermines those very concepts. The logic of an exceptionalism predicated on any kind of destinarian discourse (secular or sacred) will render that violence invisible by placing it within the realm of, in contemporary terms, collateral damage, as an unfortunate but unavoidable, even necessary, consequence. Violence is subsumed into the larger narrative of righteous pursuit and fulfillment of the nationʼs inevitable destiny. Despite the failure in Vietnam, in many respects the supposed triumph of the U.S and capitalism over the “Evil Empire” was taken as a fulfillment of the “American” destiny. OʼSullivanʼs assertion that the United States would become the “great nation of futurity” had become a reality. The language of exceptionalism moved from promise to fulfillment. The nation no longer needed to invoke its special destiny; it had become the city on the hill. As I have already suggested, this sense of fulfillment may be why 9/11 came as such a shock. The events of 9/11 did not fit any pre-constituted narrative. As a nation that has always understood itself to be blessed by God, the horror of 9/11 would be unbelievable. The nation was not safe from the terror of the outside world; it had invaded and undermined its sacred myths of inviolability and innocence, all the more reason then to turn to the comfortable narratives of exceptionalism to create consensus. Pease argues that the spectacular destruction of the Twin Towers at Ground Zero revealed the lie of the Virgin Land myth by rendering the land and the nation impure. In place of Virgin Land the image of the Homeland was erected. If Virgin Land was an expression of a modern nation-stateʼs narrated exceptional identity then the conception of the Homeland is an expression of a biopolitcal state of exception.33 The deployment of “Homeland” does not, however, call into question the larger issue of American exceptionality. Instead it reconfigures the American mythology of redeemer nation in response to the crisis of meaning opened up by the catastrophic

33 “[T]he Homeland engendered an imaginary scenario wherein the national people were encouraged to consider themselves dislocated from their country of origin by foreign aggressors so that they might experience their return from exile in the displaced form of the spectacular unsettling of homelands elsewhere” (Pease, “The Global Homeland State” 8).

39 event itself. The establishment of the Homeland, the subsequent “global war on terror” and the invention of the “unlawful enemy combatant,” are responses to the supposed loss of agency in what was essentially characterized as a kind of national rape. Pease, in suggesting that the Homeland represents a new iteration of American exceptionality (without using those exact terms), links American exceptionalism with the “state of exception” as described in the work of Giorgio Agamben. In Homo Sacer Agamben describes “the exception” as a “zone of indistinction between nature and right” (21). The state of exception political formation in which the law no longer applies but nevertheless retains its force. American exceptionalism and the political state of exception are distinct concepts; however, it is, I want to suggest, necessary to begin the work of examining the imbrication of American exceptionalism with exceptional thinking as described by Agamben in the justification and representation of practices such as torture.

Conclusion The vehement reassertion that America is exceptional, innocent, and chosen was an attempt to appropriate a national trauma and place it in the service of the state by appealing directly to exceptionalismʼs consensus ritual and to gain popular support for the political and economic concerns of the ruling elite. “Everyone” came together “that day”—we were all American—to mourn and participate in a ritual of belonging. And this ritual was enacted through television. The idea of America as exceptional nation tells only one story of the nationʼs history. As a narrative of consensus it requires all counter- narratives to be excluded. The voices of displaced native populations, slaves, women, immigrants, and countless others are implicitly and explicitly excluded from the exceptionalist narrative. As a discipline, American studies has gone through a transformation since the 1970s, and has sought to work against the exceptionalist narratives of their predecessors. Despite every effort to establish it, there is no one “America,” no one American experience or even one American exceptionalism. Jan Radway articulates in her seminal address to the American Studies Association, “Whatʼs in Name?” that “American national identity is […] constructed in and through relations of difference” (Radway 10); and Shelly Fisher Fishkin writes:

At a time when American foreign policy is marked by nationalism, arrogance, and Manichean oversimplification, the field of American studies is an increasingly important site of knowledge marked by a very different set of assumptions—a place where borders both within and outside the nation are interrogated and studied, rather than reified and reinforced (20).

Radway continues:

If intellectual practice in the field does not examine the ways in which the construction of a national subject works to the economic and political advantage of some precisely against the interests of others, then American studies runs the risk of functioning as just another technology of nationalism, a way of ritually repeating the claims of nationalism by assuming it as an autonomous given, inevitable worthy of scholarly study (12).

Exceptionalism seeks to place America outside the grasp of history; the event of 9/11 forcefully pulled the U.S into the present undermining the myth of the inviolability of the American landscape. In response the attacks were quickly constructed as an attack on the idea of America and hence its exceptionality, and perhaps this is why the exceptionality of America was reasserted so forcefully. The purpose of this chapter was not to re-inscribe the primacy or veracity of the exceptionalist matrix, but rather to explain the normative power the exceptionalist matrix has in setting the discursive terms over which something like the meaning and character America is struggled. The discourse of exceptionalism is deployed to obfuscate the lived multiplicity of American experiences. The reassertion of American exceptionality was employed to tame and control the possible meanings of 9/11. I take the nation as my primary point of reference, not because the nation is a de-facto basic unit of analysis, but because the nation, as idea—what or who was attacked, who was the “we” that came together, why

41 is the terrorist threat an existential one—had become the primary point of axis. The exceptionalist matrix offered a comforting frame through which to make sense of the events of 9/11. This dissertation seeks to understand how prime time series have attempted to engage with and often complicate the comfort offered by the mythology of exceptionalism in our time of “Manichean oversimplification.” American exceptionalism is both a foundational mythology and justifying discourse. As a foundational myth it established the terms and narratives of the nationʼs history and meaning through tropes such as choseness, mission, frontier, wilderness, destiny, promise, and fulfillment. As a justifying discourse it employs these narratives to defend the U.Sʼs expansionist and imperialist adventures in the global wilderness. In the chapters that follow, I will analyze how prime time serial television on the one hand incorporates and extends the foundational mythologies of exceptionalism, particularly exceptionalist preoccupation with the idea of progress, destiny, and choseness, and on the other hand interrogates exceptionalism as a justifying discourse by engaging explicitly with the question of torture, both as it relates to the intersection of the particular manifestation of American exceptionalism and the more general question of state of exception as a modern political formation.

42 CHAPTER TWO RE-IMAGINING THE FRONTIER

The foundational mythology of American exceptionalism has sought to explain American origins and purpose in ahistorical terms. By ahistorical, I mean that American exceptionalism, while in many ways obsessed with the unfolding of a specific conception of sacred and cosmological Judeo-Christian history, has been deaf to the idea of history as the lived experience of people. According to exceptionalist history America may at times intercede into the mundane events of the world, but it ultimately stands outside that history. This mythology has gained has particular currency in the twentieth century, often dubbed “the American century” as the nation rose to become a superpower, and by the end of the so-called American century, the rhetoric of exceptionalism transitioned from the language of promise into language of fulfillment. The reemergence of exceptionalism in reaction to 9/11, which has come to signify an interruption in the nationalist narrative of continued American supremacy, represents a return to the foundational exceptionalist tropes: promise, destiny, choseness, world redemption, and the geographical determinism of the frontier. This chapter suggests that the current incarnation of American exceptionalism expressed within the space of prime time serial television is working to shore up a reinvigorated sense that, in spite of recent events, America will once again be master of its own destiny. Serial televisionʼs intervention into this narrative has manifested in a preoccupation with catastrophe narratives that engender a return to some kind of pre- civilization, expressed as a return to the frontier or paradisal garden. On CBSʼs Jericho the detonation of 23 nuclear bombs across the country by an unknown terrorist group effectively returns the small Kansas town back to the old west frontier. On ABCʼs LOST a catastrophic plane crash strands a group of 47 people on a tropical Pacific island coded as a posthuman Eden. And while HBOʼs Deadwood doesnʼt begin with a catastrophic event, it appropriates the frontier for similar ends. Other series that either began or ended with a catastrophe from 2001-2008 include, Buffy the Vampire Slayer,

43 Angel, Battlestar Galactica, The 4400, Heroes, Carnivale; on Foxʼs 24 catastrophes occur on an hourly basis, and HBOʼs The Wire investigates the catastrophe of modern urban life. If the terrorist attacks of 9/11 are filtered through as a direct attack upon the very idea of America when read through the lens of American exceptionalism, they become a confirmation of American exceptionality according to crisis/assurance logic. Catastrophic events remove the characters from the flow of time as a way to regain a sense of control, similar to the manner in which the jeremiad reassures special American destiny. Frederick Jackson Turner conceived the frontier as the space where the true America was born, and Leo Marx articulated the mythology of the American garden as space where the true America could emerge. The return to the frontier appropriates earlier exceptionalist notions in order to reclaim the language of a future promise rather than the language of a past fulfillment. The re-staging of civilization as an event that takes place within the space of the frontier marks this response as particularly American. 9/11 brought the U.S. into the flow of history, and the return to these liminal, pre-civilizational landscapes and settings of frontiers and gardens, serve as attempts to return to the nation its place outside the normal unfolding of history and regain the sense of being in control of oneʼs destiny once again. The aim of this chapter is to analyze how prime time serial television uses the historical conventions of exceptionalism to enter into the larger national dialogue about American identity that emerged in the wake of 9/11. The two series under investigation in this chapter articulate exceptionalism in a way that seeks to question some of its assumptions while accepting others. The chapter begins with an examination of HBOʼs Deadwood and its generic appropriation of the Hollywood western to reinvent the myth of the American frontier that, while working to re-conceptualize it as a space of violence and exclusion, ultimately conforms the exceptionalist myth of a manifest destiny of redemption and fulfillment. Next, the chapter turns to CBSʼs family drama, Jericho which functions as a televisual jeremiad by using the pretext of 9/11 as world-ending catastrophe to interrogate its reactionary national response, and to encourage its

44 American audience to reject that reactionary response of fear and exclusion in favor of an inclusive conception of American identity.

Deadwoodʼs Frontier Exceptionalism: “Beholden to no human cocksucker.” The HBO series Deadwood, created by David Milch, aired from 2004-2006. The series is about a fictionalized version of Deadwood, a frontier town in the Black Hills region of the Dakota Territory in the mid-1870s, as it changes from an outlaw frontier camp to a civilized town. Milchʼs Deadwood and its inhabitants are based on historical people and events, but Milch takes liberties with these historical figures and with events to serve his own narrative purposes. Despite the liberties taken with historical facts Deadwood aspires towards a level of verisimilitude through a slavish attention to details in the production design and in its relentless use of profanity which was meant to approximate the pervasive vulgarity of the Old West.34 Deadwood takes the Hollywood westernʼs sanitized image of the American west and replaces it with an image of a frontier inhabited by a menagerie of colorful yet morally reprehensible people. Of all the series this dissertation takes up for analysis, Deadwood is most obviously engaging with the mythology of American exceptionalism by virtue of the fact that it is an explicit frontier narrative. Robert Westerfelhaus and Celeste Lacroix argue that Deadwood deviates from the American “monomyth” of exceptionalism by giving “ritual expression to the disquiet some Americans feel about what they and their nation might have become” (36). It is my contention that while Deadwood reconfigures, exploits, and rejects certain exceptionalist tropes and ideologies, it nevertheless remains faithful to the core American contention that the frontier is the only true place where the American man can make his way. Though Milch is interested in creating a counter narrative of the American west to that of the Hollywood western, Deadwood remains committed to many of the standard tropes of American exceptionalism, particularly Turnerʼs conception of the frontier as the birthplace of a distinctly American civilization.

34 Milch claims that profanity functioned as a kind of social equalizer saying, “the lingua franca of the time and place, which is to say that anyone, no matter what his or her background, could connect with almost anyone else on the frontier through the use of profanity” (Barra).

45 As discussed in chapter one, Turner conceived of the frontier as the place where European civilization encounters the savage wilderness, and that the “fact of the frontier” was integral to the creation and formulation of the American nation. Turnerʼs understanding of the frontier rests on a modern notion of progress. The frontier is a liminal space and it is its liminality that renders it exceptional. The space of the frontier is fleeting; it is a phase changing space in which one thing becomes another, unlike the pastoral, which is a site of idealized stasis half way between decadent civilization and savage wilderness. Turnerʼs frontier is imbued with a transformative, even magical, power to act as geographical midwife to the birth of the specifically American civilization. It is the privileged site wherein men of destiny will find their way. Deadwoodʼs narrative is about what happens within the time and space of the frontier. In setting his narrative of civilizationʼs birth within the frontier, Milch indicates an implicit acceptance of a Turnerarian, and thereby modern, characterization of progress, and therefore, though he actively worked to undermine the veneer of righteousness from classic depictions of the Old West, his frontier is still an exceptionally American space. Given Turnerʼs conception of the frontier wherein the order of civilization emerges from the chaos of the wilderness, the question remains as to how this transition is achieved, and Deadwoodʼs answer is, through struggle. The struggle between chaos/wilderness and order/civilization forms the primary narrative frame of the series. At each narrative level, series, season, episode, and character, the struggle for order plays out. It is not an equal struggle since implicit in a progressive understanding of change, civilization will always win out over chaos. In season one, civilization literally comes to Deadwood in the form of Mr. Brom and Alma Garrett who have come from New York to the camp for adventure and its promise of an easy fortune.35 Brom Garrett is a gullible easterner, unskilled in the duplicity and

35 When discussing characters, I will endeavor to use the names that they are most often referred to within in the context of the series. Because of this, some characters will be referred to by their first names and others their last. Therefore, the use of only a characterʼs last name should not indicate any kind of privilege. On first mention, all characters will be referred to by first and last name (if known). So, for example, on Deadwood George Hearst is generally only called by his last name; Alma Garrett Elsworth is at varying times known as “the widow,” “the widow Garrett,” “Mrs. Garrett,” or “Mrs. Elsworth,” and for simplicityʼs sake she will be referred to here as Alma. On Lost some characters are know by first or last

46 lawlessness of Deadwood. Born into wealth and carrying a taint of European Old World aristocracy and decadence, Brom is more interested in the trappings of his ideas about frontier prospecting and is seen as inauthentic by the Deadwood community. He sips his whiskey and preens in his prospecting garb, repeatedly checking his reflection in the mirror. He wishes for Alma to wake up and offer her approval of his attire, but she continues to pretend to be asleep to avoid having to deal with her husbandʼs tediousness. Therefore it is not surprising when he is unceremoniously pushed off a cliff and falls to his death. The frontier is not for men like Brom Garrett to succeed because they are unable to “[strip] off the garments of civilization” (Turner 33); they do not meet the savage wilderness half way and are thereby undone by it. Deadwood may be a place of depravity and filth, but it is a place where someone like Mr. Elsworth can find success, or as he articulates it:

I may have fucked my life up flatter than hammered shit, but I stand here before you today beholden to no human cocksucker and working a paying fucking gold claim. And not the U.S. government saying Iʼm trespassing, or the savage fucking red man himself, or any of these other limber dick cocksuckers passing themselves off as prospectors had better try and stop me (“Deadwood” 1.01).36

Al Swearengen and Seth Bullock are Deadwoodʼs ideal men of the frontier. Al, the orphaned son of a whore, and Seth, the violent tempered but duty bound lawman/entrepreneur, embody the American dream and the possibilities of the frontierʼs self-fashioning potential. Unburdened by the shackles of civilization they are able to harness the savage lawlessness of the frontier so that they can mold and shape it. Al

names, and some characters have multiple names such as Henry Gale who is later known as Ben Linus. On Battlestar Galactica, characters are known by their call signs, rank, model number (in the case of the cylons), first or last name. Every attempt will be made to be as consistent as possible. 36 When citing individual episodes, I make every attempt to include the episode title when appropriate. Episodes will be cited using the following system: season number.epsiode number. For example, the Lost episode “Tabula Rasa” would be cited as episode 1.03. The only exception to this system will be in references to the Battlestar Galactica miniseries which will be sited as follows: M.01 and M.02.

47 has a deep sense of investment in the campʼs future and direction, since it is inextricably tied to his sense of identity. Alʼs interest extends beyond his own sphere of influence and bleeds out into the welfare of Deadwood as a community, though he would refuse to admit it. Al may be a brutal thug, but he understands the ties he has to other people, and is loyal to such an extent that, “when he ainʼt lying, Alʼs the most honorable man youʼll ever meet” (“Tell Him Something Pretty” 3.12), and he respects the community upon which he relies. Sethʼs innate sense of justice and fair play as well as his desire to reinvent himself as a businessman, likewise gives him a sense of allegiance to Deadwood and its community. Their sense of communal investment distinguishes them from other characters like Cy Toliver and George Hearst whoʼs interest in Deadwood extends only so far as their own needs and desires. In season one, no other character embodies the frontier myth better than Wild Bill Hickok. Hickok was a famous scout, marshal, marksman, and sometime actor, who went on to be immortalized in dime novels as an iconic figure of the American Wild West. Deadwoodʼs Wild Bill is a deconstruction of the mythologized frontier figure. The myth of Hickok is that of a man who willingly left civilized life behind to make his own way in the west, and when he comes to Deadwood he is already a kind of frontier celebrity. This Wild Bill is stripped of his mythological veneer and instead Deadwood offers us a version of Hickok as a world-weary celebrity who only wishes to be left in peace. He is harassed and taunted by fans and responds angrily to being placed on a pedestal. Deadwoodʼs Wild Bill is acutely aware of his own notoriety and weary of living up to other peopleʼs expectations of him as a larger than life figure. He knows his time has passed. Charlie Utter, his loyal friend and confidant, sees Bill become more self- destructive using the pretense of prospecting to mask his true aim of gambling and drinking his days away; he asks Charlie, “Can you let me go to hell the way I want to?” (“Here was a Man” 1.04). Wild Billʼs death, at the hand of the imbecilic “hooplehead” Jack McCall, represents the death of a more primitive frontier, one that must necessarily pass away as progress marches on. He is a creature of the old and untamed wilderness and a symbol of a previous historical moment. The wilderness he once scouted had become

48 the proto-civilization of the frontier town on its way to becoming a fully formed community. He is sacrificed on the altar of progress, so that the idea of Wild Bill (the one he hated and resented), as personification of the wild frontier and its promise of freedom, can become fully realized in the bloom of civilization. The spirit of Wild Bill will remain. Indeed, it is through his death that Deadwood takes another step toward becoming a recognizable civilization. Hickokʼs murder and Jack McCallʼs trial creates a sense of community among the miners, prospectors, and other townsmen. But the trial poses problems for a camp that prides itself on its lawlessness and self-governance. Both Al and Sol Star know that holding the trial will bring unwanted attention from Washington. It would bring the wrong kind of civilization to the frontier. Sol says to Seth, “Shouldʼve took him [McCall] into the territory. Hang ʻem here, theyʼll be openinʼ a can of worms” (“The Trial of Jack McCall” 1.05). And Al, speaking to Magistrate Clagett, says it might be better if “before a guilty verdict would get executed on that cocksucker, three men, would walk in that meat locker where heʼs being held with bags over their heads and cut his fucking throat,” because he had a vision,

[…] the vipers in the big nest in Washington. They were taking us in the camp, for acting like we could set our own laws up or organizations and then saw the big viper decide to strangle and swallow us up every fucking thing we gain here. It was horrible. How could we fucking avoid it? How could we let the vipers in the big nest know that, we didnʼt want to cause any fucking trouble? (1.05).

Interference from Washington would restrict the freedom inherent in Deadwoodʼs lawlessness and the way to avoid it is to let him go and judge him according to “custom” (1.05) because there is no law under which he may be rightly tried. Deadwood escapes from the institution of law, but nevertheless comes together as a community through the mutual experience of the murder and trial, which paved the way for the institution of the law that is unavoidable.

49 Men of Destiny Alongside the American trope of the frontier is the trope of mission and destiny. As discussed in chapter one, the idea of manifest destiny has its origins in the Puritan conception of “errand in the wilderness.” Manifest Destiny is an exceptionalist mythology of destiny and choseness wherein America and Americans were anointed by God to carry out a sacred mission of world salvation. To achieve these ends, America was not only blessed by God with a special destiny, but American people were also endowed with unique and exceptional characteristics with which to accomplish their mission. Characteristics such as self-reliance, fearlessness, adventurousness and audacity, were collectively characterized as the pioneer or frontier spirit. The frontier spirit embodies the sense that one could strike out into the unknown to accomplish the impossible and create a new world, and with the confidence conveniently provided by destiny, that one could be sure of success in the face of any adversity. This self- assuredness, so central to the idea of the American identity, is the direct result of the certainty inherent in the ideas of choseness and destiny. The circularity of the exceptional American individual mirrors the circularity of American exceptionalism; the success of the American is attributed to his exceptional character and destiny, each reinforcing the claim of the other. How then did the question of an exceptional American destiny get taken up in response to 9/11, if such a small group of people were able commit such a tremendous act of violence against? How could the ideology of Godʼs chosen nation retain any meaningful ideological potency? If America was Godʼs chosen nation, how could he let something so traumatic happen? As discussed in the previous chapter, this question was almost immediately neutralized by the rhetorical deployment of the exceptionalist logic of crisis/assurance, which reinforces exceptionality by articulating adversity as confirmation of choseness. Despite this, the question of destiny emerged in such a way that it, along with other exceptionalist tropes such as the frontier and the errand in the wilderness, became a preoccupation on prime time U.S television. Deadwood, Lost, Battlestar Galactica, Dexter, and 24 all take up the question of destiny and exceptionality by asking who has and what it means to have a special destiny. These

50 destinies range from the mystical to the evolutionary, and what links them together despite their differences is their seeming inevitability and their link to a particularly exceptional individual. On Deadwood the character most explicitly linked with the idea of destiny is George Hearst. Here, the focus will be on how Deadwood works to deconstruct the justifying logic that the ideology of American destiny provides. Hearst is an archetypical nineteenth century robber baron, ready and willing to exploit whatever resources necessary (legal or otherwise) to achieve his aims. In this respect, he is much like Al who will bribe, murder, steal, or torture to achieve his aims. The difference between the two men rests in Alʼs sense of allegiance to the camp and his people. In the struggle towards order, George Hearst represents the overly technologized civilization of the industrial revolution. Though a self-made man, unlike Brom Garrett who represented old aristocratic civilization, Hearst is unlike Seth and Al, in that he has no link with community. His endless search for “the color” is single-minded and renders him incapable of establishing communal ties. Hearst fancies himself chosen; he repeatedly refers to himself by his “Indian name,” “the boy the earth talks to.” Hearst claims, “[the earth] tells me where the color is. Thatʼs all it tells me” (“Boy-the-Earth-Talks-To” 2.12), and he prefers the earthʼs company to that of any human companion. To Cy Tolliver who has just agreed to be Hearstʼs dog he asserts that “My proper traffic is with the earth. In my dealings with people, I ought solely have to do with niggers and whites who obey me like dogs” (“True Colors” 3.03). In Hearstʼs estimation “niggers” and “whites who obey” are less than people, and he cannot abide people who might have the expectation that he treat them as equals.37 And whereas Deadwood might present Al as uniquely suited, destined even, to be successful in the frontier, he does not self-consciously cultivate an image of a golden child. His willingness to get his hands proverbially and literally dirty renders

37 Aunt Lou is the only person with whom he has any kind of congenial relationship. He is at home in dirt searching for “the color” where he may revel in being the earthʼs consort, as he to whom she tells her most intimate secrets. His forays into the earth carry a tinge of the sexual, “he do love his nose in a hole more, and ass in the air, and back legs kickinʼ out little lumps of gold like a fucking badger” says Aunt Lou (3.03) and “Iʼve been down every hole I could find” (2.12).

51 him heroic within Deadwoodʼs moral universe. Hearstʼs desires contradict Deadwoodʼs moral universe. Deadwood privileges participation within a community over the disconnections of alienated atomistic relationships. In the episode “The Trial of Jack McCall” at the funeral of Wild Bill, archetype of frontier values, who according to his friend “Calamity” Jane Cannery, “Took you as he found you, thought the best a you” (1.05), the Reverend states:

Saint Paul tells us, by one spirit, are we all baptized in the one body. Whether we be Jew or gentile, bond or free. And theyʼve all been made to drink into one spirit. For the body is not one man but many. He tells us, the eye cannot say unto the hand, I have no need of thee. Nor again, the head to the feet, I have no need of thee. They are much more those members of the body, which we think of as less honorable, all are necessary. He says that, there should be no schism in the body, but that the members should have the same care, one to another. And whether one member suffers, all the members suffer with it (1.05).

The “body” of the community is made of many and “all are necessary”; Hearstʼs inability to understand this truth is what makes him the villain. As with other exceptionalist tropes in Deadwood, Hearstʼs pretense of a charmed existence deconstructs the perniciousness inherent in proceeding and acting with the certainty and hubris that he will be successful in his endeavors, not only because one has cultivated oneʼs skills, but because one has a natural right to it. The certainty the pretense of destiny, and of being counted among the chosen, provides is dangerous and ultimately inhuman. As Al explains to E.B.:

Hearst organizes violence between his man and Dority. […] Orchestrates combat between them, mutilates me, plants that organizerʼs body like a flag in the fucking thoroughfare. […] Makes of me and Tolliver a two- headed beast to savage what might be healthy borne out of the fucking

52 election and gnaw its own privates off-hours. Plans keep coming to the cocksucker that their final sum is this: But for what brings income to him, break what he can; what he canʼt, set those parts against themselves to weaken. […] The whyʼs what fucking confounds me. Whatʼs in his head, I cannot fucking find in mine (“A Two-Headed Beast” 3.05).

Hearstʼs sense of righteous entitlement creates violence; his existence is a war of one against all in which there can only be one winner. Contrast this with the Reverendʼs citation of oneʼs need of the other. Cy and Al may be bitter enemies, but there is some sense that they have a mutual respect for one another; Hearstʼs machinations turn them into a “two-headed beast” ready to consume itself. Hearst, having lost connection with his own humanity, is unable to acknowledge the humanity of others. For him other people are simply assets to be exploited or hindrances to be removed. Hearstʼs final victory at the end of season three with the murder of Elsworth, who in the first episode declared the promise of the frontier and the common man for whom the frontier dream has become a reality. In his life before Deadwood he may have been a failure, but he has made a new life for himself and no one can keep him from that. Elsworth continues to prove to be an honest hardworking man; he marries Alma to give her and her child legitimacy; he looks after Sophia as if she were his own. In the penultimate episode “Catbird Seat,” Elsworth is murdered in his tent. Shot in the back, the promise of the frontier foreclosed upon, as is the final event which forces Alma into selling her claim to Hearst, who in this final victory holds the entirety of the Black Hills strike.

Exceptional Exclusion As discussed in the previous chapter, one of the purposes of the exceptionalist myth is to act as a foundational and nationalist discourse and to create a sense of national cohesion and consensus. The myth of the frontier works in creating consensus by suggesting that it is a place where anyone with enough drive and determination has the freedom to strike out and make a place for himself. Though Deadwood is invested in the promise of the frontier, it doesnʼt gloss over the fact that the promise of the frontier

53 was not available to everyone, but that it was the providence of white men. Women and non-whites are either explicitly or implicitly excluded from the freedom the frontier promise. Implicit in the idea of a transformative frontier is the notion that each new instance holds the promise that entirely new (and better) conception of civil society might emerge. Given that the frontier is a space where two divergent modes of human existences converge (the savage and the citizen), one should expect that each unique confrontation would yield something entirely new. But the myth of the frontier is not about the spontaneous flourishing of a new civilization from the hurly burly of frontier life created through the tumultuous juxtaposition of two modes of being, but is, rather, about the establishment of a very narrow conception of American civilization. The frontier is the space in which the special American destiny unfolds, and since destinies are necessarily preordained, the outcome is always already known. Daniel Worden contends that:

In both Calamity Jane and Mr. Wu, the town of Deadwood and its citizens acknowledge the porous egalitarianism of neo-liberalism's entrepreneurial individualism. Discrimination, based on level of sobriety, gender identity, race, even language ability, certainly occurs in Deadwood, yet entrepreneurial individualism can erode social hierarchies (234).

But, the freedom of the frontier is for the citizen as narrowly defined; it is the specific freedom of white men to strike out, break free of certain social shackles, to become more than the foppish citified men of urban life. The frontier is the place where men like Bullock, Swearengen, Elsworth, Hearst, and even Steve “the Drunk” can take advantage of the frontierʼs limited chaos to give birth to the American spirit. Wu, Hostedler, Samuel “the Nigger General” Fields, “Calamity” Jane Cannery, Alma Garrett Elsworth, Joanie Stubs, and countless others are unable to partake in that freedom. Al asks Wu, “Did you come to camp for justice or to make your fucking way?” (“Sold Under Sin” 1.12). Wu eventually pledges his allegiance to the frontier nation as he slices off his traditional

54 braid and declares “Wu! America!” (“Boy-the-Earth-Talks-To” 2.12), but heʼll still need to enter The Gem Saloon through the back door. He cannot partake fully in the promise of the nation. Jane takes advantage of the freedom of the frontier to fashion a masculine identity for herself, but, ultimately the promise of the frontier, to strike out and fulfill oneʼs destiny, isnʼt afforded to women. Like Wild Bill, Janeʼs character does the work of deconstructing the frontier myth of Calamity Jane. She is a singular, exceptional, entity in the camp, perhaps only conforming to the stereotype of foul-mouthed drunk. She often participates in the action from the periphery. Her peripheral nature should not, however, be mistaken for inconsequence, as it is precisely that which allows her the ability to take in a much larger picture. Jane often played the role of Greek chorus commenting on the goings on in Deadwood with the insight her existence on the margins of society allows her. Her brand of womanliness, one would hesitate to say femininity because there is little about Jane that is feminine in a traditional sense, provides a poignant counter to the violent masculinity of characters like Bullock, Swearengen, Toliver as well as the sexualized femininity of Joanie, Alma, and Trixie. Jane embodies the struggle of what the frontier could potentially offer a woman, but who is, like Alma, unable to fulfill that potential because of the nascent limitations inscribed on the frontier as a masculine space. Though a respected scout, her choice to dress in menʼs tracking clothes and her uncouth manners renders her inconsequential to many in the town, and leaves her unable to feel at ease in both the company of women and men. Deadwoodʼs presentation of Janeʼs inability to really find a place for herself, one that takes advantage of what the frontier ought to offer, exposes the lie in the frontierʼs promise of freedom and the limitation of American exceptionalism. Jane may be exceptional, but in failing to conform to a proper feminine exceptionality she is unable to partake in the American dream. For her, and for so many others, the dream of American exceptionalism is only the nightmare of exclusion.38

38 She almost achieves this with Joanie at the end of season three, but the seriesʼ cancellation does not allow the audience knowledge of whether or not Jane and Joanie can gain some kind of happiness.

55 Like Calamity Jane, Alma Garret, though granted a certain amount of autonomy and financial security after the death of her husband, is unable to take full advantage of the frontierʼs promise. Alma is intelligent, observant, and far more keyed into the workings of Deadwood than her husband, Brom. Initially, Deadwood has a corrupting affect on Alma; its distance from the prying eyes of New Yorkʼs civilized society allows her to throw off its trappings and indulge in her urges. Since she spends most of season one cooped up a hotel room, Alma uses laudanum to dull the boredom of her existence. She has an affair with Seth. Alma takes possession of Bromʼs gold claim; she does not allow herself to be intimidated by Swearengenʼs threats nor those of her father and in- laws, who believe she has had a hand in their sonʼs death. Alma decides to stay in Deadwood to oversee her husbandʼs gold strike and to look after Sophia, the young Norwegian girl whose family was murdered by Swearengenʼs road agents. Alma experiences an internal struggle between her desire to let the world go on without her by taking refuge in the oblivion of laudanum and her desire to do whatʼs right by her social and emotional obligations to her husband, Sophia, herself, and in later seasons to the community. In seasons two and three, Alma continues to struggle with her role in Deadwoodʼs society. She establishes the first bank in town; as a businesswoman she becomes a more prominent member of the community, but despite her accomplishments she retains status as second-class citizen. She cannot vote and must marry to avoid the stigma of “fallen woman” after her illicit affair with Seth resulted in a pregnancy. Even in the outlier town of Deadwood, a child born out of wedlock, especially to an upper class woman, remains socially unacceptable. Though Alma is owner of the bank, backed by a rich gold strike, and has a vested interest in the future of Deadwood, she is never invited to the meetings at The Gem. The truth of this situation is such that even Jennifer, a minor whore in Alʼs employ, can remark “Guess if youʼve got a pussy, even owning a bank donʼt get you to that table” (“Unauthorized Cinnamon” 3.07). Almaʼs conforming to traditional femininity allows her to achieve more success than Jane but she remains shut out from places of power. Her treatment and second-

56 class status calls attention to the limits of the promise of the frontier and its relationship to the construct of civilization. The trope of womenʼs civilizing presence is a standard device in progress narratives.39 Alma occupies this position within the camp and is held up as keeper of a certain kind of social order, one that is prim, proper, and clean. Everyone alters her/his language when speaking to her, except perhaps for Trixie, who speaks to almost everyone with the same profanity laced irreverence. However, the fact that her pregnancy was a scandal reveals the lie in the assertion that Deadwood, as frontier and not yet civil society, is free from any kind of law. Almaʼs body is policed in a manner similar to the whores who inhabit both the Gem and Bella Union. Alma takes on the role of civilizer self-consciously, aware that she represents more than only herself.40 She confides to her dead husband Brom, “because she cannot tell anyone” at the close of the second season that, “I am so afraid that my life is living me, and soon will be over, and not a moment of it will have been my own, and of how my body now tells me that is fine and right” (“Boy-the-Earth-Talks-To” 2.12). Her life is not for her to live; she is to live it for the sake and benefit of others. This realization comes from her identity as a mother, which itself conforms to the idea of the self-sacrificing woman who gives up her own life so her children may live theirs. As a civilizing force, she is to nurture the community at the expense of herself, leaving the men to attend to the work of civilization building, therefore the frontier cannot be a place where she achieves any kind of real freedom. By the final season, Almaʼs perseverance against Hearst, which eventually brings the town together against him, pushes her further into the realm of abstract ideal. Her relationship to the camp becomes one of equivalence between her and the camp, which strips her of her identity as an individual woman. The idea of the frontier is then never one that is completely without an element of civil society. The frontier is the space

39 First intrepid men strike out to explore the wilderness; the establishment of small outposts and encampments, which, in turn, become permanent settlements, follows these men. The arrival of women is a synecdoche for the arrival civilization. Which, in the narrative of the American west, spurs those initial explorers to move on. 40 This awareness is something she shares with other characters. For example, Bullock is aware that as sheriff, he represents something larger than himself to the community, which is to his benefit because it makes him a risky target for both Swearengen and Hearst.

57 where men can pursue their freedom in its lawlessness, while women remain shackled by the constraints of social expectations as whores or mothers. Other characters on Deadwood also reveal the manner in which the myth of exceptionalism, via the promise of the frontier, covers over its limited applicability. In a sad testament to the exclusionary nature of the American experience, there is no room for an exceptional black man in Deadwood. Hostetlerʼs story also reveals the exclusionary nature of exceptionalismʼs promise. He has come to Deadwood, like Wu, to make his own “fucking way.” He owns a successful livery business and is a good honest man. Yet Hostetler is aware of how the full promise of the frontier is reserved for the white man. Few of the townʼs people afford him respect, treating him with quiet disdain to outright callous inhumanity; his chief antagonist is Steve “the Drunk.” Steve essentially suffers from a nineteenth century version of “angry white man” syndrome. Feeling as though Blacks are naturally beneath him, Steve sees any success Hostetler might have gained as unjustly acquired, because any gains a black man makes are necessarily gains not made by a white man who, in Steveʼs mind, has a rightful claim to them. Hostetler and Fields decide to leave Deadwood, and Hostetler agrees to sell his livery to Steve who looked after it while Hostetler was away from camp because he feared he would be “roped up” for causing the accidental death of Bullockʼs son when his horse bolted. After Bullock acts as go-between, establishing a scenario in which Steve and Hostetler would sign the paperwork simultaneously (each fearing if he signed first would be made a fool by the other backing out), Steve requests the board he signed which stated, “I fucked the Sheriffʼs horse,” to be returned to him, but upon finding it he sees that the chalk had been rubbed away. Steve is indignant and accuses Hostetler of lying to him; he rants:

Thereʼs no more fucking writing on it! Shall I accept myself as satisfied, only for Hostetler once escaped to send the real fucking board back from Cheyenne while heʼs laughing up his lying sleeve? For Bullock to open the package and humiliate me? Or for the fucking bank woman to humiliate

58 me with the true fucking board? Or to revoke my fucking security on my fucking loan? Or whatever your fucked-up plan is to make me a fucking cunt! (“A Two-Headed Beast” 3.05).

While Steve raves, Hostetler becomes increasingly agitated, grabbing at his head, undoing his tie, pacing, and breathing hard. He has suffered through the indignity of Steveʼs bigotry and vile hatred, but Hostetler can no longer bear it. He yells, “I will not be called a fucking liar. I didnʼt live my life for that” and walks away seemingly as though heʼs decided to leave, but after a moment the three men in the stables hear a gunshot followed by a loud thud. Steve appears genuinely surprised, but Fields looks down with a sense of understanding at what Hostetler has done. No longer capable of accepting the indignity of Steveʼs accusations of dishonesty, which Steve has based solely on Hostetlerʼs race, he takes his own life in a kind of twisted act of self-determination and control. Steveʼs privilege as a white man allows him the freedom to behave in an utterly reprehensible way towards another human being. Throughout the scene, Bullock looks at Steveʼs ridiculous accusations with astonishment, but he never once steps in and says that Steve is out of line or that he has gone too far. As with Almaʼs pregnancy or Janeʼs masculine self-fashioning, Hostetler is unable to take full advantage of the supposed freedom and lawlessness of the frontier by virtue of his race, revealing again the lie within the promise of the frontier. He, like Alma and Jane, are excluded from the possibilities supposedly inherent in the frontier to make the world anew. Deadwood trading on frontier mythology presents the mythology of exceptionalism as the mythology of exclusion that it was and continues to be.

Exceptional Violence The previous sections have established that Deadwood is preoccupied with exceptionalist discourses that argue American civilization was born through an engagement between the wilderness and civil society within the liminal space of the frontier. Series creator David Milch stated that in writing Deadwood he “wanted to focus

59 on that idea of how order is generated in the absence of law” (Havrilesky) and to work through,

How does order develop without law? In new societies, in frontier societies where there is no central authority, how does order develop? It isnʼt just a matter of brute force; even brute force can only be used by somebody with an idea of order. How does chaos evolve into order? (Barra).

In a previous section I discussed that one of the primary promises of the frontier was its alleged lawlessness. Within the construct of the frontier narrative, Deadwoodʼs lawlessness presents its inhabitants with the ability to make the world anew, but as we have seen this promise is only available to a select few, white men. But it is not enough to merely be a white man; these men must also be prepared to and capable of exerting their will over others through the use of violence or the fear of possible violence. For example, both Al and Hearst violently remove whoever gets in their way or even those who merely become an inconvenience. Bullock only manages to control his rage by sublimating it into his overdeveloped sense of morality and familial obligations, without which he would probably descend into a state of listless violent depravity. These men of violence, according to the narrative logic of Deadwood, are also the primary agents of civilization. On Deadwood civilization is not created in a bloodless declaration; it is born through violence, and this violent birth calls attention to exceptionalist discourses that either ignore or downplay the role violence played in the American expansion westward and the continued deployment of violence in the maintenance of American domination in the world today. Deadwood confronts the question of the relationship of violence to civilization by presenting two competing answers. First, that violence is an integral part of civilization, functioning as the engine of progress, or second, that violence will eventually become less and less a part of civilization as it progresses through time. The American frontier has roots in the idea of the social contract. Central to contract theory is the notion of a pre-civilizational space often referred to as “the state of nature”; the frontier is one iteration of the state of nature. It exists prior to the

60 establishment of law and once civil society is constituted the state of nature falls away and the frontier ceases to be the frontier. One conception of the state of nature emphasized humanityʼs innate violence and brutality; this view is most associated with the seventeenth century political philosopher Thomas Hobbes. For Hobbes, the institution of civil society would effectively control humanityʼs natural inclination towards violence. According to later progressivist conceptions of history, such as the discourse of exceptionalism, once civilization is established, it moves towards a state of greater peace and freedom. Any violence that occurs is understood as a brief aberration in the unfolding of history; therefore, violence in this framework is always understood as a stoppage within civilization, rather than as a central component of it. Progressive exceptionalist discourses cover over the violence of expansion and conquest, by pulling it into a historical narrative that sees expansion and conquest as the benevolent spread of liberty and freedom. In contrast to this standard narrative of violence and its relationship to history, in Society Must Be Defended Michel Foucault suggests that the taming of historical violence is the central purpose of rationalist historical discourses in the West. He argues that instead of merely recounting history as a series of struggles (wars, conquests, expansions) historical discourses have directly intervened in the struggle. In this construction, History is another tactic deployed in a perpetual war for domination; “historical knowledge becomes an element of the struggle: it is both a description of struggles and a weapon in the struggle. History gave us the idea that we are at war; and we wage war through history” (190). In contrast to the Hobbesian account, Foucault provocatively suggests that eruptions of violence do not stop history; rather history is a violent struggle. Violence is not attributed to some inherent human characteristic that has temporarily been allowed to erupt, but is the function of history as a relation of force. Exceptionalist discourse functions by masking historical violence as atypical; as Majia Holmer Nadesan argues, “[h]istorical events or phenomena that could potentially rupture the universalization of the [exceptionalist] mythos are erased or are retroactively constituted as ʻexceptionsʼ to the principles of the benevolent American state,” (193).

61 Essentially violence becomes an exception within exceptionalism. What Deadwood offers instead is a negotiation of violence as exception by emphasizing the ubiquity of it. As an essential element of the series, Deadwoodʼs violence is almost a character in itself. Like the excessive profanity, it functions as another language, one in which everyone in the camp eventually becomes well versed. Deadwoodʼs violence undoes the romanticized and clean narrative of benevolent American expansion, which argues expansion brings freedom and order to the primitive wilderness. Though Deadwood effectively dismantles some of the myth of exceptionalism, it nevertheless revels in a particular expression of masculine violence that plays into a facile acceptance of the supposed savagery that haunts menʼs souls. Deadwood entertains a conception of historical unfolding as a never-ending struggle, notably in the figure of Al Swearengen, but because the series is fundamentally wedded to the concept of order emerging and eventually overtaking chaos, the brute force of Deadwood is executed under the pretense that someday with the institution of law, even in its depravity and corruption, brutish violence will eventually be expelled. In spite of this, Deadwood offers a compelling counter-narrative to the consistent erasure of American violence. To demonstrate this, I will examine three representative scenes of violence, one from each season. These scenes occur at similar points in the narrative arcs of the three seasons punctuating them at similar moments, often at important turning points within the season and series long narrative. The first scene occurs in episode six, “The Plague.” The end of the previous episode saw the acquittal of Jack McCall for the murder of Wild Bill Hikock; he flees camp and Seth Bullock decides to ride out after him. A series of establishing shots reveal to the viewer an Indian burial site. Seth on horseback rides through the grounds. His horse is hit with an arrow and he falls to the ground. The Indian rides into the shot and bludgeons Seth in the head. The scene shifts to a point of view shot from Sethʼs perspective. The Indian dances around and taunts Seth as he lies on the ground. The P.O.V. shot encourages the viewer to identify with Seth and his fear. They continue to fight and Seth manages to gain the upper hand; Seth grabs a rock and begins to repeatedly smash it into the Indianʼs skull. The viewer, through a series of relatively

62 quick cuts, sees Sethʼs rage from multiple vantage points and distances. No music accompanies the scene; one merely hears Seth grunts and the force of the rock as it repeatedly meets the bone of the now dead Indianʼs skull. Though one is meant to understand that this a fight in which there can be only one survivor, and that Seth is, therefore, justified in killing the Indian, the brutality and savagery of Sethʼs repeated blows to the obviously already dead body speaks to both the issue of Sethʼs violent temper and to the larger question of civilizationʼs relationship to violence. Seth is the civilized white man who encounters the savage Indian in the wilderness of the frontier. As in the earlier example of Deadwoodʼs use of the Wild Bill myth, the series often appropriates exceptionalist mythologies so that it might attempt to unravel them. The violent interaction between Seth and the unnamed Indian exposes the exceptionalist myth of the empty frontier as a farce. The ideological construction of an inert, empty, or “virgin” American wilderness was central to expansionist discourse of manifest destiny; if the land was empty of human inhabitants, one did not need to address the colonialist aspects of expansion. If one accepted that the land was inhabited, one could easily justify overtaking and pushing those inhabitants out by appealing to their “savage” or “barbaric” nature.41 The sceneʼs establishing shots reveal that the wilderness is in fact not the uninhabited empty landscape the foundational mythology worked to establish. Instead, Deadwoodʼs wilderness is occupied by a people with their own culture that, if the white men are to succeed in their endeavors, must be violently beaten out. The encounter between them is one of intrusion and ultimate conquest. Seth intrudes into a sacred landscape, is attacked because of this encroachment, and is ultimately victorious. What renders the scene so disturbing is Sethʼs barbarity. It isnʼt enough that he stop the Indian from killing him, but that he goes on to completely destroy him, that he strikes again and again in a fit of terrible rage. Exceptionalist discourses worked to intervene and mitigate the violence of expansion by either entirely removing the confrontation between European settlers and the native

41 If savage, one should undertake the project of civilizing them by striping them of their culture in projects of forced removal and cultural reeducation programs. If barbaric, mass slaughter was all that was required.

63 inhabitants or by neutering the confrontation through the benevolence of the “white manʼs burden.” The scene strips that mythology of the gleam of any possible benevolence to reveal the harsh brutality of the violent destruction of the native peoples. This scene is also noteworthy because it is one of the few times Native Americans physically appear on the screen. They are virtually absent as people, though they repeatedly appear in the guise of threatening menace or as an example of a barbarism to which even the inhabitants of the outlier camp of Deadwood would never sink. Invocations of the barbaric Indian threat are a means through which to establish a sense of realism, and as individual instances, they effectively communicate the generic nineteenth-century racist attitude toward the native Indian population. However, the arguments take on a different meaning when placed within the larger narrative context of the series. Though the encampment represents an emergent civilization, it is not a completely primitive space. The townspeople take great care in distinguishing their lawlessness from that of the completely primitive “savages.” For example, the early arc in season one in which a team of road agents attacks a Norwegian family and frame it as an Indian massacre illustrates how community cohesion necessitates the creation and cultivation of an “other.” Al is keenly aware that if the camp were to learn the family was not attacked by Indian raiders but white men, the campʼs communal cohesion would suffer, “Or we could let [Sophia] spread word that folks got road agents to fear more than Indians, breed mistrust one white for another throughout the whole fucking camp” (“Deep Water” 1.02). Al is so concerned about this, that he is willing to murder the little girl to insure her silence. Both Al and Seth are extremely violent men. Their relationship with and use of violence are, however, very different. Alʼs strategic use of violence may be read as an understanding of violence as a central component of progress. Al is a relation of force, a line of power; he uses violence to achieve his goals. Sethʼs use of violence conforms more readily to a Hobbesian formulation; his internal savage appears in his nearly uncontrollable rage, and he must actively work to control his urge to solve problems with violence. He repeatedly fails, and when he does, it generally causes more problems than it solves, for example, when he nearly beats Almaʼs father to death or when he

64 drags Hearst through the thoroughfare by the ear. Sethʼs violence must be contained if he is to succeed. As Sheriff, he represents the law in an abstract sense. If he is the man of law, the man of civilization, then he must seek to rid himself of the impulse towards violence, because if he does not, the law, in the sense of western juridical tradition, cannot succeed. Al is the man of the frontier and a man without law. Until the arrival of Hearst, Al is effectively the sovereign lord of Deadwood, holding the power of life and death over his subjects. Ideally, his reign would eventually be replaced by the move toward the institution of a new contract, one between men who agree to abide the law for their mutual benefit rather than from their fear of the repercussions of sovereign violence. In season two, Francis Wolcott arrives in Deadwood as the agent of George Hearst. His purpose is to begin the work of quietly consolidating the Black Hills gold claims. We learn from Maddie, Joanie Stubʼs partner at their new high class brothel the Chez Amis that, heʼs “a trick, a specialist” whose girls often end in “a wooden box” (“New Money” 2.03). Wolcott is a sensitive man and a bit of a dandy. He dresses well and carries himself with an air of contempt for everyone he encounters in the camp. After Cy is unsuccessful in his attempt to blackmail Wolcott by informing him that he is aware of his predilection to “ride one off a cliff” (“Something Very Expensive” 2.06), Wolcott does two things. The first is to inform the hapless Cy who is “past surprise at [anyoneʼs] habits or inclination” that:

Believing yourself past surprise does not commend you to me as a friend. A man inadequately sophisticated, or merely ignorant or simply stupid, may believe himself past surprise, then be surprised to discover, for example, that Mr. Hearst already knows of my inclinations and finds them immaterial. Suggesting, as a corollary, that your skills for blackmail and manipulation no longer are assets to you, and for your fatuous belief in their efficacy, in fact have become liabilities. In short, youʼve overplayed your hand. Now I should think in consequence, now recognizing yourself as a man past his time, that during this last transitional period you would

65 devote yourself with grateful and quiet diligence to such uses as others may still find you suitable (2.06).

I quote this scene at length because in it Wolcott highlights the seasonʼs primary narrative theme, that a new order is coming, and one must decide whether to move with the changing wind, which Cy chooses to do, or fight against it. Wolcott is a harbinger of the new order; as Hearstʼs front guard he represents the new civilization, one that is industrialized, impersonal, consolidated, and evidenced by Walcottʼs next actions, irrationally violent. Wolcott follows his pronunciation to Cy by doing “something very expensive.” Angry that Doris, a whore who works as the Chez Amis, has reported his personal proclivities to Cy decides “we must not let [Doris] be past surprise.” He arrives at the Chez Amis and requests to see Doris. A few scenes later he emerges from the room asking for Carrie, his favorite girl. Unsure of what has taken place, the audience is left to assume that he has done something to Doris. A few scenes later it cuts back to Wolcott and Carrie. Doris is dead on the bed; her throat slashed. Carrie afraid realizes that Wolcott is going to do the same thing to her, and that it was always his intention to kill her. She is beautiful as she weeps, all whiteness and lace. She asks him quietly, “Do you know how to make it not hurt?” She goes to leave, he grabs her, and he slides the blade neatly across her throat. Red blood streams down her body in stark contrast to her white skin and clothes. Later Maddie confronts Wolcott; she threatens him with Joanieʼs pistol and demands that she be paid for her silence. Wolcott reaches out and slashes her throat as well; she falls to the floor as surprised by his action as Wolcott is. Perhaps Wolcott found himself to be past surprise and felt astonished that he wasnʼt. As in the previous example of Sethʼs encounter with the Indian, an important turning point in the series is punctuated with a moment of irrational violence. Here, once Wolcott confirms unequivocally that Hearstʼs intentions are to consolidate the campʼs holdings, he brutally and unemotionally slashes three womenʼs throats. These acts of physical violence create a visual compliment to the dialogue. Wolcott is set off by Cyʼs assertion that he is “past surprised” which is indicative of Cyʼs apparent obliviousness to

66 Hearstʼs primary objective. As he walks to the Chez Amis, Wolcott mutters to himself, “Past hope. Past kindness or consideration. Past justice. Past satisfaction. Past warmth or cold or comfort. Past love. But past surprise? What an endlessly unfolding tedium life would then become. No, Doris [beat] we must not let you be past surprise.” Wolcott can conceive of, without hesitation, an almost inhuman existence that is past love, justice, kindness, or satisfaction. And indeed, this is what life is like for many in Deadwood; it is space wherein being past justice, kindness, or love is an easy state to inhabit. But to be past surprise, Wolcott reminds the audience, is dangerous. After killing the three women, Wolcott finds himself surprised by his own actions. Additionally as the representative of Hearstʼs interests, Wolcott represents, like Seth or Al, a certain expression of violence within civilization. It is not Alʼs cold calculated violence, nor is it like Sethʼs repressed savagery. Wolcottʼs ability to easily see himself past caring about most human interaction, an ability which enables him to kill three women without much hesitation, renders him inhuman. His actions have no motive guided by self-interest, nor does he grapple with the moral or ethical implications of what he has done. The efficiency of his movement has a certain mechanical quality, cool, calm and without care, like the consolidated ruthless capitalism his employer, Hearst, represents. Finally, in the episode, “A Two-Headed Beast” Dan Dority, who represents Al, and Captain Turner, who represents Hearst, engage in a brutal “fair fight.” First initiated by Captain Turner, Al does not allow Dan to fight him right away. Instead he prefers to try discerning Hearstʼs angle. What is it that Hearst wishes to achieve? Al exclaims, “Itʼs past me. I cannot figure the fucking angle. Go ahead and fucking fight him” (3.05). Hearstʼs intentions are for the fight to act “as an object lesson to every man watching” (3.05). Turner, he assumes, will overtake Dan, effectively demonstrating to the camp that thereʼs a new king in town. Again, as in the Wolcott and Seth examples, highly charged moments within the narrative are punctuated by acts of extreme violence. Like the scene in “The Plague,” the fight is shot without any attempt to romanticize or glamorize the violence. Dan and Turner meet in the thoroughfare and savagely beat one another in the muck and mud. After almost losing the bout, Dan finally gains the upper hand when he reaches up and gouges out Turnerʼs eye with his filthy mud-covered

67 thumb. Turner rolls away screaming; Dan delivers the final blows with a log. The fight between the two men is intercut by Hearst and Al watching from their respective balconies. Danʼs victory over Turner signifies to Hearst that the camp will not go down without a fight. Unlike the fight between Seth and the Indian, a considerable amount of time is spent in establishing the fairness of the fight between Dan and Turner. A fair fight can only occur between equals, and therefore indicates a level of mutual respect between Hearst and Al that was missing in the exchange between Seth and the Indian, or even between Wolcott and the whores. Gone is the representation of violence as integral part of civilizationʼs unfolding. In its place is the temporary exceptional violence of the fair fight. Their violence maintains the community. Though Deadwood offers a counter-narrative to violence as a fleeting exception according to the mythology of American exceptionalism by highlighting the ubiquity of violence, it ultimately falls back into the pattern by asserting that once a community has been firmly established in Deadwood, and represented in the body of Alma, who the town comes together to protect, violence becomes only a momentary necessity. Deadwoodʼs appearance on HBO gives it the space in which to press the extremes of violence, physical violence, linguistic violence, and sexual violence. The traditional western is

politically conservative: at best a justification for nationalism, at worst an alibi for American imperialism, racism, paternalism, and violence. The consensus of both the formalist account of the western as a set of tropes about individualism, violence, and morality and the historicist reading of the western as a symptom of US hegemony is that the western reinforces conservative values regarding nationalism, racial identity, the necessity of violence, and American exceptionalism (Worden 222).

It can take liberties with the western genre and invert expectations by working from within the expectations of the quality genre as established by the “not TV” aesthetic cultivated by HBO and often predicated on shock. But while Deadwood may not be a

68 traditional western, it still speaks in the language of individualistic frontier mythology where men are “beholden to no human cocksucker.”

Jericho: Televisual Jeremiad CBSʼs Jericho aired from 2006-2008. The series followed the lives of the citizens of the eponymous fictional town in Kansas following a devastating nuclear attack on twenty-three major American cities. Stylistically and narratively, Jericho borrows from other prime time serials like 24, Battlestar Galactica, and Lost. Jericho conforms to the industryʼs reliance on what Todd Gitlin called recombinant culture. Jericho was an explicit attempt by CBS to capitalize on the success of these other series by remixing key elements, such as the use of documentary style camera work, fast paced editing, action and violence of 24 and Battlestar Galactica, the central narrative mystery like that of Lost, as well as conforming to the “quality TV” genre which was in resurgence at the time. Like Deadwood, Jericho delved into the question of how order emerges from chaos and how communities survive in an unforgiving wilderness. Unlike Deadwood, Jerichoʼs engagement is not as complex or nuanced. Its placement on network television rather than cable, limits the scope and presentation of the series. Because of this, the analysis of Jericho will concentrate on the larger series long narrative rather than engaging with individual episodes. Jericho actively engages with the tropes of American exceptionalism as a foundational discourse primarily by appropriating the trope of the frontier as idealized birthplace of an authentic America and revitalizing the American errand in a post- apocalyptic wilderness, and by re-enacting the ritual of consensus. The town reflects a contemporary notion of the pastoral in the guise of the “American Heartland” and becomes the site wherein, though the series questions the U.S response to the events of 9/11 as reactionary, it does so in an attempt to call the nation back to itself. Jericho takes the form of a contemporary visual jeremiad that argues only a return to “true American values” of small town communal life can insure that the American dream and spirit will survive.

69 The mythology of exceptionalism, as we have seen in the previous discussion of Deadwood, relies on the argument that America is born within the liminal space of the frontier. The central premise of Jericho is that twenty-three major metropolitan cities were destroyed in a simultaneous nuclear attack, including Washington D.C., during a joint session of Congress, effectively destroying the federal governmentʼs infrastructure. With communication systems and state and federal governments destroyed, the people of Jericho, Kansas are left to fend for themselves. When taken in its entirety, Jericho functions as a televisual jeremiad. Generally employed during times of national crisis, the jeremiad, or “state of the covenant address,” was meant to bridge the gap between the promise of America and its reality. A jeremiad generally includes a diagnosis of present problem, usually brought on by a crisis, castigates its audience for their implicit or explicit complicity in that crisis, then ultimately assures the audience that if they return to the values they held before the crisis the initial promise of fulfillment and salvation will be reassured. This is what was referred to in the previous chapter as the circular logic of crisis/reassurance, which in turn mirrors the larger tautological logic of exceptionalism. Jericho employs the jeremiadʼs crisis/assurance structure to reaffirm the exceptionality of the American people and nation. It diagnoses the American response to 9/11 as reactionary, insinuates the audienceʼs tacit responsibility in that response, and ends with the assertion that if the nation can return to the “true” American values of community, sacrifice, inclusively, and entrepreneurial capitalism, the great American destiny will once again be assured. The creators of the series articulated that Jericho was returned to the state of an “Old West frontier town” (Jericho DVD extras). Situating the town of Jericho in Kansas is significant for thinking about Jericho and exceptionalism as a foundational discourse since Kansas has historically been associated with frontier mythologies, particularly with the idea of the American Old West and with the contemporary American “Heartland.” Victoria E. Johnson explains in her book Heartland TV,

the Midwest as Heartland […] is a key prism through and against which ʻcommon senseʼ ideals regarding citizenship, national identity, and cultural

70 worth have been variously debated and understood in critical moments in television and broader U.S social history (5).

Post-9/11, heartland discourse was strategically employed to foster a sense that there was a battle over the soul of the American nation. The heartland narrative extended to the discursive construction of the events of 9/11 themselves; it was argued that though the terrorists attacked New York City and Washington D.C., their true aim was the American ideals embodied in the discursive construction of the heartland/frontier. In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks, the heartland is all that remains. The Heartland values Jericho endorses have their roots in exceptionalist discourses that emphasize a rugged American self-sufficiency associated with the frontier. Johnson argues that defining and appealing to the Heartland has been central to television since its inception. She writes,

the Heartland myth provides a short-hand cultural common sense framework for ʻall-Americanʼ identification, redeeming goodness, face-to- face community, sanctity, and emplaced ideals to which a desirous and nostalgic public discourse repeatedly returns” (5).

The pilot episode quickly establishes Jericho as a tight knit community and the mayor, town patriarch Johnston Green and his wife Gail, stand at its center. For example, in the pilot, Dale, a teenager who wants to share the horrible information that his mother perished in Atlanta, takes the answering machine tape that recorded her last words to Mayor Greenʼs house. The members of the community look to them for guidance and reassurance and they trust that they will protect them as best they can. Jerichoʼs “heartland” characteristics are also evident throughout the rest of the community, which is primarily a community of farmers, miners, and business owners. The cast is mainly white, middle or working class. What little racial diversity there is comes through the character of Robert Hawkins and his family. He appears in the pilot identifying himself as a former cop from St. Louis. When he advises the Sheriff to use

71 paint to blackout the words on his police vehicle, he is told, “with all due respect, this isnʼt St. Louis” which reiterates Jerichoʼs difference from urban and even suburban America. Additionally, the set explicitly calls to mind the foundational imagery of the American frontier re-imagined within the space of the contemporary Midwestern heartland. This Jericho does not have a Wal-mart or a Gap. The local grocery store is simply a “Supermarket” and all the other shops are locally owned small business. The set is a nostalgic representation of the same kind of “Mainstreet” America that the corporate owned Orlando suburb, Celebration, sought to recreate; it is an image invented in part by television and only possible on television. The lack of big corporate capitalism is also significant given that the fictional corporation Jennings and Rall, analogous to something like Haliburton, are at least partially responsible for the attacks; their primary purpose was to create a corporate nation whose purpose was to insure the maximum accumulation of capital for its shareholders—a neoliberal privatized utopia. Jennings and Rawl take over what would have previously been governmental services as well as traditionally private sector services. This anti-corporate narrative runs counter to the prevailing push towards increased corpratization of American culture. Hence, while Jericho suggests that what America needs, if it is survive, is a conservative return to frontier/heartland values, it is also suggesting that contemporary American corporate capitalism is a dangerous deviation from, not a fulfillment of, Americaʼs special destiny. Who is responsible for the attacks remains a mystery to both the audience and town for a majority of the series, but the perpetrators are eventually revealed and with this revelation Jericho attempts to upset the prevailing narrative about who a terrorist is and what his/her goals are. In the final episodes of the series the mastermind behind the attacks, who goes by the name “John Smith,” reveals his reasons for wanting to destroy the United States. Though he initially tells Hawkins that Jennings and Rawl were behind the attacks so that they could essentially build their own private nation (“Sedition” 2.06), Smith finally reveals that he was behind the attacks and that his goal was to save the nation by destroying it.42

42 By series end, it remained unclear whether Smith was singlely responsible for the attacks as he claims. Internal J&R documents reveal that they were involved in the plot at some level.

HAWKINS: But 14 years ago, it was you that wrote that report detailing how a massive nuclear terrorist attack would decapitate the federal government, right? And in that report you stated one individual with enough access to mastermind the entire attack. […] Youʼre not just some innocent whistle blower are you? SMITH: I believe I am. Only the last time I blew the whistle I took out 23 American cities. HAWKINS: Killed millions. Tens of millions of people. Why? SMITH: To liberate this country. When I worked for J&R, I saw just how corrupt the relationship between the company and the federal government had become. No bid contracts, private army, a corporation that wrote legislation. J&R was a cancer grown deep into the bone of this government. So, I decided to remove that cancer in one fell swoop.

Smith diagnosed a problem, the corporate cancer that had invaded the federal government, and decided to remove the cancer with the hope that enough of the national body would remain. Smithʼs list of corruption echoes critiques of the Bush administration and its policies such as no bid contracts granted to Haliburton and the use of the private security company Blackwater in Iraq, whose analogues on Jericho are the corrupt Jennings and Rall and their security subsidiary Ravenwood. Appropriating the language of revolution, Smith sees himself as a “dream keeper,” saving the nation from what he believes to be its backsliding into corporate corruption. Though the audience is meant to be appalled by Smithʼs audacity and cold detachment towards the murder of millions of people, his ruse works. Though Smith doesnʼt explicitly state it, the series implies that, the people of Jericho, who represent a microcosm of an idealized conception of the nation, the Heartland, are the people he wishes to save from the cancer. Their “common sense” values were saved so that the American dream could again be secured.

73 The attacks destroyed millions of lives, cities, and the whole of the American national infrastructure. 9/11 was conceived in similar terms, as an attack on the idea of America; what Jericho does, which Battlestar Galactica also does, is to take the hyperbolic assertion that 9/11 destroyed civilization, and play on that assertion by literalizing it and actually destroying American civilization, or at least taking it back to the imagined golden age of the frontier. Jeremiads sought to diagnose a social disease, and the attacks forced the people of Jericho, and through them the audience, to question their beliefs in the virtue and persistence of America and its ideals. Many of Jerichoʼs narrative arcs diagnose where the nation went wrong in its response to 9/11. These episodes function as morality plays, asking the audience to think about how they might act given these exceptional circumstances. For example, when in the first season refugees arrive in town and supplies are running low, the townspeople must choose between helping them and trying to survive the winter with less, or turning the refugees away to help insure the communityʼs survival. The situation raises the question of what constitutes a community; is it a matter of geography, time, participation, or common humanity? Jericho comes down to something like a common humanity. This critique, while an important sentiment that is worth underscoring, doesnʼt go far enough because though it casts the reactionary demonization of outsiders as immoral when Gail asserts, “think about our neighbors who havenʼt made it back yet, thatʼs who they [the refugees] are,” (1.18) the appeal to a common humanity is inflected through the lens of nation. The refugees may be outsiders to Jericho, but theyʼre still Americans. Hence the arbitrary link of nationality goes unquestioned as primary marker for inclusion. In the second season, when Erik, Mayor Greenʼs second son, is informed by Constantino, former Mayor of New Bern turned leader of an insurgent militia fighting against Jennings and Rall, that if the people of Jericho wanted to join his fight they would need to show no mercy.

CONSTANTINO: We win by making them lose their desire to fight. Thatʼs the only way. ERIC: I know.

74 CONSTANTINO: Then when you take out a convoy you gotta stop leaving soldiers alive. Every soldier you take out costs them. Forces them to train replacements, saps their will. Itʼs not gonna happen in a day or a week. Itʼs a process that could take years. I need to know if thatʼs something youʼre willing to undertake. (“Patriots and Tyrants” 2.07)

Later in the episode Eric says to Stanely, who is digging a grave for his teenage sister, that he couldnʼt join with Constantinoʼs insurgency, “thereʼs something he [Constantino] lost that I donʼt ever want to give up. I mean weʼre right and Cheyenne is wrong, but the moment we start killing American soldiers all that changes.” Ericʼs argument mirrors arguments against the use of torture, the moment one dehumanizes oneʼs enemy, one loses oneʼs own humanity. In episode four, “Walls of Jericho,” when a stranger arrives in town badly burned and suspected of murdering one of the local police officers, the following argument ensues over his unconscious and ravaged body:

BILL: Why'd he have Shepʼs truck? JIMMY: We need to know what he did with him. JAKE: I know, but we can't just torture a dying man. ERIC: No one is torturing anyone. HAWKINS: We could give him a shot of adrenaline. It'll wake him up enough to question him. JAKE: He's dying of 3rd degree burns. It'd be like waking him up on fire. BILL: Our people are dying out there. Shep may already be dead. JIMMY: We need to protect ourselves Jake. JAKE: We need to protect ourselves from this. BILL: Jake, Shep, he's one of us. We need to find out what this guy did to him. HAWKINS: Hey, he is going to die anyway. But he could save some peoples lives. […]

75 ERIC: He could be a murderer. APRIL: And that gives you the power to do anything that you want? ERIC: Yes. Yes.

And in a later episode, after threatening someone with torture, Hawkins offhandedly remarks to Jake that he wouldnʼt actually torture the man because torture only works that way in the movies. In both of these instances the logic of torture that relies on the exceptionalism of the emergency is questioned. Jerichoʼs critiques, though they are an attempt to articulate a different kind of American response to a post-9/11 world from the Manichean logic of the global war on terrorʼs “with us or against” mentality, must be read within the exceptionalist framework that grounds the critique to begin with. Jericho, like its terrorist mastermind, takes the position of dream keeper; it highlights the post-9/11 national backslide away from core American values.

HAWKINS: I am not important. What is, is getting that bomb to Texas with no detours. Now you tell me you understand what it is that youʼre in the middle of right now. JAKE: (over Hawkins) I understand itʼs important. HAWKINS: (interrupting Jake) Yeah, itʼs important. (Shaking his head) Itʼs important. Whatever happens in the next few hours could determine the course of things for years to come. You know, maybe our history for the next hundred years. That is the responsibility we got here. And if that comes at a terrible cost, so be it, because thatʼs the only way things get better, and itʼs the only way that people stay free. [Beat] Itʼs why I do what I do. (2.07)

That this speech is given by Hawkins and not Jake, the hero, is interesting since Hawkins was initially an ambiguous character. He had prior knowledge of the bombings, has an underground bunker with communication abilities, takes orders from a

76 mysterious source, and moved his family to Jericho because he knew it would be safe. One of the guiding questions of the first part of the series was whether or not Hawkins was a terrorist who has infiltrated deep into the American heartland, which is a narrative riff on a common post-9/11 theme; the notion that a “terrorist” could be anyone, that “they” would infiltrate into “our” towns, families, and lives, and after earning “our” trust would betray “our” hospitality by murdering “us.” The “us/them” dichotomy constituted a central axis point around which the post-9/11 “war on terror” was constructed. “We,” the Americans, were innocent, pure, and sacred keepers of the dream of freedom; they, the terrorists, were the destroyers of that dream of freedom. “We” have respect for life; “they” take lives without thought or hesitation. It is then significant that the possible terrorist in Jericho was a black man since he is already visually coded as an “other” to Jerichoʼs primarily white population through his blackness and by virtue of the fact that he a recent inhabitant. The people of Jericho remain largely ignorant of Hawkins possible betrayal. In doing this, the series places the town in the privileged position of being above the petty prejudices of the viewing audience, as if to say, it is the audience that needs to learn to question their own assumptions, further establishing that it is the salt of the earth, heartland people of Jericho, who ought to be the model American citizens. Compare Hawkinsʼs passionate speech about freedom to Danʼs declaration upon hearing Deadwood would finally be joining the union, “Weʼre joining America. And itʼs full of lying, thieving cocksuckers that you canʼt trust at all–governors, commissioners and whatnot. By God, thatʼs just the new way of things” (“A Lie Agreed Upon, Part 1” 2.01). Deadwood seeks to actively upset the very idea of American exceptionalism by undoing the frontier and western imaginary; on Deadwood joining the union is a step away from freedom, whereas Jericho argues that saving the union is imperative if freedom is to survive. Jericho seeks to reaffirm American exceptionality by appealing to the foundational myth of the frontier/heartland to effectively call the nation back to itself. Jericho reasserts an exceptional America. When reflecting on German national identity after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Jurgen Habermas noted that “it is essential that Germans understand themselves

77 as a nation solely on their loyalty to the republican constitution, without hanging onto what he calls ʻthe pre-political crutches of nationality and community of fateʼ” (Borradori 11). A similar observation may be made about American national identity. Thinking back through the sacred/secular tension articulated in the previous chapter, the American exceptionalist identity rests on a sacred “community of fate” in which the American people have been chosen by God to fulfill his original covenant with man, yet, exceptionalism also claims that the secular revolution and resultant constitution created in and through the rational agreement to recognize the inherent rights of all men is what binds the nation together. This sacred/secular divide permeates American national identity and is expressed most tellingly in the tension between the active ability to choose and the passive state of having been chosen—between the logic of the contract and the logic of the covenant. There is an element of choice in the sacred formulation of the covenant; the choice is not between equals, but between a superior being and man. The contract was meant to navigate around this unequal relationship through the mutual recognition of the rights of every man; as a result the contract then created a higher being, civil society. The tension between allegiances based on a rational/contractual ideal or allegiances based on a “community of fate” plays out at the micro level on Jericho. The people of Jericho who have survived are repeatedly presented with choosing what the basis of their community will be. Will it be based on an instinctual, if arbitrary, feeling that they were spared for some reason and therefore their first priority must be to look after their own survival even if that means turning others who need help away? Or will they base their community on the mutual recognition that everyone is trying to survive and that if one is willing to work towards the mutual benefit of everyoneʼs survival then one may become a part of the community? Read against the larger reaction to 9/11 and the knee-jerk recourse to American nationalism rooted in a rhetoric of choseness over choice, Jerichoʼs eventual determination that itʼs only through a community of mutual participation and choice that community can survive offers an alternative, negotiated, representation of how a community can, and perhaps even ought to react to catastrophic or apocalyptic events.

78 Ultimately, Jericho doesnʼt fully escape the exceptionalist framework. The rationalist community of choice still falls squarely within the exceptionalist discourse, in that it conforms to the performance of the ritual of consensus. By straying into the proscriptive, Jericho, like its antagonist John Smith, performs the role of “dream keeper.” Though the unity of the nation is destroyed, since Jericho ended with the beginning of the Second American Civil War, the American spirit will survive. Here is where Jericho in spite of its seeming assertion that communal survival must be based on active choice, reverts to the passivity of choseness and the pre-political crutch of the eternal American spirit. The conceit of the American errand remains central to Jerichoʼs narrative aims; like a traditional jeremiad, it might question the national response to the events of 9/11 as reactionary and irrational, but Jericho ultimately works to reassure its audience that America will overcome its brief historical missteps. These series both address the question of the nation, specifically the meaning of America by appropriating the narrative of the frontier. Deadwoodʼs and Jerichoʼs interests remain within the sphere of a particular historical/mythological experience by re-staging the emergence of America by re-staging its inception. On Jericho this necessitated the apocalyptic destruction of the nationʼs urban centers so that a “true” American spirit could emerge from its ashes. On Deadwood, Milch re-imagined the American West not as idealized land of lonesome yet noble cowboys, but a land fraught with the violent struggle that gives birth to civilization. It is both a narrative of anxiety and assuagement. Deadwood is far more critical of the exceptionalist legacy than is Jericho and its dream-keeping jeremiad. This chapter has sought to demonstrate how the historical discourse of American exceptionalism has been taken up on prime time serial television, in part as a response to the uncertainty of the American identity after the events of 9/11. These series use exceptionalist tropes such as the frontier, destiny, choseness, the civilization/wilderness dyad, and the unifying role violence plays in all of these in an attempt to understand and intercede on the national conversation about the meaning and identity of America.

79 CHAPTER THREE TELEVISION, TORTURE, AND THE TICKING TIME BOMB

Much of the discourse concerning the state of exception and the global war on terror across both the humanities and the social sciences has focused on the juridical concept of the exception; writers and critics focus on examining exceptionalist logic without linking the juridical concept to the history of American exceptionalism. This chapter seeks to understand how the mythology of American exceptionalism intersects with the legal state of exception. What is the relationship between necessity and destiny? The state of exception and American exceptionalism rely on an imagined “greater good” or “redeemed future” to ground their arguments. The logic of exceptionalism rests on a necessity to transcend or suspend the law to avoid a catastrophe; likewise destiny requires a belief in the necessity of oneʼs actions in the fulfillment of oneʼs destiny. Both the argument from necessity and destiny assume a guaranteed future in which the greater good will necessarily be served. The state of exception seeks a justification for state action beyond the bounds of law, and American exceptionalism seeks a justification of the nation beyond the bounds of rational consent and instead looks to mystic origins and promised futures. The legal state of exception provides a backwards justification for the suspension of law in the name of saving the future. Bush administration officials have often cited Foxʼs 24 and its hero, Jack Bauerʼs use of torture to gain pivotal information as sufficient evidence that torture works, at times going so far as to suggest that torture was not only useful but a necessary tool in the “global war on terror.” In waging this war (rhetorically and physically) the Bush administration relied on a logic that understood “America” and its mission as exceptional to justify the use of torture in its perceived “struggle for civilization.” This conception of the U.S as exception is related to both the myth of American exceptionalism and to the legal construction of the state of exception. The former argues that the American experience is unique. First, the mythology of American exceptionalism framed the

80 construction of 9/11 as an exceptional moment in history, not because nothing like it had happened before in history, but because nothing like it had happened to the United States. Second, the event was cited as a historical flashpoint inaugurating an emergency state of exception in which normative legal and moral structures could no longer hold. Within this framing the question of torture has taken on the quality of a limit case in which the implications of exceptionalist thinking are played out. In the continued struggle over defining “America,” the torture debate places the question—are “we” a nation that does or does not condone the use of torture—at the center of this struggle. The Bush Administration repeatedly asserted that “America does not torture” while in practice they employed torture under the moniker of “enhanced interrogation techniques.”43 In the post-9/11 U.S, torture became one of the primary issues through which the “war on terror” was constructed. At the center of the torture debate is the popular Fox serial 24; many advocates for the use of torture cited 24 and its hero Jack Bauer. In a 2008 Newsweek article Dahlia Lithwick reported:

According to British lawyer and writer Sands, Jack Bauer […] was an inspiration at early ʻbrainstorming meetingsʼ of military officials at Guantánamo in September 2002 […] Michael Chertoff, the Homeland Security chief, gushed in a panel discussion on 24 organized by the Heritage Foundation that the show ʻreflects real life. John Yoo, the former Justice Department lawyer who produced the so-called torture memos […] cites Bauer in his book War by Other Means. ʻWhat if, as the Fox television program 24 recently portrayed, a high-level terrorist leader is caught who knows the location of a nuclear weapon?ʼ Even Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, speaking in Canada last summer […] ʻJack Bauer saved Los Angeles … He saved hundreds of thousands of lives,ʼ Scalia said. ʻAre you going to convict Jack Bauer?ʼ

43 See Sands and Danner.

81 I quote Lithwick at length here to demonstrate how pervasive the citation of 24ʼs fictional representations of torture has been in the proliferation of a very specific justification for the use of torture—the “ticking time bomb” scenario. Aside from being an argument for an increase in media and televisual literacy, the link between 24, torture, and the ticking time bomb demonstrates the power television has in constructing the terms of a national dialogue. Jack Bauer and 24, for better or worse, have set the terms of the debate over torture specifically and the war on terror generally. That one televisual text has become such a lightening rod for the national debate (one can declare oneʼs position on torture via the proxy assertion of oneʼs love or hatred for Jack Bauer) speaks to the centrality television retains as a site wherein the identity of the nation is struggled over.44 The post-9/11 debates over the use and justification of torture embody what is at stake in the dispute over defining the meaning of America. This chapter will examine similar themes in Foxʼs 2445 and Showtimeʼs Dexter to situate them at the intersection of the re-emergence of American exceptionalism and its appropriation of the discourse of the legal concept of a “state of exception.” The language of the frontier, traditionally conceived as an encounter between the savage wilderness and civilization, was taken up and used to describe an uncontainable and limitless expansion of barbaric global terror, which is at once everywhere and no where. This was a frontier unhooked from its geography. This state of exception knit together with the exceptionalist matrix created a powerful and pervasive discourse of American national identity. The series discussed in chapter two, Deadwood and Jericho, retain the conception of the frontier as a place and an idea; 24 and Dexter tackle the metamorphosis of the frontier from idealized space linked to the specificity of the American landscape, where noble savage meets civilized man to create the ideal American society, to the frontier conceived as a kind of indefinite state of exception. The post-9/11 frontier was constructed as theoretical landscape—an intangible entity, a no place, where the limits of the law and barbarity engaged one another and the

44 In contrast to arguments that suggest television has lost its currency as a mass medium. 45 24ʼs first season was written and shot before the events of 9/11. Later seasons capitalized on the connections between the events of 9/11.

82 conceptions of choseness and destiny are recast as questions of necessity and burden; their mythologies are repurposed in light of the detachment of frontier from the spatiality of a specific landscape to the generality of nationʼs metaphysical being. Unlike the previous chapter, which examined the resurgence of some of the traditional narrative tropes of American exceptionalism, the purpose of this chapter is to explore the intersection between American exceptionalism and the state of exception as it has played out within prime time serial televisionʼs engagement with the contemporary debate over the use and justification for torture. Are we a nation that tortures and if so, does Americaʼs exceptionalism, both its identity and mission, provide a sufficient justification of its use? Showtimeʼs Dexter, a series that follows the life of a serial killer whose victims are other serial killers, explores the logic of the exception through an examination of what happens when justice is pursued beyond the bounds of the law in pursuit of a safer future. My analysis of Dexter will attempt to illuminate how the logic of exceptionalism extends beyond the question of torture to the precarious relationship between justice, violence, and the law. While the analysis that follows will cite and discuss representations of specific acts of torture, this investigation hopes to reveal the implications and ramifications that arguments for torture have in setting the terms of the debate over contemporary American conceptions of the relationship between law, morality, and national identity. The exceptionalist logic of torture, as exemplified by what has become known as the “ticking time bomb scenario,” extends beyond the prison cell and into the everyday by fostering a sense of what Didion called the “new normal.” In this new normal the present exists in a state of permanent crisis that requires a complete reinvention of the moral and legal universe. It is my contention that this new normal does not rely on a radically new discourse of law and the nation, but on the longstanding tradition of deploying American exceptionalism as a justificatory discourse.

The State of Exception The previous chapters have delved into the history of American exceptionalism, but in order to understand the metamorphosis of the frontier into a state of exception, a

83 general understanding of the state of exception as broadly conceived and deployed both theoretically and practically is necessary. The state of exception is a juridical concept that emphasizes the power of the sovereign decision. Recent discussions of the contemporary emergence of the state of exception draw on the work of Italian theorist Giorgio Agamben who was in turn driven by an interest in furthering Foucaultʼs project by understanding the continued role sovereignty plays in contemporary political life.46 Agamben is interested in the role sovereign power has in producing biopolitical existence (Agamben, Homo Sacer 6). He begins with Carl Schmittʼs definition of sovereignty, “sovereign is he who decides on the state of exception” (11). Within the political and legal framework of western liberal democracies, a state of exception is one in which the law is suspended. Like the frontier, the state of exception is a liminal state between the chaos of nature and the law of civilization, but unlike the frontier it does not precede the establishment of law but emerges as a result of the lawʼs suspension (18). Despite this difference it is predicated on a distinction between “state of nature” and the “the law”; Agamben explains the state of exception is a “zone of indistinction between nature and right” (21).47 Enacting a state of exception removes questions of legality and illegality, while also avoiding the regression of civilization back to the state of nature. As originally conceived, states of exception were enacted during times of emergency and necessarily short-lived; once the emergency or crisis ended, the rule of law would be resumed. The events of 9/11 and the resultant “global war on terror” have been constructed as inaugurating a new state of exception in the sense described above, but there is an important difference; the “global war on terror” is conceived as an emergency situation without any foreseeable end. In this situation, the state of emergency is no longer the

46 Foucaultʼs later work, beginning with Discipline and Punish through the three-part History of Sexuality, traced the emergence of what he called biopower and biopolitics. To this end he traces the emergence of different types of power in the modern period, from the sovereign power, disciplinary, and governmentality. Foucault notes that these different modes of power do not supplant one another, rather his point is to emphasize that power does not function in only way. Governmentality focuses the management of the life of populations; his conception of life here is not political, cultural, or sociological, but the biological life of existence. 47 Declaring the state of exception resides with the sovereign and grants him the power to authorize what under the auspices of the law would be illegal.

84 exception but the rule.48 Though the discourse of the contemporary state of exception as articulated by the Bush administration and his interlocutors focuses on its supposed newness (from those who seek to critique it) the logic of the state of exception echoes the characteristics of the exceptionalist matrix. As a habit of thinking American exceptionalism has always emphasized the inside/outside quality of the American national identity and the persistent claim that its particularity (being unlike any nation before or after it), was a sign of the universality of its values. The conception of the legal state of exception becomes yet another component of the exceptionalist matrix through which the United States tries to assert its exceptionality. Nowhere is this more evident than in the justification of torture as a necessary, if exceptional, practice. Andrew W. Neal suggests that the formalist conception of the exception as described by Agamben (via Schmitt) is “over determined” by arguing that exceptions will always emerge as a “structural inevitability” in the modern liberal state that in turn reifies and normalizes it. Neal further notes that Judith Butler in her work Precarious Life avoids this by theorizing “exceptionalism as the instrumental manipulation of the law as ʻtacticʼ” and “takes us from the reified ʻlimitʼ to the banality and anonymity of bureaucratic process” (47); “[e]xceptionalism is therefore never determined by ʻnecessityʼ or the ʻthreatʼ of the ʻexceptionalʼ circumstance itself, but is always the product of a particular kind of politics” (48). Butlerʼs conception of exceptionalism as tactic acts as a butress between American exceptionalism and the state of exception. “The suspension of law is not the exception in itself, but rather part of the performative constitution of ʻexceptionalismʼ as a normalized and legitimate mode of government that blurs the norm/exception distinction” (51). In Butlerʼs terms “It [the suspension of law] becomes the occasion and the means by which the extra-legal exercise of state power justifies itself indefinitely” (67). This parallels the use of exceptionalist mythologies of destiny and mission that have been deployed to justify other historical events and practices. Bulter makes the move away from the norm/exception reification through performativity:

48 I am necessarily describing Agambenʼs arguments using fairly large strokes. Agamben ultimately argues that the state of exception has always been the rule and that the rule of law an illusion. What is of importance here is first that this state of exception is presented as a new situation and second that it without any foreseeable end.

85 through repetition the exception becomes the norm. But she does not include an integration of how American exceptionalism has always functioned in this way. Rather than seeing the deployment of exceptionalism during the war on terror as new, it should be understood within the historically discursive practices of American exceptionalism. The crisis or catastrophe has always been a central component of the jeremiad, whose purpose was to reassure the populace of their salvation. Exceptionalism has always been a norm. The deployment of exceptionalism as tactic assumes a particular understanding of power relations in which power somehow shifted to the terrorists on 9/11, such that America needed to reclaim their purpose and justify its reaction, and therefore looked to past exceptionalist justifications. It reframed the response as a new errand in the wilderness, that god was on its side, and added the political formulation to the mix as a limit—as one of those moments in American history were necessity wins out over the ideal.

“Not Today”: 24, ticking time bombs and the logic of the exception In his introduction to The Torture Memos, an edited collection of the legal memos used to justify “enhanced interrogation techniques,” David Cole writes, “[t]he justice department memos […] twist language and the law in order to rationalize the unthinkable” (1). Given the established prevalence and power of American exceptionalism the logic of the ticking time bomb doesnʼt represent a radically new presentation of thinking the unthinkable, but is yet one more expression of the paradoxical exceptionalist matrix. As with in the previous chapterʼs discussion of Deadwoodʼs self-conscious attempt to offer a counter-narrative, this chapter engages with serial television as space in which the logic of torture is narrativized and demonstrates the power exceptionalist logic has, when knit to the mythology of American exceptionalism, in framing a national narrative of post-9/11 America. I frame this discussion through the “ticking time bomb scenario” as it occurs in 24 and Dexter. The ticking time bomb scenario rests on at the intersection of the legal state of exception and the history of American exceptionalism crystallizing together these discourses imbrication with one another.

86 The emphasis on deconstructing and then denouncing the juridical states of exception will always be unable to fully account for the national willingness to engage and legitimize the practice of torture. Excavating the argument for logical holes and slippery slope possibilities of its consequentialist ethics doesnʼt satisfactorily account for tortureʼs appeal or the ticking time bomb argumentʼs nationalist inflections. The legitimacy of torture could be claimed by any entity on the grounds of saving the future. The liberal claim is made on behalf of the nationʼs moral fortitude—only in American hands can the justification for torture be made. Again one can see the latent reliance of choseness and destiny to justify American violence as a force for the good of the world. In Sacred Violence Paul Kahn argues that the twin appearances of terror and torture in the contemporary political situation point to a political theology of sacrifice upon which the modern nation-state is founded. Politics and justice are placed at odds with one another. The political contract is not “the foundation of political obligation” (113); instead “the modern nation-state has successfully linked law to violence not because government managed to monopolize the legitimate means of coercion but because it rests on the oldest form of realizing meaning in the West: sacrifice” (98). Sacrifice is the essential characteristic of the western political imagination “that finds ultimate meanings in acts of killing and being killed” (14). However a problem emerges because “the act of sacrifice can refer to the self or an other. Sacrifice is both transitive and intransitive. Whom do we sacrifice for the state: citizen or enemy” (94). Kahn therefore suggests that ticking time bomb scenario “reminds us that civilization has its origins in the guilt-ridden act of violence” (95) by testing “oneʼs willingness to sacrifice others” (94). Kahnʼs argument is compelling in that it can help us to understand the link between the state of exception and exceptionalism. As we have seen in the previous chapters American exceptionalism is marked by the tension between its secular and sacred origins. The desire to somehow legitimize torture without bringing it into the realm of the law runs parallel to something like the exceptionalist desire to act within history without being subject to it. His analysis points to the fact that within the question of torture the issue of justice has little to do with it;

[Justice] appeals simultaneously to the universal character of reason and to the idea that all men are created in the image of God. Today law has inherited this tradition of the universal. […] Nevertheless, the state embodies the universal character of law within the borders of a very particular historical project (154).

At the core of exceptionalist thought is the wish to have it both ways, to speak from the position of the universal but act from the position of the particular. The ticking time bomb scenario reveals the tension between the universality justice and the particularity of political sacrifice. The ticking time bomb scenario works on the assumption that exceptional circumstances require exceptional thinking. 24 takes this as its primary premise. In order to complete his tasks, Jack Bauer often has to work at the boundaries of the law or even beyond it. Cameras are unplugged, knowledge of events and actions are almost always disavowed, and consequences (such as the possibility of not only losing his job and going to jail, but dying) are always deferred until the emergency is over. For the moment, necessity must be the only guiding principle against which he can measure his actions, and necessity almost always dictates that thereʼs never enough time and that the most extreme measures must be taken. On 24 the emergency is over at the end of each day/season, and presumably, normalcy returns with the last beep/pulse of its famous digital clock. However, the repetition of new and ever more catastrophic emergencies season after season helped to foster a sense that the emergency is never ending; there will always be terrorists who wish America harm and Jack Bauer will always be ready to “do whatʼs necessary” to insure they fail. The argument for the use of torture on 24 and by the Bush administration hinges on the construction of a perceived immediate necessity (saving millions of lives) and the exceptionality of the situation, that is, the insistence that under “normal” circumstances the question of torture isnʼt a question, but only becomes so in “exceptional”

88 circumstances. Both the act and the circumstances are exceptional. Charles Krauthammer, a central proponent of the use of torture, explains:

[T]here is the terrorist with information Let's take the textbook case. Ethics 101: A terrorist has planted a nuclear bomb in New York City. It will go off in one hour. A million people will die. You capture the terrorist. He knows where it is. He's not talking. Question: If you have the slightest belief that hanging this man by his thumbs will get you the information to save a million people, are you permitted to do it? […] on this issue, there can be no uncertainty: Not only is it permissible to hang this miscreant by his thumbs. It is a moral duty (“The Truth about Torture”).

This “textbook” case attempts to build into the system of law an exception to the prohibition against torture based on the utilitarian moral imperative that says torturing one person, who must be a “bad” person since he states explicitly that it is “a terrorist with information,” to save the lives of “million people” results in the greater good. He asserts, “[t]here must be exceptions. The real argument should be over what constitutes a legitimate exception.” Attempting to render the use of torture not only moral, but also just, opens a space in his logic that exposes the real issue at stake in the use of torture, which is not the extraction of information, but to extract a confession and to punish. Luban describes what he calls the “liberal ideology of torture.” He is interested how torture could be legitimized within the liberal tradition when it has always been anathema to it. He claims, “that torture is a microcosm, raised to the highest level of intensity, of the tyrannical political relationships that liberalism hates the most” (1430). Given liberalismʼs aversion to torture, in what circumstances might it become acceptable within the liberal imagination? According to Luban the ticking time bomb scenario provides the only rationale for a legitimate use for torture: intelligence gathering,

to speak in somewhat perverse and paradoxical way, liberalismʼs insistence of limited governments that exercise their power only for

89 instrumental and pragmatic purposes creates the possibility of seeing torture as a civilized, not an atavistic practice, provided that its sole purpose is preventing future harms (1436).

This argument assumes the emergence of exceptional measures. The exception is therefore built into the paradigm, but this is problematic again given that once one begins the work of formalizing the exception by bringing it within the bounds of the law it ceases to be exceptional. Krauthammer wishes to believe the moral good that will result from the application of torture precludes it from becoming a punishment, yet when he continues a few paragraphs later to ask,

[y]ou capture Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in Pakistan. He not only has already killed innocents, he is deeply involved in the planning for the present and future killing of innocents. He not only was the architect of the 9/11 attack that killed nearly three thousand people in one day, most of them dying a terrible, agonizing, indeed tortured death. But as the top al Qaeda planner and logistical expert he also knows a lot about terror attacks to come. He knows plans, identities, contacts, materials, cell locations, safe houses, cased targets, etc. What do you do with him? (“The Truth about Torture”).

His answer, to punish him: “it would be a gross dereliction of duty for any government not to keep Khalid Sheikh Mohammed isolated, disoriented, alone, despairing, cold and sleepless […] to find out what he knew about plans for future mass murder” (2005). That he might have useful information appears to be incidental to Krauthammerʼs desire to see Mohammed punished. At the heart of his logical machinations is a desire to perform an end-run around the liberal legal establishment that disallows torture, first, because it is an unreliable means of information gathering (Khan 26) and second, because of “a concern not just for the victim but also for the torturer” (Khan 3). The desire stems from the profound need to punish, to perform an inversion of the terroristʼs violence against

90 the nation back onto the body of the terrorist. The pretense of intelligence gathering is only a ruse to mask the punishment at the heart of the logic of torture. When a person tortures another, he has complete control over the life-world of his victim. In Discipline and Punish Foucault explained that in the pre-Modern period, torture was used as a way to demonstrate the sovereignʼs power over the life and death of his people. He called this the spectacle of the scaffold; the victim was tortured in the public square to extract from him a confession of his trespasses against the king. In The Body in Pain Elaine Scarry argues that the logic of torture reveals a “spectacle of power” (27); “[t]orture consists of a primary physical act, the infliction of pain, and a primary verbal act, the interrogation […] the pain is traditionally accompanied by ʻthe Questionʼ” (28). In both Foucaultʼs and Scarryʼs terms, torture is linked with the extraction of information in the form of the confession. The ticking time bomb scenario shifts tortureʼs purpose to the extraction of “actionable intelligence.” Scarry writes, “[a]lthough the information sought in an interrogation is almost never credited with being a just motive for torture, it is repeatedly credited with being the motive for torture” (28, emphasis in original). The ticking time bomb is different, in that it attempts to make the search for information a justification for torture. What separates contemporary torture from the pre- modern spectacle of the scaffold is that it wishes to conceal the retributive/power aspect inherent in torture. By claiming moral superiority, the logic of the ticking time bomb abdicates the torturer of responsibility, as if to say to the suspected terrorist, you brought this on yourself. But Krauthammerʼs invocation of Khalid Sheik Mohammadʼs role in the planning of the September 11th attacks belies his concern about using torture to avoid future possible terrorist attacks; according to his logic it shouldnʼt matter what “the terrorist” has done in the past; indeed, one could conceivably be innocent of any wrongdoing, but if one believes you to be in possession of any useful information then, according to the ticking time bomb scenario, torturing you for that information is not only excusable, but the only moral thing to do. Krauthammerʼs qualification that the victim must be a known terrorist undermines the claim that torture is not used to punish, therefore “what masquerades as the motive for torture is a fiction” (Scarry 28). Krauthammerʼs appeal

91 for saving the future mimics the logic of Manifest Destiny and the nationʼs history of a fatalistic resignation to violence and oppression since they are ultimately done in the service of universal salvation. Individual instances of injustice are tolerated. The village is destroyed so that it might be saved. This is the lesson of the jeremiadʼs renewal in crisis. For the moment, the nation is willing to accept the practice of torture, and to make itself a monster, so as to serve the promise of redeemed future. Demonstrating that ticking time bomb scenario is just another iteration of exceptionalist thinking. The ticking time bomb scenario functions to both reduce oneʼs empathy for the individual harmed and his/her responsibility for that pain in the name of “saving the world” (Taylor 721). Torture, as justified in the ticking time bomb scenario, rests on exceptionalist habits of thought that place the act of saving lives (of the nation, a people, a city) in the special category of immediate necessity. Again this justification replicates the exceptionalist logic of Manifest Destiny and provendiatiality wherein any injustice committed by the United States in its imperial expansion across the North American continent would ultimately be redeemed by the future expansion of liberty. The singular act one commits in the present is redeemed in the universal future of world salvation. Exceptionalist logic that attempts to justify torture goes beyond the claim of preemptive self defense into a terrain of a political theology in which America is Godʼs chosen nation, such that, if torturing people is “what it takes” to “get the job done,” then it must be so. The argument from necessity demonstrates again the circularity of exceptionalist logic outlined in chapters one and two: the predetermined, yet unknown future, justifies any injustices of the present. America tortures/uses enhanced interrogation techniques to save the world and keep it free. In her essay “Double-Blind: The Torture Case” Diana Taylor describes the ticking time bomb hypothetical as both a limit case and a scenario. Taylor defines the limit case as “irreproducible and ungeneralizable—the exception that serves only as illustration rather than rule” (716). Advocates like Krauthammer appeal to the logic of the exceptional limit case. However, the act of codification presupposes repetition; therefore Taylor suggests that the ticking time bomb functions as a scenario. Scenarios “are hypothetical; [… &] reveal deep social imaginaries, fears, and desires” (716). Taylor

92 characterizes Krauthammerʼs ticking time bomb argument as “an emotional appeal (wouldnʼt you torture to save millions of lives?) that twists the ʻmonstrousʼ practice into a pragmatic necessity” (725). Taylorʼs argument articulates how the torture debate occurs at the intersection of the limit case and the scenario. Presented as a limit or exceptional case, in this one special or unlikely circumstance—a ticking time bomb ready to explode within hours—one must transgress normal boundaries into the “monstrous” realm of torture. However, the codification of the ticking time bomb—the victim must be a known terrorist, all other options must be exhausted, danger must be imminent, and many peopleʼs lives must be at stake—exposes it as a repeatable scenario. She opposes scenarios to narratives because scenarios “demand staging and embodiment” (728) and “eliminate complexity and put us in the picture; we identify with and are part of, the drama” (729). Taylor laments that the scenarios have become “the ways in which ethical issues are being rehearsed and decided in our society” (729); they “banish reflection” in favor of the emotional spectacle of the possibly explosive perpetual present;

Instead of the so-last-century division between good and evil, in which bad guys like Darth Vader wore black, now, post-9/11, the good and the bad have collapsed into one. The new hero is 24ʼs Jack Bauer—the ʻgoodʼ man who chooses to do bad things for good reasons. The clock ticks against him. He, and by extension ʻwe,ʼ are running out of time in a crisis that seems both endless and imminent (732).

In fact, Dexter appropriates Bauerʼs character for different ends. Instead of a good man doing bad things for good reasons, Dexter is a heroic sociopath and serial killer, and the series poses the question, does a bad person doing bad things for good reasons, make him good? 24 follows the ticking time bomb argument to its logical conclusion and makes no exception for who can and cannot be tortured. During seasons one through five, and in season four particularly, torture is simply a normal part of the day-to-day fight against terrorism. Its use is not presented as a means of last resort, but is a go-to tool of choice.

93 Thereʼs little moralistic hand wringing over whether or not to torture.49 Season four of 24 garnered the most attention for its flagrant and repetitive use of torture. As a simple plot device itʼs an easy way to create dramatic tension. At first glance it would be easy to suggest that 24ʼs repeated use of torture creates a fantasy world in which it is not only a highly effective, but a fairly easy form of intelligence gathering, hence the repeated conservative appeals to it as justification for the practice, but that reading fails to account for both the representation of torture and its ramifications within the series. For example, Bauer and other Counter Terrorist Unit (CTU) agents torture people who they suspect may have pertinent information based on extremely tenuous circumstantial evidence. Their victims are not Krauthammerʼs “known terrorists” who committed heinous crimes; Bauer and CTU torture “regular” people as often as terrorists. 50 The first person in season four CTU uses “enhanced interrogation techniques” on is Richard Heller. They believe, based on a polygraph, that he might have information pertaining to the kidnapping of his father, the Secretary of Defense, who later authorizes that the interrogation should continue once he determines his son may have information (“Day 4: 8:00 a.m. – 9:00 a.m.” 4.02 and “Day 4: 12:00 p.m. – 1:00 p.m.” 4.06).51 A few episodes later, a member of the CTU team, Sarah Gavin, is also forcefully interrogated after planted information is found on her workstation (“Day 4: 2:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m.” 4.08). Bauer uses Audrey Raines, his girlfriend and the Secretary of defenseʼs daughter, to lure in her ex-husband Paul who Bauer believes to be connected to the terrorist plot. Paul claims to not know anything about the terrorists and believes his link to the terrorists is merely superficial. Unhappy with this response and convinced that Paul knows more than he is letting on Bauer decides to torture him for information. By season six the tone of the series had shifted and there was an attempt to create a more morally grey universe. This shift makes sense given the seasonʼs appearance during the late Bush administration; by 2006 his approval ratings dropped and the war in Iraq continued. In season six, Bauer is unsure about what heʼs fighting

49 As for example in season one of Lost, when the torture of Sawyer is presented as a “last resort.” 50 To be clear, torture is a practice that everyone in 24ʼs world engages in, CTU and terrorists alike. 51 A scene between the Secretary and his son is one of those typical scenes in 24 where the arguments for and against torture are rehearsed by characters.

94 for. The new President Palmer, the first President Palmerʼs brother, is wavering on his decisions. The neighbors are indeed “sleeper” terrorists, but the audience is also asked to feel for innocent detainees who are victims of profiling and PATRIOT ACT-like detention methods. This attempt at nuance is largely unsuccessful because it relies too heavily on rote argumentation. Debate on 24 happens much like it does on the 24-hours news, through meaningless talking points. For example, in the opening sequence of the season an argument over warrantless wiretapping and indefinite detainment has the National Security Advisor arguing against “trampling” the constitution in the name of security while the Chief of Staff asserts that security has a price. Despite this rather banal conversation, the individual plight of Jack Bauer continues to reveal interesting things about the repercussions of exceptionalist thinking. Bauer is released after two years of torture and suffering in a Chinese prison, but he is only released to be sacrificed for some other cause. What was an undercurrent in all the previous seasons becomes a fully realized point of the narrative, Bauerʼs never- ending sacrifice. Nations require sacrifices; someone must go willingly to the slaughter so that the rest of the city/community/nation can live in peace. Of course he escapes this fate and becomes entangled in trying to thwart the terrorists yet again, but having been on the receiving end of torture, albeit unjustifiable torture since the Chinese are not presented as torturing Bauer to extract information to save millions of lives but instead to punish him for killing the Chinese consul, again underscoring that itʼs only America that is capable of acting exceptionally, Bauer begins to question his methods. In episode 6.03 when confronted with a situation, which in previous seasons would lead him to immediately torture his suspect, he says, “I donʼt know how to do this anymore” to which the suspect responds reassuringly “you will.” After a nuclear explosion in Los Angles, Bauer regains his confidence and moral certitude; he must stop another explosion no matter what the cost. There is an implied equivalence made between individual and nation by invoking Bauerʼs success as proof that the U.S. should engage in the practice of torture. According to the ticking time bomb scenario and the liberal ideology of torture, the question, do we as a nation torture, is the same as, would I torture? Bauer is offered as

95 an “everyman” with whom the “we” of the audience is asked to identify with, but Bauer is not simply presented as an everyman; instead he is an embodiment of exceptional American par excellence. He occupies the position of “America”; his success is predetermined because he is on the side of right and freedom; whatever he does must by definition, according to the exceptionalist matrix, be a moral good because it is done in the service of universal freedom. Bauer is committed to the dream of America as world redeemer. His sacred mission is coterminous with the nationʼs. He is an iteration of the frontiersman who works within the chaos of the unknown wilderness of a new world inhabited by terrorists to secure a positive future for civilization. 24 normalizes torture, most problematically because Bauer is always absolved of guilt because his actions often provide some kind of useful information. Despite this seeming normality, Bauer is always aware that his actions are not standard practice and that he works beyond the bounds of the law, which is what makes him distinct from both his fellow CTU agents and his conservative interlocutors. When Bauer is personally responsible for torturing a suspect it almost always results in revealing “actionable information”; however, in the example above, Sarah Gavinʼs torture does not lead to results since she was not guilty of any actual wrongdoing. On 24 it is only Bauer who can reliably know when torture is necessary and appropriate. He is the exceptional individual, endowed with a special sense to know when torture is appropriate, replicating the myth of choseness as well as exceptionality. Like a superhero, Bauer has special torture powers, able to discern when torture is appropriate and necessary. Between seasons six and seven the two-hour movie, 24:Redemption, aired. In it Bauer is helping a friend, former Special Forces operative, in the fictional African nation, Sangala. Bauer has been traveling the globe running from a subpoena to appear before a Senate committee to testify about the “illegal detention and torture of some prisoners in Mr. Bauerʼs custody” while simultaneously searching for redemption for those same actions. Attempting to address the problem of child soldiers, Bauer intervenes as a paramilitary operation executes a military coup (aided by American corporate money) and saves a group of young Sangalan boys from conscription, but in doing so is finally arrested. Redemption sets up the action for season seven. It establishes that Bauer is

96 haunted by his past even if he is never willing to recant, and when the bookish government official Frank Trammel attempts to serve Bauer with the subpoena he says, “failure to comply with a subpoena is a federal offense Mr Bauer; you are bound by law to respond” he reveals the problem at the heart of exceptionalist logic. In declaring the exception, in adhering to its logic, there is no longer any law to which Bauer can be bound and no standard of justice by which to judge his actions, and this is precisely what advocates for the use of torture fail to comprehend. Season seven sees the apotheosis of 24ʼs narrative—in one episode he actually tortures someone in the White House (“Day 7: 6:00 p.m. – 7:00 p.m.” 7.11). First, after the events of Redemption, Bauer is questioned by the Senate about his previous actions. This opening scene is a nod to the extratexual debate over 24 and the justification of torture. It sets the tone for the entire season which seeks to maintain the consistency of Bauerʼs character and the persistent narrative need to have someone work beyond the bounds of the law, even as it also begins to suggest that perhaps torturing people should be done with less carefree glee. Having chosen to refuse council, Senator Mayer questions Bauer about Ibrimahim Hadad, “a member of a terrorist sleeper cell CTU had under surveillance in 2002” (“Day 7: 8:00 a.m. – 9:00 a.m.” 7.01) who Bauer admits to torturing.

MAYER: Did you torture Mr. Hadad? [Split screen] Senator on left Bauer on right. BAUER: According to the conventions set forth by the Geneva Convention, yes I did. Senator, why donʼt I save you some time? Itʼs obvious that your agenda is to discredit CTU and generate a series of indictments. [Mayer interrupts] MAYER: My only agenda is to get to the truth. BAUER: I donʼt think it is Sir. MAYER: Excuse me?

97 BAUER: Ibrahim Hadad had targeted a bus carrying 45 people, 10 of which were children. The truth, Senator, is I stopped that attack from happening. MAYER: By torturing Mr. Hadad! BAUER: By doing what I deem necessary to protect innocent lives. MAYER: So, basically, what youʼre saying, Mr. Bauer, is that the ends justify the means and that you are above the law. BAUER: When I am activated, when I am brought into a situation there is a reason, and that reason is to complete the objectives of my mission at all costs. MAYER: Even if it means breaking the law? BAUER: For a combat soldier the difference between success and failure is your ability to adapt to your enemy. The people that I deal with donʼt care about your rules; all they care about is a result. My job is to stop them from accomplishing their objectives. I simply adapted. In answer to your question, am I above the law? No, sir. I am more than willing to be judged by the people you claim to represent. I will let them decide the price I should pay. But please do not sit there with that smug look on your face and expect me to regret the decisions I have made. Because, sir, the truth is, I donʼt.

Bauerʼs language in this scene is pointed and directly in line with his general character. He refers to himself in mechanical terms; he is “activated” or switched on to perform a specific duty. He indicates that the rules he breaks are not his but the Senatorʼs, and he questions Mayerʼs claim to represent the people. Bauer implies that his one rule— protect the innocent no matter the cost—is more representative of the peopleʼs will, which is a higher authority than Senator Mayer can claim. Bauer remains the hero and ultimate American. Itʼs his unabashed acceptance of an economy of sacrifice (both his own and that of his enemies) to which admiration of him points. Torture is ultimately

98 beside the point. “The rules are what makes us better” FBI agent Larry Moss asserts, to which Bauer replies, “Not today.” Unlike the standard image of Bauer as rugged hero who does whatʼs necessary, the antithesis of the intellectual who is made impotent by constant questioning, another image of Bauer emerges, one in which he is a sad and pitiful character. When the status quo is restored at the end of each season, Bauer is unable to participate in the civilization he works to protect. He is at various points assumed dead, a fugitive searching the globe for redemption, and captured by the Chinese, held prisoner, and tortured. His family life is a shambles; his first wife is murdered, his daughter resents and hates him, and his girlfriend is captured and tortured. He is a tool of the state, no more than a crude weapon of sovereign power. 24 participated in the cultural normalization of torture, but the series may be less comfortable with the reality and efficacy of torture than the image of Bauer painted by those who cite him as hero or villain. Bauer may be a hero, but he is ultimately alone. He must remain outside of the social order, for if he were to return to it, he would infect it. In season four when Audrey witnesses Bauer torture her ex-husband Paul, she cannot come to terms with what Bauer does and decides she cannot be with him. Perhaps it is too much for her to acknowledge that what Bauer does, he does for her. To protect the body of the nation from invasion, desecration, and violation, the citizen soldier sacrifices himself. In Bauerʼs case he willingly places the “needs of the many” before his personal need to be a “normal” member of society. And he must suffer in silence. He can never tell, or share, or reveal, the lengths he had to go to to preserve the people. The assertion that the nation is only “doing what needs to be done” is expressed on 24 in Bauerʼs repeated assertion that he only resorts to the use of torture because he has no other choice. However, what those who appropriate Bauerʼs logic fail to understand, in a way that Bauer always does, is that these actions force him into the position of the scapegoat, taking on the burdens of the community he can never return to. America not only wishes to remain in the world community, but hold power over it, wishing to retain its status as sacrificed and sovereign.

99 Bauerʼs inability to exist and be recognized by the society he works to protect is a primary narrative point in the seasons six and seven. Season seven introduces Renee Walker, an FBI agent, who moreso than Bauer ever did, represents the implied “you” in the ticking time bombʼs question, “would you torture one person to potentially save millions?” Instead of Bauerʼs immediate “yes,” the season follows Walker as she grapples with the possibility of becoming the next Jack Bauer. She is initially repulsed by his methods, but as the situation intensifies early in the season, she decides to engage in Bauerʼs “by any means” necessary line of thinking. In “Day 7: 3:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m.,” Bauer instructs Walker to threaten a suspectʼs wife and infant in order to gain information (7.08). The ruse works, as all of Bauerʼs incursions into the land of the exception do, but unlike in previous seasons, the woman confronts Walker and declares, “you are a monster,” and Walker knows she is right. Walker learns what it means to act outside the bounds of the law; it means to exist beyond the bounds of the human community, one must become monstrous. This monstrous existence, one that Bauer always acknowledges, is what proponents of torture willfully ignore. Their desire is essentially to have it both ways, to claim the force of law, while not only ignoring it when one deems necessary, but also claiming the moral high ground of leaving it behind. A few episodes later, a civilian is killed in an attempt to capture the terrorist leader. Seated in the back of a car Walker declares, “We should not have used her like this,” to which Bauer replies, “She was our only asset.” Walker angrily declares rather prosaically that “Sheʼs not an asset, sheʼs a human being.” Bauer is visibly shaken by having this thrown back in his face, as though heʼs never really thought about it that way before. Bauer lives in a world of things in which he is only one of many. In the final episode of the season, Walker is tempted to use Bauerʼs “torture now, deal with the consequences later” approach. Wilson, the mastermind behind everything thatʼs happened on the series since season four, and it should be noted that the bad guys on 24 are more often wealthy white Americans who exploit ideologically motivated terrorists for their own monetary gain, has finally been apprehended by the FBI, but when confronted by Renee, he is satisfied that there is no material evidence that ties him to

100 anything.52 Renee turns to Bauer on his deathbed after having been exposed to a weaponized biological agent that will soon kill him.

WALKER: he has absolutely no reason to tell us who else is involved in this with him, but I can make him talk. If we donʼt find these people, one day they will launch another attack and I donʼt see how I can live with myself knowing there was something I could have done to stop it. [Pause Bauer looks down and sighs.] I donʼt know what to do. BAUER: I canʼt tell you what to do. Iʼve been wrestling with this one my whole life. I see fifteen people held hostage on a bus everything else goes out the window. I will do whatever it takes to save them and I mean whatever it takes [beat] because maybe I thought, if I save them, I save myself. WALKER: Do you regret anything you did today? BAUER: No. Then again I donʼt work for the FBI. WALKER: I donʼt understand. BAUER: You took an oath; you made a promise to uphold the law. You cross that line it always starts with a small step. Before you know it youʼre running as fast as you can in the wrong direction just to justify why you started in the first place. These laws were written by men a lot smarter than me, and in the end I know these laws have to be more important than the 15 people on the bus. I know thatʼs right, in my mind. I know thatʼs right. I just donʼt think my heart could ever have lived with that. I guess the only advice I can give you is [beat] try and make choices you can live with. (“Day 7: 7:00 a.m. – 8:00 a.m.” 7.24).

52 Not to mention that in season five, the final “big bad” is an American corporation that has been manipulating the president who is aware of and has been allowing the terrorist acts to occur.

101 Walker seemingly makes the decision to walk Bauerʼs road by torturing Wilson. She removes the symbols of her office, the FBI Jacket and badge until Janice invokes the memory of Agent Larryʼs death. Renee has taken the position of the “you” in the ticking time bomb scenario. Though she is an FBI agent with training beyond the average person, she does not have the Special Forces background that Bauer has. When presented with the option of “doing whatever it takes” the moral ambiguities are more palpable to her. She does not have the luxury of abstraction that the Senator has, or the complete absence of abstraction that has been Bauerʼs experience. Seeing both the possible immediate benefits of acting without reservation, while always cognizant of the implications of pushing the law aside, makes for a far more compelling commentary on the nature of the ticking time bomb scenario. It exists in a no-manʼs-land of extreme abstraction, the intangible “what if,” while simultaneously invoking the immediacy of the perpetual present of “right now.” No one can inhabit that space and to attempt to do so is to sink into the depth of madness. After years of bending and twisting the law in some kind of wilderness of terror, the primacy of the law prevails, even if it meant the [white people] go free. At its close 24 asserts the universality of justice over the particularity of the political theology of sacrifice, and had this been the final season and had Jack Bauer been allowed to die it would have done so while maintaining that sacrifices will always be required. But, the series will continue, and Bauer is not only rewarded with a second chance at life, but the return of his daughter to his life. Ultimately 24 revels in the melodrama of overwrought and obvious symbolism; who else but a victim of Bauerʼs “whatever it takes” mentality, the innocent Muslim cleric who he abused in “Day 7: 4:00 a.m. – 5:00 a.m.,” can offer him some kind of absolution for his sins? As with the earlier plot point involving the framing of an innocent Muslim as a terrorist, these plot contrivances indicate some kind of shift in the larger cultural mood.

BAUER: Iʼve made so many mistakes and I always thought I would have the time to correct them. GOHAR: You have the time, right now.

102 BAUER: [quietly] You donʼt know what Iʼve done. GOHAR: We live in complex times, Mr. Bauer nothing is black and white. But I do know this, I see before me a man, with all his flaws and all his goodness, simply a man (“Day 7: 7:00 a.m. – 8:00 a.m.” 7.24).

He reaches for his hand. Cuts to a view from behind viewing glass and Gohar raises his other hand in prayer. It cuts back to the shot reverse shot as Gohar continues “let us both forgive ourselves for all the wrongs we have done.” Itʼs a commercially calculated move; if the Fox network wants 24 to bring in profitable audiences, in late 2008 and early 2009, the “torture-now-deal-with-the- ramifications-later” ethic of 24ʼs earlier seasons isnʼt viable.53 Cynically then, 24ʼs shift in tone can be chalked up to the perceived needs of the prime time network landscape. However, it manages to hedge its bets in such a way that it manages to have it both ways. Bauer has no regrets but realizes the impossibility of living (literally in this case since Bauer is dying) in the space of the exception.

Serial Killer Logic The popular Showtime series Dexter, based on the novel Darkly Dreaming Dexter by Jeff Lindsay, follows the life of Dexter Morgan, a blood splatter expert for the Miami Metro Police and serial killer. The series uses the conventions of the police procedural, mystery novel, and serial killer crime dramas to paint a vivid portrait of the life of a serial killer. Dexter is a different kind of serial killer; he has a code. His adopted father, Harry Morgan, taught him this code after recognizing Dexterʼs detachment from the world and his need to kill at a young age. Dexterʼs sociopathic behavior is rooted in an experience he had as a small child; Dexter witnessed the brutal murder of his mother. She was butchered with a chainsaw, and he and his brother were left in the cargo canister for two days in a pool of her (and the other victimʼs) blood. Dexter calls

53 This season was also delayed for over a year due to the 2007 writers strike. Series creator Joel Surnow left mid-season. For more on Surnow and the role his politics played in the series see Mayer.

103 his code “the code of Harry.” According to this code, Dexter may only kill other killers and he must have irrefutable evidence of his victimʼs guilt. Dexter has constructed a very elaborate identity for himself. He sees himself as a kind of inhuman monster. Heʼs damaged and broken: “Neither man nor beast with [his] own set of rules - [he is] Iʼm Dexter” (“Letʼs Give the Boy a Hand” 1.04). He resides in a space beyond humanity. This is important for him, and the audience, because if he were to conceive of himself as human, and if the audience were placed in the position to see him as human, they would then be implicated in his actions. If he is understood as some kind of exception he is then not emblematic of something nasty or evil within human nature. The problem, however, with arguing that Dexter is inhuman is that he isnʼt inhuman. He is flawed humanity, broken, born through an event that no person should have to endure, but heʼs still human, and this is ultimately what makes him a compelling character. Itʼs not simply that the series provides an interesting look into the mind and life of a serial killer, but that it so successfully places the audience into a position in which one finds oneself not only identifying with, but also rooting for the killer. We empathize with his experiences and we lament that his innocence was taken from him so violently. We rationalize his special desires that need to be fulfilled because they are properly channeled into, like Bauer on 24, making the world a safer place by “taking out the trash” (“Born Free” 1.12). And like Bauer he does it by working around the law and around morality. He claims his code is superior to the law and has managed to convince himself and the audience that he can be, and in fact is, both a killer and a hero, and that being a killer is an act of heroism. Why read Dexter in relationship to the torture debate? What can Dexter reveal to us about the nature of the state of exception and its imbrication within the American exceptionalist matrix? There is something about Dexterʼs code and worldview that resonates with exceptionalismʼs justifying discourses. The logic of the ticking time bomb extends beyond the specifics of the scenario, and Dexter, both the series and the character, can help us understand the ramifications of exceptionalist thinking as it circulates outside the specific question of torture. Torture, as a special case in the liberal tradition, is the most visible and egregious example of the ramifications of exceptionalist

104 thinking, but the logic of the exception extends beyond the issue of torture, indefinite detainment, or the USA PATRIOT act. Its logic extends beyond justifying state action outside the bounds of law. The exceptionalist matrix, which has incorporated the state of exception within it, is as much a habit of thinking as it is a foundational mythology and a process of justification. Considering Dexter in light of the exception can help illuminate how it functions as a process. The repetitive deployment of the ticking-time bomb scenario represents one such process; Dexterʼs identity and actions, the righteous serial killer who only kills other killers, is another iteration of how exceptionalism functions as a process of justification that must be continually reasserted. Dexter can successfully get its audience to identify with a serial killer because the “the code of Harry” exemplifies exceptionalist thinking as a process of justification that already exists. “Audiences taking in a monster story arenʼt horrified by the creatureʼs otherness, but by its uncanny resemblance to ourselves” (Newitz 2). There is a tradition of vigilante justice in American popular culture; from Dirty Harry to Batman, the trope of the wronged man who seeks justice outside a system that failed him is a mainstay of action films and comic books. Dexterʼs story at its base fits within this tradition; however it deviates from the standard vigilante trope. Dexter isnʼt a wronged man seeking vengeance or revenge for the loss of his mother or the loss of his innocence. Dexter only appropriates the language of justice to serve his very particular purpose—killing people. His past trauma provides a reason for why he the way he is, and the audience can look to his code and trauma to give them the comfort that what heʼs doing is somehow justifiable. But, in order to do so, both Dexter and the audience must bracket off the violence he commits, in much the same way that the structure of exceptionalist belief in an eventual good outcome justified the violence of expansion. In Homo Sacer, Agamben writes about the figure of the “wargus” or “wolfman.” He notes this figure was

a monstrous hybrid of human and animal, divided between the forest and the city […] a threshold of indistinction and of passage between animal and man, physis and nomos, exclusion and inclusion […] who is precisely

105 neither man nor beast, and who dwells paradoxically within both while belonging to neither (105 italics in original).

This figure inhabits the space of the exception, neither within the law or the community, but not completely outside of it either. This figure echoes the wilderness frontiersman who flees the city willingly to bring order to the wilderness, but the monstrous man/beast hybrid is cast out and rejected. As noted earlier, the state of exception differs from the frontier or the garden because it is called into being through the suspension of the law. Unlike Jack Bauer who, while never regretting any of his actions, laments his liminal and lonely existence, Dexter has chosen to embrace a liminal existence by building his entire sense of being around it. Dexter understands his identity through the lens of the monstrous or inhuman. Like Bauer he exists in a perpetual outside, in constant relationship to the law, but always removed from it. The space of the exception is the space between the state of nature and the law, a literal no manʼs land. Dexter inhabits and rules over this land. Working as a blood splatter expert for the Miami Metro police department places Dexter firmly within the sphere of the law, but often he uses his position to undermine the execution of justice to serve his own ends. The law is merely a tool to be exploited or an inconvenience to be discarded when necessary. The law, like his victims, is at times also his enemy because it stands in the way of his mission. Itʼs an inconvenience and hindrance that must be set aside when necessity dictates that doing so serves his higher purposes. Each of Dexterʼs three seasons are highly serialized, each episode builds on the last, following a central mystery. Dexter disposes of his victims by hacking them up into smaller manageable pieces and then dumping them out into the Atlantic Ocean. At the beginning of season two, divers discover Dexterʼs dumping ground. This discovery leads to the search for the “Bay Harbor Butcher.” The season follows both the search for “the Butcher” and Dexterʼs attempts to evade capture. Once more is learned about the identity of the butcherʼs victims some people laud the butcher as a defender of the people. His dreamlike vision from the end of season one in which he sees himself welcomed by a crowd of adoring fans comes closer to reality. A comic book artist even

106 creates a comic book hero based on him, “the Dark Defender” a “stalker of the night his blade of vengeance turns wrong into right” (“The Dark Defender” 2.05). Despite this adulation, Agent Lundy, the F.B.I agent assigned to work the Butcher case, reminds everyone that, “the worst killers in history are usually the ones who think their murders were somehow just, even deserved. Leaders have slaughtered whole populations for the same warped reason.” As the season progresses, his nemesis Detective Doakes learns Dexterʼs true identity. Throughout seasons one and two, Doakes has always been wary of Dexter. Dexter claims this is because Doakes is also a killer. In “Thereʼs Something About Harry” this confrontation comes to a head when Dexter captures Doakes (2.10). Dexter is now placed in the position of having to decide what to do with Doakes; setting him free dooms Dexter to capture, but killing him would violate his code. As the episode opens, Dexter has Doakes locked in a cage in a cabin in the remote Florida Everglades. Doakes, who represents the law, is caged by Dexter who stands outside of it free from its restrictions. Dexter claims to follow a higher law. In a series of shot and reverse shots that highlight the distance and power differential between the two men, Dexter and Doakes argue about the difference between them and their relationship to both the law and justice.

DEXTER: Why couldnʼt you just leave me to do my work in peace? Why did you have to go and ruin everything?” DOAKES: Youʼre a killer. I catch killers. DEXTER: So do I. I caught you. DOAKES: Iʼm not a killer. DEXTER: You are. Itʼs why youʼve always known what I am. Itʼs why you have more officer related shootings than anyone else.

Doakes looks dejected and shameful. Doakes understands his own actions in different terms from what he believes Dexter to be. However, Dexterʼs point is underscored by the time the series has spent in creating equivalences between them. That is why it

107 becomes so easy for the FBI and Lundy to eventually believe Doakes is the Bay Harbor Butcher. The scene continues:

DEXTER: Only they donʼt fuck with you when you shoot somebody. Why couldnʼt you pay me the same professional courtesy? DOAKES: Thereʼs nothing professional about what you do. I kill when I have to, on the job. DEXTER: Oh so, itʼs okay to take a life as long as you get a paycheck for it? DOAKES: The city pays me to keep the law. DEXTER: Iʼve got news for you Sergeant; my code requires a higher standard of proof than your cityʼs laws. At zero cost for the taxpayer, you ask me, Iʼm a bargain.

Dexter speaks with contempt of the law. The prepositions, “you,” “your,” and “my” place him outside and above the law; itʼs Doakesʼs and the cityʼs law, not Dexterʼs. As we saw in the previous discussion of 24, Bauer makes a similar claim in defense of his exceptional methods. By the end of the episode Dexter has decided that the best way to get rid of Doakes is to frame him and let him take the fall as the Butcher. Dexter reasons that Doakes has less to lose. He has no strong family connections and no one who relies on him. Dexter has Debra, Rita and the kids to look out for. He is aware enough that he knows if heʼs revealed as the Butcher it would devastate them. The two men continue their exchange later in the episode as Dexter prepares the room for “Doakes’ final kill.”

DOAKES: Thereʼs no way people are going to believe I did this shit. DEXTER: You were U.S Special Forces. Iʼm sure you have done this. DOAKES: Wartime circumstances, heat of the battle, but never cold- blooded Morgan. DEXTER: Iʼm sure that made things easier for you.

108 DOAKES: Morgan, God damn it! You got a conscience man; you said it yourself. You go after killers. You take out killers. I get that. But this [beat pointing to the plastic] this is some sick fuck ritual, man. You need help, man. Let me help you. DEXTER smiles reassuringly: Donʼt worry Sergeant I wonʼt make you watch. Iʼm not uncivilized.

Dexter rejects the distinction Doakes makes between “the heat of battle” and Dexterʼs vigilantism. Dexterʼs claim to be “civilized” is, of course, an ironic assertion, since it is said as he places the final piece of plastic sheeting over the cage obscuring Doakesʼs and the audienceʼs view of the staging area. The sheet creates a semitransparent wall and shifts the perspective from Dexter to Doakes as if to reiterate just how uncivilized Dexter is, existing in his plastic lined universe of warped justice:

DOAKES pleads with Dexter: You donʼt have to do this. You donʼt have to kill this man. DEXTER asserts from the other side of the sheet: This man is a felon with a body count. He brought it on himself. DOAKES: Turn him over to the law. DEXTER: I live by my fatherʼs law.

With this final declaration, Dexter turns on the saw and begins his work. We hear the noise, but the plastic sheeting obstructs the view. We see him but only through the warped semi-translucence of the plastic screen. Doakes pleads one last time “Morgan donʼt do this” as blood flows and pools down into the sheet. Doakes looks down in horror. Doakesʼs reaction and the staging of the scene suggest that we should likewise be horrified, yet we find ourselves in the unenviable position of commiserating and agreeing with a sociopath. Dexter is our hero—we donʼt want him to get caught. Until this episode, Dexterʼs brutality was hinted at, but most of his killing and dismembering happens through visual association. We see mangled and dismembered body parts;

109 occasionally we see the initial kill, a knife through the abdomen or across the neck. The really dirty work happens off camera, but here and still obscured from direct vision, the bloody gruesome reality of what Dexter is, is slowly uncovered, the insane illogic of a law outside the law. Dexterʼs worldview is eventually challenged when he learns that Harry, who he thought died from a heart attack, actually committed suicide after confronting his creation. In a flashback, a young Dexter, covered in blood and using a hacksaw to dismember a victim, is startled by his father opening the door. Harry looks on in disbelief. Dexter says, “Hey dad, look what I did” with the pride of a little kid showing a drawing he did. Harry, unable to contain his disgust at what he has created, vomits into the camera. In voiceover back in the present, Dexter says, “The idea of a code was one thing, a grand idea, a noble cause, but the reality of it. Harry walked in on what he created and he couldnʼt live with himself” (2.10). The reality of exceptionalist thinking, that doing evil in the name of good can somehow cancel the evil out, is impossible. Dexter begins to question his purpose, and Doakes is able to convince him to “end it now” and “take responsibility for who [he is]” (“Left Turn Ahead” 2.11), by accepting the ramifications of his actions and turning himself in. He decides to confess to Deb first, but he changes his mind because Deb believes in him; she tells him “you decide who you are, who you want to be, and you hold onto that.” Better to live the lie and survive than confess the truth and die. He chooses to continue with his plan to let Doakes take the fall as the Bay Harbor Butcher. For Dexterʼs third season Showtime commissioned Shepard Faireyʼs to create an iconic image for the series. The image, which echoes Faireyʼs image of Barak Obama, depicted Dexter looking thoughtfully into the distance with the words “power-saw to the people” at the bottom, and the sixth episode was titled “Si Se Puede.” Like the “yes we can” slogan, Dexter takes his message of vigilantism to the people. In this season, Miguel Prado, a district attorney, makes his appearance, representing another facet of the law Dexter must contend with. Prado learns of Dexterʼs secret identity and becomes his apprentice. Dexter teaches him “the code of Harry,” but it backfires; Prado goes rogue and murders an innocent woman, a rival defense attorney Ellen Wolf. Prado

110 wants to kill Wolf because “her job is to uphold the law, but Ellen Wolf she twists and bends the law until it's unrecognizable” (3.07). Wolf is part of that bureaucratic red tape that gets in the way of Prado and a bad guy taking his last breath. He envies the power Dexter has in claiming and executing his own set of laws.

PRADO: What did it feel like to uh take him out? To end his life […] DEXTER: You put people on death row; you must know what it's like. PRADO: Oh no, but there's like an ocean of bureaucracy of briefs and appeals between me that bad guy taking his last breath. I'm asking what did it feel like to use your hands [beat] to make this a better place. DEXTER: It felt right. It felt like Justice (3.06).

But by Dexterʼs own code, Dexter should be executed. Itʼs the one irony that Dexter isnʼt keyed into (since the series is a formal exercise in the use and abuse of dramatic irony), which is the lesson he attempts to teach Prado after Prado killed Ellen Wolf. Dexter in voice over says, “They look at him and see a defender of truth, justice, and the American way. I see a man about to learn a hard lesson. […] Too many people are affected when the innocent die.” (3.09) Once Prado flouts Dexterʼs code, Dexter realizes that he cannot align himself with the law; only by acting from the space outside of it can he fulfill his destiny. He alone is chosen therefore he, again like Bauer, has the ability to discern when exceptional force is necessary and appropriate. Dexter attempts to make his defining trauma and his motherʼs death meaningful, since she was unable to save him from being irrevocably altered by the event (she pleads with him: “donʼt look Dexter”), by enacting justice through his actions as a vigilante serial killer. He is not able to save neither her nor himself, but he can “save” others. But in order to root for Dexter we have to bracket the collateral damage he causes. His narrow definition of causality makes him incapable of recognizing his complicity in the deaths of many other innocent people. For example, he absolves himself of Doakesʼs death by killing Lila who was directly responsible. He doesnʼt realize

111 that though he did not directly end Doakesʼs life, he created and is responsible for the circumstances that allowed his death to occur. Doakes has to die so that Dexter might live and continue his good work, but Dexter cannot kill him because doing so would violate the code. Dexter gets what he needs and maintains the codeʼs purity by not taking an innocent life. Dexterʼs identity as warped superhero, “the dark defender,” keeps him from realizing that heʼs the one who needs to learn the lesson that too many people are affected when the innocent die. He invokes the language of choseness in the final moments of season two:

I passed through the flames and rose from the ashes again. Iʼve never been one to put much weight into the idea a higher power, but if I didnʼt know better Iʼd have to believe that some force out there wants me to keep doing what Iʼm doing. I am a master now, an idea transcended into life. [...] Am I evil? Am I good? Iʼm done asking those questions. I donʼt have the answers. Does anyone? (“The British Invasion” 2.12).

In seeing himself in the position of master and “idea transitioned into life” Dexter places himself in the realm of the exception and beyond the law. However, by doing this he refuses to take responsibility for his own actions. The moment he decided to let Doakes take the fall for being the “Bay Harbor Butcher” was the moment he began to believe his own lie, that he is beyond the law, and not subject to it. The discussion of 24 sought to articulate how Bauerʼs “whatever it takes” code forces him to exist, live is too strong since it calls to mind having a life beyond mere existence, outside of the human community and that his expulsion is the price he pays for the ability to live out his “whatever it takes” code. Dexter, both the series and character, function as a national allegory. Exceptionalist thinking is central to Dexterʼs self-conception and his code. Dexter in many ways is similar to Jack Bauer. He works at the margins of legality, morality, and humanity. He provides a valuable social service by keeping society safe from murderous ticking time bombs. He does not kill out of a sense

112 of justice, but because he has a need. Part of his ritual, instilled in him by his adopted father Harry, is the lie that he tells himself that he is serving justice. In the final scene of the first season, Dexter walking through a crowd blocked off by police tape, imagines himself as though he were walking a red carpet, cheered on by his adoring fans. A plane flies by with a sign that says “We [heart] Dexter” as confetti rains down over the scene. The crowd cheers. Dexter smiles. Debra jumps up with glee.

DEXTER V.O: My tragedy is I killed the one person I didnʼt have to hide from, and Iʼm the only one who mourns him. Everyone else would probably thank me if they knew I was the one who drained him of his life. POLICE OFFER: Good job in there, Dex; you sliced him up good. DEXTER V.O: In fact deep down, Iʼm sure theyʼd appreciate a lot of my work. SECOND POLICE OFFICER: Way to take out the trash. Thanks buddy. WOMAN: All right Dexter! Protecting our children! DEXTER V.O: This is what it must feel like to walk in full sun; my darkness revealed, my shadow self embraced. Yeah, they see me. Iʼm one of them in their darkest dreams (“Born Free” 1.12).

Dexter continues to live a charmed existence throughout season three and into season four. He has a family life complete with doting wife Rita, loving stepchildren, and new baby boy. The series continues to explore the negotiations Dexter must make to continue living his double life. At the end of the season Rita is murdered by another family man/serial killer. He finds his son in a pool of his motherʼs blood, echoing his own traumatic foundational moment (“The Getaway” 4.12). Dexter, the serial killer, was born out of a trauma, a defining event that conditions his entire reality, in much the same way that 9/11 was a national trauma that went on to define the conditions for the supposedly new “post-9/11” world. The language of birth is used in “Born Free” (1.12). The cargo canister is the site “where dearly disturbed Dexter was born”; in witnessing the brutal

113 murder of his mother, Dexter, the serial killer, was “born free of all thatʼs human.” This conception that he has of himself, that Harry, his adopted father also had of him, as an exceptional case, who works with a different set of rules, is central to his identity and his ability to function in the world. His claim to inhumanity, centered on his inability to connect with or empathize with other people, is a mechanism for placing him outside the flow of human events by controlling the minutia of his life as a killer. Dexterʼs code and character articulate the killer logic at the heart of exceptionalism. Both Dexter and 24 reveal the ramifications of American exceptionalismʼs imbrication with the state of exception. Bauer and Dexter each use and abuse the law to suit their needs and discard it when they deem necessary. They commit violent acts and claim to be serving a higher purpose, but instead only make themselves monstrous, alienated from the human community. Dexterʼs code, like American exceptionalism, performs a backwards justification for Dexterʼs actions, because in the end the future is protected. But this code, again like exceptionalism, covers over Dexterʼs particular interests, satisfying his desire to kill people, and elevates it to the level of cosmic justice. Bauerʼs lonely and painful existence serves as a sad testament to the logic of ticking time bomb.

114 CHAPTER FOUR STATES OF AMERICAN EXCEPTION

In this chapter I shall focus on ABCʼs successful sci-fi drama series Lost and Sci- fiʼs cult hit Battlestar Galactica and examine how they engage with American exceptionalism. Lostʼs labyrinthine plot follows the lives of a group of plane crash survivors who have landed on a mysterious island. Initially, Lost appears to be re- imagining of the traditional castaway narrative, but this assumption is immediately complicated in the pilot by the appearance of a mysterious and invisible monster, polar bears (on a tropical island?), and a mayday message that has been on a continuous loop for 16 years. Lostʼs popularity drove a short-lived fascination by the networks with reproducing its success by creating series that had large ensemble casts and convoluted plots that capitalized on paratexts and transmedia storytelling.54 While Lost was taking network television by storm, the cable network Sci-fi began airing its edgy re- imagined Battlestar Galactica (hereafter BSG). BSG follows a ragtag fleet of ships that carry the last remaining humans who inhabited the fictional Twelve Colonies after they were annihilated by cylons. The cylons were a race of sentient robot warriors created by the humans, but they turned on their creators and decided to destroy them.55 The series follows the fleet as they search for a new home pursued by the cylons who are determined to see them completely destroyed. The original BSG created by Glen Larson in the late 1970s attempted to capitalize on the success of Star Wars. Ronald Mooreʼs “re-imagined” BSG takes the original premise and refashions the originalʼs action adventure fare into a meditation on everything from religion to the question of what constitutes life. Like 24 much has been made of BSGʼs engagements with post-9/11 American culture which culminated with a special panel hosted by the Sci-fi channel and The United Nations to discuss “human

54 This brief surge in serialized television has ebbed again in the wake of the writersʼ strike, dwindling audiences, and the financial crisis of 2008/09. By the Fall 2009 season NBC had abandoned the 10pm drama in any form. 55 Echoes of Shelleyʼs Frankenstein reverberate through these series as well.

115 rights, children and armed conflict, terrorism, human rights and reconciliation and dialogue among civilizations and faith.” As with 24, the UN panel highlights the role television plays as national and even international medium capable of speaking thoughtfully to contemporary issues. Both of these series engage with the tropes of exceptionalism as a foundational narrative and a justifying discourse. Both series self-consciously appropriate state of nature narratives and states of exception brought about by some catastrophic event to address such questions as: what is a community; does survival force a regression to a state of savagery; are distinctions between an “us” and “them” easy to identify; are people inherently good or evil; does everyone deserve a chance at redemption; does a state of emergency necessitate one set to set aside oneʼs values for the perceived immediate good? Whereas other series such as Deadwood, Jericho, and 24 are self- consciously about America or the idea of America, on BSG and Lost the theme of exceptionalism is explored by displacing the setting away from the explicitly American landscape, and instead indirectly engages with the frontier or garden. Despite this generic de-familiarization common to science fiction narratives, which often attempt to claim to speak from the universal position of humanity, Lost and BSG are nevertheless American series inflected by specifically American values and assumptions and told from an explicitly American perspective.

Lost in the Garden Like the idea of the frontier, the image of the garden is closely linked to the foundations of American exceptionalism and its promise of fulfillment and redemption. The idea that within the space of the American landscape, be it as frontier or garden, humanity had the ability to literally recreate the birth of civilization, in a kind of cosmic do-over, is one of the pillars of exceptionalist thinking. The space of the garden differs from the frontier primarily in its relationship to time; the space of the frontier is fleeting and transitory whereas the garden is static, existing outside of time. Lost engages with the idea of the garden as expressed in what was referred to in chapter one as the Puritan Matrix. The Puritan conception of the garden has obvious roots in the biblical

116 Garden of Eden, but later the myth of the American garden is also informed by early modern conceptions of the garden as expressed by thinkers who transformed the Biblical Eden, Godʼs paradise on Earth, into the philosophical construction of the “state of nature.”56 In a state of nature, humanity existed in a state conceived as the antithesis of civilization and culture. The state of nature is amoral, ahistorical, without law, and without community. The wilderness, and by extension the frontier and the garden, are intimately linked to this conceptual state of nature, in that the wilderness was represented as the state of nature. For both the Puritan and later Enlightenment imagination, the New World wilderness became a place in which one could build a perfect society. As we have seen in the discussion of Turnerʼs frontier thesis, the frontier was the site where the inception of civilization was reenacted. The frontier exists at the edge of the wilderness, and is connected only tenuously to civilization. Turner argued that the fact of the American frontier is what distinguished it from Europe and in the cultivation of the frontier one became an American. Similarly, the American garden pastoral trope, described by Leo Marx as the midway point between the savagery of the wilderness and the dehumanized and technologized urban landscape, is also an exceptional space in which human civilization could be ideally expressed. These settings, frontier and garden, provide their inhabitants with the ability to create a better world, and garden/frontier narratives often attempt to answer the question: what does it mean to be human? However, as the previous analyses have

56 The concepts of both the garden and of the frontier have a relationship to the concept of the state of nature. The modern notion of progress is predicated on the “state of nature” as an ideological construct. The concept of the state of nature has its origins in early Enlightenment philosophy. The state of nature is a philosophical tool utilized to postulate on the origins of civil society. The state of nature was theorized as a time and space that existed before the onset of what in the Hegalian tradition might be called history. Following from the work of Newton, who argued that the physical universe was guided by fundamental and unchanging laws and that these laws were discoverable through human reason, other philosophers argued that, like the physical laws of the universe, there existed fundamental and unchanging laws governing human society. Though there were debates over what the state of nature was like, there was a consensus that if one wanted to attempt to create a reasonable society, one must return to the state of nature as foundational concept. How one defined human existence in the state of nature determined how one would then theorize the tenants of good government or the purpose of art. The state of nature was offered to explain what humanity was in its pre-civilization “natural state.” Only by understanding this natural state and manʼs relationship to nature within it could one properly theorize on the nature of reasonable government, law, and society. There is a lot to be said here concerning the utopian tradition as well as the garden/eden trope. In the exceptionalist matrix the utopian tradition is most often coded through the garden/eden/frontier/new world tropes.

117 attempted to demonstrate, within the nationalist context of American exceptionalism, the question of the human is invariably tied to the question of the American, such that, to be one is to be the other. This is, of course, highly problematic, in that both the human and the American are coded as white, male, middle-class, heterosexual, and able-bodied. While Jericho is doing something very similar, Lost, because of its “exotic” location and more diverse cast of characters, is working under a broader claim to universality. Jericho is explicitly about the idea and meaning of “America”; Lost is making larger claims about the idea and meaning of “being human” which is, in many respects, what makes Lost a more explicit expression of American exceptionalism because of its false claim to universality. And this false universality is made evident in that, despite the original large multicultural and ensemble cast, by the end of season five, the primary characters are white and male. All of the non-white characters have either been killed or relegated to minor roles, and female characters have been reduced to the position of love interests or mothers.57 Even early in the series, Jack Shepherd emerged as the primary protagonist with whom the audience is most encouraged to identify. He is the hero, though he might not be the best choice. For example, Sayid Jarrah, a former Iraqi soldier who has military and survival experience, might have made a more practical leader, but Jack, the handsome, clean cut (heʼs wearing a suit on the plane when it crashes), white, spinal surgeon, becomes leader by default. He periodically acts as the voice of the community, and even when facing challenges to his authority, he remains the character with whom the audience is to identify most strongly. In season one, the first ten episodes are dominated by the establishment of a community among the castaways that culminates with the introduction of the mysterious “Others.”58 The pilot episode introduces the fourteen primary characters who represent a fairly diverse group of people and the narrative arc follows them as they move from the chaos of immediate survival to the establishment of a relatively stable community,

57 Given that there is one season left to air, this could possibly change. 58 The “Others” become the primary antagonist throughout most of the series. Viewers eventually learn the “Others” are the Islandʼs true inhabitants, governed by the mysterious figure Jacob, and are separate from the Dharma Initiative, introduced in season two, the mysterious corporation who built the various research stations around the island.

118 similar to the movement from camp to town on Deadwood.59 Here, I will highlight a few episodes from the first season, “Tabula Rasa” (1.03), “Walkabout” (1.04), “Confidence Man” (1.07), and “Solitary” (1.08). These examples represent Lostʼs self-conscious appropriation of state of nature discourse, and how that appropriation then conforms to an explicitly Americanist framing of that discourse.60 “Tabula Rasa” is the first episode after the pilot; it establishes the primary narrative structure of the first three seasons. Each episode contains a parallel narrative that jumps between island time and flashbacks to the pre-island life of one of the characters. “Tabula Rasa” is a “Kate-centric” episode. Tabula rasa, or empty slate, describes a philosophical argument, first articulated by British Empiricist John Locke, who also notably argued that “in the beginning all the world was America,” that states that individuals are born without knowledge, and that one accumulates knowledge of the world through oneʼs experiences. It privileges empirical knowledge over innate ideas and emphasizes the possibility for individual and human transformation. The theory of tabula rasa is optimistic about human nature in suggesting that, if given the correct set of circumstances, individuals will be good. The concept had a profound effect on Americaʼs “founding fathers” and forms the foundation for the belief that everyone is born equal; if all individuals are born without knowledge, then all individuals are born in an equal position. It is also related to the Christian conception of original sin. In humanityʼs original state, it was pure and good; with improper knowledge came humanityʼs downfall. Both the secular and religious connotations are expressed in the course of the episode.

59 Coupled with events on the island, Lost uses Flashbacks, to reveal individual characterʼs background. Generally each episode features one character, though there are occasional ensemble flashbacks, no flashback. The final episode of season three functioned as a “game-changer” by changing the flashback to a flashforward. 60 Lost also even more directly nods its head toward western culture by naming characters after philosophers, scientists, and fictional characters. Some of them are: John Locke, Danielle Rousseau, Desmond David Hume, Jack Shepherd, Daniel Faraday, Kate Austen, and Sawyer (for Tom Sawyer). Additionally books such as The Lord of the Flies, Alice in Wonderland, and Watership Down are references in the first few episodes of the series. They serve as a kind of wink to the audience indicating the series literary roots.

119 First, the title and events of “Tabula Rasa” suggest that the plane crash has conferred equal status on each of the survivors. The island-centric plot focuses on the fate of a mortally wounded U.S. Marshall.61 The Marshallʼs wound has become infected; Jack is determined to “fix him.”62 He scrounges through the wrecked fuselage looking for antibiotics and ready to do whatever it takes to save the wounded man. This would be a noble pursuit, if there was the hope of a quick rescue, however a few of the survivors learned in the previous episode that their plane was over 1000 miles off course; if anyone is looking for them, they are looking for them in the wrong place. Sawyer, the islandʼs resident bad boy and voice of Hobbesian pessimism, asks Jack if he is willing to use what medication they have remaining trying to save an obviously dying man. Is the survival of this one man worth the possible death of many others in the long run, or do their circumstances require a new moral code? Jack initially rejects Sawyerʼs assertion that they are “in the wild.” Sawyer in turn decides to take matters into his own hands and shoots the Marshall, but instead of killing him, he only makes the situation worse, forcing Jack to ultimately complete the task of euthanizing the Marshall. The implication of these events is that extreme or exceptional circumstances forcibly change the rules, while simultaneously reaffirming a foundational belief in everyoneʼs equal right to survival. It would be immoral, given the circumstances, for Jack to use what limited supplies they have on the dying man.63 Second, the episode argues through flashbacks centered on Kateʼs criminal past, that everyone possesses the ability to achieve redemption by returning to a state of innocence, a tabula rasa, symbolized by the island as a representation of the paradisal garden. The flashback details Kateʼs time in Australia, her work for a farmer, and her eventual capture by the Marshall. At this point in the series the audience does not know

61 Island-centric will be employed when referring to narrative elements that occur on the island versus flashback or flashforward which will describe elements that occur off island. Lostʼs narrative moves between past, present, and future at times within the space of one episode, therefore it is more descriptive to use the spatial location versus the temporal location. 62 Jackʼs primary character flaw is his sense that he must fix everything. His obsession is integral to the primary narrative arc of the series. Hence even in a “Kate-centric” episode, the writers manage to use it flesh out Jackʼs character. 63 The issue of extreme or emergency situations and their relationship to exceptionality will be a primary focus of the next chapter.

120 what crime Kate committed, but her wanted poster indicates that she is potentially dangerous, which given Kateʼs “girl next door” appearance and petite frame competes with the stereotypical image of a “dangerous criminal.” Kate never harms or cons her Australian host, and in the final car chase sequence she sacrifices her chance to escape capture to save him and thereby insures her own capture by the Marshall. The message here, which also relies on the tabula rasa trope, is that Kate isnʼt an inherently bad person; she has only made bad choices. Jack, back in the island, learns that she is a criminal and that she is dangerous, but his knowledge and experiences with her on the island (her fearlessness, willingness to help others, etc.) combined with his attraction to her, leads him to the following conclusion, “It doesnʼt matter [what you did] Kate. Who we were, what we did before this, before the crash, it doesnʼt really [beat] three days ago we all died. We should be able to start over” (“Tabula Rasa” 1.03).64 The catastrophic event of the plane crash precipitated a cosmic slate cleaning, complete with Christian imagery of Jesusʼ sacrificial death and resurrection. Three days ago they all died and in doing so, gained an opportunity to have a second chance at redemption, to become new people, and move from a renewed state of innocence to a state of enlightened rather than fallen experience. As season one continues, most of the characters find themselves seeking redemption from their past. The impulse towards a return to innocence and purity away from decadence toward the possibility, even necessity, of a better future is central to American exceptionalismʼs “errand in the wilderness” which is in turn bound up with destiny, mission, and choseness. The promise of America is the promise to start over. These ideas are further taken up in the following episode “Walkabout.” In this John Locke-centric episode, the audience learns Locke traveled to Australia because he thought it was his destiny; his belief is further solidified by the fact that the island has somehow cured him of his paralysis. He, like Kate, has been given the opportunity to start anew and achieve his destiny. So, not only does Lost appropriate state of nature discourse, but it also appropriates the link between it and with the American discourse

64 Here, “beat” is used to indicate a long pause in the dialogue.

121 of destiny and mission. Lockeʼs belief in his destiny constitutes one of the seriesʼ central narratives. Similarly, other characters have special destinies or have been chosen by the island to fulfill certain purposes. With a return to innocence through the special landscape of the islandʼs geography and the use of destiny and choseness as a primary narrative theme, Lost reinvents the Puritan errand for the post-9/11 landscape. The catastrophe should be harnessed as a moment of possible cleansing change, taken up in such a way that America might reinvent itself. Instead of conceiving 9/11 as a loss of innocence, it should be understood as a moment of innocence regained. But, by the end of season five though the possibility of redemption remained, the sense of an innocence regained is lost.

Lost in the Exception In addition to the garden motif explored in the previous section, Lost also engages with the state of exception and the question of torture. Lostʼs engagement with torture centers on the effect it has on the person doing the torturing and the effect it has on the community. The two examples of torture examined here are from the first two seasons and involve the character, Sayid Jarrah, an Iraqi citizen and former member of the Republican Guard who fought in the first Gulf War. Lostʼs representation of Sayid Jarrah is problematic. Sayidʼs role as torturer and Lostʼs recurrent depiction of torture throughout the series is particularly relevant to American exceptionalism and the political state of exception. Sayid is not the only one who commits the act of torture, however his narrative arc, flashbacks, and search for redemption revolve around his identity as a torturer. He goes so far as to declare, “my name is Sayid Jarrah, and I am a torturer” (“One of Them” 2.14). In later seasons he becomes an assassin which only makes his character that much more problematic given the history of the image of the assassin in the western tradition. Sayidʼs status among the rest of the castaways is ambiguous. His narrative conforms to the overarching theme of redemption; however, in spite of what may have been good intentions on the part of the creators and writers, they are effectively arguing, “Sayidʼs just like us, therefore we should not be so quick to judge him and all Arabs;

122 theyʼre humans just like we are.” In their attempt to blur the boundaries between “us” and “them,” they miss the racist logic underlying their assertion; the statement, “just like us,” implies an “us,” in this case, the white Americans who represent the normative position and to which he generally returns. This surface attempt at inclusion is made all that more problematic by Sayidʼs occupation. He, like most of the characters, is on a quest for redemption. The representation of a former torturerʼs search for redemption is, in itself, not problematic; however in the context of post-9/11 America generally, and the second Iraq War more specifically, that the repentant torturer is an Iraqi Muslim takes on a particular and loaded significance. In “Confidence Man” Sawyer is thought to be hiding Shannonʼs asthma medication; without it she might die (1.08). After repeated requests from Boone (Shannonʼs brother), Jack, and Kate, Sayid decides he will “make him talk.” In an exchange between Jack and Sayid, Jack offers to “do what needs to be done,” but Sayid will not let him and insists that he take on the burden. He jabs bamboo slivers under Sawyerʼs fingernails in an attempt to get him to give up the location of the medication. It turns out that Sawyer never had the medication. Sayid, disgusted with what he has allowed himself to do, exiles himself from the community. The Sayid-centric episode, “Solitary” follows “Confidence Man.” In it Sayid performs acts of torture in his position as an interrogator for the Republican Gaurd, but the incarceration and abuse of his childhood friend Nadia leads him to renounce his duty and allow Nadia to escape execution. In the parallel island-centric narrative, Sayid has been taken captive by “the Frenchwoman” Danielle Rousseau. Her solitary existence is another nod to state of nature discourse since it appears sheʼs regressed to a state of noble savagery. However, unlike the French philosopher Jean-Jaques Rousseauʼs belief that human existence is best expressed by living a solitary existence in communion with nature, living alone on the island for sixteen years has made Danielle Rousseau jumpy and paranoid. Afraid that he might become like Rousseau, detached from reality and alone, Sayid returns to the safety of the group. “Solitaryʼs” narrative suggests that what Sayid really needs to survive is the castawayʼs civilizing force. Lost ultimately portrays Arabs as uncivilized torturers in desperate need of [American] civilization; this argument mirrors, first, the longstanding

123 imperialist justification that Europeans were bringing civilization to the savage people of color whose land they colonized, and second, it invokes Bushʼs reinvigoration of that tradition in his post-hoc justification of the invasion of Iraq. Perhaps sensing the problematic nature of Sayidʼs characterization, he eventually has a romance with Shannon, the blonde California girl, who is subsequently murdered in the second season. However, the situation with Sayid has only proceeded to get worse as he has been reduced to the status of human weapon only brought back into the narrative to act as the islandʼs resident Jack Bauer, but unlike Bauer, he is stripped of his initial depth and humanity. In “Confidence Man” Sayid steps in so that Jack can retain the position of heroic white man, who has already had to compromise his morals, and must not debase himself further by becoming a “savage” torturer. On Lost, Sayid Jarrah, “the torturer,” cannot be granted the status of hero like Bauer on 24. He is not bestowed with a special ability or sense to know when torture is appropriate and necessary; in his hands torture is always barbaric. When he believes, in season five, that heʼs been chosen for a divine mission, the murder of the young Ben Linus in “Heʼs Our You” to save the future, he fails and is further alienated from the group because of it (5.10). After season oneʼs “Confidence Man,” Lost returns to the issue of torture in season twoʼs “One of Them.” This episode introduces Henry Gale, later known as Ben Linus, who at this point in the story is an unknown quantity. Rousseau captures him and turns him over to Sayid. Gale claims to be a businessman from Minnesota who crashed landed with his wife on the island three months before. Rousseau claims he is “an Other” (the name given to the hostile island inhabitants). Sayid, initially skeptical, decides “I want to find out who he is. I want the truth. And I think we both know that Jack will have issues with what must be done in order to get it.” This island-time arc is intercut with flashbacks to Sayidʼs past during the last days of the first War in Iraq. He has been captured by Americans who first use him as a translator, but in a parallel plot to the island-centric one, an American CIA agent Inman persuades Sayid into torturing his superior officer, Tariq who has also been captured. Inman informs Sayid that, “youʼre going to make him talk to you.” Inman passes him a box similar to, if not the same box we first saw Sayid carry in “Solitary” the season before. Sayidʼs torture of Tariq takes

124 place off-screen. Tariq first taunts Sayid for his disloyalty as Sayid slowly removes various tools, a hammer, pliers, and small blade from the box. Tariq spits in Sayidʼs face and the scene cuts to Sayid returning the box, blood on his hands, to Inman with the information he desired. That he first tortures another person at the behest of the United States appears to be an attempt to mitigate the initial stereotyping of Sayid as barbaric Arab. Sayid contrives to have Gale placed in the armory; he and Gale are locked in. Jack is outraged at being tricked, but Locke confronts him; Jack is “raising an army” against the Others and “thereʼs only one reason to raise an army, Jack, and thatʼs because weʼre at war, and like it or not, whatever Sayid has to do behind that door [he gestures toward the armory door] thatʼs part of it too.” Jack believes that Sayidʼs actions are wrong, yet his own decision to raise an army and kill the others in war does not strike him as wrong, returning us to Khanʼs question: if Jack is willing to kill, why not torture? During the flashback Sayid learns from Inman that Tariq was responsible for testing saran gas on his village. Inman shows Sayid footage of the effects the gas has, but this horror is withheld from view and only indicated through the sound of screaming from the television just off screen. The undercurrent in Inmanʼs rationale for telling Sayid about Tariqʼs past and in Lockeʼs previous observation that Sayid is “angry [and] looking to punish someone” points to the fact that information is always the pretense for torture. Sayid feels a sense of almost divine justification; he explains at the close of the episode:

SAYID: Jack asked me how I knew [beat] knew for sure that this man was lying. How I knew for sure that he was one of them, one of the Others. I know because I feel no guilt for what I did to him. But there is no way I can ever explain that to Jack, or even Locke, because both of them have forgotten. CHARLIE: Forgotten? What? SAYID: That you were strung up by your neck and left for dead. That Claire was taken and kept for days during which god only know what happened to her. That these people, these Others, are

125 merciless, and can take any one of us whenever they choose. So tell me, Charlie, have you forgotten? (“One of Them” 2.14).

Not only is torture a form of punishment but a form of communication, “[t]orture and terror are linked forms of communication” (Khan 6). Inman communicates power and authority by transferring the responsibility for Tariqʼs torture to Sayid and in turn Sayidʼs torture of Gale communicates to the Others that if they continue to terrorize them, they will be terrorized in turn. Torture as a form of communication is predicated an absolute distinction between “us” and “them.” At this point in the narrative no one knows whether Gale is an Other or not, so the question of justification hangs over the situation. If Gale is an Other, is Sayid justified in using extreme measures? Jackʼs disapproval and the structure of the narrative do not lend themselves towards sympathy or identification with Sayid. The flashbacks explain how he came to have his particular skill set and mitigate the barbarity of his actions by presenting his desire for retribution against Tariq for the sarin attack on his village and against the Others for the accidental death of Shannon sympathetically. Even Charlie, who was hung and left for dead, looks at Sayidʼs declaration that he has “not forgotten” looks at him with uncertainty and unease. The declaration that he has not forgotten echoes the 9/11 mantra, appropriated from Holocaust discourse that America will never forget.65 When Gale asks Sayid who he is Sayid replies:

I was 23 years old when the Americans came to my country. I was a good man. I was a soldier. And when they left I was something different. For the next six years I did things I wish I could erase from my memory, things which I never thought myself to be capable of. But I did come to learn this

65 The appropriation of the language of Holocaust remembrance as well as the language of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by using “Ground Zero” to describe the site of the twin towers works to create a sense of monumentality; to approximate the trauma of the Holocaust and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki demonstrates the desire to confer on the events of 9/11 the same historical significance. That these events are patently incomparable points to the American sense of exceptionality as simply a nationalist egotism.

126 [beat] there was a part of me, which was always capable. You want to know who I am? My name is Sayid Jarrah, and I am a torturer (2.14).

This is an ambiguous statement in which Sayid attempts to shift blame away from himself and onto the Americans, yet he claims to have learned he was always capable of torture. In this respect Sayid resembles Deadwoodʼs Seth Bullock who is all too aware of the violence he is capable of. Does torture then become an expression of the inner savage? Given that the castaways are stranded on an island surrounded and attacked by hostile natives it seems natural that their savage violence must be met with more violence. But this places violence beyond civilization rather than squarely within it. The island may provide the illusion that the castaways, the Others, or the Dharma initiative has reverted to a pre-civilizational space, when what they inhabit is a post- catastrophe state of exception.

Itʼs a Machine?: Un-doing the Ticking Time Bomb Scenario Like all good science fiction, the creators of BSG approximated a reality close enough to our own so as to be recognizable, but different enough to allow for the pretense of objective detachment. The original BSG, created by Glenn Larson, drew heavily from Mormon theology, which is itself related to the mythology of American exceptionalism. As noted in chapter one, since Star Trek space has been constructed from within the discourse of exceptionalism as “the final frontier.” The re-imagined frontier, which in the series is the space beyond the red line—the unmapped part of the universe—of Ron Mooreʼs BSG invokes the typical Turnerian conception (minus perhaps the westward movement) as a space in which civilized man is stripped of his civilization, but unlike Turnerʼs frontier, BSGʼs wilderness is a post-apocalyptic state of exception. BSG takes for granted the existence of a state of exception; it begins with the annihilation of most of the human race. As demonstrated in chapter three, exceptionalist discourse frames debates over the use and justification of torture. On 24 the state of exception is a temporary manifestation brought about by an imminent terrorist attack

127 that supposedly threatens the very existence of the nation and replicates the logic of American exceptionalismʼs history of justification through divine providentiality and choseness. BSG differs, in that, unlike 24, which from the outset accepts the legitimacy of exceptionalist thinking epitomized by the ticking time bomb scenario even if it is, at times, uncomfortable with the ramifications of it, BSG calls the issue of legitimacy itself into question by asking what right humanity has to survive. 24 endorses the logic of suspending the universality of justice during supposedly exceptional moments of catastrophe and crisis in favor of saving a particular nation. BSG explores the rejection of the particular of the nation in favor of the universality of justice. Instead of relying on a predetermined assumption that humanity deserves to survive because of some kind of divine providence, BSG questions that logic and asserts, “Itʼs not enough to survive. One has to be worthy of surviving” (“Resurrection Ship: Part 1” 2.12). In taking a universalist position BSG takes up the question of torture from within a frame of the human; the BSG universe uses species distinctions between cylons and humans to approximate the discursive construction of race.66 Racist discourses sought to define the limits of the human, which were then used to justify the practices of slavery, imperialism and colonialism. The cylons are not human; they are a completely distinct, if artificial, race of beings. Therefore, because they are literally not human, humanity need not extend to them the universal dignity accorded to humanity. Within the confines of the series, humanity retains the same special dignity, or place in the universe, that the tradition of western humanism has accorded it. Chapter one established how the history of American exceptionalism appropriated this humanistic tradition and cast it in terms of nationalism. This is the exceptionalist matrix, which makes the claim of universality (through the appropriation of the human) from the particularity of the nation. BSGʼs claim of universality rejects the particularity of exceptionalism; instead BSG interrogates the logic of justification itself. It takes a

66 The concept of race as it has emerged in the West since the fifteenth century is absent in BSG. There are 12 colonial planets each with distinct cultures that more closely approximate the discourse of class and nation rather than that of race. The distinction between human and cylons is cast along a racial divide. In the spin-off series Caprica, racist discourse becomes more prominent as a woman remarks, “You can never trust a Tauron; deceit is in their DNA.”

128 reflexive position; what weʼre willing to do teaches us who we are. To this end, BSG seeks to highlight the effect practices, such as torture and even genocide, have on the humans who commit them. The question is not simply about when the infliction of extreme pain, death, or even genocide can be rendered morally acceptable (because the series is also about that) but seeks to understand what the justifications of those actions say about those who commit them. BSG uses the “ticking time bomb” scenario in the first season episode “Flesh and Bone” (1.08). In it a “skinjob,” the name the Colonials use to describe the humanoid cylons,67 has been found within the fleet. He is detained and claims that there is a nuclear bomb hidden within the fleet. Kara “Starbuck” Thrace interrogates him to reveal the location of the nuclear device. Though the time frame of the episode is rather short, the immediacy of the threat is downplayed; there is the sense that “weʼre running out of time,” but it lacks the frenetic tone of Bauerʼs “damn it, there isnʼt enough time” sense of an immediate “now.” The interaction between interrogator and interrogated and the dynamics at play in that relationship, particularly the effect is has on Starbuck, is highlighted instead. Upon first seeing Leoben, the cylon prisoner, Starbuck is surprised to see that he is sweating. She finds this interesting, why would a machine need to sweat? This revelation leads her to the conclusion that she can use Leobenʼs and the cylonʼs desire to mimic their creators against him. She assumes that his pain, like a humanʼs, will elicit the information she needs.

STARBUCK: See, now, a smart cylon would turn off the old pain software about now, but I don't think you're so smart. LEOBEN: Maybe I'll turn it off and you won't even know. STARBUCK: Here's your dilemma, turn off the pain, you feel better, but that makes you a machine, not a person. You see human beings can't turn off their pain. Human beings have to suffer and cry and scream and endure because they have no choice. So the only

67 This is a reference to the use of the term in Blade Runner to describe the humanoid androids.

129 way you can avoid the pain you are about to receive is by telling me exactly what I want to know. Just like a human would.

The logic of the ticking time bomb is absolutely reliant on the fixed boundaries between the interrogator, who represents and works for the common good, and the terrorist, who by virtue of being categorized as terrorist or enemy combatant wishes to annihilate the common good. Roslin reprimands Starbuck for torturing Leoben:

STARBUCK: Itʼs a machine, Sir. Thereʼs no limit to the tactics I can use. ROSLIN: So whereʼs the warhead? STARBUCK: I donʼt know. ROSLIN: You donʼt know. You spent the last 8 hours torturing this man, this machine, whatever it is, and you donʼt have a single piece of information to show for it.

Torturing Leoben is completely ineffective; indeed itʼs counter productive, “during the time I've allowed him to remain alive and captive on this ship, he has caused our entire fleet to spread out, defenseless. He puts insidious ideas in our minds, more lethal than any warhead. He creates fear” (1.08). Instead of torturing him, Roslin gives Leoben what he desires, to be treated like a human:

ROSLIN: I apologize for what you've been through. Take his restraints off. Do it. LEOBEN: Thank you. ROSLIN: I can do more. I can guarantee your safety. I can order your release. We are running out of time, we have only four minutes left until your bomb goes off. I've come here to tell you that this conflict between our peoples does not have to continue. It can stop right here with us. We have to trust each other. Trust me. I think you know you can. Tell me what I need to know and you will live.

130 LEOBEN: The warhead doesn't exist. I made it up. The Lieutenant was right. I was too far out. I didn't want to die, so when I got caught I made up a story to buy some time. ROSLIN: I see. Thank you for the truth. LEOBEN: Thank you, Madam President. Don't be too hard on Kara, she was just doing her job, the military, they teach you to dehumanize people.

This move is a cynical ploy on Roslinʼs part, and her next move is have him “thrown out the airlock.” Starbuck is upset that Roslin, after having treated Leoben like a human and gotten the information she needed, callously has him throw out the airlock. Later she returns to her rack and prays to the Lords of Kobol that “I don't know if he had a soul or not but, if he did, take care of it.” Leobenʼs knowledge about Starbuckʼs character, her past, and her possible destiny leads her to begin to doubt the easy distinctions she and the humans have tried to establish between themselves and the cylons. The interaction between Leoben and Starbuck (dehumanized according to Leoben by her military training) raises the issue of human exceptionality and the core preoccupation of the series: does humanity deserve to survive and if so, why? It isnʼt enough to be “godʼs chosen” people and choseness alone fails as an argument for human and cylon rationalizations equally; like the humans the cylons believe their God given mission was to destroy humanity and usurp their place in the cosmos. The complicated distinction between human/machine is further explored in both the B and C plot lines that concern two different versions of Sharon/Boomer, the cylon sleeper agent who is unaware of her true nature aboard the Galactica and the version of her (later known as Sharon/Athena) back on Caprica who has recently come to the realization that she is in love with Helo the human she is meant to kill. She decides to defect from the cylons to save him. A version of the cylon model Number Six, later known as Caprica Six, is wary of Sharon and her model in general:

131 DORAL: I notice you're calling her “Sharon” now. CAPRICA SIX: Yeah, well, I choose to think of her as one of them. DORAL: Because you dislike her? CAPRICA SIX: Because in the scheme of things, we are as we do. She acts like one of them, thinks like them. She is one of them. DORAL: But she's one of us. It would be best to remember that.

The Six feels threatened by the blurred boundaries that Sharonʼs programming represents, and the juxtaposition of Sharonʼs defection (on Caprica) and her anxiety and confusion (on Galactica) underscores the problem of relying on what amount to arbitrary distinctions, differences that donʼt make any difference. Sharon is unsure of who she is, but is absolutely certain about how she feels about Helo and later her half human, half cylon child, upon whom the fate of all of humanity and the cylons will eventually rest. BSG universalizes the perimeters of experience. What links both the human and the cylons together is their ability to think and feel. The body that experiences pain and love is incidental to the kind of body that feels them, therefore any justification that relies on the “just so” explanation that either humans or the cylons have been chosen by God(s) to survive is made untenable. In the second season “Pegasus” story arc, BSG returns to the issue of torture. In episode 2.10 “Pegasus,” the Galactica comes across the colonial Battlestar Pegasus. The ship managed to survive the initial attack on the colonies by making a “blind jump” away from the battle. The introduction of the Pegasusʼ, Admiral Cain, and her crew allows the series to explore how another group deals with the cylonʼs attempted annihilation of the human race. From the outset, Cain and her crew become a foil for Adama and his crew; the primary difference between them is Adamaʼs militaristic impulses are tempered by the presence of President Roslin who represents the interests of civil society and the law (at least when it suits her needs).68

68 During the first season there is a power struggle between Roslin and Adama who vie for control of the fleet.

132 The representation of torture differs from the typical structure of the ticking time bomb scenario, but relies on a similar logic to justify its use. The primary difference is that there is no specific imminent threat (bomb, release of toxin, etc.) that leads to the interrogation, torture, and abuse of the Six (Gina) cylon prisoner aboard Pegasus and the attempted rape of Sharon/Athena by the Pegasusʼs Lieutenant Thorn, “cylon interrogator, rides them hard and keeps them talking” (2.10) on the Galactica. Instead the generalized existence of the post apocalyptic state of exception and fact that the prisoner is a machine is justification enough; or rather, one does not need to justify the abuse at all because “you canʼt rape a machine” (“Resurrection Ship: Part 1” 2.11). The implied torture of Number Six/Gina69 and Sharon/Athenaʼs attempted rape are far more brutal than what Leoben experienced in “Flesh and Bone.” Sharon and Six are both female cylons who were abused by Thorn, inverting the typical representation of torture as something that men do to other men (Lynndie England notwithstanding). This inversion brings the question of gender and violence into the discussion of torture. While on 24 women participate in and are the victims of violence, they are largely absent during instances of extreme torture.70 When we first encounter the tortured Gina/Six she is lying on the floor of a cell, curled up in a fetal position, wearing only a short grey shirt. Baltar is shocked by what he sees and smells. She is covered in bruises and dried blood. In this scene, Baltar is accompanied by his personal vision of Number Six; she is called “Head Six” since she is only visible to Baltar. Baltar attempts to rationalize and justify her treatment, “She must have struggled. She must have fought back” (“Pegasus” 2.10). Confronted by another version of herself, Head Six replies, “That doesnʼt justify this.” Played by former model Tricia Helfer, Number Six is the most overtly sexualized cylon. When the camera pans down to reveal her broken and bruised body on the floor the image pushes against the already firmly established visual vocabulary of her stylized white beauty (alabaster skin, platinum blond hair) and overt sexuality. What happens to the issue of torture when it

69 She is not referred to by name until the airing of the mid season two hour movie Battlestar Galactica: Razor. 70 The exception here would be the implied torture of Bauerʼs girlfriend Audrey Raines at the end of season seven which takes place entirely off screen.

133 becomes a question of inflicting pain on a white female body versus, for example, the bodies of Iraqi men in the images from Abu Gharib prison? These torturers are not cast as noble or heroic; they are not making tough decisions in the heat of the moment to use any means necessary to save millions of lives. Instead they have repeatedly raped and brutalized the woman on the floor. The audience is meant to identify with the victim rather than the torturer. Later in the episode a set of sequences is intercut together to further highlight the depravity and dehumanization of the Pegasus crew. In the first sequence Chief Tyrol and Lieutenant “Helo” Agathon are drinking and talking with some of the Pegasus crew who brag to them about Lt. Thornʼs exploits and their own repeated rape of Gina. This discussion is intercut with scenes of Thorn attempting to interrogate Sharon/Athena. First, he grabs her by the throat and throws her against the wall of the cell, and when she does not answer his questions, he pushes her face down into the cot as other marines hold her arms down; he pulls at her pants and then at his own. Her rape is only stopped when, after realizing what Thorn was going to do to Sharon/Athena, Helo and Chief Tyrol rush in to rescue her and in doing so, accidentally kill Thorn.71 By this point in the series, the audience has come to know Sharon/Athena, who is pregnant with her half-cylon/half-human child fathered by Helo, and in this instance of torture and attempted rape the audience is again asked to identify with the victim of violence, or at least with the men who love her and rush to her aid. These scenes strip the liberal ideology of torture of any of its righteous justification. One could argue that their treatment was necessary for the greater good, as cylons they hold information that could be essential for the survival of the human race, but the episode doesnʼt engage that line of thinking. Instead it presents torture as an inhuman practice perpetrated by barbaric people. Along these instances of torture, during “Pegasus” we learn that Cain executed her Executive Officer (XO) for failing to follow her orders and in “Ressurection Ship Part 1” that she stripped her civilian fleet of parts and had the families of those unwilling to

71 Both of these characters have had romantic relationships with separate versions of the Sharon model.

134 leave them behind executed. The two-hour special episode Battlestar Galactica: Razor that aired between seasons three and four, explores the experience of the Pegasus crew, notably Admiral Cain and her relationship with Lieutenant Kendra Shaw who arrived on Pegasus on the day of the attack. Since the season two Pegasus arc is told from the perspective of those on Galactica, Razor offered the chance to “put [Admiral Cain] in context” (2.10). The title refers to Cainʼs philosophy of “being a razor” which she articulates in a conversation she has with Kendra after she has followed Cainʼs orders and executed the innocent family members of those people deemed valuable on the Scylla. Speaking to Kendra she states:

Sometimes we have to do things that we never thought we were capable of, if only to show the enemy our will. Yesterday you showed me that you are capable of setting aside your fear, setting aside your hesitation and even your revulsion [beat] every natural inhibition that in battle can mean the difference between life and death. [Cain looks down at the razor she carries with her, opens it up and lovingly caresses it.] When you can be this [she indicates to the razor in her hands] for as long as you have to be, then youʼre a razor. This war is forcing us all to become razors. Because it we donʼt, we donʼt survive. [Beat] And then we donʼt have the luxury of becoming simply human again. Do you understand me? (“Razor”).

This philosophy is driven by her desire to give the cylons “pay back.” Unlike the Galactica and her civilian fleet who accept in the miniseries that the war is over and they have lost. She declares:

War is our imperative. And if right now victory seems like an impossibility, then there is something else to reach for— revenge [beat] payback. So we will fight, because in the end itʼs the only alternative our enemies have left us. I say letʼs make these murdering things understand that as long as this crew and this ship survive that this war that they started will not be over.

135

Cain is driven by vengeance in her decision to torture Gina/Six. She instructs Thorn, “Since itʼs so adept at mimicking human feeling, Iʼm assuming that its software is vulnerable to them as well, so pain, yes of course, degradation fear, shame. I want you to really test its limits. Be as creative as you feel you need to be.” Again, here torture is not a means to an end but a form of punishment. The cylons destroyed her world, now she is going to destroy the cylonʼs in return. Torture is stripped of the justifying logic of the ticking time bomb. In the end, Cain is unworthy of survival and is murdered by Gina/Six, and Kendra is redeemed for murdering the innocent people on the Scylla by sacrificing herself to save other members of the Pegasus and Galactica crew. Their deaths bring the discussion back to the issue of choseness and humanityʼs survival.

“In the end you are those choices”: Choosing vs. Having been Chosen BSG is preoccupied with the assumption that humanity is worth saving. If one is willing to transcend the boundaries of humanity—to jump the red line as it were - into the realm of inhumanity (as opposed to posthumanity)—a world were torture, genocide, and terrorism are justified—perhaps what it means to be human needs to rethought. The human race does survive, but only through its end in the form of the hybrid child Hera. The end point of the series represents the foundation of humanity, at the level of biology, as a posthuman hybrid of human and machine as evidence of the triumph of the universal over the particular. Unfortunately, the series achieves its universalization through the erasure of women, gays, lesbians, and people of color and through a foundational act of colonization. To understand the finaleʼs incongruence with the rest of the series lets look at how BSG emphasized a salvation based on choice rather than on being chosen, “you make your choices and you live with them. And in the end you are those choices” (“Razor”).

136 Before the cylon attack on the colonies, then Commander Adama diverts from his prepared speech at the Galacticaʼs decommissioning ceremony.72 He looks out over the crowd and asks:

You know, when we fought the cylons we did it to save ourselves from extinction, but we never answered the question “why.” Why are we, as a people, worth saving? We still commit murder because of greed, spite, jealousy, and we still visit all of our sins upon our children, and we refuse to accept responsibility for anything that weʼve done. Like we did with the cylons. We decided to play god, create life, and that life turned against us. We comforted ourselves in the knowledge that it really wasnʼt our fault, not really. You cannot play god then wash your hands of the things youʼve created. Sooner or later the day comes that you canʼt hide from the things that youʼve done anymore (“Miniseries: Part 1” M.01).73

Very early the series establishes that in order for humanity to survive they will have to prove themselves worthy. This begs the question of to whom must they be worthy, and for most of the series it is to one another. The Twelve Colonies are a polytheistic culture who believe in a religion modeled on the Olympian gods, whereas the cylons are a monotheistic culture who claim to worship the “one true god,” and believe they are carrying out Godʼs divine mission in eliminating humanity from the universe. The cylonʼs fundamentalist attitude and use of divine providence to justify their actions are cited as evidence of their immorality. Adamaʼs speech indicates that humanity has also cited divine providence in justifying their enslavement of the cylons, but he articulates a different position in which humanity must take responsibility for themselves. Similarly there are cylons who throughout the series, beginning with Sharon/Athena, and later the

72 The Galactica was able to survive the attack because it was an older ship and did not have the updated and networked technology the new ships had and that the cylons were able to easily exploit. 73 The series follows the events of the second war with the cylons. Forty years before the events of the series, the cylons, who were created by the humans, rebelled against them. There was a war that ended in an armistice.

137 larger factions of Threes, Twos, and Sixes come to reject a morality based on divine providence and species purity to work together with the humans. These core beliefs conform to the Puritan myth of errand in the wilderness and divine providentiality. Humanity has been cast out of their land—the Twelve Colonies, and they must now search through the vast and hostile wilderness of space to find a new Eden—Earth. But unlike the Puritan errand, the road to salvation and survival on BSG continually points to a rejection of the exceptionalist logic of the Puritan errand. Believing humanity were the Godsʼ chosen people and the cylonʼs parallel belief that they are Godʼs chosen are what create the catastrophe. Adamaʼs opening declaration is echoed throughout the series. In season one, the fleet returns to Kobol, “Birthplace of mankind. Where the gods and men lived in paradise until the exodus of the 13 tribes” (“Kobolʼs Last Gleaming: Part 1” 1.12). Kobol was the site of the first fall. While stranded there, Head Six reveals to Gaius the true nature of humanity. Throughout season one Head Six prophesied that their child would be the savior of everyone, cylons and human, but that humanityʼs “true nature” could stand in the way of that happening. In a vision Gaius sees Adama drown the child. 74

BALTAR: Adama [beat] I saw him drown the baby. Why would anyone want to drown a baby? HEAD SIX: Gaius, the answer's all around us. What happened here? [She points to the ground littered with human skulls. Human sacrifice. Not the fairy tales your scriptures would have you believe. BALTAR: I thought Kobol was supposed to be a paradise or something. Some place where gods live with the humans in harmony, or … HEAD SIX: [interrupting] For a time, perhaps. Then your true nature asserted itself, your brutality, your depravity, your barbarism. BALTAR: So the scriptures are all a lie. It's all just a lie, just a cover-up for all this [beat] savagery.

74 It is unclear at this point in the narrative if this theirs or another child.

138 HEAD SIX: Exactly. All of this has happened before, Gaius. And all of it will happen again. […] Mankind's true nature will always assert itself (“Valley of Darkness” 2.02)

The mythology of humanityʼs noble origins is revealed here to be a lie; instead Baltar is faced with humanityʼs savagery. The only route to survival and salvation is to reject the myth of an original innocence and exceptionality. The mantra “all of this has happened before and all of it will happen again” serves not only as a guide, but also as a challenge for humanity to not surrender to the futility of a preordained fate. In the following episode “Fragged,” Baltar and Head Six continue their discussion:

BALTAR: Itʼs all so pointless. We kill them. They kill us. So, we kill more of them. So they kill more of us. Whatʼs the point anymore? HEAD SIX: You, your race invented murder. Invented killing for sport, greed, envy. Itʼs manʼs one true art form. BALTAR: Youʼve done some killing of your own. HEAD SIX: Yes, well, weʼre your children. You taught us well. BALTAR: Why does God want to bring a child into this kind of world anyway? HEAD SIX: Because despite everything, despite all that, he still wants to offer you salvation. Our child will bring that salvation (2.03).

Later in the episode, Gaius must shoot Crashdown. Once he does Head Six reassures him: HEAD SIX: I'm so proud of you Gaius. BALTAR: Why, because I've taken a life? HEAD SIX: It's what makes you human. BALTAR: Is it? Not conscious thought? Not poetry or art or music [beat] literature? Murder. Murder is my heritage. Is that the lesson I'm supposed to pass on to our child?

139

The salvation motif recurs here. Humanity are cast as Godʼs chosen people who have been given one last opportunity to prove themselves worthy by overcoming their murderous heritage. That Gaius is meant to be the childʼs guardian fits with the theme of humanityʼs redemption; no one more than Gaius Baltar is in need of salvation. Though he is, for all intents and purposes, responsible for the destruction of the human race because he gave Caprica Six the necessary access codes that allowed the cylons to launch their attack, he never feels particularly remorseful about it. Gaiusʼs primary concern is always the survival of Gaius Baltar. BSG diverts from the standard errand script, so, while the motif of salvation, like the errand in the wilderness, is appropriated, it is a salvation predicated on the loss of exceptionality. The irony is if humanity is to survive, it must end. Only through the merger between humanity and the cylons can they both be saved. The merger happens throughout course of the series beginning with the incorporation of Sharon/Athena into the fleet, the birth of her hybrid cylon/human daughter (the promised savoir), the revelation at the end of season three that the final five cylons have been living as and believe themselves to be human, and in season four the integration of the human and cylon fleet and culminating in the hybridization of the Galactica itself. The relationship between Sharon/Boomer/Athena and Adama mirrors BSGʼs macro narrative and at the level of the personal. In season one, then sleeper cylon agent Sharon/Boomer is activated and attempts to assassinate Adama. Here the cylon/human relationship can only be described as antagonistic. In season two on the second mission to Kobol, Adama attacks Sharon/Athena (the Number Eight who fell in love with Helo and returned with him to the Galactica); she realizes that the humans will never trust her because, “To him, to the president, to all of them, cylons aren't people. I'm not a person to them. I'm a thing” (“Home: Part 2” 2.07). She attempts to earn Adamaʼs trust, by first shooting the man who was about to shoot him, she then asserts:

I need you to know something. I'm Sharon, but I'm a different Sharon. I know who I am. I don't have hidden protocols or programs lying in wait to

140 be activated. I make my own choices. I make my own decisions. And I need you to know this is my choice.

She gives up her gun to Adama, who could have very easily decided to shoot her, as a demonstration of her trust. Sharon is allowed to stay aboard the Galactica, until in season three she is reinstated as an officer of the colonial fleet and re-christened Athena, and she has become not only an accepted member of the fleet, but Adamaʼs friend and confidant (“Occupation” 3.01). Before the attack on the resurrection ship in season two, Adama goes to Athena “to find out why the cylons hate us so much” (“Resurrection Ship: Part 2” 2.12). This response echoes the question, “why do the terrorists hate America,” that was often repeated in the period after the 9/11 attacks. Athena, initially puzzled by the question reminds Adama of his own words:

[I]t's what you said at the ceremony before the attack when Galactica was being decommissioned. You gave a speech that sounded like it wasn't the one you prepared. You said that humanity was a flawed creation, and that people still kill one another for petty jealousy and greed. You said that humanity never asked itself why it deserved to survive. Maybe you don't.

At the end of season two, the fleet finds a habitable planet and after a bitter, contested, and nearly stolen election, the will of the people dictates an abandonment of the search for earth in favor of ground beneath their feet. In a surprising and game changing move season two ends by jumping forward one year and as the cylons arrive and take control of the human colony. The first four episodes of season three are perhaps the most overtly political of the series in the manner in which the narrative approximates the war in Iraq. In its first two seasons, BSG appropriated the space opera genre to narrativize the post-9/11 American situation by establishing an analogue between the humans as America and the cylons as the terrorists. What BSG does differently from a series like 24, or even Lost, is to reject the knee-jerk position that any action taken against the cylons/terrorists was justifiable because of the assumed

141 American/human innocence by, as I have been attempting to demonstrate, questioning the common sense assumption of humanityʼs innocence and worth. Season three opens with the cylons fighting against the human insurgency. Placing the humans into the role of terrorists, suicide bombers, the indefinitely detained, the tortured, and the occupied takes the previous critique further by attempting to underscore how easily one can move from the position of terrorized to terrorist from torturer to tortured. In episodes “Crossroads” parts one and two, Gaius Baltar has been placed on trial for treason. Lee “Apollo” Adama gives up his military post and decides to become Baltarʼs co-council. He believes that the fleet has unfairly scapegoated Gaius, and that to find him guilty, when so many others, he included, have been absolved of their actions, and would be an injustice. He takes the stand in Gaiusʼs defense. He testifies:

I'd say we're very forgiving of mistakes. We make our own laws now, our own justice. We've been pretty creative at finding ways to let people off the hook for everything from theft to murder. And we've had to be. Because [beat] because we're not a civilization anymore. We are a gang. And we're on the run. And we have to fight to survive. We have to break rules. We have to bend laws. We have to improvise. But not this time—no. Not this time. Not for Gaius Baltar. No. You, [indicating to Gaius] you have to die. […] This case [beat] this case is built on emotion, on anger, bitterness, vengeance. But most of all, it is built on shame. It's about the shame of what we did to ourselves back on that planet. And it's about the guilt of those of us who ran away. Who ran away, and we are trying to dump all that guilt and all that shame on to one man, and then flush him out the airlock and hope that that just gets rid of it all, so that we can live with ourselves. But that won't work. That won't work. That's not justice (“Crossroads: Part 2” 3.20).

Here Lee rejects the logic of exceptionalism. He declares that the state of exception is a place without justice and that to try and have recourse to the ideals of justice without law

142 is impossible. If humanity is to become worthy of survival—and Leeʼs speech indicates that if they find Gaius guilty they are not—they cannot have recourse to the scapegoat. The scapegoat takes on the burdens and guilt of his people so that they might once again be clean, but as Adamaʼs original speech indicates “You cannot play god then wash your hands of the things youʼve created. Sooner or later the day comes that you canʼt hide from the things that youʼve done anymore” (M.01), and he votes to acquit Gaius. At the end of season three, Starbuck mysteriously returns to the fleet after she committed suicide in “Maelstrom” by flying into the “Eye of Jupiter” (3.17). She flies alongside Lee in an untarnished Viper claiming to know the way to Earth. The reappearance of Starbuck is important to BSGʼs appropriation of exceptionalist narratives in that it brings the destiny trope back to the forefront of the series. We have already seen this of the other series discussed previously, Hearst on Deadwood, Bauer on 24, Locke on Lost, and Dexter on Dexter. The issue of Kara “Starbuck” Thrace and her special destiny is an important subplot throughout the series, but it isnʼt until season four that her purpose and what makes her special becomes central in the narrative. Also the importance of Sharon/Athenaʼs and Heloʼs child Hera who “has some meaning that transcends the here […] is meant to fulfill a role” (“Daybreak: Part 1” 4.21) regains its prominence. Both are the subjects of various prophecies concerning “humanityʼs end” and both have central roles to play in seriesʼ narrative closure. Starbuck begins to fulfill her destiny first by leading the fleet to Earth. What they find is a post-apocalyptic wasteland not the promised land of milk and honey foretold in the scriptures.75 On the planet, Starbuck finds the charred remains of her dead body inside her Viper; this throws Starbuckʼs identity into question. Is she a cylon? Can she resurrect? Is she a hybrid? Or is she something else entirely? In the episode “Someone to Watch Over Me” we learn that Starbuck also knows the melody, which she learned from her father, to the music the final four cylons mysteriously heard that lead to their

75 This Earth was the home to the lost thirteenth colony that left Kobol during the original Exodus. The thirteenth colony is where the original cylons who were created by the humans on Kobol.

143 realization that they are cylons,76 and in “Islanded in a Stream of Stars” she comes to terms with her death and resurrection which would seem to lead to the conclusion that she is, at the very least some kind of hybrid or a full cylon.77 At the end of the final battle to rescue Hera, she uses the mysterious melody and converts it into jump coordinates that take the fleet to our Earth. Once there, she realizes her work is done, that she has lead humanity to their end, and has fulfilled her role as the “dying leader” and so she disappears, leaving Lee alone in an empty field. In the end, Starbuck was an Angel, sent by God to lead humanity to its end.78 The series finale aired in three separate parts. The “A” plot line revolves around the rescue of Hera who was taken in the previous episode by Boomer. The cylons wish to study her so as to learn how they might biologically reproduce since they lost their ability to resurrect.79 In continuation of the Athena/Adama relationship, Adama, after seeing a picture of Athena and Hera on the wall that had become a makeshift shrine to the dead, decides to use the Galactica in one last mission to save Athenaʼs child. He does this out a sense of loyalty and love rather than any sense that Hera has a special destiny—the cylons had taken one his family and he was going to get her back. The mission is volunteer only, “Everyone has to make their own choice and they have to do it in person” (4.21). In the ensuing battle and recovery of Hera, the humans and the cylons come to an understanding through a conscious choice to trust one another. But despite all of these events (the hybridization of everything from the fleet, to the ship, to families) and the continued repetition that believing oneself chosen is different from making a choice, the finale comes down to the salvation of humanity through a fulfillment of their preordained destinies. Everything that happened, including the

76 Tigh, Tyrol, Anders, and Tory all hear Bob Dylanʼs well-known “All Along the Watchtower.” 77 cylons cannot biologically reproduce. When one body dies, their consciousness is downloaded into a another body. In season four the rebel cylons who joined with the humans give up the ability to resurrect. Additionally there was a passing mention to the Number Sevens who were “boxed” and destroyed which lead speculation that he was Starbuckʼs father and that Starbuck was the first cylon/human hybrid. 78 There are a number of things that can be said about Starbuckʼs identity as the a Jesus figure that subvert the traditional representation of humanityʼs savior that are beyond the bounds of this particular discussion. 79 See previous footnote.

144 destruction of the Twelve Colonies, had to happen the way it did so that Starbuck would be able to punch in the proper coordinates and lead humanity to their Earthly salvation. And so, after four seasons of nuanced investigation, BSG ends on a strangely regressive note by reenacting the foundation of human civilization as an act of conquest and colonization. Once the fleet arrives on Earth, they find primitive humans (presumably our—the viewerʼs—ancestors) living on the African savannah. At Leeʼs suggestion the humans and humanoid cylons decide to abandon all their technology by flying the fleet into the sun and establishing a new colony on our Earth. The language Lee uses to justify this decision trades on the exceptionalist trope of a slate-cleaning return to the pastoral garden:

LEE: No city. Not this time. ROMO: What do you propose we do? [The camera pushes in on Lee, cut to Lee speaking to Adama as they walk through the savannah.] LEE: We break the cycle. We leave it all behind and start over ADAMA: You're talking about a little over 38,000 people, the entire human race with nothing but the clothes on their backs and some provisions. LEE: It's not the entire human race. There are people already here. ADAMA: Tribal. Without language even. LEE: Well, we can give them that. I mean we can give them the best part of ourselves, and not the baggage, not the ships the equipment, the technology, the weapons. There's one thing that we should have learned it's that, you know, our brains have always out raced our hearts, our science charges ahead, our souls lag behind. Let's start anew (“Daybreak: Part 2” 4.22).

The racist and colonialist cliché of the white manʼs burden is repeated without any hint of irony. Colonizing Earth allows the fleet to escape from their state of exception into the garden of the exceptionalist matrix. The pastoral garden is a haven from the inhuman

145 wilderness of space and the inhumanity of technology. The non-humanoid cylon centurions do not remain on earth and instead return to the inhuman wilderness of space, while the colonizing humans will integrate with the native peoples bringing them up out of the wilderness into the light of civilization. Not only are the centurions banished from paradise, but humanityʼs future will be decided by white men crouched in a field. That two of the men are minor characters throughout the series and that other primary female characters such as, Sharon, Roslin, Starbuck, or even Ellen Tigh are missing speaks to a regressive conception of who constitutes the voice of civilization. The final scenes of the series naturalize the exceptionalist frame even further. In a helicopter shot that transforms forests of trees into an image of New Yorkʼs Central Park, over which “150,000 years later” appears. The camera tracks through Times Square. In voice over Number Six speaks:

At a scientific conference at the Smithsonian institute in Washington the startling announcement was made that archeologists believe they have found the fossilized remains of a young woman who may actually be Mitochondrial Eve. Mitochondrial Eve is the name scientists have given to the most recent common ancestor for all human beings now living on earth. She lived in what is now Tanzania.

Throughout the voiceover the camera continues moving through time square tracking over to a man, reading a magazine. The man would be instantly recognizable to most viewers as Ronald Moore, BSG's series creator. The camera pulls back to reveal Head Six and Head Gaius reading over his shoulder.80 They walk through Times Square ruminating on whether or not the cycle will repeat itself. The camera pans down to homeless black woman begging on the street as Jimi Hendrix's version of “All Along the Watchtower” plays in the background. The camera quickly moves up and away from the

80 Caprica Six, like Gaius, had her own personal Gaius that only she could see.

146 woman to a shop window where a large TV carries the news story “Advances in robotics” which becomes a montage of various new robots and robotic technology. This scene performs a few different narrative functions. First, the implication of the article Six reads from is that BSGʼs narrative represents our past, and the human/cylon hybrid Hera is humanityʼs mother; the message here is that we have always been posthuman. Second, the appearance of Ron Moore interjects an authorial voice and thematic closure. Third, it naturalizes twenty-first century America as the culmination of all human civilization, and fourth, in moving away from the image of the homeless woman to that of the robots on the screen it diverts our attention away from present inhumanities toward an imagined future where our abuse of technology will allow “our brains out race our hearts.” Last, it affirms humanityʼs role as godʼs chosen people. In a series that was so often preoccupied with commenting on the present, questioning the politics of the particular masquerading as the universality of justice, and rejecting a retrograde humanism predicated on humanityʼs intangible specialness, this epilogue appears to un-do the work of the narrative up until this point. So, while on the one hand BSG is claiming that humanity can only survive in the form of a post-human human/cylon hybrid, it does so by returning to a discourse of choseness and a preordained destiny in the garden of a new world. Thus diverting the question away from “is humanity worth saving” to an assertion that it always was. The montage of robots highlights the dehumanization aspects of technology and the perils of creating artificial life. The cycle of violence “that has all happened before and will all happen again” in this construction is relegated to the confrontation between human and machine, rather than in the racialized and nationalist politics of contemporary life. To believe that we have always been chosen, that we have a special destiny, takes away the responsibility we have in creating our world. BSGʼs finale reveals that the salvation of humanity did not come through the choice to overcome the particular interests of race in favor of the universal dignity of life itself, but instead rests on the notion that humanity is Godʼs (though he doesnʼt like to be called that), chosen people. They have suffered and been offered redemption through the mystical intervention of angels (Starbuck and the “Head” characters) and magic

147 universal Bob Dylan songs which only cheapens the initial question, why is humanity worth saving? As a test of faith, the near destruction of the human race and their final redemption moves BSG from a critique of exceptionalism to a reassertion of it. This analysis demonstrates the power that the exceptionalist matrix retains even in a narrative like BSG that actively sought to undermine its core values and assumptions. The exceptionalist matrix provides a sense of certainty that is reassuring.

148 CONCLUSION

As of this writing, most of the series discussed in this dissertation are no longer on the air. Lost is in its final season, and it was recently announced that the current, and eighth, season of 24 will be its last. Only Showtimeʼs Dexter remains on the air and is slated to have fifth and sixth seasons. There are a number of reasons why these series fell out of favor with audiences; perhaps the highly serialized nature of these programs tried their patience or the catastrophic and explicitly exceptionalist themes no longer resonated with them. This dissertation sought to analyze and throw light on how these series took up, both explicitly and implicitly, the reinvigoration of American exceptionalism by questioning its assumptions while also reinforcing them. It also sought to further extend the reach of American studies into the realm of television studies in such a way so as to take seriously the role television plays in the construction of the myth and meaning of “America.” Far from merely guiding audiences back to the normalcy of consumer and commercial culture, prime time television became a site where a prolonged consideration of the normative deployment of exceptionalist justifications for issues such as the legitimization of torture, the false universality of a limited and exclusionary national mythology, the violence at the heart of civilization, and the serial killer logic of destroying the law to save it. In late September of 2002 the Fox network began airing Joss Whedonʼs space cowboy series Firefly. After airing only a few episodes, Fox cancelled the series due to poor ratings. Firefly is an interesting example to think about, in conclusion to the discussion of the other series in this dissertation, first because of its premature cancellation and revival on DVD and film speak to the larger changes in the television industry, and second, because it takes up exceptionalist themes. Despite its early demise, Firefly became very popular in its afterlife on DVD and later as a major motion picture, Serenity, which provided the short-lived series with narrative closure. While not as successful as the fan community might have hoped it would be, the success of

149 Firefly, points to the afterlife of television after TV, by which I mean, that television is no longer confined to its first run prime time appearance.81 The series follows the crew of the “firefly class ship,” Serenity, as they attempt to make their way at the edges of human civilization. Whedon takes the idea of the “space western” to its logical ends; the characters ride horses, rob trains, smuggle cattle in the belly of their space ship, and speak in an affected old Hollywood western accent peppered with Chinese profanity. In Firefly, the imagined future is one where U.S and China survived as the dominant cultural remnants. Despite the occasional use of the Chinese language and incorporations of Chinese design into the costuming and sets, none of the main characters are Chinese or Asian, nor do Asian characters appear in secondary roles. This future is still, for the most part, one in which American culture outlives even the end of the original Earth, surviving into the far reaches of space. In Firefly, humanity has left “earth that was” behind for a new star system. A centralized government, the Alliance, rules the inner planets, and the outer worlds are imagined as a vast and, as yet, untamed frontier, “the black,” where anyone with enough will can make their own way. Like Turnerʼs frontier, the outlying planets represent a wilderness landscape where the human spirit, conceived in essentially American terms, can find its full potential. The Alliance menaces Captain Malcolm “Mal” Reynolds and his crew, who have taken on the fugitives, Simon and River Tam, a doctor and his psychologically broken but brilliant sister. The horrible experiments the Alliance performed on River demonstrate the civilizationʼs dehumanized depravity. Additionally, Firefly and her crew must also be on the lookout for the barbarous Reavers, a group of savage and cannibalistic humans who troll the frontier terrorizing humanity. Situated halfway between these two extremes, the crew manages to eke out their existence by taking legitimate shipping jobs, as well as, participating in smuggling and thievery. Their halfway life replays the myth of the frontier. Like Seth Bullock, Fireflyʼs savvy streetwise protagonist, Mal tries to maintain his moral fortitude, while consistently tempted to let his

81 Television had an afterlife in syndication and on VHS, but the archival quality of DVD, and now Blue Ray and other forms of digital storage, allow for a different kind of extension beyond prime time than either VHS or syndication could. This kind of television afterlife is emblematic of other programs produced during the first decade of the twenty-first century because they are made with their afterlife in mind.

150 inner savage free. Simon, like Brom Garrett, must decide if he is willing to strip off the garments of civilization to survive in the unforgiving wilderness of “the black.” Like all the characters discussed throughout this dissertation, the cast of Firefly must navigate exceptional spaces, whether they be the mythic spaces of the garden or frontier, or the imagined space of the state of exception. What links these various spaces together, and what this dissertation has sought to tease out and make evident, is the relationship they have, not only to the idea of civilization, but also to the law. Implicit in the idea of both American exceptionalism, as broadly conceived here, and the state of exception, is the precarious nature of the law and the individualʼs relationship to it. The example of the ticking time bomb scenario provides the most salient and illustrative example of this, because it is expressly about what the law can be made to allow. It highlights that the law is often at odds with morality or ethics, and therefore, as is discussed in chapter three, why the torture debate is not, at its heart, really about carving out a space within the law, but an attempt to make torture morally acceptable. And those who sought to morally justify torture did so by appealing to the legitimizing discursive strategies of American exceptionalism, as it functions both as a foundational narrative of the nation and as a legitimizing discourse. As this conversation circulated through the American public sphere, dramatic television interceded into the debate by narrativizing it. Diana Taylor argued that the ticking time bomb scenario, articulated by advocates like Charles Krauthammer and 24ʼs Jack Bauer, lacked the depth and complexity that narratives can provide; the ticking time bomb scenario relies instead on the immediacy of emotional appeal, “what would you do to save innocent lives?” Lost and Battlestar Galactica both work through the scenario, narrativizing it, giving it depth by questioning its internal logic and ultimately rejecting its logic as untenable if humanity is to survive. Even a series like 24, with its knee-jerk “torture always works” simplicity, presents its audience with the complex ramifications of that line of thinking. This analysis sought to present the complex and multifaceted ways television series serves as sites of cultural struggle, informed by the notion that cultural artifacts are shaped by, and in turn shape, the cultures from which they emerge.

151 Initially, American studies did the cultural, historical, and discursive work of codifying and legitimizing the narratives of exceptionalism. The scholars of the myth and symbol school sought to codify and illuminate the essential American character. They outlined the terms of the frontier spirit and enumerated the exceptionality of American history, often by looking to American literature and other historical texts. These characterizations remain embedded in popular culture as powerful touchstones. As the field changed, American studies scholars sought to reveal the exceptionalist discourses and the habits of American empire that were left out of the destinarian and triumphalist discourses. They returned to the same texts as their predecessors and uncovered the counter-discourses embedded within. They gave voice to those Americans deemed unexceptional, African Americans, women, Native Americans, and others. These scholars demonstrated how the supposedly noble cause of the American destiny, to be the shining city on the hill, was put into the service of genocide, slavery, internment, and empire. Like their predecessors, they often turned to literary and historical sources. Though its audiences have diminished and become more fragmented, television retains its central role within American culture, yet it often is not addressed in more traditional American studies work. Implicit in this dissertation is my own attempt to intercede into this project by placing television texts at the center of analysis. HBOʼs Carnivale presented its audience with a vision of the Depression Era American west during the Dust Bowl, which would eventually become the site for a final battle between good and evil. Carnivale reproduced the exceptionalist trope that the end of human history would occur in the space of the American landscape. Other series such as Heroes, The 4400, Sleeper Cell, and most recently Flashforward and V (a re-boot of the 1983 miniseries) have also used serialized narratives to engage with American exceptionalism, torture, and the “war on terror.” From the myth of the frontier, errands in the wilderness, special chosen destinies, and the redemption of the world, the themes and assumptions of American exceptionalism continue to persist within its culture and on its television screens. By examining how American Exceptionalism appears, the cultural work it performs, and how it is adapted to suit the needs of a particular historical

152 and cultural moment, we can learn how to become aware of its persistence within the popular American imagination.

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169 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Erika Johnson-Lewis received her Bachelorʼs degree from Florida State University in 1999. In that same year, she began working on her Masterʼs degree in humanities, also at Florida State. After taking two years off to have her son, she returned to complete her Masterʼs in 2005. At that time, she started her coursework for the completion of her Doctorate in interdisciplinary humanities. While a graduate student at FSU, she taught classes in the western tradition and television studies, often in the same course. Her research interests include: television studies, American studies, convergence and transmedia, feminism, gender, and fandom. In her teaching, she strives to incorporate the traditional humanities with media studies in ways that highlight continuities and discontinuities within the humanistic tradition. She has published work on Battlestar Galactica and The Wire and is currently working on a book chapter on Lost.

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