This one has been developing for a while . . .

Last week, I mentioned the abiding American belief in the superior efficiency of the private sector, contradicting all evidence. Since then, Dick Cheney and family’s torture offensive has raised a question I think historians do not deal with enough: the power of fantasy in American political life. I do not just mean Cheney’s fantasies about himself or the constitutional powers of his former office, or even the inconsistent tales the Cheneys have woven about Dick’s past actions. I mean the tendency to base whole policies and ideologies on made-up stories that we try to will into reality.

We knew that Cheney and the people around him were anything from nasty opponents to downright evil, depending upon one’s viewpoint, but the latest reports are lower than anything we have yet seen. Apparently Cheney’s office pushed to have not only terror suspects, but a legitimate Iraqi P.O.W., repeatedly tortured, harder than military interrogators thought was useful or humane. This torture was ordered from the highest office or second-highest office in the land, not to prevent a bombing or save troops, but instead to document a pet political talking point about the link between Al-Qaeda and Saddam, the link that Cheney kept mentioning despite the nonexistence of evidence to support it.

Cheney and company were trying to conjure two fantasies at once: the fantasy of a pan-Arab or pan-Muslim conspiracy against American civilization, somehow masterminded by failing military strongman Saddam Hussein, and the more sweeping and brutal fantasy that hidden truths can only emerge through force and pain. “Torture works” is really only one element of the second fantasy, which is part of the larger attraction in the conservative mind toward absolutist formulations and coercive solutions as the only “realistic” and lasting ones. It fits the dark, pessimistic, vestigially Calvinist view of human nature at the root of American conservatism.

Throwing Calvin in there may risk overintellectualizing, because the currently prevalent “torture works” fantasy (especially the willingness of nonconservative ideologues in the media and the public to entertain it) clearly derives from popular culture. Up through the 1960s, scenes of torture and “enhanced” interrogation were the province of only the most hard-boiled crime, spy, and war films. They were relatively rare, and almost always the audience was expected to identify with the person being interrogated. Tying people down and hurting them was for Nazis, psychotic criminals, and corrupt cops. Indeed, the use of torture was a key signifier of despicable villainy, showing the depravity and sick desperation of the people or civilization that used it. If my memory serves, in classic Hollywood films torture was generally associated with Asian enemies, from Fu Manchu to the Japanese to the Turks in Lawrence of Arabia.

That started to change with the reactionary crime films of the Nixon era, in which audiences were somewhat transgressively encouraged to identify with rough, rule-breaking cop characters like Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry, shooting and pistol-whipping his way to a truth only he had the “guts” to seek. This linkage between the lone hero’s true insight into the world’s evils and his willingness to shake off restraints and be brutal in exposing and destroying them helped form the key elements of the fantasy that guys like Cheney seem to be trying to live out.

From there, torture and other brutality against suspected enemies got slowly but progressively more common and “heroic” in film, most often in the form of rough interrogations that were probably not meant to count as torture for American audiences. A key point in such “permissible” torture scenes was the moral cowardice of the miscreants being interrogated: they cracked easily, before any serious damage was done, and always gave accurate information out of their abject fear of and submission to the heroes. At the same time, ironically or logically, I am not sure which, murdering-torturing villains in popular culture got more insidious, creative, and extreme. This served to maintain a distinction between acceptable and unacceptable torture – the Nazi dentist who pulled Dustin Hoffman’s teeth in Marathon Man definitely fell in the second camp — but also to build up the moral courage of the heroes. Villainous torture never worked, because heroes would refuse to talk or find some way to mislead the villains, and then escape. Torture thus became a test of character, one that was passed or failed according to the righteousness of the torture victim’s purposes. In these often-repeated fantasy scenarios, though apparently almost never in real life, torture could be seen as a highly effective tactic, and particularly so if one thought of war and international politics in terms of moral absolutes.

At the same time, the increasingly dire crimes of the villains justified and eventually demanded increasingly ruthless heroes. These themes squirmed through the urban crime thriller and serial killer genres through the ’80s and early ’90s, meeting up in some particularly mangy mid-period Eastwood and late Charles Bronson vehicles until finally emerging on top of the Hollywood A-list in 1995’s Se7en, currently rated the 32^nd best film of all time by Internet Movie Database users. That was the one where taunting Deadly Sins-themed killer Kevin Spacey gets executed by budding matinee idol Brad Pitt for (somehow) having the head of the tough detective’s young bride delivered to a remote location in a box. Who could blame Brad at that point? No one did, and it was not many years later that the “necessarily” ruthless hero arrived full blown on television in the form of 24’s Jack Bauer, who maimed, tortured, and killed suspected terrorists weekly, just in time for 9/11 to make fiction and reality appear to meet. (The conjunction was pretty eerie, considering that 24‘s debut was being advertised all over New York the day the airliners were crashed.)

Obviously people have been connecting 24 to normalization of torture for quite a while, and Dick Cheney did not need a television show to teach him the joys of inflicting pain on suspected enemies. Yet it is striking to observe that the effectiveness of torture, the thing that Cheney is currently staking his reputation on, seems to have no nonfictional evidence to substantiate it. Apparently, those righteous joys are all Dick needs.

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