avevale_intelligencer (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
avevale_intelligencer) wrote2009-07-13 07:59 am
avevale_intelligencer) wrote2009-07-13 07:59 am
Watching The Pretender...
I like this series a lot. Jarod's ability plays into a lot of what I have imagined for my Nyronds. I wish they had made more of it. I'm also very fond of the way Sydney, Miss Parker and Broots are gradually led to the realisation that what they are doing week after week is helping Jarod, and that this is both the right thing to do and what they want; and the contrast between the Centre's obsession with "focus" and the emotions that exclude (anger, hate, greed, ambition) and Jarod's championing of the inclusive emotions (love, hope, forgiveness).
I do see a moral ambiguity here, though, that I hadn't noticed before. Jarod's standard MO, when dealing with the people he punishes, is to put them in what seems to them like the situation they put their victims in. The deadly element is not present, but they don't know that, and Jarod fosters the assumption on their part that he is like them, has done to them as they did to their victims, and that forces them to confess.
And we know what this is, don't we? This is torture.
I suppose I ought to be grateful to George W Bush, for clarifying my thinking on this. (If at any point President Obama locates his spine and does something substantive to outlaw torture for the future, it will be thanks to Bush that it happened.) It's a shame, though, that that clarification has shadowed my enjoyment of this series, because I now realise that anyone, put into the position of one of Jarod's victims and told what it was s/he had supposedly done, would confess just to make it stop. And that this never actually happened in the show is dishonesty on the part of the writers. And that, even if that weren't true, the fact that he does not kill his victims is not enough to make what he does morally acceptable. Understandable, certainly, since it shows the effect of his upbringing by the Centre, but not just or right.
The unregenerate subhuman inside me which glories in seeing retribution meted out to the evil will continue to enjoy those scenes. But I shall never do that with a whole heart again. Le sigh.
I do see a moral ambiguity here, though, that I hadn't noticed before. Jarod's standard MO, when dealing with the people he punishes, is to put them in what seems to them like the situation they put their victims in. The deadly element is not present, but they don't know that, and Jarod fosters the assumption on their part that he is like them, has done to them as they did to their victims, and that forces them to confess.
And we know what this is, don't we? This is torture.
I suppose I ought to be grateful to George W Bush, for clarifying my thinking on this. (If at any point President Obama locates his spine and does something substantive to outlaw torture for the future, it will be thanks to Bush that it happened.) It's a shame, though, that that clarification has shadowed my enjoyment of this series, because I now realise that anyone, put into the position of one of Jarod's victims and told what it was s/he had supposedly done, would confess just to make it stop. And that this never actually happened in the show is dishonesty on the part of the writers. And that, even if that weren't true, the fact that he does not kill his victims is not enough to make what he does morally acceptable. Understandable, certainly, since it shows the effect of his upbringing by the Centre, but not just or right.
The unregenerate subhuman inside me which glories in seeing retribution meted out to the evil will continue to enjoy those scenes. But I shall never do that with a whole heart again. Le sigh.
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Before W. I wouldn`t have noticed, but now, watching American forces exert their power is just not as much fun anymore.
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I don`t know how interogations in Germany are conducted, but there was a very famous case of a police inspector who got suspended, trialed and convicted for threatening (!) to hurt a suspect in order to get out of him where he hid the kidnapped child, in order to safe the kid's life. I guess Mr. Pretender wouldn`t stay too long in his job over here...
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But is it possible that "interrogation" in general is just a form of psychological torture, particularly to those who are completely innocent? Some of the interrogation bits you see on police/CSI shows could be particularly tramuatizing...
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Jarod's victims often appeal to the rules of conduct that are supposed to govern the people one of whom he's pretending to be. His response in such cases is to whip the rug out from under them by revealing that he's not really a doctor/lawyer/Indian chief or whatever, and that therefore the rules don't apply to him.
A degree of coercion is necessary when dealing with criminals, and since criminals often pretend to be innocent people, sometimes that coercion will be applied to someone who doesn't deserve it. Sometimes the only way to apply that coercion is through physical, mental or emotional stress of some kind. What separates that kind of thing from torture, I think, is a set of sensible rules, known to both policeman and suspect, and rigidly adhered to: rules which allow no scope for sadism or the primitive avenger impulse on the part of the policemen, and which ensure that when (if) the criminal confesses it is a confession that can be relied on, and not a waste of time and energy. When Jarod says "I'm not really a cop" or whatever, he is invalidating those rules, and from that point on whatever his victim says becomes valueless, the babble of someone who will say anything to save his or her life.