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Almost as old as cinema itself, the split-screen – in which the filmic frame is divided into several parts – is one of the most prominent stylistic figures in 24, but is often used only to enhance the writing modes that are specific to cinema: alternate editing and shots/reverse shots are swallowed by the frame; link shots are evened out; framing choices are toned down; the different images are automatically reduced to one temporality only, etc. Through the division of images and the alteration of their ‘readability’ with confusing or defamiliarizing effects, the split screen stands as one of the preferred tools to create a certain kind of narrative sadism, which contributes to the series’ originality and to the viewing pleasure it provides.

24 (Fox, 2001-2010) was no doubt the War on Terror series of the George W. Bush presidency. Its groundbreaking aesthetic and narratological aspects – the 24-hour “real time” unfolding of events and its use of the split-screen – also function as a mise en abyme of a contemporary society defined by surveillance and by plots. The split screen exhibits the multiple narrative subplots, but also political plotting against America, in particular within the White House, in a reframing of the classic Cold War theme of the enemy within. The paranoid fracturing of the screen invites us to radically question what things seem, but also signals the split (hero/antihero) that characterizes Jack Bauer. This article will examine how the split screen functions less as a series of open windows than as a web closing upon Jack Bauer; and how it also reflects the ambivalence of those spectators who clearly perceive “real time” to create the conditions of the state of emergency that justifies the systematic use of torture, in the real-life context of a presidency that (even after the Abu Ghraib scandal) refused to consider waterboarding a form of torture.