24 heures chrono : enfermement spatio-temporel, nœud d’intrigues, piège idéologique ?

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.