Celebrating bad -assery of “24” music

Something wonderful happened to me and approximately 15.7 million other Americans on Sunday… Something wonderful happened to me and approximately 15.7 million other Americans on Sunday and Monday nights this week. The best show on television, “24,” returned. Jack Bauer be praised.

For those of you who have never seen the Fox TV show, “24” is shot such that each season represents one full day, with each episode acting as one hour in that day. The show centers on the Counter Terrorism Unit in Los Angeles and with each new season comes yet another hellish day for American national security.

No other series on television packs nearly as much excitement and “Holy s**t!” moments as my beloved “24,” and, likewise, no other show stars a dude quite as tough as Jack Bauer, who, in the first episode this week, actually shot and killed his best friend to protect the country. And I have a hard time convincing my roommate to protect my beer.

Needless to say, I have a total man-crush on Mr. Bauer.

Since I began devoting one hour a week to watching “24” and approximately 24 hours a week to talking about “24,” I have, because of the sheer intensity of the show and my embarrassing lack of self-control, shrieked countless expletives and monosyllabic non-words, shattered a remote controller against a wall, thrown a water bottle dangerously close to a full aquarium and broken all four legs of a couch with one forceful jump. And it wasn’t my couch – or remote controller, or aquarium, for that matter.

I will understand if no one reading this ever invites me over again, and I hope we can still be friends.

Alright, so enough back-story. Believe it or not, there is another reason I bring up “24” besides the show’s extensive bad-assery, my man-crush on Jack Bauer and my penchant for writing humiliating personal facts in these columns. And I bet you can guess the reason simply by looking at the words floating around my headshot above this article. That’s right – the music!

Much of the genius of “24” rests not just in its acting or plot twists, but in its ability to make viewers ridiculously tense for an entire hour every week through the use of music.

In high school, my “24”-watching friends and I had an ongoing joke that one night, we would buy the soundtrack to the show, pop it in a car and just drive around Lancaster County really fast making sharp turns like those in the show. We also weren’t very cool.

I bring this up, though, to suggest how powerful music can truly be in other medias – the impact of music in television and movies cannot be overstated. What would the end of “Titanic” have been like if that theme song had been performed by, say, Blink-182 instead of Celine Dion?

Oddly enough, probably a lot less annoying. Nonetheless, the power of music in visual media is undeniable.

But with “24,” music plays a different role. The show uses music not as a theme song – there isn’t a “Friends”-like sing-along with the opening credits – but rather as an undercurrent that pushes even the more relaxed moments to high-pitch intensity.

The music isn’t full of memorable melodies. You won’t be humming “24” tunes on the bus the next day, as they’re composed of terse, short blasts of swelling strings and computerized beeps. The music is extremely unsettling, and if I were to actually listen to it while walking around campus, I’d be a much less relaxed person. So much less relaxed that I’d probably run everywhere, and also.

But as much as music adds an extra slab of tension to “24,” it also takes away from the realism in the show that has banked on pretending to be based in reality. Real government agents don’t have orchestras, or guys holding boom boxes, following them around all day. But somehow we just accept that Jack Bauer saves the day with some omnipresent string section playing at all times. It is a clear dramatic conceit in a faux-real world.

But nitpick as I may, without “24’s” music, I can’t imagine the show reaching the nail-biting, water-bottle-throwing levels of intensity that it does with every episode. Somehow, the music that so obviously isn’t a part of real life adds to our imagined notion of how realistic the show is.

It’s a brilliant manipulation of our perception of reality: By anchoring the show with a ticking clock and real-world issues, “24” seems closer to home than any of that reality-TV garbage that VH1 pumps out by the minute. Even with constant theatrics and heart-pumping music, “24” seems more realistic than “Survivor” ever could.

So thank you music for, once again, making the world a better place. And also, thank you, Jack Bauer, for kicking enough ass for 15.7 million people. That’s a lot of ass.

If you want Justin to come to your dorm room during “24” and probably destroy all your stuff, e-mail him at jhj11@pitt.edu.