What Stories We Tell When We Talk about Torture: Mapping the Geopolitics of Compassion and the Post-Abu-Ghraib National Family in 24: Redemption and Rendition

Abstract

This paper constellates two post-Abu-Ghraib cinematic texts, John Cassar's 24: Redemption (2008) and Gavin Hood's Rendition (2007), and examines how they manage national anxieties of shame and complicity through geopolitically determined displays of compassion. Collectively, these films depict good white citizens of the world who reconcile the disillusioned viewer to the national family by feeling for racialized subjects in pain. Scrutinizing the familial aesthetics that structure both texts, I consider what normative conditions must first be met in order for the racialized subject to be included in the national family and, more expansively, the human family on which the prohibitions against torture are predicated. Following Judith Butler's argument in Frames of War that ‘the human’ is a norm that can be enunciated or silenced, I map the selective admission of scenes of suffering into the ethico-political visual horizon of the US and argue that their admission or emergence assuages the shame of the post-Abu-Ghraib viewer while obfuscating the US's war crimes.