This article is a preview from the Autumn 2014 edition of New Humanist. You can find out more and subscribe here.
The first season of The Americans (recently broadcast in the UK on ITV) ended with a sequence soundtracked by Peter Gabriel’s “Games Without Frontiers”. The series has rightly been praised for its intelligent use of music, and “Games Without Frontiers”, which was released in 1980, the year in which the series begins, was a perfect choice of track for the climax of the first season. Atmospherically, the song is somehow both anxious and fatalistic: drained of emotional inflection, Gabriel’s vocals sound catatonic; the production is cold and forbidding. “Games Without Frontiers” feels not so much post-traumatic as pre-traumatic: as if Gabriel is registering the impact of a catastrophe that is yet to come.
Heard now, especially in the context of The Americans, a Cold War thriller, it reminds us of a time when such dread was ambient, when the spectre of seemingly inevitable apocalypse was woven into everyday life. Yet if “Games Without Frontiers” invokes the broad historical moment when The Americans is set, it also comments on the specific intrigues of the series. For The Americans is about Soviet spies posing as an ordinary US family. Cold War espionage did not respect the boundaries between private and public, between domestic life and duty to the cause: a game without frontiers indeed.
Created by former CIA agent Joe Weisberg, The Americans centres on Elizabeth (Keri Russell) and Philip Jennings (Matthew Rhys), two KGB agents living undercover as Americans in Washington. Weisberg had reputedly toyed with setting the series in the 1970s, but opting for 1980 makes strong dramatic sense. In 1980, the Cold War was intensifying in the immediate wake of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and the election of Ronald Reagan, who was keen to prosecute a Manichean struggle against the “Evil Empire”.
The series is characterised by a bipolar oscillation between a downbeat naturalism and the screaming adrenal intensities of the thriller. There is no shortage of car chases and shoot-outs in The Americans – there is probably no more exciting show on TV at the moment than this – but these are intercut with scenes of domestic life, where the tensions are of another kind altogether.
Far from being a respite from the Cold War, the Jenningses home life is the zone where they carry out their most emotionally charged deceptions. The marriage is itself a sham: initially at least, Elizabeth and Philip are agents on a mission, not lovers, and the series is in part about their attempts to navigate this fraught emotional terrain, and to reconcile their differing expectations about what their roles entail. But Elizabeth and Philip at least know what they are doing; their children, Paige and Henry, necessarily do not. They are not aware that their parents are KGB agents (the children’s ignorance being one of the best forms of cover that the Jennings have available to them).
This not only raises the threat of discovery, but also raises a moral dilemma: should the children be told? This dilemma comes to a head in the second season, when one story arc concerns the murder of a fellow KGB couple and one of their children. When it turns out that the surviving child, Jared, had been recruited by the KGB, the question of Paige’s recruitment is inevitably raised. “Paige is your daughter,” says the Jenningses KGB controller, Claudia, “but she’s not just yours. She belongs to the cause. And to the world. We all do.”
This brings us to a contrast between The Americans and even some of the most sophisticated spy fiction, such as that of John Le Carre. In Le Carre’s work, George Smiley’s adversary is the KGB Spymaster Karla – and for all that Le Carre complicated the broadbrush good-and-evil binary of Cold War propaganda, Karla remained an almost demonic figure whose commitment was incomprehensible to Smiley and his self-styled liberal pragmatism. In The Americans, the Soviets are transformed into our likeness. This first of all happens through the foregrounding of Elizabeth and Philip. But they are well supported by the rich cast of characters in the rezidentura (KGB station): Nina Krylova, a double, then triple agent, fragile but resilient and resourceful; the pragmatic strategist Arkady Ivanovich; the ambitious and enigmatic Oleg Burov. The decision to have the characters in the embassy speak Russian is important; their difference from Westerners is maintained, and the absurd convention whereby they are heard speaking bad English in pantomime Russian accents is avoided.
In a reversal of stereotype, the Soviets in The Americans seem so much more glamorous than their American counterparts. The Jenningses’ chief antagonist, FBI agent Stan Beeman (Noah Emmerich) – who in a soap opera twist turns out to be a near neighbour – comes off as dour by comparison with the dynamic and glamorous Elizabeth and Philip, just as the FBI offices seem drab and mean when set against the intrigue of the rezidentura.
This no doubt contributes to the series’s subversive flourish, which consists in the fact that the audience not only sympathise with the Jenningses, they positively root for them, dreading their discovery, hoping that all their plans come to fruition. The Americans’ message is not that the Jenningses share a common humanity with their American enemies and neighbours, but just happen to be on the other side. Given the extremity of their situation, it is impossible for us to think that Philip and Elizabeth are “just like us”; at the same time, however, the series forces us to identify with them, even as their otherness is preserved.
At key points, their differences from the “real” Americans are emphasised. While Philip is sometimes seen to vacillate, to appreciate at least some aspects of the American way of life, Elizabeth never wavers in her commitment to the destruction of American capitalism. At one moment during the second season, Paige starts going to a church group. Nothing brings home Elizabeth’s alienness to American life – and to many of the protocols of US TV drama – more than the ferocity of her hostility to this development. The scene in which a furious Elizabeth confronts Paige about all this is strangely hilarious: there aren’t many places elsewhere in American TV drama where we can see Christianity attacked with such fervour.
The complexity of Elizabeth’s character – and its sophisticated performance by Keri Russell – may be the highlight of the series. Both she and Philip have to be ruthless – when it is necessary, they kill without compunction – but Elizabeth has an unsentimental coldness and poise which the more equivocal Philip lacks. It is to the series’ credit that it doesn’t code this coldness as a moral failing – rather, it holds in tension two conflicting world views, which value Elizabeth’s strength of purpose and Philip’s uncertainties very differently. There is certainly no doubt, for instance, that Elizabeth loves her children (if she didn’t, she would too easily fall into the stereotype of the Soviet monster) – but the question is what place this love should have in a hierarchy of duties. For Elizabeth, it is clear, the Cause must
always come first.
In conditions where capitalism dominates without opposition, the very idea of a Cause has disappeared. Who fights and dies for capitalism? Whose life is made meaningful by the struggle for a capitalist society? (Perhaps it is this devotion to the Cause that gives the Soviet characters in The Americans their glamour.) It was none other than Francis Fukuyama who warned that a triumphal capitalism would be haunted by hankerings after existential purpose that consumer goods and parliamentary democracy could not assuage. Much of the appeal of The Americans depends upon the fact that it is set before this period. Our knowledge that the collapse of the Soviet experiment was less than a decade away from the period when the series is set lends all of the discourse about the communist Cause in The Americans a melancholy quality. In 1980, the Cold War felt as if it would last for ever. In reality, within a mere nine years, everything that Elizabeth and Philip stood for would collapse, and the end of history would be upon us.
Season One of The Americans (20th Century Fox) is available now on DVD. Season Two will be out later this year
