 |
Conceptually, The Americans is rooted in identity politics; at once, it's a methodical contention with the Cold War, a dramatic exposition of nationalism and a meticulous deconstruction of the domestic realm. Its characters shift in and out of disguise, switching out wigs, replacing elaborate costumes and altering the very shape of their smiles. Their work, and in turn their livelihood, is performative, ever-dependent on convincing and transforming.
In its intimate depiction of Cold War-era Soviet spies, The Americans makes devastatingly existential arguments. Executive producers Joe Weisberg and Joel Fields tackle our nationalistic understandings of marriage, work and parenthood by writing from the outside in. They work from a coolly sociological perspective, but they break into our homes and our offices -- into where we live, and where we work -- with emotional intensity. And with its third season now concluded, the confluence of the intellectual with the introspective represents The Americans' narrative evolution. Unbearably personal and yet academically rigorous, the series has become a stinging mosaic of our norms, our history and our everlasting search for self.
***
The Americans operates with a realization of morality and decency that is fundamentally skewed from television's standard. Through this revision, the series has evolved into a direct rebuke to the medium's antihero craze. At face value, we could at least come to grips with the crises of Tony Soprano or Walter White or Don Draper; there was always a degree of levity, even if it only came through in moments as brief (and isolated) as Heisenberg tossing a pizza pie on the roof of his house, or Pete Campbell fumbling down a flight of stairs. In The Americans' third season, the actions of Philip and Elizabeth Jennings, Soviet spies posing as a suburban fantasy, turn bleak, cold, unnerving -- beyond redemption.
It’s what makes The Americans difficult but enormously rewarding television. Typically, despair and misery aren’t characteristics we associate with the fictional worlds we choose to encounter on a weekly basis. But here, it’s the template through which our characters are understood. Philip's (Matthew Rhys) tasks to brutally kill, repeatedly lie and sexually manipulate take an inevitable toll on his sanity; equally tragic is Elizabeth’s (Keri Russell) inability to reach such an emotional breakthrough, as her staunch belief in her cause remains near-indestructible despite the horrible things she’s forced to do. The show provides us with characters acting, amorally, in allegiance to our enemy. But it magically, effortlessly provokes us to care even still. These are spouses and parents who care about their world, even if they aren’t quite sure how to channel that passion. They are displaced, misguided; they tell lies to everyone around them as much as they do to themselves.
Realism is a quality in television that might be attributed a tad too lightly -- and it’s hardly a label we’d normally stick onto a series about KGB spies in Reagan-era America. But damn if this show doesn’t capture our psychology, our contradictions, our guises and our impulses with more accuracy than most anything to come before it. It progresses with a structure boldly averse to “dramatic,” or what one might call deliberateness. The season finale “March 8, 1983” leaves a lot of ends untied, neglecting to provide an update on Martha (the extraordinary Alison Wright), the FBI secretary whose life has been forever limited and (depending on your perception) destroyed by Philip and his bosses. Kimmie, the troubled teen at the center of Philip’s moral crisis through much of the season, is absent in its crucial final weeks.
The lack of closure is maddening, but also essential: The Americans progresses like life. Just as it appears that Elizabeth and Philip are finally ready to reveal their true identities to their daughter Paige (Holly Taylor, a transcendent young actress), in comes their suspicious teen to confront and force it out of them instead. It's abrupt, considering the careful work done to get to this point, and yet it feels just right. This element lends the show an extraordinary streak of unpredictability, pronouncing the gloomily anticipatory nature of the viewing experience. The rejection of firm closure -- aside from a fateful phone call from Paige to close out the season -- allows the show to breathe with unsettling authenticity. You never know when the hammer is going to drop.
The third season of The Americans is the equivalent of a television masterpiece. Week in and week out, it holds an emotional grip that’s astonishingly rare. To live with these dilemmas of spirit and morality, and the search for meaning and balance and love -- for who you are, and what you want -- is engrossingly cathartic, a delving into human minds and relationships torn by circumstance and forever limited by self-delusion: by Martha’s sham marriage, Agent Stan Beeman’s (Noah Emmerich) blind obsession with a myth of a soulmate, Philip's grotesque work requirements, Elizabeth's twisted commitment to justice. These characters, no matter how jaded or disillusioned or oblivious or cruel, are individually rendered with empathy and humanity. The rigor with which Fields and Weisberg operate allows every idea, and every soul, to be reckoned with.
The show pushes itself, extending beyond merely suffocating drama. A streak of pitch-black comedy runs through each episode (the contrast between Martha’s innocence and tragedy is so stark, for instance, that to laugh often seems the only appropriate response), and the performances are steadfastly connective and humane. Rhys and Russell capture their characters with a balance of openness and precision, allowing their psyches to be understood and their emotions to resonate. That’s to say nothing of the brilliant and subtle work of Emmerich, Wright and so many other supporting players.
The show’s emotional openness comes in all directions. In the season finale, when Stan’s ex-wife Sandra (Susan Misner) bumps into Philip at an EST sex seminar, the ensuing conversation is penetratingly beautiful (and by the end, very sad). Philip, trying to “reclaim” his body, finds a safe person who’s looking for a confidante -- and he surely wants a confidante as well. But in Philip’s world, no one is safe: he can only wear that mask of normalcy. Philip and Elizabeth are always engaging in different ways through their different disguises, but the disparate nature of their lives renders cohesion -- that is, a definable sense of self -- impossible. The conversation between Sandra and Philip is genuine on both sides, and yet there’s a wistful hollowness, an inescapable sense of secrecy. It's a crisis universal to The Americans, and to human nature as well.
Therein lies the series' power: examining our mystical, varied but threaded states of being by interpreting it literally, in characters whose masks aren’t so metaphorical. The life-and-death stakes of the show’s early days have given way to reflection, a force compelling its characters to look in the mirror. Elizabeth does it through the maternal eyes of Betty (Lois Smith), an old widow who resembles her mother, and Philip through the childlike eyes of Kimmie. To invest in these characters is to invest in the sensory gamut as humanity knows it. That the show hits the spectrum so broadly and yet so specifically ascertains its consummate emotional intelligence.
These humanistic explorations of sex and family and country are filtered into one, basic idea: truth. It's presented in The Americans as it actually functions: as a complicated, ever-shifting ethical scale. It’s not merely an exchange of valid information, or of empirically-based feelings. It’s an unedited foray into our internal lives, rawer, messier and darker than we’d allow anyone to believe. The increasing unreliability of the show’s actual information -- consider Stan's season-ending audience double-cross, or Paige's volatile state-of-mind -- creates an interactive, internalized embodiment of the concept. Read between the lines, The Americans says: feel the characters, understand them, and forget about the details. Listen to Stan’s deluded idealizations, or Philip’s intensifying moral conflict. The mechanics are just that: mechanics.
Historically, the Cold War’s legacy is often whittled down to events as comically rigid as the Kitchen Debate or, as The Americans chooses to end its third season on, President Reagan’s “evil empire” speech. The Cold War ostensibly situated Democracy against Communism, and freedom against tyranny. But the ideological divide, as demonstrated so vividly in The Americans, illuminated so much more. It dichotomized the way we think about family, sex, individuality, love and marriage. Reagan's speech violently illustrated these divisions, and perpetuated the endless, cloudy conflict intrinsic to the Cold War as a consequence.
His words permeate the halls of the Jennings home; Elizabeth scratches her scalp in response, utterly baffled by the characterization, while Paige confesses her parents’ sins in the other room, inadvertently echoing the words of her President. The struggle, as these characters' behaviors elucidate, is more nuanced. Their immediate reactions are believably primal, but from an observer's distance, the sociopolitical dynamics reveal themselves as the root of their choices.
Just before the speech, Elizabeth bids adieu to her dying mother, who sent her off as a little girl, abandoning her in the name of the cause. Her childhood emerges here as an unthinkable reality left to Paige to question: “Would you do that to me?” she asks her mother, pained. Elizabeth’s response, “You will never have to do anything like that,” doesn't really answer the question -- mainly because she can't comprehend it. Everything so tragically beautiful and achingly sad about The Americans can be extracted from this moment. This is a show that confronts existence and choice, combating them with expressions of intimacy and affection. Listen to what Paige is asking, really: What do you believe? What does love mean to you? What do you want from me? What would you sacrifice? Who are you?
Look in the mirror, comrades. It’s a question being asked of us all.
Grade: A+