The Americans

Linda Mizejewski

• Publisher: Wayne State University Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780814347447
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Television

Based on the actual KGB strategy of planting "illegals" into American life during the Cold War, The Americans (FX 2013–2018) focuses on Philip and Elizabeth Jennings (Matthew Rhys and Kerri Russell), Soviet spies posing as middlebrow travel agents in the Virginia suburbs. Groundbreaking and unsettling, The Americans spins its stories of espionage, violence, and politics around narratives of marriage, romance, bromance, and family. Exploring the series' bold merger of the spy genre and domestic melodrama, author Linda Mizejewski focuses on the characters and relationships that made this series memorable: the extraordinary women who defy the femme fatale stereotype of the spy genre, the conflicted men, and perhaps most shockingly, the children who are both victims and provocateurs Do viewers of this Cold War thriller root for "the good guys"—the American agents in pursuit of the Jennings—or for the Jennings themselves, the attractive couple whose personal stories compel us even as they plot the takedown of the United States? Mizejewski argues for the importance of The Americans' portrayal of 1980s suburban life as a microcosm of the moral complexities of citizenship and national identity. Drawing on television studies and feminist media theory, this book examines the series' seamless loop of espionage violence and family melodrama, as well as its savvy uses of 1980s pop culture and music. Far from invoking nostalgia, the replication of the 1980s "look" invokes uncertainties about how, exactly, we should see Reagan's America and the Cold War. Yet the appeal of this series rests on solid footing in the Americanism it both critiques and espouses. Mizejewski examines The Americans' struggles with this ambiguity and with the contradictions of identity, gender, marriage, and the meanings of home. Everyone from scholars and students of television and media studies, genre studies, gender and sexuality studies, and popular culture, to superfans who can't believe the show is over will revel in this highly approachable and fun read.

1

Wigs, Sex, and Women’s Work

The female spy in popular culture flickers between male fantasy and feminist figuration. She’s very good at what she does, but much of what she does is women’s work—seduction, glamour, masquerade. American Cold War children grew up with her animated cartoon version, the slinky Russian spy, Natasha, on The Bullwinkle Show (originally titled Rocky and His Friends [ABC/NBC 1959–63]), whose television history overlapped with that of the equally slinky British agent Emma Peel in The Avengers (ITV/ABC/Thames 1961–69). Diana Rigg as Peel performed the femme fatale with wit and style, as did her American counterpart who was the title character of Honey West (ABC 1965–66). At a time when women on television were housewives or nuns, these female spies were the outliers—skilled professionals in a male profession. Yet as Honey’s name not so subtly suggests, no matter how quick they might be with a gun or a quip, their signature tools were cleavage and wigs.1

The Americans’ timeline begins in 1981 when the wig-and-cleavage tropes for women spies were the only ones available in pop-culture history. Even Scarecrow and Mrs. King’s housewife-spy didn’t appear until 1983. The sexy opening scene of The Americans’ pilot episode delivers this cliché so seamlessly that only in retrospect do viewers realize they’ve been taken in as thoroughly as Elizabeth’s hapless target. Wearing a Marilyn Monroe wig and low-cut cocktail dress, Elizabeth Jennings poses seductively on a bar stool, feigning awe when her mark brags about his Department of Justice job. Several shots frame her next to a mirror on the wall so we see both the character and her reflection, but even this visual cliché about female duplicity is complicated once the episode reveals that the themes of the entire series are double identities and the falseness of appearances. The platinum wig is a cliché but also a more nuanced emblem of the series itself.

Wigs are all about gender, and The Americans repeatedly plays up the implications of everyday gender performance in relation to character disguises and espionage. Philip often wears wigs, too, so the wig cliché transcends the female spy stereotype and instead symbolizes the complexity of these characters whose jobs are deceit and impersonation.2 For the women spies on The Americans, gender performance is central to their deceptions whether or not they’re actually wearing disguises. The Jenningses’ hard-nosed KGB handler Claudia is effective precisely because of her invisibility as a large older woman, and the reluctantly recruited spy Nina Krilova is effective because of her hypervisibility as a young, sexy one. In an additional twist on female role-playing, Elizabeth Jennings’s disguises are not always about sex and seduction. Her performances of traditional femininity draw her into a real rather than fictional friendship as “Patty” in season 4, and she’s forced into painful self-reflection while posing as a frumpy health-care worker in season 6.

The mirror on the left doubles the image of Elizabeth in a Marilyn Monroe wig, signaling the series’ larger themes of double identities and false appearances.

As this suggests, the emotional core of this series resides in its aggrieved female characters, including Elizabeth and Philip’s daughter, Paige, and Philip’s other wife, Martha Hanson, both of whom are discussed in the following chapters. While Philip Jennings and Stan Beeman are engaging protagonists, their stories don’t entail the same levels of complexity. Philip’s fatherhood is never as conflicted as Elizabeth’s motherhood, for instance, and his honey-trap entrapments don’t involve the violence suffered by both Elizabeth and Nina. The Americans’ deep emotional and narrative investment in these women stands in sharp contrast to other prestigious FX action dramas such as The Shield (2002–8), Sons of Anarchy (2008–14), and Justified (2010–15). As one critic put it, “The FX network has produced a critical darling that is not entirely awash in testosterone” (Borenstein 2016).

Jennings, Elizabeth

The Natasha cartoon is invoked as a joke by Elizabeth in a rare moment of relaxation with Paige in season 4. At this point, Paige knows her parents are KGB agents, although she doesn’t yet know that sex and violence are part of her mother’s job. During a family bowling night, Paige asks her if the KGB taught her how to bowl. “Vital part of training,” Elizabeth replies in a seductive, exaggerated Russian accent, and they both laugh gleefully (“Chloramphenicol” 4.4). Joe Weisberg said the script directs the line to be spoken “a la Natasha,” mocking not just the femme-fatale prototype but also the bad Russian accents Americans heard on television all through the Cold War (podcast 4.4).

The Americans can joke about the Natasha caricature because Elizabeth’s character derives from the more serious development of the female spy in twenty-first-century television, beginning with Sydney Bristow in Alias. Alias gave Sydney fabulous wigs and disguises but also gave her an in-depth personal life as a daughter, friend, and lover.3 Similarly well-drawn women spies appeared in Nikita (CW 2010–13) and Covert Affairs (USA 2010–15). The Americans gives Elizabeth a rich emotional life and takes seriously her loneliness, her intimacies, and her homesickness. It also portrays her as the more politically astute of the two protagonists. She’s attuned to American leftist interests through her relationship with Gregory (Derek Luke), a Black civil rights activist, and she has a meaningful friendship with Young Hee, a Korean immigrant, thus linking her to American minorities. She’s the character we see most furiously reacting to Ronald Reagan’s “Evil Empire” speech, and unlike Philip, she’s unmoved by American materialism. “It’s nicer here, yes. It’s easier,” she tells him. “It’s not better” (“New Car” 2.8). Elizabeth remains the uncompromising communist even when the Cold War is beginning to thaw through the diplomatic efforts initiated by Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985, which show up in the series’ fifth season. Philip withdraws from the illegals program by the end of that season, but Elizabeth’s change of heart comes very late in the series. When she does turn against the KGB hardliners, though, she exposes the Soviet operation and ends the entire espionage plot line.4

You can make a strong case that The Americans is Elizabeth Jennings’s story. The series begins by prioritizing her perspective with the rape story, and her political trajectory mirrors the final years of the Cold War itself. Of the two protagonists, she’s the one who changes the most. And perhaps most powerfully, The Americans centralizes Elizabeth in the series’ most emotionally charged subplot, the Jenningses’ involvement of teenage Paige in their espionage. If The Americans is Elizabeth’s story, it’s the story of a female anti-hero who transgresses ideologies of femininity not only in her uses of violence but in her violations of traditional motherhood, most egregiously in her disdain for the American coddling of children and her eagerness to recruit her daughter into the KGB.5

Elizabeth’s motherhood, much more than Philip’s fatherhood, animates much of the family melodrama in The Americans. Like Philip, she’s a loving but somewhat distant parent to their younger child, Henry, who, as the least developed recurring character, comes off more as a prop for their American-family ensemble. But the Elizabeth-Paige subplot seethes with the heat of maternal melodrama: mother-daughter conflict, boundary issues, fear of loss. In season 3, when Paige learns her parents’ true identities and is revolted, Elizabeth is more visibly shaken than Philip. Philip fears that Paige will blow their cover by confiding in someone, but Elizabeth fears she’s lost her daughter’s love (“Stingers” 3.10). And after Paige tells the whole story to her spiritual adviser, Pastor Tim (Kelly AuCoin), Elizabeth is much harder on her than Philip is for putting the family in danger. Paige is forced to spy on the pastor to make certain he believes the Jenningses’ pious story about how they’re actually peace workers helping with human rights issues in El Salvador. When the teenager neglects her assignment just once, Elizabeth comes down on her full throttle about the urgency of both watching and performing for Pastor Tim: “Thanks to what you did, that’s all that stands between us and this family being destroyed!” she shouts at her, while Paige quivers with tears (“The Magic of David Copperfield V” 4.8).

Paige believes her parents’ sanitized version of their KGB work until she and her mother are attacked by a knife-wielding mugger late one night. Elizabeth easily overtakes him and cuts his throat with his own knife. Paige is shocked, suddenly realizing her mother has been trained for something more vicious than humanitarian aid work (“Dinner for Seven” 4.11). Elizabeth uses the opportunity to expound the feminist message that a well-trained KGB agent isn’t as physically vulnerable as a woman. But soon she’s teaching Paige martial arts in the basement, and we’re seeing Paige becoming both empowered and indoctrinated. Exploiting Paige’s idealism, she eventually recruits her daughter into the KGB’s second-generation illegals program, against Philip’s vehement protests.

The throat-slitting incident with the mugger and its consequence of Paige’s recruitment encapsulate the thrills and perils of Elizabeth’s power as a character. There’s a lot of pleasure in having Paige—who can be a whiny teenager—see her mother spring into action as a fearsome avenger. She’s finally seeing her mother for what we’ve always known her to be. And for female viewers, seeing Elizabeth’s swift takedown of the mugger is a specifically female pleasure—the fantasy of confidence and safety, of walking dark streets without fear of assault. Elizabeth’s physical prowess is a female pleasure throughout the series, in fact, perhaps culminating in her late-night sidewalk rumble with FBI director Gaad and one of his agents that leaves both men bloody and incapacitated. “A woman the size of my mother beat the crap out of me,” the latter confesses abashedly to Stan, who generously responds, “I’m sure she could have taken down any one of us” (“Open House,” 3.3). These incidents remind us that her character is indebted not only to Sydney Bristow but also to the action heroines of cinema that had become mainstreamed with the character Ripley in Alien (1979) and its 1980s sequels and with Sarah Connor in The Terminator (1984). Writing about the gender transgressions and the cultural disruptions of these “musculine” heroines, Yvonne Tasker (2002, 132–33, 151–52) reminds us that the threat of rape and the rape-revenge plot have always haunted this film tradition.6 The revenge moment in The Americans’ pilot episode—the ease with which Elizabeth kicks her rapist’s head through the wall—is all the more significant as a confirmation of her self-sufficiency and the feminist implications of her character.

The problem is that Elizabeth’s feminist dimensions—her competence, fierceness, and her purity in devotion to a cause—are complicated by scripting that makes her progressively more dogmatic, more violent, and less sympathetic than Philip, especially in the final season of the series. Her zealotry is evident when she uses the mugger incident to begin training Paige in self-defense, with lessons that become gradually more connected to training as a KGB operative. We grow suspicious of her motives when she does this, but we should also be suspicious of a narrative that punishes Elizabeth for her transgressions more than it punishes Philip—ultimately through the loss of Paige, which she’d feared most. The question is to what extent her character suffers disproportionately because she’s an outlaw of both state and gender—the more dogmatically communist of the Jenningses and also the more outrageously transgressive because of her role as a mother. This suspicion of cultural bias needs to linger, but we also need to remember that melodrama itself sanctions and sympathizes with this kind of suffering. Kathleen Karlyn describes the key figure in domestic melodrama as the “excessive woman who desires too much,” revolting against the rules of gender in which she’s thoroughly imbricated as a wife, mother, daughter, lover (1995, 41).

The Americans breaks new ground by weaving Elizabeth’s conflicts about these roles into her work as a driven patriot, willing to kill for her cause. In one of the most devastating scenes in the series, Elizabeth’s identities as both daughter and mother unexpectedly implode when she has to kill an elderly woman who has become an unwitting witness (“Do Mail Robots Dream of Electric Sheep?” 3.9). During a break-in to a small shop, Elizabeth stumbles on the owner’s mother, Betty (Lois Smith), who comes in at night to do the bookkeeping. The quiet nights at the office make her feel “in tune” with her deceased husband who’d started the business, she explains, and she talks about his service in World War II when he helped liberate Nazi concentration camps. Elizabeth is captivated by his GI photos on the desk, and we realize that she’s thinking of her own father, who died in that war in 1942—in fact, shot as a deserter. Nevertheless, her mother and Betty had husbands who fought in a war when the United States and Russia were on the same side.

Elizabeth is so shaken by Betty’s evocation of her mother, who’s now seriously ill in Moscow, that she lets down her guard and, prompted by Betty’s questions, reveals details of her personal life—her parents, husband, children, and even her name. Viewers sadly understand that she’s making these disclosures because Betty can’t survive as a witness. Instead of using physical violence, she has Betty overdose on her heart medicine, but this means Elizabeth must sit with her as she dies. Betty haltingly asks Elizabeth to explain why she’s doing this, especially as a woman who has children of her own. When Elizabeth replies that she’s doing it “to make the world a better place,” Betty says, “That’s what evil people tell themselves when they do evil things.”

The word “evil” resonates because when Betty had talked about the GI photos, she’d mentioned the concentration camps, a knowable and external evil that had linked Betty’s husband and Elizabeth’s father as allies. But now Betty pointedly asks if killing her will make the world a better place. “Yes, it will,” Elizabeth replies, but it rings hollow in the echo of Betty’s quiet statement about evil. While Betty had spoken about feeling “in tune” with her husband, Elizabeth later hides her tears from Philip so he won’t see that this killing has upset her. Elizabeth and Philip are sometimes deeply in tune with each other as espionage partners and spouses, but they are sometimes trapped in the silos of their own isolation and fears.

While Philip enjoys a true friendship with Stan, Elizabeth is singularly lonely. In heartbreaking subplots, we see her lose a man she’d loved and a woman whom she’d genuinely befriended. The relationship with the lover, the civil rights activist Gregory, had happened fifteen years previously, when her marriage was still an arrangement and Philip was still a stranger. She had recruited Gregory for work with the KGB and found someone she could finally talk with. “He was passionate about everything, passionate about me,” she explains to Philip (“Gregory” 1.3). Years later, Gregory still loves her and makes the decision to die to protect her and Philip. The KGB plants evidence in Gregory’s apartment to divert the feds from Philip, who’d killed an FBI agent. Claudia asks Gregory to do this as his “final act of service” for which he’ll be protected by being safely exiled to Moscow. But realizing that a Black man in the USSR would face only a different version of racism, Gregory chooses suicide by cop instead, and we see him die in a...