Substance / style

Moments in television

Sarah Cardwell, Jonathan Bignell, Lucy Fife Donaldson, Sarah Cardwell, Jonathan Bignell, Lucy Fife Donaldson

• Editore: Manchester University Press
• Anno: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781526148773
• Argomento: Media & Performing Arts
• Categoria: Television History & Criticism

An exciting new strand in The Television Series, the 'Moments in Television' collections celebrate the power and artistry of television, whilst interrogating key critical concepts in television scholarship.Each 'Moments' book is organised around a provocative binary theme. Substance / style offers fresh perspectives on television's essential qualities and aesthetic significance. It reassesses the synergy between substance and style, highlighting the potential for meaning to arise through their integration. The book's chosen programmes are persuasively illuminated in new ways.The book explores an eclectic range of TV fictions, dramatic and comedic. Contributors from diverse perspectives come together to expand and enrich the kind of close analysis most commonly found in television aesthetics. Sustained, detailed programme analyses are sensitively framed within historical, technological, institutional, cultural, creative and art-historical contexts.

1
Layers of style: design and embodiment in The Americans

Lucy Fife Donaldson

The opening credits of The Americans (FX, 2013–18) present a collage of photographic and print images, apparently archive footage and fragments of documents, graphic outlines and cut-out text moving between emblems, statues, propaganda posters, family photographs and footage of leisure and war that juxtaposes and overlaps iconographic representations of America and the former USSR. The text crediting each cast member appears first in Russian Cyrillic, which is then immediately almost fully covered by a black cut-out box – referencing the redaction of text in official documents – containing the English-language version of the actor's name in red lettering. This tightly patterned clustering of imagery sets up the world of the series, establishing the cold-war spy thriller narrative through images of spycraft and secret documents as well as initiating a suggestive paralleling of the US and the USSR through their mutual interests, from space travel to family to nuclear armament.

More than this, the design of the credits and their movement present forms of identity (national and personal) as layered constructions built up through personal and political ideologies across two nations in conflict. The principal characters, Elizabeth and Philip Jennings (Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys), occupy the dual roles of unremarkable US citizens (small-business owners and parents to two children) and Soviet KGB officers; throughout the series the dangers and difficulties of their work, complete with multiple identities and disguises, are interwoven with the intimate dynamics of their relationship, alongside their role as parents. The credit sequence acknowledges the multiplicity of these identities through its series of collaged images that present parallels between American and Russia, and juxtapositions of what we might take as an authentic image (from their legal form of identity – a section of their passport) with a politically idealised image (taken from a piece of propaganda). Keri Russell's credit is introduced with a frame that situates the US Marine Corps war memorial in Arlington (also known as the Iwo Jima memorial) alongside the Worker and the Kolholz Woman memorial in Moscow, both sets of figures collectively raising objects (the national flag; the hammer and sickle), followed by a portion of Elizabeth's Russian passport next to the woman from Aleksander Rodchenko's ‘Books Please!’ poster. Matthew Rhys's credit follows footage of an American boy swinging a baseball bat, which cuts to a young Russian boy learning to use a scythe in the fields, and then to Philip's Russian passport beside a male figure from a US Second World War bonds poster. The rapidity of editing impresses a density in the combination of images and imagery, which create a collection of possible meanings that gather rather than replace one another. It also is difficult to grasp all the associations and connotations being built into the overlaps and apposition of the collage, just as it will prove difficult for the characters to manage these differing layers that construct their identity. Fittingly for a television programme centring on spies, the placement of the English-language credit gestures to how an outer surface can obscure another layer of identity, though it is difficult to tell in the credit sequence, as in the series, which might be the preferred or authentic surface (the Russian or English name; the passport or the propaganda), or whether these amount to the same thing. The layering of images further hints at the complexity of the relationship between the two nations, pointing out their perceived opposite ideological impulses, as when an image of Santa Claus with a small child is overlaid with a photograph of Karl Marx, alongside their direct parallels, as in the placement side by side of reworked versions of Russian and American propaganda posters of a woman holding her index finger to her lips in a silencing gesture.¹ The images chosen for the credits thus intertwine the personal and the political, conflating the individual with the national, the authentic with the iconographical, and hint at the ways their combination might not sit comfortably on top of or alongside one another.

Style/surface – substance/depth

As the opening credits begin to suggest, in The Americans the relationship between style and substance resists any easy delineation; if each layer or surface offered relates to an aspect of identity under scrutiny, the distinction between those that are false and those that are true is difficult to discern. As a stylish evocation of spycraft in the 1980s embedded within a substantive, emotionally complex serial drama the series offers a number of ways to engage with issues of style. This chapter is concerned principally with the programme's style as shaping a material surface (both in terms of being fabricated and creating a credible world) through intermeshing design decisions. While sound makes a crucial contribution to the dramatic achievements of the series, for the purpose of containing my argument I have focused on visual design. Special attention will be paid to the intersection of design with Keri Russell's performance, as her embodiment of Elizabeth Jennings – a central surface in the show's design – offers a focused opportunity to track the materially meaningful qualities of style. Russell's choices as a performer engage carefully with decisions around costume and make-up, to render her character through a meticulous collation of elements that integrate the personal and professional: ruthless violence, tender tactility, professional detachment, patriotic dedication, vulnerability and ferociousness.

Style is often aligned with surface, with artifice, construction, ephemerality.² Holding a style, adopting a disguise, are temporary modes of being; to be invested in style is to skate on the surface, to remain superficial and undeveloped. The design of The Americans foregrounds the artifice necessitated by the Jennings's work through changes of setting, costume and make-up. Thus style is crucially manifested in surfaces, in the outward indicators of identity, time and place. Elizabeth and Philip – or perhaps more accurately their original Russian identities, Nadezhda and Mischa – are almost blank slates, surfaces to be decorated in order to complete operational missions. The work of Russell and Rhys (and other cast members), along with production designers John Mott, Diane Lederman and Dan Davis, costume designers Jenny Gering and Katie Irish, make-up department head Lori Hicks and hair department heads Peggy Schierholz and Cory McCutcheon, is concerned with the manipulation and transformation of surface, their collaborative labour producing style, from the intricate details of a temporary identity that feels real to both performer and audience in order to be convincing, to the overarching look of a sequence remaining coherent within the series as a whole.

Substance, on the other hand, is concerned with complexity, with materiality, thickness, solidity. The layered narrative of The Americans, as well as its historical/political grounding and multifaceted performances, delivers such weight and seriousness. While the disguises necessitated by the Jennings's work connect to the potential ephemerality of style, the design of the series, from décor to costuming and the all-important wig/make-up work, is central to rooting the series in a credible incarnation of the 1980s, and making material and tangible the emotional shades of the characterisation and narrative. Each surface is supported by considerable depth if we acknowledge the labour of the design personnel listed above, which involves extensive knowledge of the period's clothing and interiors as well as sourcing of materials, many of which are never seen on-screen but still inform the world of the show.

Style is made political in the split between national ideologies manifested through attitudes to material consumption. As hinted at by the overlapping of Santa Claus and Karl Marx in the credit sequence, in the series, American values are equated with an investment in passing surface pleasures, clothes, cars and other unnecessary items. Russia is a place of hardship, a rejection of style and surface in favour of deeper feelings of duty, loyalty and survival. Design is also politicised through its relationship to temporality, as Alex Bevan observes in the relationship between costume and nostalgia: ‘the series illustrates how nostalgic costuming and particularly the camping of past styles can signify points of difference, Otherness and (mis)alignment with dominant codes of dress, and by extension, dominant histories of the past’ (2019: 196). Although I would not go as far as to describe the design as camp, Bevan's suggestion that the historical and political themes are embodied through costumes and production design, that otherness is communicated through the deliberate deglamorising of disguise in certain moments, offers an approach that takes surfaces seriously.

Style can be formulated as avoiding depth, remaining at the surface level; ‘style over substance’. But style is also significant, meaningful. The work of interpretive criticism, as argued for by Jason Jacobs and Steven Peacock in their introduction to Television aesthetics and style, centralises visual and aural style as worthy of scrutiny. For Jacobs, Peacock and the co-editors of this volume, all key contributors to work on television aesthetics, it is the responsibility of television criticism to ‘negotiate the potential complexities and meanings of style’, in recognition of television as capable of ‘expressive richness’ (Jacobs and Peacock 2013: 5, 6). My appreciation of the achievements of The Americans aims to address its style not as opposed to its substance, but rather as the constitution of its meaningfulness, and more specifically to locate this meaning in the fine detail of the series’ design. The varied elements of design constitute decisions about and on the surface, that when put together we might consider as creating an overall pattern and shape, a texture. As I have argued in relation to film (Donaldson 2014), to think about texture acknowledges materiality and fabrication, the importance of minute compositional decisions (textures in the diegesis) to an overall shape or surface (texture of the whole). The television series is a form that by virtue of the density of its narrative and characters and temporal/spatial span forms a more complex and detailed surface in which to investigate the layers of design.

Layers of intimacy

The Jennings’ marriage is a professional arrangement designed as an anchor for their cover as operatives in ‘Directorate S’, Russia's programme of embedding agents to live as Americans, and so the overlapping proximity of tensions between artifice and authenticity, ...