(Not
just a review of the serial)
Simply
yonks ago, I was studying drama in South London and attended a class
by one of the Three Wise Men (who taught us the history and theory of
drama) when the Suspension of Disbelief came up. In case that's a
concept you've never come across, I'll outline it in a sentence or
two. The idea is that while viewing a performance, an audience sets
aside the natural tendency to dismiss what they see as fake; in other
words, they let go of their incredulity. According to this theory,
the success or failure of the show depends on the extent to which the
actors playing Lady Macbeth or James Bond relieve the audience of
their common sense. As you can tell from my tone, this concept –
even if traces back to Aristotle - bugged me from the start.
Actually,
not from the very start, because for a few ticks there I was seduced
by Suspension of Disbelief's sophistry. From the actor's point of
view, it's comforting to think of an audience as being naturally
receptive. They are presumably - in one way or another - paying to
watch, and therefore have set themselves up. But what soon gnawed at
my confidence in this trick of the footlights was the consequent
thought: if true, isn't it all rather condescending? A bit like
plonking the kids in front of a Punch and Judy and hoping for the
best? Will they give you a rest, or start complaining the puppeteer's
bum is sticking out of the booth?
Though
I wasn't the first to bolt out of the doubters' stalls, I was in good
company. This idea that the skill of puppeteers, magicians, film
makers, actors in radio drama, even story tellers is the ability to
lull their audience into a suspension of disbelief was challenged
during the early twentieth century by – amongst others – Bertholt
Brecht and JRR Tolkien. Setting Fantasy Fiction aside, the Theatre of
the Absurd, Epic Drama, Agit Prop and the Theatre of Cruelty all had
a beef with the so-called Fourth Wall. Fourth Wall. Again, in case
you're not familiar with the term, it refers to the frame of a
traditional Proscenium Arch Theatre through which the audience sit
facing the play. Although the stage is three dimensional, the overall
effect is like a picture frame; therefore, whatever the audience sees
isn't so very different from watching a film on screen. What Brecht
and his contemporaries did was to tear down the arch, stage plays in
the round, or anywhere the actors had no place to hide.
It's
not only about physical space. Brecht wrote issue based plays such as
The Caucasian Chalk Circle, where the aim was to get the audience to
think and – ultimately – to act for themselves. The play is based
on the Judgement of Solomon, a moral allegory championing nurture
over nature. It was first staged by worker's co-operatives in the
aftermath of World War Two; and in many performances the audience are
invited to take part, the play itself becoming a sort of collective
rite. Actors speak directly to the audience - not through camp
“asides” - but slipping in and out of character. Costume changes
are done on stage, not in the wings or dressing rooms. Ideally,
nothing is hidden, everything is shown and the story is told through
its songs and choreography as much as by talking heads mouthing off
at each other. Although plays like The Chalk circle were soon being
performed in the West by professional theatre groups for the benefit
of mostly bourgeois audiences; in their original context, the purpose
would have been to inspire a kind of political correctness (for want
of a better expression) in both audience and performers alike.
The
Fourth Wall is a comfort zone that allows the audience to relax and
enjoy the show. If they wanted something else, they could try a lap
dancing bar or go and stand on the terraces of a football match.
There they could have a stake in the experience without getting
preached at or indoctrinated. At the theatre the choice was not
between making a fool of themselves or lurking in the shadows. It was
between being amused by Agatha Christie, moved by Peter Shafer or
challenged for being there at all by Cunning Stunts.
Sorry,
it's unfair to presume a familiarity with late twentieth century
drama in the UK, So Let me qualify those choices. In this taxonomy,
going to an Agatha Christie play is not so different from watching an
episode of Father Brown on the BBC. No matter how brilliant or dull
the acting, the sets or the script - whodunnits hide in plain sight
behind that Fourth Wall with all the vibrancy colour TV had circa
1968. On Shaftesbury Avenue you might get to see the stars of screen
in the flesh, and wait at the Stage Door for an autograph. Meantime
there's ten metres of solid air between a front seat in the stalls
and what goes down on stage; the only two-way exchange is at the end
when the actors pull their wigs off and take a bow: you get to
applaud, even throw roses.
Another
kind of drama engages the conscience or the existential mind. It may
be performed in a different sort of theatre building, though not
necessarily. It may be epic in scale (like Shafer's The
Royal Hunt of the Sun
or Equus)
and it may be Beckett's Waiting
For Godot,
staged in the round at an intimate studio theatre. Little might come
between the audience and the performers in the free flow of emotion,
tears and mirth. There's a sort of handshaking going on, a formal
dialogue, even improvised so long as it conforms to a political or at
least a social correctness. Brecht and the other absurdists had this
effect on established theatre.
With
performers such as Cunning Stunts, the audience may be confronted,
annoyed or intimidated. A certain amount of convention still
prevails, in so far as men who attend feminist events are expected to
bear responsibilities that shift the personal onto a collective
guilt. This requires silence, and therefore one aspect of Fourth Wall
remains intact; but to quote a rather hackneyed phrase, the medium is
the message. Just attending the event is a form of political
expression, and there is a cumulative affect. Progress means change,
and once change has occurred, it's hard to go back. As with the horse
that has bolted, there is no use locking the barn door.
The
Americans is a US TV show in six series with a total of seventy-five,
forty-five minute episodes. That's a staggering amount of viewing:
fifty-six hours. To spend so much time reading a book, it would be
more than twelve hundred pages, about as long as War and Peace. Given
that the subject is Russian spies operating in the USA during the
1980s, alluding to Tolstoy – still Russia's most celebrated author
- isn't out of place. But why is downwritefiction suddenly turning to
reviewing a TV show? And why has this long article kicked off with
over a thousand words on the Suspension of Disbelief in the theatre -
when The Americans is delivered over the Internet?
Quite
a while back, we looked at Land
and Freedom,
a film by Ken Loach. That piece of cinema, when I finally allowed
myself to watch it, didn't have the same effect as The
Americans,
though it had a fair smattering of déjà
vu moments
for me. I examined it because the novel I'd put out on Amazon, MY
Heart Forgets To Beat,
covered much of the same ground: a young Liverpool man going off to
fight in the Spanish Civil War. I had to set the record straight and
explain why my book and Ken Loach's film were so very different, even
though their politics were broadly similar. The motive I have for
dealing with The
Americans
runs even deeper than the two decades spent writing and rewriting
MHFTB.
Unlike the Spanish Civil War (beginning twenty years before I was
born, and in which my mother's cousin Sean Redmond had died) I took
an active part in the Cold War. Not as a protagonist, but as an
activist I had first hand contact with undercover agents, and
Caroline Taylor - a fellow campaigner and friend - got killed in a
horrendous, unexplained accident.
OK,
The Americans was released on Amazon between 2013 and 2019. I
stumbled on Episode One the week before Christmas, believing it to be
only a pilot for a series that was never made. I got a shock when the
credits rolled up and saw what a massive undertaking it was. Having
been riveted (as they say) I was daunted by the prospect of ploughing
through the whole deal. And here's where Suspension of Disbelief
first came in. From the pilot episode onwards, I had to confront the
question: what compels my interest in one piece, while I pass on so
many others?
There's
also an existential question. Is it so great these days when you can
catch up on a show you've missed, instantly do all the fan stuff,
look up the stars and crew on IMDb, Google a few context questions...
and all the while not having to impose your choice of viewing on the
family, watching on your phone or laptop alone in shed or bed?
I
dunno. I recently watched Episode Two of Strange Report – in
colour, fgs - which I last saw on our old black and white set when it
was broadcast in 1969. I was 13 then, and was instantly smitten by
Anneke Wills. Now she looks like Miss Jones the infant school
teacher, you may look back but never touch. Shuddering thought. (Must
have been the onset of puberty as I'd hardly noticed her as the
Doctor's assistant.) Why is it - sorry for posing another rhetorical
so soon - why do you have to project your own real life onto roles
enacted on screen? If you said you never did, I'd say you and whose
army! Leastways, I have nothing for anyone who denies it. You are
neither Lear nor Cordelia. Lady Macbeth has got your tongue. Jimmy
Porter never jumped you in a dark alley. There's not an ounce of
Colonel Whatshisface in your father. There's no Betty Bacall on your
back seat, no Columbo in your rear mirror.
Come
on, I say, we are all Philip Marlowe trying to protect the guilty
female. Or else, we are all that damaged human for christsake
desperate to avoid the grey knight in the Plymouth coupé. These are
the stories we tell ourselves. We can neither take them nor leave
them, because there is no universal belief system we have signed up
to, that we forever have to acknowledge. There is no Inquisition. The
stories that shadow us wherever we go are palpably there whether we
like it or not. They are present in a single line from a song, an
image that flashes on a billboard, a short phrase overheard on an
escalator, and - most pernicious of all - the stab of memory or a
vision that's somehow suddenly taken out of its dream context. Though
I shake my head at Polanski, I cried when his Oliver set out for
London, homeless, friendless, penniless. I cried when I heard Thick
As A Brick
for the first time in years on a crappy tape machine somewhere in the
mountains of Anatolia in 1993. This isn't Suspension of Disbelief. I
hardly ever cry, even when things get tough. I didn't cry watching my
Mum's funeral on Zoom, or when our babies were born. But I cried when
Margaret Thatcher got kicked out of Number Ten, and I cried when I
woke up early one morning after a heavy night's drinking and realised
Ronald Reagan had his finger on the button.
They
talk about catharsis in art. Arion, a Greek from Lesbos, started what
we now call drama by staging his verses with music, dance, a single
actor and a chorus line. It was entertainment, not pure entertainment
because there was a religious side to it. And the roots of drama go
back further than Arion telling his own story at the court of the
tyrant Periander. I like to think he recreated his rescue by the
dolphins as an offering to the gods. In the version of the story I
tell myself, he pleaded for the life of the sailors – who may or
may not have been guilty of trying to rob and drown him – with this
appeal to the King: it may all have been in his mind. By turning
experience into a show he expiated the ghosts of his own fears, and
saved the sailors from being crucified. Catharsis is what we do with
our minds when we try to work through life's experiences. This is not
Suspension of Disbelief. Forget the double negative. This is belief.
So,
in The
Americans,
there's this married couple living in Washington who turn out to be
what are known as Illegals – undercover KGB agents spying and
carrying out assassinations and acts of sabotage while appearing to
be law-abiding travel agents living out The American Dream. They are
the attractive parents two kids and, under the aegis of the KGB's
Department S, they lead multiple double lives. They put on disguises,
track down potential victims and either seduce or blackmail them into
spying. Bugs are planted, secret documents copied, plans or samples
of weapons technology – including nerve agents – stolen, whatever
it takes to keep the Soviet Union abreast of the game. They also,
from time to time, carry out the cold blooded murder of folk who are
a threat to the USSR.
It's
the Eighties, the fourth and final decade of the Cold War. Elizabeth
and Philip Jennings have already been in America since the mid
Sixties, building their fake identities and gradually stepping up the
scope of their activities. With the death of the Soviet supremo
Brezhnev and the struggles of the reformists under Gorbachev,
rivalries within the KGB mean the lines of control get blurred. Also,
from time to time, the agents' commitment to the cause of world
communism comes into question, and there are personal tensions
between the couple.
The
crux is that they are also real parents with actual children at
ordinary schools. They have private lives and roles at the travel
agency to juggle with their undercover activities. As if being
working parents wasn't enough of an impingement on family life, there
are constant, stressful demands their KGB masters put on them. They
suddenly have to leave home, often for days on end; or to disappear
down into the basement where they keep their secret code books.
They're frequently injured in the field, and have to disguise cuts,
bruises and swellings with make-up and lies. While the children - a
boy of 9 and a girl of 13 years of age at the start of the series
(roughly 1980) – are not exactly neglected, they suffer from lapses
of supervision and the odd behaviour caused by their parents' double
lives. And then what happens at the beginning is that purely by
chance an FBI officer with a family moves in at the house across the
street.
There
are elements of farce in the bizarre coincidence: a close and genuine
friendship develops between the two families. Ironically, they are
people doing the same job. Stan Beeman, the FBI agent, has just moved
from New Orleans where he has been working undercover, spying on
white supremacists. His new job in the capital is in Counter
Intelligence. Beeman makes no secret of his profession, while
Elizabeth and Philip actively cultivate his and his family's
friendship. The men play racquetball, drink beer and gossip; the
women cook and gossip, the children do homework and watch TV and play
video games together.
Meanwhile,
Philip Jennings is developing a romantic relationship with Martha –
secretary to Stan Beeman's boss at the FBI - whom he dupes into
spying on the Bureau, she believing him to be doing internal
surveillance of government security breaches. At the same time, Stan
entraps Nina, a junior at the Soviet Rezidans (a bogus cultural
office staffed by KGB agents). This also turns romantic, but whereas
Philip's marriage goes relatively unaffected by these professional
seductions, Stan's – already shaken by the time he has spent
undercover – begins to unravel.
I
don't need to spoil any of the plot by going much further into each
of the threads. As a viewer, you'll either get it or you won't. If
you do, the chances of becoming hooked are great. To some extent,
we've been here before with The Sopranos, and rooting for villains
has been the premise of drama since The Scottish Play. Mafia boss
Tony Soprano turning to a psychologist to manage his panic attacks is
mirrored here when Philip Jennings accompanies Stan Beeman to EST
meetings - forerunner of The Forum and NLP. The idea of
Neuro-Linguistic Programming feeding into spying and terrorist
activities lost no irony on this old cynic. It's one of the many
threads that worked for me, though there were elements I was less
taken with.
The
use of music is crucial to the soundtrack, with the series following
the recent trend of featuring complete numbers as background to
certain sequences. In The Americans, nearly all the featured tracks
are contemporaneous with the Eighties. You get songs by Phil Collins,
David Bowie, The Cure, Bruce Springsteen, New Romantic melding into
Disco, Indie into Country and so forth. UK acts seem to get more than
their fair share for some reason; and there's no Hip Hop, a genre
that should have been worked in somehow. The original music composed
and performed by Nathan Barr is broadly electronic, with many actual
references to Kraftwerk. The symbolism of the German sound is
entirely cogent, the familiarity of the Russian tocsin and balalaika
subtly modulated by electronic overtones give them stark totalitarian
colours. Barr's theme tune for the series was nominated for a Grammy.
Electronic drum and bass beats are employed to pace the operation
sequences, which is familiar enough territory in action series, but
in The Americans the soundtrack bristles with 80s and other
culturally significant leitmotifs. There's a certain amount of
occasional music too, with Philip Jennings joining line-dancing
sessions, for example, to catchy Country Rock. At one point he buys
his daughter Paige the latest album by Yaz (Yazoo in the Yuke).
While
I could go on praising the music all night, throwing in odd
compliments left and right on the sound effects and even the shock of
silence that crops up with unspoiled regularity; I'm afraid it's not
so with the reproduction of the dialogue, which too often
deteriorates into audio cow pats. For heaven's sake, what is it with
the Americans? I mean, those people Over There, collectively (if
erroneously) known as the Yanks? Sometimes I get the impression their
dialogue tracks are simply slapped on by a deaf horse wielding a
palette knife. Talk blips and bulges here, scrapes thin there, and
often in-between you get this purple fudge of voice and background
noise that is plain annoying. Three or four times I resorted to
turning on the bloody subtitles because I just could not catch a
single frigging word. One of the drawbacks of the collaborative
effort is this: no matter how well an actor says their lines, a
conspiracy of sound recordists and editors can render a great
performance worthless.
Dialogue
doesn't always matter in an action context. I once spent an hour with
a student playing and replaying the first five minutes of Die Hard 2
(with Bruce Willis), and trying to write it down. Eighty percent of
what was uttered was unintelligible; but it made no real difference,
as you could figure out the gist. The palette knife treatment works
when the text is only another sound effect. But when two characters
are whispering in a bar, and the information exchanged is crucial to
your grasp of the scenes that follow, you've got to hear most of
those god damn words else you'll feel like Dumbo – all ears and
innocence. On the other hand, there's an abundance of well-written
dialogue in The Americans, so even if the reproduction often sucks, I
have no crib with the writers.
Nostalgia
for the Eighties has been around for some time now, and films of the
era still get a lot of airplay on broadcast TV. I caught a replay of
Ghostbusters
II
the other month, though Fatal
Attraction
seems to have lost its mojo. Here in Turkey there's been a long
running series called Seksanlar
(“The Eighties”) - a soap opera set in the years after the 1980
military coup. However, this is the first political action series
I've watched set in the USA during the era, and it makes a real
effort to recreate the world just before CCTV, mobile phones and the
Internet changed everything forever. On the one hand, there's a
liberating aspect to reversing the progress made in the wake of the
Cold War. The world of the Eighties appears simpler, the division
lines clearer. Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were determined to
roll back socialism both at home and abroad. Meanwhile, left and
right were increasing their stakes in each other's camps. The arms
race had created huge industries on either side of the Iron Curtain.
Many workers relied on defence jobs, or felt threatened of being sold
out to the Warsaw Pact by left wing politicians. As inflation soared,
whole sectors of industry were being privatised, and workers rushed
to invest their dwindling savings in shares guaranteed to rise.
Meanwhile, demographics were shifting power down and outwards.
Younger people were taking a more active role in politics, women were
asserting their rights, downtrodden races and socially ostracised
groups were struggling for justice and power.
The
makers of The Americans have taken a few liberties, or employed what
was called Artistic Licence. Mostly it's details deliberately glossed
over. Pay phones, for instance, too often simply failed to work, but
that's never an issue in this version of Eighties Washington.
Parking and traffic problems dominated downtown cities, and yet when
it's required there's always a convenient space right in front of a
building. Failing local government and the ever presence of hard
drugs turned many inner city areas into no-go zones. The Americans of
DC ride buses and trains outside of commuter hours without trouble.
Yuppies and well off youngsters spent freely while many of the masses
struggled to make ends meet. The Jennings family, for example, make
do without a home help though their house is truly large. I guess the
decision not to give them a Filipino or Mexican maid was done to keep
the domestic decks as clear as possible. But Elizabeth and Philip
rarely do more housework than wash a plate or fold a bit of washing.
The one time Paige is seen mopping the floor is an exception that
glares. I don't mean to be pernickety, but this version of the
Eighties is a little too slick and borders on the “lite”.
Do
any imperfections thus far detract from credibility? Crucially, do
they bring a Restoration of Disbelief? For me, no. They're not even
an issue. The phone dials turned with a finger or pen, the green
screen computer monitors, the walkie-talkies as big - and probably as
heavy - as clay bricks, the 'hi-tech' electronic devices on handmade
PCBs with 'solid state' components and wires all sticking out are
authentic enough to garner a knowing smile from the cognoscenti
(pre-hipster geek that I am); and if the gadgets get a second glance
from anyone under thirty, that's probably all to the good. No matter
the payphones always work and the parking is all Kojak-slick.
Authenticity has its conventions.
It's
curious how the makers don't need CGI for much more than the look of
cities back then. Some shots would have needed a bit of digital
editing, but mostly the era is recreated through home and office
décor, fashion, automobiles and manners. Political correctness is
still fairly peripheral. FBI agents and office staff retain a broad
shouldered-Fifties look in long coats, sharp skirts and severe
haircuts. The Eighties themselves were a mostly forward looking time.
Unlike the Seventies, when the clock was constantly being swung back
to the Sixties, the Jazz Age, even Victorian times (re Laura Ashley,
reproduction Art Nouveau, Art Deco & Pop Art). In the Eighties,
most people could hardly wait for the future to arrive. They had to
have fuel injection and electric windows, the latest Intel chip,
cable TV, to go jogging or play squash after work, and to holiday in
far off, exotic locations every year. While Punk and the New Wave had
cut many of the frills, the New Romantic Look – at least in the
early Eighties – gave people a taste for bolder colours and tighter
flowing lines. Socialist or New Realism, a style imported from China
and Eastern Europe in the Seventies, still had some traction,
especially amongst the left-leaning bourgeoisie. I think it's fair to
say the counter-culture Reagan and Thatcher inspired was large and
influential enough in reaction to the ruling style, if not the
rulers' values.
There
was a sense of trying to get ahead which I think The Americans
latches onto really well. Capitalism had gone through a kind of blip,
and though some backsliders had staggered off, and a new generation
of The Poor had risen and quickly been re-disenfranchised, the
American Way had somehow prevailed. This was true across much of the
world. Despite this, I don't think many people anywhere - even by the
mid-Eighties - speculated on the Warsaw Pact actually collapsing at
the end of the decade. Even on the Left, there was a positive
outlook: people believed technology was bringing the world closer
together. America was striding ahead of the pack with its Apple
Macintosh/IBM PC, Space Shuttle, media dominance, the global reach of
its military and the way it seemed to have the dull, uninspiring
Soviets licked in every field. By the end of the decade, how many of
us had left our trusty Zenits in the drawer and forked out on a
Nikon?
I
think it's worth drawing historical parallels. For instance, after
the Reformation, when the Catholic church had been decimated, fresh
faced Jesuits beheld a population of doubters and non-believers and
saw opportunity. But their gains were small in the Old World.
Communists in the 1980s thought whole continents were ripe for
conversion; and here and there – Nicaragua, for example - they were
right. But mostly people looked at the alternatives and there was no
contest. Never mind how much they wanted work for all, free health
care and education; freedom was represented by automobiles, PCs, fast
food and television. The Americans, therefore, and I mean the
Illegals - those spies embedded in Washington and other cities across
the USA – were only ever fighting a rearguard action. Their
struggle was more patriotic than ideological, the best that they
could hope for a preservation of the status quo. While life and death
struggles took place in a few marginal corners of the world, the main
show was the endgame of the Cold War. Ronald Reagan raised the
stakes, threatening a Star Wars level of threat against the Soviets.
Abandoning the concept of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) in a
nuclear war that no one could win, Nato would be capable of an
escalation from tactical skirmishing into Strategic warfare that
would leave Russia unable to guarantee a catastrophic response.
The
Eighties was a period of action for me, when I spent much less time
viewing or reading, and far more time doing. But watching The
Americans,
I often find myself cast back into the Sixties, when I (alongside
half the kids in the UK) would regularly hide behind an armchair
during the scary bits of Doctor
Who.
I could barely watch as Elizabeth and Philip Jennings came within a
hair's breath of being exposed as spies. Surely - I would ask myself
again and again, from Episode One onwards - this is Suspension of
Disbelief? Surely, I don't believe these are actual spies? Well, no,
they're actors on TV. Alright then, surely I don't believe Elizabeth
could hide all her facial bruises and swellings with a few dabs of
make-up? Or that Philip could survive so many protracted brawls
without ever losing one of his many wigs? Well, of course I don't
believe any of that. So, ergo, isn't my disbelief suspended while I'm
hardly able to look? Whereas, in fact, I feel compelled to watch.
Some
action dramas don't really appeal to me, no matter how good the
acting, how well-timed the action, how realistic the sets and the
CGI, or how stirring the music, I click off after a few scenes.
According to the theory, these would be examples of unsuspended
disbelief. Or put the other way, these would be examples of suspended
belief. But that's not it either. Of course I don't believe drama is
real life. However, I do believe drama can be true... if that's not
the same as saying it's realistic; nor the same as naturalistic - the
nineteenth century theatrical equivalent of realism. I know an actor
is not King Lear or Eliza Doolittle, just as well as I know that
those characters are not real people anyway. What a good actor can do
is make me believe in their portrayal of the character. A good actor,
a good play, a good film, a good novel or short story, a good radio
play, a good piece of narrative verse, even a good song, or a
symphony like Beethoven's Eroica
or Mahler's Das
Lied von der Erde
can invoke a kind of universal truth. I can marvel at a David Hockney
landscape - which on one level looks a bit like a child's daub, and
on another a Sunday painter's effort – and see what he's getting
at. The work is more than a window looking onto a bit of ground. The
painting, just like Derek Jacobi's portrayal of Hamlet at the Old Vic
in 1978 somehow gets through to the truth of doomed youth or the
beauty of a Yorkshire winter. Therefore, while I can see the
cleverness, and to some extent the usefulness of the expression
Suspension of Disbelief; for me, good art gives an affirmation of
belief. Or as a mathematician might put it, two opposites turn out
positive.
Most
films and all TV series are made by committees. Yep, there are
auteurs out there, people like Orson Welles or Ridley Scott, whose
personalities are so overwhelming and whose ideas are forceful enough
to push through a project in their own way. However, even the most
visionary of director/producers has to employ collaborators and be
forced into compromises. Then there are the conventions that allow
short cuts to be made; for example, certain tropes – like peanut
butter sandwiches – will do to stop a gap or provide continuity. As
we watch, we say to ourselves, Here's where the hero discards a
jacket, grabs someone's hat and scarf and nonchalantly sidesteps out
of a desperate chase scene. Too many of these and we begin to wonder
if the budget's been squeezed, a staff writer fired for being too
creative, or the producers are having a laugh at our expense. We're
apt to give up at this point, unless something else happens that
rescues the drama.
Cable/Internet
serials have evolved into the modern equivalents of Homer's epics.
Via the multi-volume novel – I'm thinking across many genres here,
from Compton MacKenzie's Michael Fane series, through The
Hobbit/Lord of the Rings
quadrilogy, and Stephen King's Dark
Tower
books to Edna O'Brien's Girl series – it's clear even the solitary
author has difficulty keeping control of such extended narratives. In
the pilot episode of The
Americans,
Philip Jennings is a vigilante that beats up a pederast who has made
the mistake of hitting on his thirteen year old daughter. This side
of him is completely dropped thereafter; and for good reason, as his
character is already stacked with enough conflicts. So where does it
all lead, when the plot goes a bit wonky circa Series Three? Or when
drawn out narratives prove impossible to end, or have to be rounded
off more or less implausibly? Often a serial simply comes to a sudden
conclusion (Boardwalk
Empire)
or has its last few episodes rushed (Chance).
I'm glad to endorse The
Americans
(without revealing anything) where after a few wobbly moves the
series manages to stay tumescent till its last gasp.
Another
concept is that of Unity. In the original Greek drama, the convention
was that the action should fit into real time. Of course, the gods of
Drama soon asserted themselves over The Clock. Therefore - and this
should be true of any work of art – narratives can manipulate time
just as fluidly as other source material. The main criteria is that
the piece remains true to itself. So this spy serial, set in the
Eighties, can flash back to the Fifties and Sixties to explore Philip
and Elizabeth's childhood and youth. But it can also step outside of
the time frame and examine universal ideas, which it does
particularly well in the family lives and friendships the Jenningses
have. This is because also in play are the facts of the present day:
as we watch, we can't help comparing how for example sexual mores
have changed, how the Cold War itself has become a piece of history,
or – as I've said above – how quaint and innocent Eighties
technology now looks.
The
Americans works because it touches nerves, both historical and
universal. We know how the Cold War came to an end, and how the dark
behemoth of Northern Asia – ie Russia – would stumble in its
efforts to keep up with its bright, prodigious rival: naughty
American. At the same time, Elizabeth and Philip are parents
struggling to bring up children, looking out for each other while
harbouring conflicting ideals and loyalties. The situations they have
to cope with are often just exaggerated versions of everyday life. We
all have up and down relations with neighbours, and we have to keep
secrets. We are nosey and protective by turns. We are consciously
seduced by pressures to consume, frequently weighing up the moral
choices they face. Should we let our children play video games or
join groups that have patently different values from our own? Is it
right to put work before family, as we so often have to do in the
short and medium term? Nowadays isn't the American Dream what most
communities follow to a greater or a lesser extent? How fake are we
all in our slavish conformities, in the two-faced smiles we're forced
to pull, and in the sympathies we all claim to feel?
After
the final episode, I watched a couple of YouTube videos of the actors
Kerri Russell and Matthew Rhys. They'd played Elizabeth and Philip,
become an item, and actually got married soon into Series Two. Did
that mean they had sex on set before in real life? And him a
Welshman! An Eisteddfod winner! Arglwydd mawr, this stretches belief,
not disbelief. Yet there they are, bold as brass, the Hollywood dream
couple, doing the chat shows together. Like most actors, they didn't
have too much to say for themselves, but one thing struck me. Their
series was Barack Obama's favourite viewing while he was in office.
They would send him advance copies of episodes. If that doesn't mean
The Americans are for real, what in tarnation does?
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