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Pleasurable deceptions in the Cold War revisitation of

The Americans
Henry M. Taylor
Abstract
Among many recent television shows that involve various forms of deception, the
period drama series The Americans (which first aired in 2013 on the cable network FX and is scheduled for a fourth season in 2016) stands out in a number of
ways. Created by Joe Weisberg, a former CIA officer turned highschool teacher
and then television author and producer, the series is set in the early 1980s, beginning with Ronald Reagan's first presidential year, when the Cold War was in the
process of culminating one last time (which also resonates with contemporary
discourses about a new cold war). The show's main protagonists are two KGB
agents, Nadezhda (in the role of Elizabeth Jennings, and played by Keri Russell)
and Mischa (as Philip Jennings, and played by Matthew Rhys) who live in suburban Washington D.C. and pose as a married American couple with two kids, Paige,
aged 13, and Henry, aged 10. Originally martial-arts trained, fitted with new identities, selected for marriage and brought to the United States in the 1960s as if part of
an alien invasion, the Jennings officially run a travel agency as their cover. Not
only do they have to deceive targets, informants, FBI counterintelligence and, to
some extent, their Moscow-led handlers, but also their neighbours, their Americanborn and unsuspecting children, each other and, finally, themselves. In viewers'
ongoing commitment to the show, the symbolic exchange for our enjoyment consists in being trained to cultivate highly situational, flexible identies in tune with
the exigencies and shifting nature of the contemporary marketplace.
Key Words: TV series, Spy Drama, Family Drama, Cold War, Postmodernity,
Erving Goffman, Social Psychology, Arranged Marriages, Identity, Role-playing
*****
1. The everyday lives of two spies
In a genre which originated in 19th-century literary adventure stories and which
has presented spies in an increasingly unglamourous fashion (as early as Joseph
Conrad's 1907 novel The Secret Agent), what makes the tv series The Americans
special, or what is, in marketing terms, its unique selling proposition, is the focus
on the daily lives of two KGB agents who during the Cold War of the early 1980s
live in suburban Washington D.C. and pose as a married American couple with
kids. Nadezhda (as Elizabeth Jennings, played by Keri Russell) and Mischa (as
Philip Jennings, played by Matthew Rhys) lead a marriage that was originally arranged by Moscow. So how do you live as a spy on a day-to-day basis? How do

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you cope with having to lie to almost everyone? What does that do to relationships? How can you try to keep up a happy family life with fake identities, and cope
emotionally and morally with some of the terrible things you have to do (including
sleeping with, blackmailing, abducting and sometimes killing targets or informants)? How do you justify your work to yourself, and how does one's double life
take a toll on one's personality? And finally, can an arranged marriage work out
and be a happy, genuinely loving one, compared to other people's married lives?
These are some of the questions raised in the course of events.
In order to maintain the audience's emotional engagement with the two protagonists, the most gruesome murders, such as the burning to death of an Apartheid
regime agent in season 3, are cleverly delegated to minor characters (in this case an
ANC anti-Apartheid spy collaborating with the KGB). And despite moments where
we do temporarily lose sympathy with the main characters because of some particularly immoral action on their part, on the whole we do root for the bad guys,
who regularly have scruples about their assignments and are really not so bad at all.
So the ordinary life approach infused with the excitement of old-fashioned if
unglamorous espionage turns The Americans both into spy drama and family
soap at the same time. We really are watching a fantasmic version of the prototypical American family, namely in reference to Freud's concept of the family romance, when a child begins to imagine having wealthier or, in this case, more
important parents. And what makes the series so fascinating is the combination of
realism with acute situations of dramatic irony, which may be comical or suspenseful. Thus, the FBI, as personified by the quiet, but pleasant-natured Stan Beeman
(Noah Emmerich), the Jennings' next-door neighbour, is portrayed as remarkably
ineffective in its counterintelligence search for the illegals, who are right under
their noses without being recognised as such, while the FBI in turn is being eavesdropped on by the KGB without finding out for a long time. The omniscient narration to which we are privy to therefore generates many highly ironic moments. The
show, incidentally, was inspired by real events, the so-called Illegals Program,
which in 2010 culminated in the arrest by the FBI of ten Soviet sleeper agents who
had lived in the US for decades.
2. Micropolitics of the personal
That the show's creator, former CIA officer Joe Weisberg, conceived of the
series as being about a marriage and a love story, is telling. Despite all the historical markers in the form of original tv footage and historical soundbites, grand politics, just like the grand, universal narratives that Jean-Franois Lyotard dispatched
in his theory of postmodernity in favour of small and local narratives (Lyotard
1979), has been reduced to a series of simulacra, macropolitics thereby being replaced by a very contemporary micropolitics of individualism and the personal.

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This explains the focal shift of the show's dominant away from traditional spy
fiction to the family narrative.
The dramatic question which runs throughout and informs individual scenes in
all kinds of variations, is, of course, the obvious one: will the two protagonists get
caught? Or will they be able to maintain their cover? Since the danger of being
found out is virtually imminent all the time, there is a current of low-level paranoia
running through the show, even when it takes on the form of situational humour
and comic relief. And in every season there is at least one moment where the Jenningses face being uncovered or captured by the authorities (namely, the FBI). That
event, which would most definitely end the series, has to be brought into play as a
definite possibility at certain intervals for dramatic reasons, but narratively it must
be put off as long as possible. However, we also sense a death drive at work, in that
being caught for the two protagonists would also be a relief of sorts from an increasingly stressful and precarious lifestyle, in which you need to have total information awareness at every moment.
There are lots of major and minor issues the Jenningses have to negotiate over
the course of the show. Leaving aside their more episodic assignments, there is the
basic marital conflict about whether Philip is still towing the line of his superiors
and fully committed. There is the conflict with their handlers about Moscow's
demand to initiate their children into their spy mission, which in turn creates tension between the protagonists, as Philip is adamantly opposed to this while Elizabeth
seems to be more compliant. There's the fundamental contradiction of both parents
loving their children more than anything, while having to lie to them almost nonstop. This overlaps with the emerging tensions with their daughter Paige, who,
independent-minded and already estranged from her parents, begins to get seriously involved in her church, where she develops her own kind of activism, contrary
to the atheist convictions of Elizabeth and Philip, who play along nonetheless, for
fear of pushing their daughter away or of having her find out too soon about their
secret lives. And when Paige finally does confront them and find out in season 3,
the question then is, how can this potentially explosive situation be contained?
3. Disguises, role-playing, and dramatic irony
The various roles Elizabeth and Philip in the line of the covert activities slip
into and out of come with a range of disguises with wigs, false mustaches, hairdos,
different glasses and changing clothes which almost seem like a nostalgic parade
and parody of early 80s fashion and makeup styles, which along with the pop music of the time nowadays invariably produce chuckles in the audience. There is an
inherent reflexivity involved, with a foregrounding of performance, as we are literally watching actors playing characters playing yet other characters, and switching
back and forth between different roles. The alternation between the Jennings'
normal lives and their secret lives also involves emotional role-playing, especial-

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ly when entering into sexual relations with targets in exchange for acquiring classified information. In the following clip from the first sequence of the pilot episode
we are introduced to Elizabeth seducing a target, with the humour typically produced through the ironic juxtaposition of incompatible opposites (namely politics
and sex). [Clip.]
Note how the tone immediately shifts from the comical in the middle scene to
the serious in the last scene in which the stereotype of the sexy dumb blonde is
shed with the wig, and it is revealed to us that she has been acting as a kind of
honey trap.
4. Performing identity
However, just as espionage implies various acts of deception, with The Americans we shouldn't be deceived by the show's smoke screen of overt content, i.e.
as this really being a story about sleeper agents (despite obviously resonating with
the topicality of sleeper cells since 9/11). Rather, as already mentioned, one of the
main questions raised by the series is whether an arranged marriage can be a happy
one, with genuine love between the partners who have been forced together by
outside circumstances. As Slavoj Zizek reminds us with reference to Alfred Hitchcock's 1935 thriller THE 39 STEPS, it is sufficient for the hero and heroine to be
(literally) handcuffed to one another to finally produce the romantic heterosexual
couple. Authentic love appears as the improbable effect of a double contingency.
Which also of course reflects Hitchcock's highly ironic view of romance and married life. By the same token, the Jenningses find out after all these years that making love to each other is no longer simply a matter of pretending. Casually put, if
you fake it long enough, it becomes real.
More crucially still, I would argue that the central issue of The Americans
concerns the nature of personal identity in the contemporary moment. This includes national, political or cultural identity as much as sexual identity. And if gender
is something one does rather than is (doing gender, performing gender), and
which keeps on having to be performed, just as characters on stage or in film, according to playwright and filmmaker David Mamet, are nothing but habitual behaviour (Mamet 1992, 13), then so is identity a question primarily of doing instead of
being. Hence the Cold War background of the 80s with the clash of the two superpowers and their opposing ideologies only serves as the MacGuffin or pretext, like
a pressure cooker, to dramatise and lend extra force to these now more urgent personal issues of the self and of contemporary relationships. In turn, the notion of the
spy serves to bring into play two alternate conceptions of identity which are negotiated: role playing and disguise as performed and always potentially unsettled
identity versus an underlying and supposedly authentic, stable identity. Hence what
the show discusses is a constructivist versus an essentialist notion of identity. As
these stills of the various appearances and disguises show, the two protagonists are

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always instantly recognisable to us. Their various makeup props and dress changes
may also be of interest to a queer studies approach (as a suggestion). [Stills.]
5. Goffman and the dramaturgy of the self
So what if, in following sociologist Erving Goffman's dramaturgical theory of
social performance roles, impression management and strategic interaction, espionage as such is only a more heightened and dramatised version of the deceptions
already involved in everyday social interactions? Goffman himself was acutely
aware of the ironies of deception in his own work in social psychology. When he
engaged in research for his breakthrough 1959 book The Presentation of Self in
Everyday Life on the Shetland Island of Unst in the late 1940s and early 50s, Goffman masqueraded as a student of agricultural techniques and was first suspected
by the islanders to be a spy. And of course social sciences experiments in general
routinely involve the deception of the test group as to the real purpose of the experiment in question.
To Goffman, the personal self as such appears as an effect of situational performance, and he uses theatrical metaphors to make his point. Thus he says, quote:
The self, then, as a performed character, is not an organic thing that has a specific
location, whose fundamental fate is to be born, to mature, and to die; it is a dramatic effect arising diffusely from a scene that is presented, and the characteristic
issue, the crucial concern, is whether it will be credited or discredited. (Goffman
1959, 252253). Of course the audio-visual medium, be it film or television, is
virtually destined to present scenes of social interaction with dramatic import.
In the following clip, the Jennings family introduce themselves to their new
neighbours, who have just moved in. Again, dramatic irony is involved, through
the reflexivity of first and second-order performances. In other words, we are watching actors playing characters who within the diegetic story space are playing
roles in face-to-face interaction. Their impression management involves the crucial
control not only of the front stage impression they are consciously seeking to make
on their diegetic interaction opposites, namely the impressions they give (in Jungian terms, the persona), but also control of the impressions they give off unintentionally through various signs of facial expressions and body language, etc.
This apparently simple scene is, due to multiple layers of knowledge, actually
quite intricate. Superficially it presents us with a relaxed co-operative interaction,
in which both sides are naturally interested in maintaining each other's ordinary
front stage performance, whereas we are actually dealing, from Elizabeth and Philip's point of view, with a non-cooperative strategic interaction. As spies they are
constantly aware of the danger of being discredited and of potentially becoming
informants under observation by an interrogator or observer (in this case their
neighbours), so they perform a control move of impression management to pass
themselves off as regular Americans and to ingratiate themselves as the ordinary

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folk living next door. To this end, they perform elements of the American way of
life, namely the spontaneous and pleasant-natured, informal manner in which new
neighbours are personally welcomed by the whole family to the neighbourhood,
and by presenting a typically American gift, home-baked brownies. The Jennings
children of course take this at face value, thereby unwittingly participating in their
parents' hidden agenda. The scene turns when Philip finds out that Stan Beeman is
an FBI counterintelligence agent, which produces dramatic irony, because we
know that the Jenningses are spies, but the Beemans don't. And yet, Stan's pokerface expression and deceptively frank dialogue just might contain a threatening
innuendo, and therefore the possibility cannot be ruled out that Stan may be suspicious and performing an uncovering move vis--vis the Jenningses. In order to
preempt this virtual move, Philip performs a counter-uncovering move by ironically raising the very issue of not spying too much, and that the Russians are the
worst kind of spy. Philip's final and to our perception somewhat strained smile is
particularly funny, because we realise what effort he is putting in to hide his surprise at Stan's revelation and to prevent giving off the wrong facial expressions.
6. Becoming American, staying Russian?
Philip in particular seems to be partial to the American lifestyle and appears to
be going native (the food is great, and the heating is working, he says), while
Elizabeth is the more dedicated to the Soviet cause. While maintaining their allegiance to motherland Russia and communism, they are unaware of and even somewhat deluded about how American they have become after so many years of
having lived in the US. This is of course on the one hand reminiscent of the fantasy
often entertained by first-generation immigrants about an eventual return to their
home country, even when this is ultimately nothing but an illusion. On the other
hand, the US as a nation makes the singular claim, through the ideology of American Exceptionalism, of being both particular and universal. Accordingly, since one
is not so much American by birth but by choice, even spies like the Jenningses can
be accommodated under the umbrella of Uncle Sam. Their continued mission over
all those years effectively forces them to become more and more American. Despite the growing realisation that they really never want to return to their motherland,
they ironically struggle to maintain an essentialist core of Russian identity.
To quote a review in the San Francisco Chronicle, Weisberg employs a
post-Cold War view of how the Jenningses live and work in 1981. We don't think
of them as bad guys or good guysthey are just people, trying to balance complicated demands in a morally complex world. That makes The Americans a very
contemporary series. (Wiegand 2013)

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7. Training viewers for the late capitalist marketplace
So what happens when spy fiction turns into spy culture, in Raymond Williams's definition of culture as a whole way of life? And what if this still fictional
way of life resonated with our own age of insecurity and anxiety, in an attempt to
train us for and reconcile us with a low, but pervasive level of paranoia as the
prevailing ideology of the contemporary workplace? A highly competitive workplace requiring constant flexibility and shifting alliances, where, as social psychologist Roderick Kramer suggests (Kramer 2002), being suspicious and distrustful
of one's co-worker's motives often makes perfect sense; and where indeed, as former Intel CEO Andrew Grove wrote, only the paranoid survive? (Grove 1996)
Second, The Americans must be seen as participating in a whole range of
recent high-profile television series, such as Homeland, The Wire, or the Netflix production House of Cards, all of which involve various forms of subversion, deception and, to varying degrees, surveillance, and which, as critics have
pointed out, serve the function of conditioning viewers to internalize the post-9/11
paranoid mindsetas embodied by today's surveillance society and the vastly
expanded covert sphere of government and beyond.
Hence if we understand long-running tv shows like this one as an ideological
investment, as a symbolic exchange with the viewers, the pleasurable deceptions of
the series can also be seen as a form of training key skills for today's societies of
controlparticularly with respect to emotional intelligence and an actor's ability to
change social roles fluidly and rapidly, with a performed, mobile identity in tune
with the shifting demands of the competitive marketplace.

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Bibliography
Erving Goffman. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York [etc.]: Anchor Books Doubleday, 1959.
. Strategic Interaction. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1970.
Andrew S. Grove. Only the Paranoid Survive. How to Exploit the Crisis Points
that Challenge Every Company. New York: Currency, 1996.
Roderick M. Kramer. When Paranoia Makes Sense. Harvard Business Review,
80(7), July 2002, 6271.
Jean-Franois Lyotard. La condition postmoderne. Paris: Minuit, 1979.
David Mamet. On Directing Film. New York: Penguin, 1992.
David Wiegand. 'The Americans' Review. Spies Are People Too. Url: http://
www.sfgate.com/tv/article/The-Americans-review-Spies-are-people-too4229674.php (last accessed 27/6/2015).
Slavoj iek. Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Lacan (But Were
Afraid to Ask Hitchcock). London [etc.]: Verso, 1992.

Henry M. Taylor studied Film, History, and Publishing Studies at the Universities
of Kent at Canterbury and Stirling, and obtained his PhD in Film Studies at the
University of Zurich. He teaches Film, Media and Screenwriting. Published monographs include a narratological study of biographical films and an analysis of Franco-Argentinian filmmaker Edgardo Cozarinskys work. His forthcoming book
deals with the history and theory of conspiracy films.