can you feel it coming in the air tonight, oh lord.
Twitter and Tumblr just aren't enough to contain my thoughts and I don't have Photoshop to work on them that way and I don't have time to write fiction, so META AT LJ IT IS.
So: The Americans.
It is not Jack Bristow and Irina Derevko being married badasses, unfortunately, but if anyone wants to make that spinoff (as well as the Sark and Rachel one, David Anders and Rachel Nichols keep saying they are really totally up for it, please somebody hire them for it, really they want it to happen) please go do so, because, JACK AND IRINA. Anyway, that's beside the point.
It's a suburban couple with two kids living in northern Virginia and doing all the things that suburban families with yards and Oldsmobiles in the early 1980s do, which is the entire point, since Elizabeth from Chicago and her husband Phillip are just as real as their practiced American accents. They're Soviet sleeper agents during the Cold War, with an emphasis on how much "sleeping" they aren't doing and how warm this Cold War really is.
I've watched the pilot twice now and I'm pretty sure I'll get even more out of it when I watch it more, but WOW the amount coming out already. I don't see an alternative, but I do like how the first introduction is during a complete fuck-up of a mission. I mean, they get an agent killed, they miss the handoff, they have to store the hostage in their garage, they wind up killing the hostage they were supposed to deliver (who just happens to be the dude who is one of the reasons Elizabeth is a bit messed up in the head), one agent nearly defects, AND AN FBI COUNTERINTELLIGENCE SPECIALIST MOVES IN ACROSS THE STREET. This is a Very Not Good Week for the Jennings.
I can feel it coming in the air tonight, Oh Lord
I've been waiting for this moment, all my life, Oh Lord
Can you feel it coming in the air tonight, Oh Lord, Oh Lord
Phillip Jennings. Matthew Rhys has played someone I wanted to cuddle up to as my best gay friend teddybear in Love And Other Disasters, so my feelings were a little confused here. You know, when he's all conflicted and good-hearted and quietly in love and ruthlessly efficient at killing with less distaste than he would have for taking out the trash. Because that change takes less than a second and W O W. Ngl, I have a serious kink for super-capable people.
He's probably been told from childhood what a lie the American Dream is, but that's a hard concept to hold onto when you're receiving an income that allows you live in a nice neighborhood and work in DC and there's a new shopping mall and you have a family and that lie of an American Dream is your daytime truth. He tries on actual cowboy boots, dances in the department store to an actual country song. (Side note: I have relatives who literally believe that all of America is either New York City or cowboys. Also that you can drive from New York to California quite easily.) It doesn't make sense to him why he's NOT an American, and why he can't simply admit it and be rewarded with the shiny happy life of his dreams.
Because one day his little boy is going to look up during some school assembly and see that Daddy doesn't sing the anthem, doesn't recite the pledge of allegiance at ball games, and he's going to ask why. Except that's a question Phillip won't answer, or at least swore he wouldn't.
And then there is his wife. His wife, who wants to kill the man in the trunk of their car and he doesn't know why. His wife, whose name he never learned, who when he points out that they are married she doesn't want to touch him; when he says "You're my wife," she responds flatly, "Is that right?" and stares him down until he walks away.
That is Phillip's love for Elizabeth: he is in love with her, he doesn't know her, and the grand corkscrew of irony is that they've been married and shared a bed and a house and children for a decade and a half.
Well, if you told me you were drowning
I would not lend a hand
I've seen your face before my friend
But I don't know if you know who I am
Elizabeth is the character I had trouble connecting with the most, I think; she’s so guarded and refuses to look at a life that ISN’T the mission. But she stuck with me, because emotionally shut-off Russian women always do. She is partnered with a man who is distracted by the shiny American life he sees, one who does not always put the mission first, and so he fucked up the mission and that’s why her rapist is imprisoned in their garage for days. Timoshev is under her roof and her partner wants to sell him off as a defector-hero and reap the material rewards.
No wonder she’s cutting brownies with a knife she could use to gut her husband like a fish.
I wasn’t sure about the choice to make her a rape victim. I’m sure that KGB training was awful enough even without sexual assault, despite the frequency with which it occurs in real life situations, but it’s become such a trope to make rape a woman’s origin story. I think I read a quote on tumblr that said a man’s story of heroism is about how much he can achieve; a woman’s is about how much she can withstand. But thinking about it all, within the specific context of this story and the characters, I think that it’s fitting. That she doesn’t like people approaching her from behind. She doesn’t welcome her husband’s touches. Her trainer who coached her in fighting, a man who seemed like he should have been there for her, looked on as she was raped and didn’t even open his mouth to say stop. How can she depend on anyone to look out for her?
My personal headcanon is that when Elizabeth opened the trunk and said remember me? that Timoshev didn’t recognize her. Not her specifically. He recognized the rage in the face of a woman of a certain age, because Elizabeth was not the only one, and he would have seen the women he hurt again.
And then later, when she’s fully prepared to brain him thoroughly with a tire iron, and he was apologizing just to save his own skin, he said that the cadets in training were just there. They were just perks. And maybe what got Elizabeth through was the idea that she was too headstrong a fighter, not compliant enough-that what she had experienced had meaning and was for a purpose, to make her a better agent. To desensitize her to the men she would have to seduce information out of. Just some reason, to make sense of it.
But there is no reason. She was there. She was convenient. She was just a perk.
So she drops the tire iron, all the fight gone out of her, because she’s been fighting this ghost all these years and it turns out that she was the only one who thought there was even a fight to be had, and she was the only person it ever mattered to.
Phillip, though: he sees what isn’t said, guesses at how young his wife must have been when she was in training and a powerful man hurt her in a way that would make her put the mission aside. Phillip, who just was angry and frightened and sick at some pedophile bastard who thought it was alright to leer at his precious thirteen year old daughter, who said it was just better to walk away from creeps like that instead of fighting them.
Except no one had ever fought for Elizabeth to keep her from an awful man’s hands, and suddenly it’s all different. And Elizabeth just watches, because maybe this is the first time somebody has fought for her, not the mission or the Motherland, but her, and Phillip, in that moment, won’t trade a genuine American life and three million dollars for a chance to be her partner not only professionally but with her deepest, most personal secrets. Timoshev tells Elizabeth that she was no one and not worth a life in revenge; Phillip disagrees and shows Elizabeth without words that she very much is worth the cost of a man’s life.
(And then he gets up and beats the shit out of the mall predator, because it doesn’t matter if it’s the USSR or the USA, there is a man who would take girls, people’s young daughters, and would throw away their safety and ability to trust without a second thought for the how violent it is to tell a girl she has no worth. It’s not a fight Philip can just walk away from anymore.)
There is little romance in dissolving a body in lye and dropping it in an abandoned factory’s loading dock, or in fucking in an Oldsmobile promptly thereafter, but romance was always an appearance, just like everything else of their relationship. This is an affirmation, a pledge of allegiance to each other because while they have shared lives for fifteen years and have procreated twice during those years, they have never been intimate. Sex was always part of the job description, but intimacy never was, and maybe it won’t kill Elizabeth after all.
Well, I was there and I saw what you did
I saw it with my own two eyes
So you can wipe off the grin, I know where you've been
It's all been a pack of lies
This is a story in which words and appearances are not used for communication but for obfuscation. Friendly chat with neighbors obscures the truth that Phillip and Elizabeth are really enemy agents speaking a second language. The hair and glasses of a boring bureaucrat convinces an FBI employee that she is helping Internal Affairs find a mole. A suburban house hides the FBI’s most wanted informant. Saying that “just to get into space is an achievement” is a positive thought that does not say that the Russians got into space first. Phillip keeps repeating that they the potential three million dollars in their grasp but it’s a mantra that becomes less and less believable as time goes on, and more like a get-rich-quick scam.
Action is truth. Truth is when Phillip attends the school event and places his hand on his heart but only sings a few words of the anthem. Truth is when Phillip doesn’t say “we’re supposed to be married” and unhesitatingly kills the man who hurt his wife.
Objects are truth. Phillip checks for blood on the knife Elizabeth holds to slice brownies instead of asking if she killed Timoshev. Food and drink, especially, are used to show what’s really going on; if you look at the flavors each family member picks when they go for ice cream, Elizabeth is solid chocolate, and Phillip is a mix of chocolate and vanilla-he doesn’t know what flavor he wants to choose. And then the shared drinks, as I mentioned on tumblr-
There are four times in the episode during which characters share drinks.
In the first, Phillip and Elizabeth stand in the kitchen; she pours herself a cup of coffee. He holds out his mug for her to pour for him too, and she very deliberately puts it down, leaving him to pour his own mug. She does not share a pot with him; they merely happen to occupy the same kitchen and pour from the same pot: it doesn’t mean they’re together.
The second time is the flashback where the two of them first meet; they have nothing to say, not yet, so he offers to pour the tea. He pours cups for both of them, and waits, so they drink together. He wants to share. He wants to do things with her. He has just let go of whatever girl’s photo he’s been carrying, and he is consciously choosing to share tea with Elizabeth.
The third time, the general hands Elizabeth a cup of tea. We don’t see him pour, we don’t even see him when she takes the cup from him. This is no partnership, no equal relationship, and after what happened with Timoshev, I think Elizabeth is re-evaluating her ideas on partnership. She has a better idea who is on her side and who is just handing her a cup and everything that comes with it.
And, added ohvienna, right after that last hot beverage hand-off is a scene where Philip and Elizabeth down two shots of vodka and for the first time in their fifteen year “marriage” she disobeys orders and tells him her real name.
Well I remember, I remember don't worry
How could I ever forget, it's the first time, the last time we ever met
But I know the reason why you keep your silence up, no you don't fool me
The hurt doesn't show; but the pain still grows
It's no stranger to you or me
And I can feel it coming in the air tonight, Oh Lord...
She shares vodka with him, she shares that danger and change are coming, and most of all, she shares that her name is Nadezhda/ Надежда (a name that means hope) and reaches for his hand. They know more about each other now than they have learned in the previous fifteen years of being married, and even though it’s painful and they can keep on not talking and keep up appearances, they’re going to act in truthful ways. They share something now, something that doesn’t belong to the Soviets or to America or to their family, but just to them alone.
And I want to see how this new thing they’ve found blooms and grows and if they end up having to kill the FBI agent neighbor for being a giant snoop.
ADD YOUR THOUGHTS, ADD ALL YOUR THOUGHTS, OMG I WANT TO DISCUSS EVERYTHINGGGGGGGGG
Also ohvienna you need to make a post about music probably because I was hearing your Ashes to Ashes flashbacks from all the way over here.
And after writing all that, I had even more thoughts about Phillip learning about sex and women and fast cars.
So: The Americans.
It is not Jack Bristow and Irina Derevko being married badasses, unfortunately, but if anyone wants to make that spinoff (as well as the Sark and Rachel one, David Anders and Rachel Nichols keep saying they are really totally up for it, please somebody hire them for it, really they want it to happen) please go do so, because, JACK AND IRINA. Anyway, that's beside the point.
It's a suburban couple with two kids living in northern Virginia and doing all the things that suburban families with yards and Oldsmobiles in the early 1980s do, which is the entire point, since Elizabeth from Chicago and her husband Phillip are just as real as their practiced American accents. They're Soviet sleeper agents during the Cold War, with an emphasis on how much "sleeping" they aren't doing and how warm this Cold War really is.
I've watched the pilot twice now and I'm pretty sure I'll get even more out of it when I watch it more, but WOW the amount coming out already. I don't see an alternative, but I do like how the first introduction is during a complete fuck-up of a mission. I mean, they get an agent killed, they miss the handoff, they have to store the hostage in their garage, they wind up killing the hostage they were supposed to deliver (who just happens to be the dude who is one of the reasons Elizabeth is a bit messed up in the head), one agent nearly defects, AND AN FBI COUNTERINTELLIGENCE SPECIALIST MOVES IN ACROSS THE STREET. This is a Very Not Good Week for the Jennings.
I can feel it coming in the air tonight, Oh Lord
I've been waiting for this moment, all my life, Oh Lord
Can you feel it coming in the air tonight, Oh Lord, Oh Lord
Phillip Jennings. Matthew Rhys has played someone I wanted to cuddle up to as my best gay friend teddybear in Love And Other Disasters, so my feelings were a little confused here. You know, when he's all conflicted and good-hearted and quietly in love and ruthlessly efficient at killing with less distaste than he would have for taking out the trash. Because that change takes less than a second and W O W. Ngl, I have a serious kink for super-capable people.
He's probably been told from childhood what a lie the American Dream is, but that's a hard concept to hold onto when you're receiving an income that allows you live in a nice neighborhood and work in DC and there's a new shopping mall and you have a family and that lie of an American Dream is your daytime truth. He tries on actual cowboy boots, dances in the department store to an actual country song. (Side note: I have relatives who literally believe that all of America is either New York City or cowboys. Also that you can drive from New York to California quite easily.) It doesn't make sense to him why he's NOT an American, and why he can't simply admit it and be rewarded with the shiny happy life of his dreams.
Because one day his little boy is going to look up during some school assembly and see that Daddy doesn't sing the anthem, doesn't recite the pledge of allegiance at ball games, and he's going to ask why. Except that's a question Phillip won't answer, or at least swore he wouldn't.
And then there is his wife. His wife, who wants to kill the man in the trunk of their car and he doesn't know why. His wife, whose name he never learned, who when he points out that they are married she doesn't want to touch him; when he says "You're my wife," she responds flatly, "Is that right?" and stares him down until he walks away.
That is Phillip's love for Elizabeth: he is in love with her, he doesn't know her, and the grand corkscrew of irony is that they've been married and shared a bed and a house and children for a decade and a half.
Well, if you told me you were drowning
I would not lend a hand
I've seen your face before my friend
But I don't know if you know who I am
Elizabeth is the character I had trouble connecting with the most, I think; she’s so guarded and refuses to look at a life that ISN’T the mission. But she stuck with me, because emotionally shut-off Russian women always do. She is partnered with a man who is distracted by the shiny American life he sees, one who does not always put the mission first, and so he fucked up the mission and that’s why her rapist is imprisoned in their garage for days. Timoshev is under her roof and her partner wants to sell him off as a defector-hero and reap the material rewards.
No wonder she’s cutting brownies with a knife she could use to gut her husband like a fish.
I wasn’t sure about the choice to make her a rape victim. I’m sure that KGB training was awful enough even without sexual assault, despite the frequency with which it occurs in real life situations, but it’s become such a trope to make rape a woman’s origin story. I think I read a quote on tumblr that said a man’s story of heroism is about how much he can achieve; a woman’s is about how much she can withstand. But thinking about it all, within the specific context of this story and the characters, I think that it’s fitting. That she doesn’t like people approaching her from behind. She doesn’t welcome her husband’s touches. Her trainer who coached her in fighting, a man who seemed like he should have been there for her, looked on as she was raped and didn’t even open his mouth to say stop. How can she depend on anyone to look out for her?
My personal headcanon is that when Elizabeth opened the trunk and said remember me? that Timoshev didn’t recognize her. Not her specifically. He recognized the rage in the face of a woman of a certain age, because Elizabeth was not the only one, and he would have seen the women he hurt again.
And then later, when she’s fully prepared to brain him thoroughly with a tire iron, and he was apologizing just to save his own skin, he said that the cadets in training were just there. They were just perks. And maybe what got Elizabeth through was the idea that she was too headstrong a fighter, not compliant enough-that what she had experienced had meaning and was for a purpose, to make her a better agent. To desensitize her to the men she would have to seduce information out of. Just some reason, to make sense of it.
But there is no reason. She was there. She was convenient. She was just a perk.
So she drops the tire iron, all the fight gone out of her, because she’s been fighting this ghost all these years and it turns out that she was the only one who thought there was even a fight to be had, and she was the only person it ever mattered to.
Phillip, though: he sees what isn’t said, guesses at how young his wife must have been when she was in training and a powerful man hurt her in a way that would make her put the mission aside. Phillip, who just was angry and frightened and sick at some pedophile bastard who thought it was alright to leer at his precious thirteen year old daughter, who said it was just better to walk away from creeps like that instead of fighting them.
Except no one had ever fought for Elizabeth to keep her from an awful man’s hands, and suddenly it’s all different. And Elizabeth just watches, because maybe this is the first time somebody has fought for her, not the mission or the Motherland, but her, and Phillip, in that moment, won’t trade a genuine American life and three million dollars for a chance to be her partner not only professionally but with her deepest, most personal secrets. Timoshev tells Elizabeth that she was no one and not worth a life in revenge; Phillip disagrees and shows Elizabeth without words that she very much is worth the cost of a man’s life.
(And then he gets up and beats the shit out of the mall predator, because it doesn’t matter if it’s the USSR or the USA, there is a man who would take girls, people’s young daughters, and would throw away their safety and ability to trust without a second thought for the how violent it is to tell a girl she has no worth. It’s not a fight Philip can just walk away from anymore.)
There is little romance in dissolving a body in lye and dropping it in an abandoned factory’s loading dock, or in fucking in an Oldsmobile promptly thereafter, but romance was always an appearance, just like everything else of their relationship. This is an affirmation, a pledge of allegiance to each other because while they have shared lives for fifteen years and have procreated twice during those years, they have never been intimate. Sex was always part of the job description, but intimacy never was, and maybe it won’t kill Elizabeth after all.
Well, I was there and I saw what you did
I saw it with my own two eyes
So you can wipe off the grin, I know where you've been
It's all been a pack of lies
This is a story in which words and appearances are not used for communication but for obfuscation. Friendly chat with neighbors obscures the truth that Phillip and Elizabeth are really enemy agents speaking a second language. The hair and glasses of a boring bureaucrat convinces an FBI employee that she is helping Internal Affairs find a mole. A suburban house hides the FBI’s most wanted informant. Saying that “just to get into space is an achievement” is a positive thought that does not say that the Russians got into space first. Phillip keeps repeating that they the potential three million dollars in their grasp but it’s a mantra that becomes less and less believable as time goes on, and more like a get-rich-quick scam.
Action is truth. Truth is when Phillip attends the school event and places his hand on his heart but only sings a few words of the anthem. Truth is when Phillip doesn’t say “we’re supposed to be married” and unhesitatingly kills the man who hurt his wife.
Objects are truth. Phillip checks for blood on the knife Elizabeth holds to slice brownies instead of asking if she killed Timoshev. Food and drink, especially, are used to show what’s really going on; if you look at the flavors each family member picks when they go for ice cream, Elizabeth is solid chocolate, and Phillip is a mix of chocolate and vanilla-he doesn’t know what flavor he wants to choose. And then the shared drinks, as I mentioned on tumblr-
There are four times in the episode during which characters share drinks.
In the first, Phillip and Elizabeth stand in the kitchen; she pours herself a cup of coffee. He holds out his mug for her to pour for him too, and she very deliberately puts it down, leaving him to pour his own mug. She does not share a pot with him; they merely happen to occupy the same kitchen and pour from the same pot: it doesn’t mean they’re together.
The second time is the flashback where the two of them first meet; they have nothing to say, not yet, so he offers to pour the tea. He pours cups for both of them, and waits, so they drink together. He wants to share. He wants to do things with her. He has just let go of whatever girl’s photo he’s been carrying, and he is consciously choosing to share tea with Elizabeth.
The third time, the general hands Elizabeth a cup of tea. We don’t see him pour, we don’t even see him when she takes the cup from him. This is no partnership, no equal relationship, and after what happened with Timoshev, I think Elizabeth is re-evaluating her ideas on partnership. She has a better idea who is on her side and who is just handing her a cup and everything that comes with it.
And, added ohvienna, right after that last hot beverage hand-off is a scene where Philip and Elizabeth down two shots of vodka and for the first time in their fifteen year “marriage” she disobeys orders and tells him her real name.
Well I remember, I remember don't worry
How could I ever forget, it's the first time, the last time we ever met
But I know the reason why you keep your silence up, no you don't fool me
The hurt doesn't show; but the pain still grows
It's no stranger to you or me
And I can feel it coming in the air tonight, Oh Lord...
She shares vodka with him, she shares that danger and change are coming, and most of all, she shares that her name is Nadezhda/ Надежда (a name that means hope) and reaches for his hand. They know more about each other now than they have learned in the previous fifteen years of being married, and even though it’s painful and they can keep on not talking and keep up appearances, they’re going to act in truthful ways. They share something now, something that doesn’t belong to the Soviets or to America or to their family, but just to them alone.
And I want to see how this new thing they’ve found blooms and grows and if they end up having to kill the FBI agent neighbor for being a giant snoop.
ADD YOUR THOUGHTS, ADD ALL YOUR THOUGHTS, OMG I WANT TO DISCUSS EVERYTHINGGGGGGGGG
Also ohvienna you need to make a post about music probably because I was hearing your Ashes to Ashes flashbacks from all the way over here.
And after writing all that, I had even more thoughts about Phillip learning about sex and women and fast cars.