Salon.com > Russians

“The Americans” gets entangled in psychological spy games

Thu, 07 Mar 2013 14:51:00 +0000

I want to pay “The Americans” a compliment, but to do so, I have to start with an insult. I was really irritated and bored with the first half of last night’s episode — “Trust Me” — in which first Philip and then Elizabeth appeared to be captured by the FBI, who torture them, and Phil especially, in the hope they will confess their true identities. I was bored and irritated because it just so obviously could not be the FBI that had captured them. That’s a plot point we’re not going to see for a few seasons, at least, because it will mean the show is pretty much over. And besides, the Russians had just realized they had a mole in their outfit: Clearly they had captured Elizabeth and Philip, and were testing them to make sure they hadn’t flipped. (This is a particular spy-genre trick I’ve seen before, like in that bad-but-sort-of-fun to watch Colin Farrell–Al Pacino movie “The Recruit”; also, if the Russians meant it, they would have kept Philip and Elizabeth for more than an afternoon.) This is, in fact, what had happened, but when Elizabeth and Philip figured out it was the KGB doing the physical and psychological assaulting, “The Americans” got original and dark.

Matthew Rhys: “I still blink hard when the young PAs say, ‘We’re doing this period drama’”

Thu, 07 Mar 2013 01:00:00 +0000

The Cold War-era espionage thriller "The Americans," which is halfway through its first season on FX (and airs on Wednesday nights at 10 p.m. ET), is not the first series to challenge the audience to identify with unsympathetic characters. But this early 1980s drama pushes American views a little harder, asking us to root for KGB sleeper cells living in suburban northern Virginia as Americans — and see CIA and FBI agents as the enemy. Welsh actor Matthew Rhys, who last appeared on U.S. television in ABC's family drama "Brothers & Sisters" as a gay lawyer (and whose TV brood included Rachel Griffiths, Calista Flockhart and Sally Field), returns to the small screen to play Philip Jennings, a Russian spy, who takes all of his roles very seriously, no matter which identity he's assumed. He is an effective strategist when it comes to collecting intelligence — and a scrappy thug when he needs to be. But equally interesting is the domestic drama within "The Americans": Philip is devoted to his wife, Elizabeth (Keri Russell) — despite the fact that theirs is an arranged, sham marriage — and an extremely protective father to their daughter and son, who know nothing of their parents' secret and past lives. And part of Philip wonders if it would just be better for the family to defect, to buy into the American way of life — which would, of course, mean betraying his country and abandoning his life's work.

Must Do’s: What we like this week

Sat, 02 Mar 2013 15:00:00 +0000

BOOKS

Laura Miller dug into Candida Moss' scholarly work on Christianity's obsession with martyrdom, titled "The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom." She writes:

"Moss is thorough, strives for clarity and is genuinely fired up in her concern for the influence of the myth of martyrdom on Western societies. 'The idea of the persecuted church is almost entirely the invention of the 4th century and later,' she writes. This was, significantly, a period during which the church had become 'politically secure,' thanks to Constantine. Yet, instead of providing a truthful account of Christianity’s early years, the scholars and clerics of the fourth century cranked out tales of horrific, systemic violence. These stories were subtly (and not so subtly) used as propaganda against heretical ideas or sects. They also made appealingly gruesome entertainment for believers who were, personally, fairly safe; Moss likens this to contemporary suburbanites reveling in a horror film."