the walls between us

In the first episode of this final season of The Americans, an early montage is set to the beautiful Crowded House song “Don’t Dream It’s Over,” which includes the lyrics:

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I’ve spent years on this Tumblr writing about The Americans and, in particular, the trust and devotion that binds Philip and Elizabeth. How they rely on each other. How they put each other first. I never thought the world would win. But now, I’m starting to think it might.

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Because the world has indeed come to build a wall between them. Up to this point, they were always in it together. Elizabeth, doing what needed to be done for Mother Russia. Philip, doing what needed to be done for Elizabeth. But now, Philip’s out. Pushed to his breaking point, he’s left the spy business, and now, for the most part, lives like the typical American working dad that he’s always pretended to be. On the other hand, Elizabeth is deeper in it than she’s ever been, with a terrifying new assignment that comes complete with a cyanide pill. Philip wants Gorbachev to win. Elizabeth just takes her orders and follows them like a good soldier, and the people giving her orders decidedly don’t want Gorbachev to win. Philip eyes his turkey sandwich and recalls the hunger he experienced as a child. He goes out country line dancing in a bar with the Stars and Stripes on the wall and looks happier than we’ve ever seen him. Elizabeth still hates America every bit as much as she was taught to. 

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It seems to me that it may come down to what they prioritize. Each other, or the countries their respective hearts belong to. Elizabeth gets a little nudge in one direction from Erica, an artist who is also the dying wife of a government official Elizabeth’s spying on. 

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“Doing I don’t know what. Just…doesn’t matter…” That’s love.

Faced with death, Erica now feels that the most important thing she could have done with her time was spend it with Glenn. 

I think that, because Elizabeth has always had Philip, she sometimes takes for granted what it is to have a partner, though the show never does. It constantly reminds us what loneliness does to a person, and how essential having a partner can be. Anyway, I hope Elizabeth figures that out before all is said and done, and that in the end, in the battle between communism and country line dancing, Philip and Elizabeth choose what matters most: each other.

being seems off

In the premiere of the sixth and final season of The Americans, Philip tries to confront Elizabeth, who is clearly falling apart at the seams. 

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She can’t let herself hear what he’s saying, so she makes excuses and heads to bed. But the truth is that Elizabeth has always been a little bit “off.” Much better than Philip ever was at enduring the more emotionally taxing and traumatizing aspects of their work, but that refusal to acknowledge the pain came at a cost. It meant she could never fully inhabit herself. Three years ago, in season 3, episode 9, a moment revealed that the idea of living a life that enabled her to be one with herself was so outside of her experience that the very concept left her puzzled. 

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As I wrote back then, 

Being in the flow of things, being in tune, is precisely what the major characters on The Americans, who must devote so much energy to compartmentalizing the hell out of their lives, deceiving themselves and others, can almost never do. Here in the latest episode, we see that Elizabeth seems confused by the very idea of feeling whole, in the moment, in tune.

Sometimes being in tune with ourselves means being in tune with others. But how can we be in tune with others if we can’t even be whole, unified, and honest within ourselves? 

So it’s always gotten to Elizabeth, just in a different way than it’s always gotten to Philip. And now, it may finally be too much to bear.

truth-telling by a woman in disguise

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The Americans, S6, Episode 13

As true as it gets.

the invisible and the visible

On “IHOP,” episode nine of this season of The Americans, the retired handler Gabriel pays a visit to Martha, who last season was sent to the Soviet Union after she became exposed as a Russian spy asset. This wasn’t a role she chose; it was one she was unknowingly manipulated into by her husband, “Clark,” who was actually Philip Jennings, a Russian spy. 

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I believe that part of what Martha understands here is that the whole reason that Clark loved her in the first place was because she was invisible, unlovable. This is why she was targeted. This is what made her susceptible to manipulation and exploitation; the lack of love in her life. Clark was able to come in and fill that void. If the void hadn’t existed, if she had been more visible in her day-to-day life, more loved, Clark would have had nothing to latch onto.

I understand Martha, and I understand what she understands. I struggle with bitterness sometimes, too, the kind of bitterness you can sense coming off of her when she tells Gabriel–who both was part of the group that manipulated and exploited her, an unspeakably cruel act, and who is genuine in his expressions of concern for her–that he can go. She has every right to be bitter. And perhaps I do, too, as someone who should know by now what it is to see and be seen, to know and be known by someone, but doesn’t, who doesn’t know what it is to stand out from the crowd for the person who stands out from the crowd for me on the proverbial or literal dance floor, but is instead still dancing on her own. I know that bitterness is no friend of mine, and only shuts down possibilities rather than opening them up, but it can be seductive at times, a way of feeling something other than the constant ache of yearning.

Two episodes prior, in “The Committee on Human Rights,” Paige, the daughter of Philip and Elizabeth Jennings, broke up with her boyfriend Matthew.

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Matthew’s responses are so terrible. If he understood anything at all, he might have said something like, “I know that I don’t know you yet, but I really want to know you.” Perhaps he can be forgiven for being a clueless teenager, but those who are visible in the sense that Paige is and, when she is older, will be visible–conventionally attractive, seen as desirable–often face these kinds of misperceptions throughout much of their lives. A friend of mine who is what many would consider attractive and who has had no shortage of relationships in her life said to me not long ago, “They think I’m [this] or they think I’m [that],” as if the ideas people who see her sometimes have about her feel a bit like cages. Even if these ideas recognize the truth of one aspect of her, they may not allow room for the fullness of her, for her complexities or contradictions.

And I wonder what it might have been like if you and I had written a book about love together, me with everything I’ve learned from being invisible and you with everything you’ve learned from being visible.

know a person #2

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season 5, episode 7

Matthew’s response is so off-base that it reveals he doesn’t even understand the idea of knowing a person, not in the way that Paige means it. Paige knows what it looks like when two people really know each other; she’s noticed it in her parents forever. 

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season 3, episode 2

Be with someone who really wants to know you, and who you really want to know. Someone, as I’ve said before, who feels like home. Someone to look out for you, and someone for you to look out for. Someone you can call a partner and mean it.

Us

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Someone to call when you’re on the road and tell them you miss them.

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Someone to come home to. Someone whose presence makes a place home. “This must be the place.”

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Someone who’s really in it with you. Someone you’re really in it with together.

God, I love the love on The Americans.

missing out: a legacy of secrecy (two moments from the americans)

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The Americans, season 3, episode 11

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The Americans, season 5, episode 2

the lucky and the lonely: one last americans season 4 post

Season four of The Americans gets loneliness. It gets the way that loneliness changes us. It gets the way that we may fundamentally not be the same person if we live solitary lives that we would be if we had closeness. 

Martha let herself continue to be used by Clark even once she knew that he wasn’t really an FBI internal investigations officer, but something else entirely. And is it any wonder? Certainly not unattractive but also not conventionally beautiful, she had probably spent much of her life feeling invisible to the men she might have desired. Then Clark comes along and makes her feel as if he really sees her and wants her for who she is. And Philip puts enough of himself into Clark that Martha is not wrong to feel some kind of real connection there. 

Martha knows loneliness all too well, remarking on the night before she is to leave for the Soviet Union:

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And then, just before she boards the plane, knowing that a life lived alone is not much of a life at all and that at least her connection with Clark was something, she says,

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But it’s William, another Soviet agent living in deep cover in the US, who provides the season’s deepest and most honest portrait of loneliness. In the season finale, in addition to remarking on his deathbed that “the absence of closeness makes you dry inside,” he also says this:

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It took me a little while to remember that this is the second time this season he’s called Philip lucky because he has Elizabeth to share his life with.

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At least Philip knows that he is lucky. And William’s envy is understandable.

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Philip is so often pushed to the brink by the demands of his work. It’s his connection with Elizabeth that holds him together. And he doesn’t take that for granted. It continues to be one of the great things about The Americans that while there are sometimes tensions and conflicts between Elizabeth and Philip, their relationship is one primarily founded on trust in each other and the ability to rely on each other. Most shows and films maintain an artificial air of conflict and mystery in their romantic relationships, and portrayals of true, complicated partnerships built on trust are rare, but The Americans gives us one. 

(Click the tag below to see all of my posts about The Americans.)

on the need to be seen

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The Americans, Season 4, Episode 13, “Persona Non Grata”

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The Americans, season 4, episode 12


One difference between you and I:
Your heart is inside your head

Yes, “Changes,” from 90125, released November 7th, 1983.

Elizabeth is going through some changes.