FX’s The Americans is a spy show that has long given precedence to the familial strains that result from clandestine work over the technical aspects and action of the spy game itself. It doesn’t really matter what military plans, agricultural weapons, or scientists Elizabeth and Philip Jennings are attempting to swipe from the US government and relay to the Soviets. What does matter is how their mission impacts the relationship between themselves and with their children.
As the show, now in its sixth and final season, surges toward the finish line, that relationship is once again the most important thread. Philip and Elizabeth—a pair of Soviet sleeper agents who have posed as a married American couple with two children in an idyllic Northern Virginia suburb of DC for decades—have always dealt with a tenuous relationship, often resulting from the severity and emotionally taxing nature of the job, as well as the need to put on a content exterior in the face of such internal strife. But, for the first time in the show’s run, the Jenningses are now slowly being pitted against each other. And it is through this coming conflict, that one of the more underrated aspects of the show is coming to the forefront: The Americans is about marriage, the Cold War, and, yes, undercover spy work—but it’s also about memory.
The show is set in the 80s, the sixth season in 1987. Things are changing in the Soviet Union. Mikhail Gorbachev is at the helm and there’s talk of perestroika and glasnost. And while many people on both the American and Soviet sides view this potential for change as positive, there are folks in the USSR, particularly those deeply entrenched in the old regime — including some high ranking KGB officials — who consider Gorbachev a detrimental force and work to sabotage him.
Phillip and Elizabeth’s inevitable confrontation is a microcosm of this political split. Elizabeth, the more ideologically stringent and unquestionably loyal of the two, believes that talk of perestroika and glasnost are simply the result of US propaganda and wants nothing to do with it. The Americans “want us to be just like them, I don’t want to be like them” she tells her husband in the season’s third episode. “And neither do the people back home.”
Phillip, though, has grown more comfortable living in the US than his wife, and is open to the idea of gradual change. He reminds Elizabeth that she hasn’t talked to anyone “back home” in over 20 years. “Neither have you,” she retorts after a beat.
They’re both right, of course. They arrived in Alexandria, Virginia in 1965 and never had any opportunity to return due to the risk of compromising their cover. Neither of them really know anything about the Soviet Union and its people at all anymore. Aside from media reports and updates from the KGB, the only real connection with their homeland is memory. The difference, though, is their interpretation of those memories.
It is not that Elizabeth remembers her childhood during and after World War II as a rosy one. As she teaches her daughter Paige, a KGB spy-in-training, about Soviet history and culture, she is not shy on the details, explaining that she ate rats to avoid starvation and lived in a compact apartment with several other families. She and her handler Claudia also tell Paige that 27 million Soviets died during the war, compared to just 400,000 US soldiers and Elizabeth lets loose on Paige’s old high school text books for skirting over the truth.
But she views these hardships as part of a necessary struggle for cause and state. While some of the dirty work that comes with her job is beginning to take its toll on Elizabeth’s conscience, she is no closer to turning her back on the Soviet Union now than she was 22 years earlier.
Phillip, on the other hand, has largely left the KGB behind and is attempting to embrace his American persona for real. He recently expanded his travel agency, but is struggling to pay back the loans he took out. At the end of the season’s fourth episode, Phillip is going over his books trying to find a way to avoid financial ruin. He mindlessly eats from a bag of chips and drinks a beer, and realizes that off to the side sits an untouched sandwich, which he had forgotten about as he focused on his accounting. This causes a flashback to his childhood in Tobolsk, when he and other children waited outside a restaurant kitchen in order to scrape the bottom of pots for any remnants of food.
This isn’t a sign of Phillip fully embracing a capitalistic lifestyle and the US or that he has turned his back on the Soviet Union (despite leaving the spy game, he certainly still cares about his country). In fact, part of the issue is that his quest to expand his business is actually causing him more problems. “The more you want, the more you get,” his friend and neighbor (and FBI agent) Stan tells him. “That’s both good and bad.” Instead, the reason Phillip’s uneaten sandwich causes him to remember his childhood on the streets in Tobolsk is the realization that he should have been content with what he had before expanding. He knows firsthand how much worse things can get.
Still, the memories of hardship and starvation clearly impact husband and wife differently. Elizabeth looks back on what she went through with a sense of pride. When she tells Paige about the rats, she doesn’t do so with a sense of horror. Indeed, there is almost a touch of levity to the story.
Elizabeth seems to cling to the collective memory and narrative of a Soviet Union that has since passed by. That is not say that she’s been duped by propaganda (though haven’t we all been duped by our country at some point or another), but her past is in direct correlation to that of her nation. In every sense, Elizabeth’s identity is tied to the Soviet Union and the hardships of her childhood are what turned her into such a skilled and committed agent.
Phillip’s memories have become more individualized. He’s able to shed his national identity when he thinks back and sees himself begging for scraps in an alleyway behind a diner. He’s not a future KGB sleeper agent in that moment. He’s just a starving kid.
PHOTO: Still from The Americans (2013). Source: IMDB.
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