Can TV be Polycentric? Or what it’s like to watch The Americans as a Russian
Alexei Morozov: “In Soviet Union, we have woman on street. You stand in line, she pour a kvass into mug. You drink, next person, she pours, uh, kvass into same mug, they drink. We all drink from same mug. Ugh. Actually, kvass is the only thing I miss from Russia.”
Phillip Jennings: “What what is that?”
Morozov: “Mm Like Russian cola made from bread. I make some in my basement. Tastes like piss. I don’t know what I do wrong.”
The Americans, Season 5, Episode 4
I can’t count the number of times I’ve told stories like this, including on this Mixed Company thing, sharing some piece of my historic peculiarity with a culturally myopic American. I always kind of suspect though that whenever I express some unique bit of such nostalgia, my conversation partner just hears a Yakov Smirnoff caricature of whatever I’m saying: “In Soviet Russia, soda drinks you! HA HA HA HA”
Is it too much to expect anything else? Could it be possible to access what it FEELS LIKE to have grown up in a different cultural infrastructure — one that is made of entirely other senses of time, privacy, hygiene, abundance, tastes? Just from a little story? I don’t count on it, really. I expect you not to get it. How would you know, unless you’ve lived it? You definitely haven’t seen any good examples of it on TV.
Typical representations of Russians in American popular culture are usually so reductive I just try to pretend what is referred to as “Russia” is a fictional stand-in for some exotic or villainous Other. In fact, I once I successfully convinced someone at a party (a relatively intelligent, rational American person) that Russians don’t actually speak a different language, just English with a weird accent — a reasonable assumption to form about an entire people when all you ever see them depicted as are grunting gangsters and sexy spies.
Today your average American’s collection of mental resources for thinking about Russians also includes Putin (a terrifying dictator), Pussy Riot (a rock group of sexy femme rebels), Anna Kournikova (a sexy tennis star), and an insidious army of hackers who are probably stealing your credit card information and re-programming the US.gov website while sipping on a nice lukewarm glass of kvass.
But then: The Americans. Sometime last year, depressed I’d finally consumed all 5.5 seasons of MTV’s Awkward (a surprisingly well-written teen comedy), I surrendered to Amazon Prime’s nudge to try The Americans. It wasn’t at all obvious that I would like a TV show about undercover KGB officers; it threatened to be packed with combat and plot-twists — a combination entertaining on its own but not anything I’d ever bother to care about or remember. The fact that it was about Russian spies and the Cold War made me worry more: it was likely to be culturally painful and politically heavy. Honestly, I decided to give it a shot only because as a teenager I really loved Keri Russell in Felicity. Maybe staring at her on screen would satisfy my craving for adolescent coming-of-age dramas — the genre, if I’m honest here, I would always rather be watching.
I don’t watch that much TV, and when I do I rarely watch just for entertainment. More often, I crave TV as a kind of [vegan] chicken soup for my culturally lonely soul. You’d think that that as a normal-ish looking white adult woman, I should feel represented enough already. But there are so many parts of me that are endlessly tugging for visibility and processing: the ecstatic and terrifying reality of suburban girlhood; crippling psychic weight of adolescent fat; the heartbreaking complexity of female friendships; the sad failure to maintain an adult version of a punk, anti-capitalist, creative life; the weird experience of being an assimilated immigrant; and the mess of living and loving in the modern city. Shows like Girls, Portlandia and Easy manage to capture some of my identities, sometimes (Girls even once had a character named Natalia way back when!) but never all. And never really the Russian immigrant one.
So I definitely didn’t expect The Americans to get it. The show centers on two super secret Russian spies Nadezhda and Mikhail (played by American actress Keri Russell and Welsch actor Matthew Rhys) in the midst of 80s Cold War tension. These KGB agents have done such a good job studying and infiltrating the enemy that they appear to be a perfect American couple, named Elizabeth and Phillip Jennings. To aid their assimilation, the pair even produced two biological children — Henry and Paige. These average American tweens speak only English, eat brownies, play video games, and believe that their parents are travel agents who occasionally work very late hours.
Great, I thought, the producers have given themselves a premise that essentially requires everything to be as American as possible, and have cast non-Russian actors in the main roles. Maybe I’ll entertain myself by hate-watching for all the ways it fails to demonstrate anything real about Russian culture and people! That is, until it makes me feel sick.
At first, so many things seemed blatantly unbelievable. For example, how would the spies or their bosses know to name their female child Paige? That is such a weird name for a native Russian speaker. I can just imagine my parents squinting their faces trying to pronounce it. Pay-Dsh? The name, its profound foreignness to the Slavic tongue, seemed to me like it understood America too well, to a degree that was hard for me to believe Russian people in the 80s would have accessed. I was convinced the show’s producers, while clearly understanding what Americans name their kids, didn’t know very much about the Russians.
More proof: in season 3, a kidnapped expat physicist Anton Baklanov, brought back to USSR and forced to work in a Russian laboratory, gets served a sandwich for lunch. Now, the scene here is NOT super secret spies in America, but Russia in the 80s. In other words, no reason to pretend to be American! But here the show gives itself away: the sandwich Baklanov has put in front of him is made of two slices of white bread. I have never seen a sandwich like that until I moved to the USA, because this is what a sandwich looks like in Russia:
A sandwich is an open-faced single slice of bread with a slab of butter and super-processed cured meat or a thick piece of solid lard called salo (mm, delicious). The idea of a “sandwich” or something being sandwiched- as in in between two instances of the same thing– would not even make sense as a metaphor, because it’s just not a thing.
Katia Bachko, a journalist and apparently a child Russian émigré like me, wrote a piece for the New Yorker about the way the Jennings eat — or rather about her immigrant jealousy for their diet. How did they learn to make brownies? She asks. Or meatloaf? Or peanut butter and jelly sandwiches? Bachko compared these perfect Americanisms to her own humiliating memories pulling out salami and pickles from her school lunch bag. I related to her childhood trauma. Unlike Katia, though, I found this lack of recognition a problem with the show, not with my real immigrant experience: The food on The Americans was TOO BELIEVABLY AMERICAN, and so unbelievably Russian.
But, for some reason, I tried talking myself into believing: maybe Russian spy school is so on point that they hire consultants and anthropologists who trained Nadezhda and Mikhail in these cultural particularities. It felt good to think of my people being so meticulous about their work. I decided this had to be possible to try to enjoy the development of the show’s admittedly suspenseful, sexy and emotionally complex plot.
Then something unexpected happened. As I kept watching The Americans, I grew more and more surprised by its increasingly nuanced representations of Russian characters. All the other (non-secret spy) Russians in the show are played by actual Russian or Russian-speaking actors, and Russell and Rhys gradually reveal ways in which their emotional pasts, shaped by their childhood memories of war and poverty, continue to affect their deep — if not surface — cultural sensibilities. Nadezhda desperately listens to tapes recorded by her mother back in Smolensk with updates about her mother’s health and relatives. The voice and tone of these messages is both believable and touching, as is Nadezhda’s tugging for it. Unlike Mikhail, who occasionally thinks about retiring from spy-life and maybe staying in the West, Nadezhda is never seduced by the freedom and opulence her “American” family enjoys. She remembers the struggles, pain, and perpetual hunger of her life back home, and will do anything (will sleep with and kill and betray anyone) to fight for the dignity and survival of her people. Despite perfectly performing the American dream– an achievement you would think is the ultimate goal of any immigrant– Nadezhda never stops longing for her mother, or her motherland.
In this latest season of the show, #5, some bits of Russian dialogue, moral tensions and familial relationships are so surprisingly poignant, that I almost fear it reveals too much the other way, showing something sacred and secret *about us* to American audiences. For example, Oleg Burov, a KGB official working at the DC embassy, decides to abandon his current post and his upwardly mobile KGB girlfriend to go back to Russia and live in an apartment with his parents. He claims he wants to be near his mother, who has been mourning the recent death of Burov’s brother in Afghanistan. “You’re a good son,” says his supervisor, blessing his leave. “You’re a good son,” echoes his girlfriend, in a separate scene. Does this plotline even make sense to American people, who are so conditioned into hero narratives striving towards achievement and independence? Does it make sense to have someone young, capable, and handsome, to choose to essentially regress? (Gulu says it would make sense to Indian people; they too have much reverence for the family).
Later, in Moscow, Burov confesses to his mother that he had done something in America that might get him jailed by the KGB. His mother first reacts by hysterically crying (just like mine would). Then the next day, exhausted and serious from her emotional processing, she tells Oleg a story he didn’t know: before he was born, she had to live in a prison camp for 5 years. “People find means to survive,” she says prophetically, essentially giving him permission to do whatever is necessary if the circumstances compel it.
I imagine my mother, first hysterical and then calm and strategic, giving the same cryptic advice. “People find means to survive.” The above storyline captures such a precise and familiar combination of sensitivity and strength, hopeless and survivalism, loyalty and betrayal that it may actually manage to represent a complex truth about the Russian soul: wars and political disappointments have left us, as a people, in a permanent a state of grief; as a result, we may be most alive when bargaining with our losses. This sort of psychic inheritance is very different from its American parallel — the energy and dynamism of its exceptional spirit– a spirit that keeps inscribing GOD HAS FAVORED OUR UNDERTAKING into every transaction.
When I first moved to the US, at 12, the first question people always asked me was, “Do you like it here, in America?” The inquiry implied only one appropriate reply: “Yes, of course, I’m so happy/grateful.” But this was a lie. I lied because I didn’t know how explain, to Americans, that someone could actually miss poverty and disrepair. I missed how good all the food tasted, because we had to grow so much of it ourselves. Sometimes my dad, a PhD, went hunting for pheasants and ducks, so we had some protein. I missed feeling like cats and dogs were free members of the city and sometimes my genuine friends, not just somene’s pets. I missed that the bus would take me anywhere, and how fun and disorienting it was when electricity or water would go out in the whole neighborhood (an irregularity that happened all the time) so we had to use candles or stand in line at the local well to get supplies for the night. Collective struggle made us resourceful, and grateful for the simplest things. So, when I entered an American toy store for the first time, my immediate thought was “I’m so glad I didn’t grow up with this.” I sensed that this level of excess and convenience would somehow make me a more terrible person.
“People find means to survive.” My parents chose to move to America not because they were in love with American politics or culture. The grew more and more worried that post-soviet Russia was becoming unstable and corrupt, a bad environment for their children. My father considered a few places to move his work, but of all the countries he visited, he thought that only in the USA we could eventually be able to become Americans. We would never be French in France, or Japanese in Japan. No matter how long we lived in these older and more homogenous countries, we would always be foreign. He didn’t mean that if we moved to the US, we’d perfectly master all the American traditions; instead, he felt that America would accept us as we are. As Russian-born, Russian-made, Russian-tugging. To this day, my mom has never made brownies, and the peanut butter I buy when I visit my parents stays untouched until I return. My parents still download American movies with overdubs and watch too many boring soap operas about Russian detectives. Over time, they’ve incorporated olive oil and avocados into their diet, but still eat salami and pickles on the regular.
I’m not saying this is typical of anything. Myself, as a 1.5 generation immigrant, I am now perhaps more like the Jennings’s kids than I am like my parents. But because actually I am both, I rarely feel like my particular cultural bipolarism is broadly understood or popularly represented. Which is why watching The Americans has been so surprisingly pleasurable, because the show literally and lyrically speaks both of my intimate cultural languages.
I’m now gonna drop a theory bomb on this navel-gazing TV review. Jan Blommaert, a Belgian sociolinguist, proposes the term polycentricity to describe the ways visual and linguistic representations may be oriented towards different cultural and societal centers. In a society like ours, shaped by globalization and superdiversity, a walk down a city street reveals countless examples of this phenomenon: shop signs in multiple languages, churches catering the all kinds of ethnic and denominational worship, clothing that signals micro differences in everything from class to kink. In this example, the street itself is a polycentric landscape — it has multiple, non-unified orientations. A polycentric piece of text or media, in turn, isn’t one that’s been translated into another language using a Google algorithm, but one that authentically speaks and relates to different worldviews. To me, polycentricity echoes DuBois’s concept of “double consciousness” — the sense that your soul is divided into separate uncollapsable parts, making the idea of a whole, unified identity feel impossible. It is like being a person with two or more heads and hearts, always looking off into separate directions.
Is it possible The Americans is polycentric? Does this popular American TV show actually manage to orient to, respect, and genuinely represent more than one cultural worldview — specifically, mine? An American show called The Americans? UHH, HOW? Well, it helps that the badass international journalist Masha Gessen is the show’s occasional translator.
Perhaps another TV example can help to illustrate a polycentric representation. A few months ago I was trying to watch the new Netflix show “Easy” — a series too obviously marketed to me, a young, sex-positive Chicagoan (the show takes place in Chicago and explores a number of intersecting romantic relationships). Due to a lapsed subscription for actual Netflix, I was using one of the free options available on the internet to stream the show. A funny thing happened when I watched Episode 4. This episode begins with a young couple negotiating their preferences at a bourgie furniture store. The couch they end up buying then becomes a kind of a domestic theater for a visit from an old friend who has lusty, destructive tendencies. Now, this couple is clearly affluent and totally cosmopolitan. They speak perfect English during several transactions: in the couch store, at a bar. But most of the episode’s dialogue takes place in Spanish– what appears to be the native language among the 3 friends. With no English subtitles! I know a bit of Spanish but am by no means fluent, but I watched the entire episode, incredibly impressed by what I thought was the producers’ intentional move to center the language and experience of these bilingual characters. Since the plot was so relatable to me through its visual and emotional narrative, I didn’t really need a translation. I got it anyway.
Later, I realized that the Netflix version of the show did have subtitles, and I was just getting what I didn’t pay for (oops). But still, it seems that forcing American audiences to deal with majority-subtitled dialogue on TV is uncommon. What is incredibly common though is for many people living in America to exist simultaneously, seamlessly, in two different cultural and linguistic registers every day. In a deep way, I felt represented by this episode, even though it wasn’t about my culture or my language.
Easy tries to be polycentric, to show a multiplicity of Chicago(s). It doesn’t do so perfectly; the show is still a limited representation of the city — more white, privileged, and north-side than the real, multi-hearted thing. Being a person with more than one center is not so easy either. In the last two seasons of The Americans, Paige grows up a bit, starts feeling like something’s fishy, and eventually learns her parents’ true vocation [SPOILERS!]. She sees her mom beat up a man on a street, meets her maternal grandmother, and gets some combat training in the garage. In one emotionally powerful scene, Elizabeth and Phillip decide to teach Paige a technique she can use when she feels vulnerable or stressed with her boyfriend, as a way of preventing herself from sharing too much. The technique looks surprisingly innocent: “just rub your thumb and index finger together,” they show her, “and remember us, where you come from. Practice it, truly master it,” they say. Paige obliges, and then, later, over sodas in a diner, when her boyfriend (the son of an FBI agent of course!) tries to understand why she looks so anxious, she rubs her fingers together and lies. She’s just stressed about homework, she tells him.
My family are not spies, but my parents have taught me to lie many times. To keep our selves safe, our business private. “People find means to survive.” I wonder if Paige, having not lived in the world her parents’ souls keep tugging for, will ever be able to get it, to claim and know the heaviness of her cultural inheritance. I don’t “use the technique” but I often feel, in everyday life, like I am suppressing a part of myself that relates to everything in a profoundly different way. Maybe the meta-structure of the “In Soviet Russia, X does YOU” joke actually deeply reveals the impossibility of cross-cultural understanding: yes, in Soviet Russia, everything is so different that you actually don’t have the tools to comprehend it. Choosing a hipster kvass in a Brooklyn bodega is just not at all the same as drinking it from a woman on a street who drove up with a giant barrel, a source of refreshment and pleasure that could have so easily never arrived.
Now that I know polycentric television is possible, I want more of it, all the time. I want TV with double consciousness that makes me (and other people like and not like me) feel seen and represented. The cool thing about television is it requires many people to write it and produce it, so it’s almost never one person’s vision. And I know there are so many writers who have stories to tell. But they also have go against the inertia of centering a single monolithic default, resist the energy and dynamism of American exceptionalism; challenge the impulse to reproduce the American family as any kind of reality at all. The Americans, at least, shows that the most picture-perfect American family is actually a perfectly-researched KGB operation. But it also shows that Russians, too, can be well-researched (minus the sandwich; I will never let that go), and represented with nuance and care and curiosity and complexity. Maybe we have something to learn from spies and hackers about how to appropriate a different culture, how to steal its secret codes, and to make the lies believable.
