Sex, Love, and Coercion in ‘The Americans’

This is a guest post by Joseph Jobes as part of our Representations of Female Sexual Desire week.

There is something about the experience of watching The Americans that I find really uncomfortable. I don’t mean this in a negative way, it is kind of the appeal of the show, but the tension of the spy antics really gets my heart racing in the climax of most episodes. Besides that phenomenon, though, there’s another aspect of this show that puts me on edge: I cannot tell if I think the way that The Americans portrays sexual and romantic relationships is progressive way, or, for lack of a better term, creepy and abusive.

Here’s what I mean by this: Many critics have proposed that the appeal of the show is not in its espionage storyline, but rather in the marriage dynamics between Phillip and Elizabeth Jennings. This is true; the romance between the two is certainly just as tense and dynamic as the “adventures” that they are going on in the week’s episode. What makes me unsettled about it, though, is that their marriage is very hard to define. Elizabeth and Phillip are sleeper KGB agents, and their marriage was an arranged front to make them seem more traditionally American (mom, dad, son, daughter). What is so unsettling about this is not the fact that it is an “arranged marriage,” but that they have to pretend it was not.

Really, what The Americans is about is faking emotions, and how, through faking those emotions, one can produce authentic experiences, for better or worse. This is best exemplified in episode six from the first season (also, we are going to focus the plot discussion here on the first seven or so episodes, which form the first big story arc of the show). In the sixth episode, Phillip and Elizabeth are captured and tortured, with the captors trying to get them to give up information on the KGB. At the end of the scene, they realize that the man interrogating them is KGB, not CIA; their agency was worried they may have defected, since they have found out that there is a Russian double agent.

Before this, Elizabeth had told their higher-ups that Phillip was thinking about defecting. In the pilot episode, the couple realizes that their new neighbor is an FBI agent, and Phillip thinks that the FBI knows who they are. He suggests they pro-actively switch sides. This is a huge source of tension between him and Elizabeth, who is a much more devoted spy. After they leave the interrogation room in episode six, Phillip realizes Elizabeth must have shared his concerns with their boss, and he confronts her about it. Her response is, “You like it here too much!” This is exactly what I want to talk about. Phillip’s job as a sleeper agent is to seem American, and not just complacently American, but actively American. Of course when he started, Phillip was loyal to the Russian cause, but now by pretending to be a patriotic American and by raising American kids in an American house, Phillip has gone past his original intent. By him “performing” as an American, he has become an American.

This is really problematic to me as related to the sexual relationships in the show. Again, remember that when Elizabeth and Phillip first came to America they were young spies, willingly faking a marriage in order to advance the cause of their country. It would be a different situation if they had ended up falling in love due to their shared goal, but that is not the case. Elizabeth reminds Phillip, and the audience, multiple times in the first few episodes that “it never really happened” for them; they never really had the romantic connection that they had to force for so long. This is expanded upon when Phillip finds out that Elizabeth has had an affair with Gregory Thomas, which upsets him. After their fight, Elizabeth tells her husband she is beginning to feel actual love for him for the first time in two decades.

The next few episodes show the Jennings being a romantic, sexually active husband-and-wife. Though it may seem that they are finally having an open, consensual relationship, I fear something else could be at play here. If Phillip can act American for so long that he becomes American, can Elizabeth have acted like a loving wife so long that she has truly become one? To put it in another way, is her desire and affection for her husband now authentic, or just a learned routine? And, assuming it is as genuine as she claims it is, is it troubling that this emotion had to come from a forced place? If she had not had to live with Phillip for so long, and pretend that she loved him, would she have ever grown a real love for him? It seems troubling to celebrate that Elizabeth has finally accepted the situation she is being forced into; yet as viewers, we want our two protagonists to love each other.

I think there are two separate ways to read their relationship, and I do not know that I am satisfied with either. The first is to view the Jennings as a sort of “odd couple,” a duo forced together out of peculiar circumstances that is now finally learning to live with each other and accept one another’s differences. This is a pretty standard romantic plot, but I think it is a little too easy. The second option is that we are watching the story of two people who have essentially brainwashed themselves into loving each other, and now are fighting to protect and reify the very facade they had created. This reading seems too harsh, though, as Elizabeth and Phillip do seem to share real love in a few scenes. The complexity of their relationship, and the blurred lines between real and forced desire is what makes The Americans such a complex show. Even when things are going great for the couple, I am never completely satisfied with Elizabeth and Phillip’s situation. At best, they are a man and woman who are trying to “make it work,” and at worst, they are two people forced to pretend to love someone they view as a complete stranger. All of this, mixed with the very well done espionage/thriller storylines, makes for very enjoyable, tense television.

Joseph Jobes is a graduate student pursuing his MA in English Literature at Kutztown University. His research interests include depictions of gender, sexuality, race, and class in postcolonial and postmodern texts. Besides reading and writing about literature, Joseph also writes criticism and commentary on cigars, pipes, and the hobby in general.