Symmetries in "The Americans" Part 1
Feb. 19th, 2014 07:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
quantumrealityAs the second season begins to ramp up, I want to revisit "The Americans" from the point of view of the symmetries I've seen in the series, starting with the opening credits.
Future parts will explore symmetries between the characters themselves, as I expect this to be an ongoing and recurring theme through Season 2 as much as in Season 1. These posts will be fairly image-laden with clickable thumbnails, so keep that in mind if you're on a slow connection.
To start off with, in 1981, the two superpowers of the world, the USA and USSR, were empires in all but name, and this was officially recognized to a greater or lesser extent by each nation. Each represented, and conceived the other to represent the diametric opposite of, a particular political-ideological system which bore little in the way of symmetry, but mirror images have a kind of symmetry too.
The USA on the eve of 1981:
GDP per capita: $17000 in 1990 dollars
Population: 227 million
Armed force strength: 2 million troops
Missile complement: 25,000
The USSR on the eve of 1981:
GDP per capita: $5000 in 1990 dollars
Population: 270 million
Armed force strength: 5 million troops
Missile complement: 40,000+
Each country could easily field the necessary nuclear armament to at least deliver a devastating blow to the military and industrial capacity of the other, and their conventional forces would make a direct attack extremely unwise.
In the context of the TV show "The Americans" and the opening credits of that show, the thing that leaps out is how the show portrays the two nations' achievements and power as being, again, almost mirror images of one another. For example, the achievements of each nation in the realm of space exploration, or the way each nation almost canonized their founder(s) into a kind of demigod, with stirring phrases or words associated with each.
Starting with these circa World War 2 era posters, each nation apparently used the image of a woman shushing the viewer to remind people not to talk out of turn in case Nazi spies might pick something up:
And then the show's opening credits go on to show us each nation's iconic monuments commemorating a crowning achievement each considered important: for the US, the flag-raising by the Marines over Iwo Jima which crystallized in one monument the gains made over the hard years of war against the Japanese, and for the USSR, the socialist-realist raising of the hammer and sickle, symbolizing the triumph and endurance of the "socialist" economic system.
And during the Cold War, space travel and space exploration was a keenly fought battleground, from the Sputnik satellite launch in 1957, the first USSR unmanned space vehicle Luna 1 circumnavigation of the moon in 1959 with the USA's Mariner 2 flyby of Venus hot on its heels in 1962, the successful launching of Yuri Gagarin into Earth orbit in 1961 followed by Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and William Anders in 1968 who officially are the first to have left the Earth's orbit (they circumnavigated the moon) and culminating, of course, in the moon landing of 1969 by Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong.
Even after the moon landings, space was still contentious as each country considered the possibility of militarizing space, such as the idea of sending up satellites armed with lasers and missiles for offensive and defensive purposes. Even without using space as an exclusively military background for a war, satellite communications have proven vital for military as well as civilian purposes.
The symmetries shown us by the show's writers and producers even extend to the "baby books" we see that existed in each country. In that, the "Not So Different" trope is being invoked here - Soviets and Americans both have put emphasis on the family and the importance of raising children in the respective values and ideology of each nation.
And finally, the leaders and founding documents of each nation are explicitly shown as being "symmetric": We have Lenin, with the one Russian word, "NAROD" which means "PEOPLE" - a common refrain of the Bolsheviks was that they were acting in the interests of ordinary people, especially the workers and the farmers. And Lenin was, to a greater or lesser degree, held up as the idol of Soviet Communism.
Similarly, George Washington is often revered as one of the founders of the United States, as well as being the architect of the Constitution which bears the famous words "We The People", which shows up in the very next shot.
The final frames show each of the American and Soviet leaders beginning with Khrushchev and Kennedy, and ending with Brezhnev and Reagan; the very last shot shows the two iconic national images: the American flag and the Red Star.
That's it for Part 1. Part 2 (of however many parts I make) will start looking at the major American and Soviet characters and discuss symmetries with their respective counterparts.
Future parts will explore symmetries between the characters themselves, as I expect this to be an ongoing and recurring theme through Season 2 as much as in Season 1. These posts will be fairly image-laden with clickable thumbnails, so keep that in mind if you're on a slow connection.
To start off with, in 1981, the two superpowers of the world, the USA and USSR, were empires in all but name, and this was officially recognized to a greater or lesser extent by each nation. Each represented, and conceived the other to represent the diametric opposite of, a particular political-ideological system which bore little in the way of symmetry, but mirror images have a kind of symmetry too.
The USA on the eve of 1981:
GDP per capita: $17000 in 1990 dollars
Population: 227 million
Armed force strength: 2 million troops
Missile complement: 25,000
The USSR on the eve of 1981:
GDP per capita: $5000 in 1990 dollars
Population: 270 million
Armed force strength: 5 million troops
Missile complement: 40,000+
Each country could easily field the necessary nuclear armament to at least deliver a devastating blow to the military and industrial capacity of the other, and their conventional forces would make a direct attack extremely unwise.
In the context of the TV show "The Americans" and the opening credits of that show, the thing that leaps out is how the show portrays the two nations' achievements and power as being, again, almost mirror images of one another. For example, the achievements of each nation in the realm of space exploration, or the way each nation almost canonized their founder(s) into a kind of demigod, with stirring phrases or words associated with each.
Starting with these circa World War 2 era posters, each nation apparently used the image of a woman shushing the viewer to remind people not to talk out of turn in case Nazi spies might pick something up:
And then the show's opening credits go on to show us each nation's iconic monuments commemorating a crowning achievement each considered important: for the US, the flag-raising by the Marines over Iwo Jima which crystallized in one monument the gains made over the hard years of war against the Japanese, and for the USSR, the socialist-realist raising of the hammer and sickle, symbolizing the triumph and endurance of the "socialist" economic system.
And during the Cold War, space travel and space exploration was a keenly fought battleground, from the Sputnik satellite launch in 1957, the first USSR unmanned space vehicle Luna 1 circumnavigation of the moon in 1959 with the USA's Mariner 2 flyby of Venus hot on its heels in 1962, the successful launching of Yuri Gagarin into Earth orbit in 1961 followed by Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and William Anders in 1968 who officially are the first to have left the Earth's orbit (they circumnavigated the moon) and culminating, of course, in the moon landing of 1969 by Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong.
Even after the moon landings, space was still contentious as each country considered the possibility of militarizing space, such as the idea of sending up satellites armed with lasers and missiles for offensive and defensive purposes. Even without using space as an exclusively military background for a war, satellite communications have proven vital for military as well as civilian purposes.
The symmetries shown us by the show's writers and producers even extend to the "baby books" we see that existed in each country. In that, the "Not So Different" trope is being invoked here - Soviets and Americans both have put emphasis on the family and the importance of raising children in the respective values and ideology of each nation.
And finally, the leaders and founding documents of each nation are explicitly shown as being "symmetric": We have Lenin, with the one Russian word, "NAROD" which means "PEOPLE" - a common refrain of the Bolsheviks was that they were acting in the interests of ordinary people, especially the workers and the farmers. And Lenin was, to a greater or lesser degree, held up as the idol of Soviet Communism.
Similarly, George Washington is often revered as one of the founders of the United States, as well as being the architect of the Constitution which bears the famous words "We The People", which shows up in the very next shot.
The final frames show each of the American and Soviet leaders beginning with Khrushchev and Kennedy, and ending with Brezhnev and Reagan; the very last shot shows the two iconic national images: the American flag and the Red Star.
That's it for Part 1. Part 2 (of however many parts I make) will start looking at the major American and Soviet characters and discuss symmetries with their respective counterparts.
