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PAMELA AUCOIN: How HOMELAND validates the war on terror

How HOMELAND validates the war on terror

[EDITOR'S NOTE: The following piece about Showtime's drama Homeland contains spoilers for season one. Read at your own risk.]

Pop culture serves to entertain and reinforce cultural norms. Television shows have always done this; studying them and their attitudes towards authority reveals a lot about America.

One of the most well-received shows of the season is Showtime’s Homeland. The series features a fine cast including Claire Danes and Mandy Patinkin, and was originally an Israeli TV show. While that may not sound exactly like the BBC, Homeland still has the allure of the foreign-produced, which suggests a less provincial background.

The New Yorker critic Emily Nussbaum praised Homeland as “an antidote to NBC’s 24,” accused of glorifying torture abroad. Homeland is presented as a show with more liberal values, one which portrays a more nuanced C.I.A that's less likely to promote bigotry against Muslims and enhanced interrogation techniques.

This has not been my viewing experience. While Homeland is undeniably compelling, it is not a balanced show that seems very interested in presenting American intelligence services honestly. Rather, it is very validating. The all-star, critic-proof cast somehow sublimates the very undemocratic policies the show suggests need to exist in order for the Claire Danes character to succeed in her mission.

Danes' Carrie Mathison is a complicated character with an undisclosed mood disorder that may actually help her do her job; after all, what kind of sane person could reconcile leading the double life of the spy? Yet her actions are quite horrifying; she installs bugs on the home of a terror suspect, which she has been ordered to take down before she can gather any meaningful intelligence. Isn’t that convenient? Our civil liberties are what come between sniffing out Al Qaeda operatives, who just won’t allow well-meaning if somewhat psychotic spies to do their jobs properly.

The fact Carrie does not lose her job is telling; ultimately, Homeland’s C.I.A. bends the rules a lot. Carrie’s boss Estes is supposedly the “smartest guy in Near East, by a mile,” yet is short-sighted enough to allow a Marine P.O.W., Nick Brody (Damian Lewis), to visit a former jailer who is kept locked up in an interrogation room. Naturally, Brody attacks his former torturer and possibly slips him a razor blade.

There are many other slip-ups by Carrie’s boss, and Carrie herself; she even has a brief affair with said Marine, who she suspects is a sleeper agent. She also manages to inadvertently let it slip she’s been spying on him. All of this suggests that the C.I.A. is a rather sloppy organisation, but such criticism is not blatant in Homeland. Carrie is the rogue genius who might become occaissionally unhinged, but her unorthodox methods are what is needed, and can lead to results.

But do they really? Not according to interrogation research, which has shown time and again that torture leads to bad intelligence and creates even more terrorists. Yet Homeland embraces torture as a viable tool to get information. The captured Al Qaeda operative is tortured in a C.I.A. cell which is freezing cold (he is undressed), and plays bursts of heavy metal music and blasts strobe lights to unnerve him sufficiently to name names. Just before he is about the provide them with specific information, he manages to commit suicide. The subtext is not missed by the viewer. Geneva conventions be damned, torture works, and an exceptional America must be allowed to practice it.

It is also telling that when innocent Muslim bystanders are shot and killed in a mosque by American law enforcement, the issue is not dealt with; it is understood this will not create an international or even domestic incident. They are Muslims, and therefore expendable; this seems to be the show’s message.

Viewers of the far superior British program The Sandbaggers would likely notice that Homeland is a far less sensitive program. The show’s eponymous “sandbaggers” are a group of British agents who would fit in well in John Le Carre’s The Spy Who Came In From the Cold. They are low-paid civil servants who engage in highly dangerous, and certainly morally ambiguous missions to keep the KGB in check. What was brilliant about this show (and, to some extent, Le Carre in general) was how it questioned the sanity of the Cold War and those who ordered these excursions in the first place. The agency bosses are portrayed as careerists, all too willing to send the sandbaggers on highly dangerous and morally ambiguous missions while they wine, dine, and dream of knighthood.

Expect no such honestly from Homeland, which can admit no such complexity. Nussbaum mentions the program’s “deep characterization.” Certainly, the writers take their time detailing some of Carrie’s family background and inability to sustain romantic relationships. This is to appease critics, who cannot simply criticize the characters as one-dimensional Jack Bauers or James Bonds. It hints at it to woo critics just enough, but it would never go so far as to suggest that there is something rotten about the State Department, whose endorsement of internationally illegal prisons abroad has served to encourage the growth of terror cells and damaged our authenticity when we criticize other nations like China, Syria, and Russia for not respecting civil liberties. The show recently won several Golden Globes, lending even more credibility to the show’s dangerous message that the war on terror can, and should, indulge our “dark side.”

Pamela AuCoin is a freelance journalist living in New York City. She has written investigative articles on the Manhattan real estate market for New York Living magazine, and currently teaches world history and occasionally German in the New York City Department of Education.

GREY MATTERS: HOMELAND and the art of playing crazy

As a certified crazy person, I’m here to tell you that either vampires burn in daylight or they don’t. I’ll accept no wiggle room on this. Anything less and you’ll quickly lose my suspension of disbelief. To get what I’m babbling about, this way, please. I’m talking about Homeland, which is, by the way, about almost nothing but crazy people.

Homeland, in case you’ve been busy catching up on something more realistic – I suggest Syfy’s zero-dollar wonder, Alphas – is about Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes), a C.I.A. operations officer haunted by the notion that she failed to do something that may have stopped 9/11 from happening. She was also compromised in an Iraq operation because of an American soldier who’d turned against his country.

Then a Delta Force raid uncovers Marine Sergeant Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis) in a compound belonging to super-terrorist Abu Nazir. Brody becomes a hero but Carrie pegs him as connected to her failed op and worse, a turned sleeper agent.

When the C.I.A. turns down Carrie’s requests for invasive surveillance because dammit, we don’t do that sort of thing in America, she does it herself with some spy pals. (Alphas, with its metaphor-fraught tales of working class, genetically “super-powered” people fighting Cheney’s still-booming and lawless torture system that Homeland needs to pretend doesn’t exist, is the more clear-eyed, adult view of post-civil liberties America.) In episodes Alfred Hitchcock would love, Carrie watches Brody eat, talk and have sex with his stunningly gorgeous wife (Morena Baccarin of Firefly fame).

The season-long hook, teased sometimes to exquisitely hair-pulling extremes, is a has-he-or-hasn’t-he game of whether or not Brody has been turned and is out for big-time trouble.

And then, for me, it all went to hell.

Carrie’s a character whose entire life, as the brilliant credits sequence reminds us every week, is literally defined by terrorism, fear and trying to control that fear by building a life, a personage as a person in strict control, serving her country, her profession and the one real man in her life, her mentor and father figure Saul Berenson (the mighty Mandy Patinkin).

So of course she decides to throw it all away, including, quite possibly, the security of the United States, so she can get drunk and fuck Brody.

The show recovered in fits, some so good and others so bad it was like tuning in to get whiplash, but this was the first trumpet sounding Homeland’s true nature, and televisual literature was not included in that symphony. Homeland never dived so far as The Killing. It stayed professional, keeping us interested (and glad there were no commercial breaks where we could pause to think about its manifold absurdities). Then there was last week’s finale that led to an explosive terrorist conflagration that wasn’t – because if it was, one of the players would be taken off the board, and so much for Homeland Season Two.

But what about the vampires? What about you being crazy?

Okay. What I mean is, if a show has vampires who can never walk in sunlight because they’ll burn up in flames except when the writers need them to, well, I’m not going to be watching that show, because the writers have contempt for me, or their material, or both.

On the most basic level, that’s the deal with Carrie and Brody. In order to accept Carrie and Brody, we must accept some whoppers about what we know about bipolar disorder – if only from Oprah, what millions of people know about returning Iraq vets and P.T.S.D. and what we all know about what it is to be human.

Right, bipolar disorder. I didn’t mention that, to add some tension spice to Carrie’s character, Homeland makes Carrie suffer really badly from bipolar disorder. Like, it’s so bad that she has to take her meds every day or else she’ll go into a manic tailspin and lose her mind. The poor thing, she can’t even go to a regular doctor for those meds because the C.I.A. would kick her out as a security risk. So, she visits her psychiatrist sister on the down-low for her weekly supply, which translates into even more suspense, and some shame and anxiety to boot; this bipolar thing is paying off big-time and all they had to do was say she has it. Poor Carrie. This is going to be one rough season.

Except, not so much, because on Homeland, vampires can walk in daylight, so to speak. After a few episodes, her bipolar kind of…goes away. Why? I would imagine because its rigors would get in the way of other plots leading to such flights of fancy as Carrie blowing off seeing her sister for meds so she can get blotto drunk for some hot Brody ooh la la. Unlike all of us, intemperance does nothing to aggravate her bipolar; hell, she doesn’t even get hangovers.

Yes, “us.” I outed myself a while ago on being bipolar. It’s no big thing – as long as you remotely behave like a grown-up about this controllable thing, i.e., not like Carrie.

Don't get me wrong: I don’t suggest Homeland hang itself on the horns of scientific accuracy (or a WebMD search). I just ask that it create a ‘verse where there are laws for Carrie’s condition, and then stick to those laws, like the way Vulcans can or can’t intermarry and the like. (On the other hand, absurdity met ugliness when the showrunners had Carrie, in deep depression, diagnosing herself – with her sister mutely complicit – for electroconvulsive therapy, a.k.a. shock treatment, a controversial, risky, cognition- and memory-impairing but highly photogenic treatment calling for Danes to be strapped and gagged, electrodes glued to her scalp. Then they cranked the juice as her body spasmed grotesquely. If you’re suffering from depression, there are a million other ways to get help – this is just an ignorant TV show by the guys who made the torture-happy 24.)

Danes has created a viable person built off the showrunners’ thumbnail description and her own vision of Carrie, which manifests in endlessly fascinating halting speech patterns, “talking” body language, odd glares and more. The creators of Homeland were insanely fortunate to get such an artist.

As for Brody – good grief. Here’s a man who for eight years was brutalized, beaten, locked in solitary, became a surrogate father to an adorable child who died horribly, was forced to brutalize other Americans and, for a freshet of memorable detail, was pissed on while he bled. And yet within a day or so he’s home, and aside from limited, soon-to-improve sexual dysfunctions and some behavioral dissonances, he’s on his way to a full recovery with timeouts for plot-advancing nightmares.

Meanwhile, in Brody’s frequent shirtless scenes we see his scars and their implied memories of unimaginable months of pain and horror, which now have no apparent effect. (Even his attempted terrorist act is based not on torture, but on love of a child.) This is Spielbergism; take a sad song and make it ludicrously better, one-upping it by saying the sad song doesn’t exist even as you’re looking at it.

As Brody breezed through photo ops, interrogations, his love affair, superior fathering, a remarkable act of remembrance in a church, the first steps towards a congressional run and the build-up to his terror attack, watching Homeland, for me, became the job of creating in my mind a less ridiculous backstory for Brody. Something Uwe Boll would not reject as failing to meet his stringent standards of realism. (I also had to ixnay the absurdity that any country would allow such damaged goods into the ‘burbs with no decompression process, where anyone could get to him, or the poor bastard could just blow his brains out in 24 minutes.)

Again, it’s entirely the actor’s art that pulls this nonsense off. It’s Lewis’ eye and neck muscle work, his oddly timed blinks, his general tightness of bearing suggesting things blowing up inside. Everything that nobody bothered to write.

But there were such great moments! Like when Brody and Carrie went to her family cabin in the woods, with its implications of a peaceful childhood she somehow missed, and his connection to a person who gets his deal. It was beautiful. And then she flat-out accuses him of being with Al Qaeda, and he’s back at her, yelling that he isn’t (which technically is true). It’s the spy scene we’ve always wanted to see: the breaking of both players’ pose.

Pure gold. But moments like this get lost in a spy show’s mechanics and, as Carrie’s mental illness makes that special guest appearance, devastating her just in time for dramatic effect, I’m just over these daywalking vampires. Next season, I’ll recalibrate my expectations of Homeland. I’ll enjoy the acting, the twists and turns. What do you want? It’s just TV.

Ian Grey has written, co-written or been a contributor to books on cinema, fine art, fashion, identity politics, music and tragedy. His column "Grey Matters" runs every week at Press Play. To read another piece about Drive, with analysis of common themes and images in all of Refn's films, click here.

MATT ZOLLER SEITZ: Should HOMELAND have quit while it was ahead?

[Editor's Note: The following article contains spoilers for the season finale of Homeland, season one. Read at your own risk.]

Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck might not seem to belong in a review of a searing cable drama about terrorism, but bear with me, OK? In the climax of Show Biz Bugs (1957), in which Bugs and Daffy compete for the right to claim top billing in a show, Daffy decides he’s had enough of being bested by the rabbit and hauls out his trump card, self-immolation. “I must warn those with weak constitutions to leave the theater for this performance,” the duck says, then swallows gasoline, nitro glycerine, gunpowder, uranium and a lit match, and explodes. “That’s terrific, Daffy!” Bugs exclaims from the wings, over thunderous applause. “They loved it! They want more!” “I know, I know,” says Daffy’s ghost, floating toward the rafters. “But I can only do it once!”

As knocked out as I was by the first season finale of Homeland, a part of me worries that the series might be the self-immolating Daffy Duck of cable dramas — incapable of topping itself in future seasons because the nature of its achievements this year are innately singular, and can only be diluted by a storyline that stretches out for two-plus years. (I have the same fears about American Horror Story, and I remember having them after Twin Peaks finally revealed who killed Laura Palmer, then sort of stumbled along until ABC canceled it.)

I even worry that the only major tactical mistake that Homeland made in its 90-minute season-ender was letting Marine Sgt. Nick Brody end his weird odyssey free and unharmed at the end. If producers Howard Gordon and Alex Gansa had let Brody swallow the match, so to speak — and complete his suicidal terrorist attack, or get shot or otherwise neutralized in the State Department bunker, or be talked down by his teenage daughter Dana, or his wife Jessica or Carrie, and sent to prison — the series would have still dazzled as a stand-alone while leaving us lots of plot and motivation questions to chew over. Brody’s statement on the phone to Abu Nazir — about how it might be more advantageous to have a fifth column influencing U.S. foreign policy rather than a sleeper agent plotting a bloodbath — makes dramatic sense, and it works as a setup for a second season, one set in the heart of executive branch power rather than on the military-intelligence fringes. But it’s damned hard to imagine how a scenario like the one that Brody laid out to Nazir could produce TV more exciting than the season that we just finished watching.

You can read the rest of Matt's recap here at Salon.

Matt Zoller Seitz is the publisher of Press Play and TV critic for Salon.

MATT ZOLLER SEITZ: When great TV shows disappoint

As regular readers know, I sometimes fall head-over-heels in love with promising new shows, and when they deliver a problematic or outright bad episode, it’s disillusioning. I tell myself it’s the nature of the beast — that it’s hard to make just one great half-hour or hour-long episode, let alone 10 or 12 or 26 in a row. The law of averages has to catch up eventually. But that doesn’t change the fact that a show that once seemed to have excellent judgment suddenly made what felt like out-of-character or flat-out stupid choices. A botch-job episode can make you wonder if you were right to like the show in the first place. At its most misjudged and tone-deaf, a bad episode of an otherwise terrific series can emphasize flaws you were previously inclined to overlook. It can even make you second-guess the things you praised in the past.

I’ll give you two recent examples, then pose a few questions and open the floor for readers to share their own experiences. I’ll place the examples within self-contained sections, so that you can easily skip them if you’re afraid of spoilers.

You can read the rest of Matt's recap here at Salon.

Matt Zoller Seitz is publisher of Press Play and TV critic at Salon.com.