This post discusses plot details of the season finale of The Americans.

And so, we end where we began, with the music. Back in the first episode of The Americans, when Phillip and Elizabeth made love in their car after dumping the body of the man who raped Elizabeth during her training in the Soviet Union, “In The Air Tonight,” a distinctly unromantic song was unsettlingly perfect for that tentatively romantic moment—and as a frame for the rest of the season. “I’ve seen your face before my friend, but I don’t know if you know who I am,” Phil Collins sings in perhaps his most famous single. “Well I was there and I saw what you did, I saw it with my own two eyes / So you can wipe off that grin, I know where you’ve been / It’s all been a pack of lies…I know the reason why you keep your silence up, / oh no you don’t fool me / Well the hurt doesn’t show, but the pain still grows / It’s no stranger to you and me.”

The Americans is deeply concerned with questions of complicity, intimacy, and the difference between them, and fittingly for a show interested in those questions, it’s often its best when the camera is lingering on two people, capturing the claustrophobia or wide-open possibility that marks their relationship at any given moment. When The Americans began, Elizabeth and Phillip were the only pair who were both complicit and intimate, in murder and in marriage. But by the end of the show, their children Paige and Henry had attacked a man who may have meant them no harm and fled from the scene, and their neighbor Stan had become entangled with Nina, a staffer at the Rezidentura, at considerable cost to his own marriage. The characters on The Americans draw charmed, poisoned circles around themselves and their collaborators and lovers, and not just because some of them are spies or cops. It’s almost a condition of adulthood, the show argues, to have secrets, and a test of true intimacy to share the full extent of those ugly secrets with another person, and to accept that they won’t reject you for them. Stan’s inability to share his secrets with Sandra dooms his marriage. And it’s an expression of truly withering contempt for Claudia to tell Elizabeth “I know you better than you know yourself. And you don’t know me at all.”

The spread of that secret-keeping like a disease makes Peter Gabriel’s “Games Without Frontiers,” his scathing critique of international affairs, a triply appropriate song to close out The Americans‘ first season, and not just because Gabriel’s description of figures “Dressing up in costumes, playing silly games,” is a great shout-out to the Jennings’ wig collection. “Hans plays with Lotte, Lotte plays with Jane / Jane plays with Willi, Willi is happy again,” he sings. “Suki plays with Leo, Sacha plays with Britt / Adolf builts a bonfire, Enrico plays with it.” The description of spreading nuclear knowledge in that first verse is the perfect conclusion to an episode that reveals that Elizabeth and Phillip have been risking themselves for information that is truly “incredibilis,” and that the world is gearing up for an arms raced based on clever fantasy rather than substance. Just as countries cascade into the game, The Americans‘ characters have been pulled into deception, whether as a condition of their jobs, or because adulthood is a disease that infects us all with secrecy. And for a show that depicts its main characters having a lot of unprotected—both physically and emotionally—sex with people not their primary partners in the years before AIDS became a visible public health catastrophe, there’s something chilling about the viral nature of the song.
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I was sorry to read yesterday of the death of children’s and young adult author E.L. (short for Elaine Lobl ) Konigsburg. She’s best remembered for her 1967 novel—one of two published that year—From The Mixed Up Files Of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, about siblings who run away to live in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, memorably bathing in the fountain at the cafe, sleeping in an antique bed, and treating themselves to lunch at the Automat, a kind of restaurant I dreamed of eating at for years afterwards. But as much as the running away details of Mixed Up Files are memorable, much of what I love about both it and A Proud Taste For Scarlet and Miniver, Konigsburg’s less-read book about the life of Eleanor of Aquitaine, is the way both books gave girls and young women credit for intellectual curiosity, and trusted them to handle big emotions and ideas, like whether or not it matters that a piece of art is by Michaelangelo, or what it means to build a good marriage.

Claudia, the main character of Mixed Up Files, first earns our respect for the gift of logistics she applies to running away. She lifts train tickets, picks her younger brother as a runaway companion because he has managed to stash away a reasonable supply of travel money, and figures out a way to make sure the two of them don’t get caught by Met security guards (this is all in an age before pressure sensors and electric alarms). But what ultimately makes her admirable, and what wins her the respect of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, a wealthy art collector, is much more ephemeral. During Claudia’s time living in the museum, an overpoweringly beautiful statue of an angel goes on display, and becomes a phenomenon. Part of the curiosity is inspired by the fact that it’s not entirely clear whether the statue was produced by Michaelangelo. But Claudia becomes obsessed by the question, and she and her brother track down Mrs. Frankweiler in search of answers.

Once they do, the older delivers one of the most valuable lessons on education anyone could give to children. “I think you should learn, of course,” she tells Claudia, who doesn’t want to go back to school, feeling that her experience on her own has been more valuable than any education. “And some days you must learn a great deal. But you should also have days when you allow what is already in you to swell up inside of you until it touches everything. And you can feel it inside of you. If you never take time out to let that happen, then you just accumulate facts, and they begin to rattle around inside of you. You can make noise with them, but never really feel anything with them. It’s hollow.”
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Last night, PBS aired Makers, a documentary about the history of the feminist movement, exploring everything from the relationship between women’s liberation and the struggles for black and gay civil rights to the rise of the eighties power tie as women entered previously male-dominated professional fields. While some of the subjects may be familiar to those of us who ended up in women’s studies classes at some point, Makers is a reminder of how much feminist history has been forgotten or obscured over the years, starting with the rumors of bra-burning at the Miss America protests. Because part of the goal of Makers was to spark discussions about the state of feminism today, I spoke with one of the subjects whose work is of particular interest to anyone who cares about the portrayal and employment of women in popular culture: Marlo Thomas.

As the star of the groundbreaking sitcom That Girl, Thomas fought to preserve the integrity of the show’s portrayal of a single woman’s life—and to hire more female writers. And as the creator of Free To Be You And Me, the book, album, and television special for children that challenged pre-existing notions of gender norms, Thomas fought to give children entertainment that would change the way they saw their possible futures. We spoke during the Television Critics Association press tour in January about the evolution of sitcom roles for women, Brave and princess myths, and the struggles women—and men—face to have it all. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

I’m excited to talk to you in part because my first job as a critic was when I was eight years old for my local paper—I wrote children’s books.

You were a critic at eight years old? How cute!

I was, my author photo has me in little pink glasses and the world’s largest lace collar. I was proof that women, even at eight years old, aren’t paid enough. I was paid in five-dollar gift certificates to the local bookstore. So I was really curious to talk to you because Free To Be You And Me was inspired by the lack of good books for boys and girls alike. What do you think about the rise of young adult fiction? It seems to me that there are many more options for young female readers today. Have we made enough progress if what young girls get offered is Twilight?

Well, you know, far be it for me to tell people what to write. I must say that after we did Free To Be You And Me, and its phenomenal success, and its continued success, I’m surprised that more and more people aren’t writing about that. I saw the movie Brave, which is taken right from Atalanta [a princess story from Free To Be You And Me], which is exciting to me. And I just wish more people would follow, not just follow the path, but find the path to children’s imaginations that is going to open up their horizons and their minds. It just seems that—my husband has two grandchildren, they’re now 16 and 17, the girl is 16—and I’ve noticed with her stuff, it’s all princesses, and the boy’s stuff is all violence. All violent games from the GameBoy on up. And I look at it, and I try very hard to bring other things in, but that’s what all their friends are reading, and watching, and playing. I’m disappointed, I really am. Somebody, some book company has to make it their job, or part of their imprint, part of their conscientiousness to say “Why aren’t we putting out books that do this?” The Free To Be You And Me classic, when it came ou,t there was nothing like it. We’ve already paved the way. Why doesn’t someone pick it up? I can’t do it all.

I think you’re describing two different challenges. It’s hard to ask individuals to take on all the work for anyone else. And you mentioned the persistence of the pricness myth. I felt conflicted about Brave. I like that she’s a different kind of princess, but the victory at the end is that she gets to choose her own husband, who will still be dyanstically important. A princess is still a princess.

Right. But it’s just that she was athletic, and she ran, and she took some action. That’s a big difference from the other princess, from Cinderella. But it’s true. In our princess story, Atlanta at the end decides not to marry, and go off to explore lands. We were feminists writing that. I don’t know that the people from Brave got our whole message, though they took a lot of it…I don’t know, it’s sort of a surrendering to a happy ending, or what you consider to be a happy ending. When I was doing That Girl, they wanted me to have a wedding at the end of the series. And I refused. I refused to have a wedding, to have her get married at the end of the show. And they said “It’ll be great! It’ll get huge ratings.” And I said, “But then I’m copping out to every girl who loved this show…This was the first girl to say “I don’t want to get married, I want to work. I want to have a career. I want to live in my own apartment.” All of those things. And the mail was extraordinary about girls wanting to be just like her, and grandmothers saying “Don’t marry Donald!” They really were very invested in this single girl. The idea of betraying them at the end of the show and getting married just seemed like a true betrayal. I wouldn’t do it. Even that, Clairol was the sponsor, and they wanted a wedding, and ABC wanted a wedding, the producers wanted a wedding. It took a feminist to say “No, no wedding!”
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A number of people have passed along Sarah Mesle’s essay in the Los Angeles Review of Books which argues that our recent young adult novels have failed to serve boys particularly well. The essay’s occasioned a number of thoughtful responses, particularly Malinda Lo’s argument that Mesle’s peddling a rather suspicious idea of an essential and inherent masculinity that we ought to be seeking narrative support for. While I’m firmly in Lo’s camp in believing that the strength of young adult fiction is not that it can teach boys or girls a sole way to be men and women, but to offer multiple and affirming ways to shape those identities, I do think there’s something to be said for a question Mesle is asking about whether we’re serving boys well, whether in the way that she imagines, or the way Lo posits. Mesle writes:

The contemporary uncertainty towards young men snaps into focus when we compare recent texts to their literary ancestors — nineteenth-century novels for young readers. Hope Leslie, Jo’s Boys, Northwood, The Lamplighter: these novels heralded the end of boyhood as a happy ending, the beginning of a triumphant journey into a powerful manhood. But today’s YA boys approach their manhood with trepidation. And they should. The adult men who populate YA fictional worlds are often careless, corrupt, incompetent — sometimes even cruel — and only rarely kind.

I agree that boys and young men need good literary role models as much as girls and young women do, and that in our conversations about how to create great female characters, we don’t often have corresponding discussions about how to serve boys with the same intelligence and complexity. Some of that is because there already exist a great many excellent stories about deeply textured young men—having your needs met first has its benefits. But I also wonder if some of what’s at stake here is not that we aren’t creating great stories that foreground the transition from boyhood into manhood. It’s that some of those stories exist, but they’re told through young women’s eyes and from young women’s perspectives that we haven’t yet trained boys to embrace and share.

In much of the classic young adult literature I read as a child, I learned to see myself as boys and men would see me. In The Giver, Lois Lowry’s story of a dystopia, I saw Fiona, a gentle a girl who was blind to the fact that her care for the elderly involved learning to euthanize the oldest among them, and whose ignorance was a source of great pain for Jonas, the novel’s main character. In The Outsiders, Ponyboy’s realization that Cherry Valance’s status as a Soc doesn’t define her as a person guided my interactions with some of the more popular girls who became my friends in middle school and high school. As an ambitious girl on a largely female policy debate team, I hoped my teammates would see me like Petra Arkanian, the only girl good enough to fight alongside Ender Wiggin in Orson Scott Card’s alien invasion novel Ender’s Game. And as an irrepressible nerd, I both hoped and feared that I would end up like Harry Potter‘s Hermoine Granger.

It’s not a bad thing to learn about yourself from how others see you, as long as that’s not the only opportunity you’re given to examine yourself. In fact, it’s one I think more boys should have. So often, male perspectives in these situations are treated like they’re a default norm, while books with female main characters are assumed to be for girls rather than aimed at and available to everyone.
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It’s been a year when many of the people whose art shaped my childhood and young adult years, from Maurice Sendak to Nora Ephron, have shuffled off this mortal coil, but I was particularly sad to learn this weekend of the death of Jean Merrill, who wrote books that treated children as if they were more than capable of thinking about politics. If Sendak trusted children to reckon with the fact that the world could be a frightening place and that they had responsibilities within it, Merrill expected her young readers to have worldviews and ideas and allegiances.

Her best, most famous book, The Pushcart War is almost entirely out of print now, which is a shame, both because it’s a terrific, detailed allegory for urban politics, and one in which children play a critical role. In that novel, New York City’s pushcart peddlers find their livelihood, and indeed their lives, under threat with the introduction of bigger trucks by a number of trucking companies. The trucks block the spaces where they sell their goods, and have started pushing and injuring peddlers who refuse to relinquish the spaces that have been theirs for years. The trucking companies, of course, have financial sway with the mayor, so the peddlers begin a lobbying campaign that involves everything from a civil disobedience and sabotage campaign that sends one of their number to prison, a high-stakes poker game with the mayor and trucking moguls that creates a fund to support the peddlers’ activities, the enlistment of a pretty but dippy celebrity, and the independent mobilization of children on the pushcarts’ behalf.

The pushcart peddlers, as it turns out, played a significant role in city children’s lives, selling them toys and snacks, and acting as part of a community safety net while their parents were at work. That adult politicians and businessmen fail to see their interests and the possibility of their mobilization opens space for New York children to assert their loyalties and preferences, and helps shift the campaign. It’s a great long-term story about organizing, and one that provides a great template for children to think about the conditions that govern their homes, schools, and parks as political issues every bit as worthy as the adult interests that tend to govern decision-making.

Then, there’s The Toothpaste Millionaire. The story of a friendship between a white girl and an African-American boy, it’s another story about the ability of children to see opportunities that adults miss, and their ability to shift markets and communities when they’re underestimated. Rufus Mayflower, the main character of The Toothpaste Millionaire, in a series of events narrated by Kate Mackinstrey, his best friend, gets irritated by the price of tubed toothpaste and sets himself the challenge of manufacturing a gallon of a similarly effective product for the same cost. It’s a funny little story, but like The Pushcart War, an allegory about corporate complacency, and about respect for what children can accomplish in their own communities.

We trust children and young adults to handle a wide array of concepts, from choosing your family as an adult in the Twilight novels to torture and bigotry in the Harry Potter series. But there’s something odd about the standard demurral of young adult fiction to engage with political and economic systems, except in a cursory or fantastical way that’s at a remove from the levers of power in our own society. Children are affected by politics long before we give them a voting say in them. And if they can advocate for the right for their parents to marry or act as symbols of the need for health care reform, it would be nice if more authors followed Merrill’s lead and treated their readers as citizens.

Cassandra Clare, the fan fiction writer turned real-life young adult novelist, has a terrific post up in response to readers (apparently very attentive ones) who were confused why the casting call for the movie adaptation of The Mortal Instruments indicated that the producers were looking for an Asian character to play one of the main characters:

They want an Asian actor to play Magnus because Magnus is Asian. (Technically, Magnus is biracial. I would be perfectly happy with a biracial actor playing him — but otherwise the option is an Asian actor, not a white actor. It doesn’t matter if any of Magnus’ background is white. Casting him white would erase that part of his background that is Asian. And important. There are plenty of roles out there for white actors. Most roles are for white actors. This is not one of them. There is very little I have control over as regards casting. I cannot pick an actor for Magnus. I don’t have that ability. But I can say, and say strongly, that I want them to cast an Asian or half-Asian actor, and I did. It is pretty much the one ironclad demand as regards casting that I have made, i.e. : if you don’t cast an Asian actor, I’ll never talk about this movie again, nor will I see it.)…

I have gotten many letters over the years from readers who are happy that Magnus is not white, that Jem is not white, that Maia is not white, that Aline is not white. The fact is that most parts in books are for straight white folks and even more so in films. There are not that many parts for actors who are not white — even less substantive ones. Taking those things away by casting Magnus as white and talking about him as white does cause actual pain to actual people — and to what end? Why? Why send the message you only want to read about white people and only want to see white people on your screens?

There’s something fascinating about the point when investment in or identification with a character causes some readers to willfully fail to see or absorb the race of characters who are clearly non-white. And it says something worrisome that such identification, in those cases, seems to require that characters be white. That Clare’s willing to raise these kinds of questions with her fans, and to stake her political capital with the people adapting her work on keeping her franchise multicultural because she believes that’s the key to making her characters distinct and interesting, is admirable and important.

I’ve mentioned Friend of the Blog Leigh Bardugo’s YA debut, Shadow and Bone, a fantasy set in a world with some similarities to Tsarist Russia in these pages before. We sat down for a long interview to mark the book’s release earlier this month—it’s now up at The Atlantic. Hearing her talk about her world-building is fascinating: she’d been interested in that period of Russian history as a child, but chose it for the novel less because she wanted to emulate the style and politics, but because her research suggested that was an era full of a combination of factors she wanted to explore. I particularly wanted to pull this excerpt where Leigh explains how she designed the magic characters in Shadow and Bone work:

The idea for the Small Science came from my interest in what happens physically when you mutter a curse or wave a wand. What are we actually seeing? This sort of opaqueness occurs with most magic. That was sort of the first straw. I decided also that I wanted a magic that was highly constrained, because I wanted the advent of modern warfare to play a part in the story. What happens when you bring a gun to a magic fight?…If the magic is constrained, if the magic is bound by rules in a very specific system, things can get really interesting. The Grisha age is ending. Yes, they are more advanced, but they are wholly reliant on these particular skills. While the rest of the world is industrializing and creating things like repeating rifles, Ravka is falling behind…

When I created the Grisha, it was important that they be powerful but that they kind of represent the Jewish brain trust that developed before World War II and after World War II in the US. They’re these very talented people that were drawn from all over the world and cast out of places, persecuted, put to death, put in camps. So they all ended up in this one place, and for better or for worse—I think for better—they developed weapons and became a kind of brainy fighting force for the Allied Powers. And that is not is something that is strongly referenced in the book but that was sort of always in my mind in the way that Grisha had been treated. That said, in books two and three, we’re going to encounter some Grisha who had no interest in serving the Grisha or the Darkling and kind of went their own way.

A little thoughtful world design goes a long way. Designing rules your characters have to live by and that governs how the world works is a useful constraint, the kind of thing that results in consistency and clear character motivation. It’s a lesson more experienced pros who get handed hundreds of millions of dollars ::coughPrometheus:: could put to good use.

The American Library Association’s annual count of the books that people most frequently tried to get removed from school libraries and classrooms is out, and of 326 reported challenges, these were the books that raised hackles most frequently:

1)ttyl; ttfn; l8r, g8r (series), by Lauren Myracle
Offensive language; religious viewpoint; sexually explicit; unsuited to age group

2) The Color of Earth (series), by Kim Dong Hwa

3)The Hunger Games trilogy, by Suzanne Collins

4)My Mom’s Having A Baby! A Kid’s Month-by-Month Guide to Pregnancy, by Dori Hillestad Butler

5)The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by Sherman Alexie

6)Alice (series), by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor

7)Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley

8)What My Mother Doesn’t Know, by Sonya Sones

9)Gossip Girl (series), by Cecily Von Ziegesar

10) To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee

Of course we’ve got the old favorites in there. We’ll probably know we’re a healthy, mature society when people stop calling for To Kill a Mockingbird, one of the most well-rounded, humane explorations of racism that exists, stops getting challenged. Brave New World‘s an illustration of how anxiously people can react to science fiction, in part because of discomfort it inspires about what the world might end up looking like. And calls to get Sherman Alexie out of classrooms always strike me as inspired by the same sentiments that suggest Bully might not be appropriate for teenagers—we have to protect children in fiction what other children and the world at large inflict on them in real life.

Of the more recent additions, some of the rationales for challenges are amusing. The challenges to The Hunger Games, for example, suggest that the series is “Anti-ethnic; anti-family; insensitivity; offensive language; occult/satanic; violence.” Almost all of those allegations are significant misreadings of the novel, which makes pretty clear that it would be delightful for its main characters to grow up in a world with an economy that allowed all parents to support their children without taking on extremely dangerous work, or people weren’t divided into districts that restricted their social and economic brutality. And I’d actually love to know what challengers interpreted as occult or satanist sentiments in the book, which depicts a world in which any form of religious belief is actually conspicuously absent.

I’d also suspect that Lauren Myracle’s Internet Girls series, Sonya Sones’ What My Mother Doesn’t Know (which is one of the most challenged books of the last decade) and the Gossip Girl books are challenged not just for their content, but because of what they suggest about how the Internet has changed children’s and young adult’s lives. If I were a parent, I might be anxious about the possibility that my child’s life was essentially unmonitorable, and that there was a whole frontier beyond the real world where they could get into trouble (and as someone who grew up in the beginning of that era, I know what I’m in for). Removing one source of inspiration may delay a discovery, but there’s no way to prevent it completely. Kids will poke around and get themselves in trouble online whether or not they’re inspired to start trashy gossip blogs or pick screen names that will haunt them in adulthood. Open channels of communication, whether it’s on books, or on bullying, will probably prove more effective in the long run than panics about individual books.

I like Simon Pegg a great deal, but it looks like his latest project, A Fantastic Fear of Everything, might be a little much for me:

Coming on the heels of Young Adult, one of my favorite movies of last year, about a YA author who drinks too much, hasn’t gotten over her high school boyfriend, and is obsessed with her outer appearance at the expense of her inner self, this movie also seems to join in the idea that there’s something a bit off about writers of fiction aimed at children and young adults. That sentiment isn’t particularly surprising, I suppose, given the larger backlash against adults who read fiction aimed at younger people. If folks think they’re lazy, then it would stand to reason that they view people people who produce that fiction as somewhat suspect.

I didn’t say this in my post about Joel Stein’s condescending condemnation about adult YA readers, but the hysteria about grown-ups reading in the genre is strangely disconnected from our other conversations about teenagers. We worry about the state of young people a lot: whether they’re having sex, what their future economic prospects are, whether they’re bullying each other into early graves, how media affects them, whether they’re civically engaged. We probably go overboard on fake trends and panics, whether it’s rainbow parties or salvia. But there’s nothing inherently unrespectable about worrying about what ideas and ideals we’re passing along to the young people in our lives, and what kind of people they’ll turn out to be. Sure, there’s trashy YA fiction mass-produced by people like James Frey’s factor. But a lot of the folks who write for younger readers, whether they’re J.K. Rowling or Friend of the Blog Tamora Pierce, up-and-comer Leigh Bardugo or a legend like Beverly Cleary, are taking on serious questions that we ask in a lot of forums. There’s nothing childish about considering how good children become good adults.

Alan Sepinwall takes on a little-discussed kind of token casting: putting random, poorly-developed teenaged characters in shows in the hopes they’ll lure teenagers into watching:

Shawn Ryan was going on a Twitter run about all the ways “Smash” had gone awry, and suggested that at least some of the problems had to be coming from network notes. I asked whether we could blame networks for all the obnoxious teenage characters — not just Leo, but Tyler on “V,” Jack Linden on “The Killing” and Josh from “Terra Nova,” to name three recent examples — and he said yes, then tweeted, “Think a lot of writers/networks mistakingly think the mere presence of a teenager is show (however annoying) will lure teens into watching.”

And that’s not a new phenomenon, nor one that’s confined to adult programs. I remember when I was a kid, a lot of the cartoons I watched had kid characters — often, in the case of something like “Superfriends,” adding them to pre-existing source material where they didn’t exist — who were elevated to a position of prominence that never made sense to me at the time. With the benefit of hindsight, I have to agree with Shawn’s theory, and say they were there because an executive or producer assumed kids wouldn’t want to watch a bunch of grown-ups have adventures unless there was someone close to their own age to relate to. And it always seemed like a fundamental misunderstanding of the audience. Though some of the kids were non-terrible, I was tuning in to watch Superman or Batman or the guys from M.A.S.K. do something cool, not Wendy and Marvin, the Wonder Twins or Scott Trakker and his pet robot T-Bob. Or, to use a live-action example from when I was slightly older, think of Wesley Crusher, who was there as young audience bait, and yet is someone whom Wil Wheaton is still apologizing for 25 years later.

It’s particularly weird that television would continue to treat teenage characters as a way to pander, because not as if it’s impossible to tell specific stories about what it’s like to be a teenager, or to find quality metaphors for the pain of adolescence, be they Spider-Man‘s web-slinging, the revelation of wizarding abilities in the Harry Potter franchise, or The Hunger Games‘ vicious battles in the arena. And there seems to be ample proof that grown-ups will watch or read intelligent fiction about teenagers that comes with a larger message. Just saying.