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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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 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.

I was looking through the acting nominations for the Comedy Awards, and it really struck me that in a lot of ways, 2011 was a richer year for women in comedy than it was for men.

In movies, Jason Bateman got a nod for Horrible Bosses, Steve Carell was nominated for Crazy, Stupid, Love, Jean Dujardin was tapped for The Artist, Zach Galifianakis for The Hangover Part II, and Owen Wilson for Midnight in Paris. None of these are particularly innovative roles, and all of them (except Dujardin, whose range I don’t really know) fall pretty squarely within these actors’ existing ranges: Bateman is a tense straight man, Carell is sympathetic and slightly clueless, Galifianakis is disconcerting and wild, and Wilson is winsome. There are a few things that I think were left off this list—I’ll defend The Trip until I run out of breath, Patton Oswalt was great and under-recognized for Young Adult, and I’m not really sure why 50/50, which was nominated elsewhere, didn’t score acting nods—but I can’t think of a performance by a man that’s not here that was a revelation. Ditto in TV, which was dominated by utterly predictable nods for Alec Baldwin in 30 Rock, Ty Burrell in Modern Family, Steve Carell in The Office, and Larry David in Curb Your Enthusiasm. I’m glad to see Louis C.K. in there—his performance in Louie was arguably my favorite thing on television in 2011. But it’s not like he has a lot of peers.

For women, on the other hand, the nominations are actually a lot of fun. I didn’t love Horrible Bosses, but seeing Jennifer Aniston get totally raunchy and ridiculous was a fun stretch for her. Ditto for Cameron Diaz in Bad Teacher—depending on how she takes her career next, she could leave horrid romantic comedies behind and steer more in the direction of Charlize Theron in Young Adult, who really ought to be here. Melissa McCarthy was a miracle in Bridesmaids, and Kristen Wiig and Rose Byrne, who had an utterly breakout performance in that film also could have easily been nominated. Television has its predictable notes—Tina Fey, for a deeply uninspired season of 30 Rock and Sofia Vergara for Modern Family. But you’ve got Zooey Deschanel in there for a debut performance in New Girl, and Maya Rudolph could easily be there for Up All Night, along with Laura Dern in Enlightened, Kat Dennings or Beth Behrs in 2 Broke Girls (that show’s massive flaws are not their fault), any of the women in Community‘s cast or Eliza Coupe or Elisha Cuthbert in Happy Endings.

And if Whitney or Are You There, Chelsea? had been less terrible, and we’d fulfilled all the potential of the lady comedy boom, this could have been an even more crowded field. I may not be equally addicted to every female comedy performance on the market these days. But it seems like there’s a lot of space available for new actresses to enter the field, and for actresses with existing track records to step out of their comfort zones. If those conditions persist, that’s a recipe for an embarrassment of riches.