[Earlier this
year, I belatedly but excitedly got into The Americans, the FX drama about
two KGB agents (the great Keri
Russell and Matthew Rhys) living in deep cover as a married couple in Reagan’s
1980s America. It’s a wonderful and very AmericanStudies show, so this week
I’ll AmericanStudy five issues and themes to which the show connects. Leading
up to my latest Guest Post on another set of pop culture texts and questions!]
On the historical
limitations and imaginative possibilities of a secretive technology.
Russian spies
Elizabeth and Philip Jennings have pursued missions relating to a number of
1980s political and international issues in the course of the show’s (to date) four
seasons, including Nicaraguan
Contras and (tomorrow’s topic) the
war in Afghanistan. But perhaps the most recurring and consistent mission
has been their investigation into and attempt to both derail and steal the US
military’s development of stealth technology. That artistic choice makes a
lot of sense, as stealth is a perfect metaphor for the show’s vision of secret
spies—not only because the technology was literally intended to produce
invisible instruments of surveillance and warfare, but also because (as
Elizabeth and Philip’s missions and contacts reveal again and again) the quest to develop
that technology took place in a clandestine, shadowy world that it might be
difficult for our internet age to imagine but that comprises a significant
percentage of the show’s plotlines and situations. If the name hadn’t already
been taken by a much less
interesting action film (on which more in a moment), Stealth could have been a less evocative but still accurate back-up
name for The Americans as well.
There’s one more
level to the resonances between the TV show and those technological histories,
though: stealth technology appeared to be one thing (a vital
new weapon toward which the superpowers were racing in a new arms race; a
narrative that, as that hyperlinked article illustrates, continues to exist)
and turned out to be something very different (a hugely expensive and largely
failed—or at least only partially successful—experiment). The US spent
billions of dollars in the course of the 1980s (and before) to develop a
stealth jet, and yet as this
list reflects more such projects were cancelled then were ever brought to
fruition. Moreover, even those fighters that were completed have still been
found (as the article hyperlinked above under “largely failed…” indicates) to
be visible to radar, the opposite of which is of course the entire purpose of
developing a new stealth vehicle. The military has used stealth bombers
successfully in some military campaigns, most notably the 1989
conflict with Panama and its dictator Manuel Noriega. Yet to say that the
technology did not turn out to be the game-changing weapon (in or after the
Cold War) about which the spies in The
Americans are so worried would be to understate the case.
The show isn’t a
documentary, though, and it’s also far from the only cultural text to
appreciate and utilize the imaginative possibilities of stealth technology. There’s
the aforementioned action film, for example, which links stealth to fears over
artificial intelligence to pose the question of what would happen if an “inhuman and invincible”
stealth bomber started thinking and acting for itself. There’s John
Woo’s first Hollywood movie Broken Arrow, in which terrorists led by John
Travolta take advantage of stealth technology to help them steal nuclear
weapons from the US military (until Christian Slater and a national park ranger
foil their plan, natch). And, to take things a bit further afield (literally
and figuratively), there’s the recurring science fiction trope (and semi-scientific
technology) of “cloaking devices,” stealth technologies for spaceships that
have played significant roles in Star
Trek, Star Wars, and a number of
other fictional universes and futures. Judging by these and other cultural
texts, we both fears and are attracted to the possibilities offered by stealth technology,
and by the ability to move through the world—even in our most powerful vehicles—unseen.
Next
AmericansStudying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other AmericanStudies shows you’d highlight?
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