Showtime’s Homeland
debuted on the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on the U.S. The series stars Claire Danes as Carrie Mathison,
a CIA operative who’s learned that an American soldier in the Middle East has
been “turned” and now works for an Al Qaeda cell. When Marine Sergeant Nicholas Brody (Damian
Lewis) is found after eight years in captivity and returns to a hero’s welcome,
Carrie is certain he’s the double agent.
Since she can’t persuade her dubious CIA superiors
to follow her instincts, Carrie goes rogue, setting up an illegal surveillance
on Brody’s house and then engineering a personal relationship with him that
lets her follow her own course.
The series plays the country’s paranoia for all it’s
worth, constantly turning the plot to keep viewers and characters off
guard. The performers hold their
characters’ secrets close; they’re as difficult for us to read as they are for
one another to truly understand, even though viewers are given key bits of
information early.
For instance, Carrie’s surveillance cameras can’t
pick up the inside of Brody’s garage, where we know well before Carrie that he
retreats regularly for Muslim prayers.
Hearing his chanting and seeing him perform the rituals seems chilling,
but it later appears that the show’s producers have played on mainstream
viewers’ stereotypes about Islam to enhance our sense of foreboding.
In a later episode, Brody explains to Carrie that
he adopted Islam because he needed religion—any religion—to survive the ordeal
of his captivity. Because Lewis plays
Brody so convincingly, it’s difficult not to be persuaded and even moved by his
explanation. But the most recent episode’s
plot twist once again upends our understandings, playing both with and against
viewers’ presumptions.
Nonetheless, it’s impossible for a series about
terrorism not to trade on knee-jerk expectations of which characters will be
good and which bad. The Arabic-accented,
Middle Eastern-appearing men are instantly marked as villains. The only thing that makes Brody truly
interesting is that he’s a red-haired, archetypally American soldier who might,
in fact, be working for the enemy.
And in a subplot that hasn’t yet been consistently
developed, a young Middle Eastern professor and his blonde American wife have
moved into a neighborhood that puts them within shooting range of a U.S. military
landing strip. The CIA believes the man
might be Brody’s Al Qaeda contact, but it turns out that it’s his wife, Aileen (played
by the always wonderful Marin Ireland), who is the mysterious operation’s
architect. Her back-story gives her
ample reasons to love the Middle East and to despise the United States, but her
centrality to the series’ plot has so far been tenuous.
Homeland’s producers, then, try to keep twisting
the plot so that the binary of American/good, Middle Eastern/bad won’t
maintain. But its visual scenario tells
a different story. Middle Eastern male characters are constantly
beaten, attacked, or killed by white military or intelligence officers. The guard who confined Brody for all those
years, whom Brody beats when he asks to visit the captured man in prison, subsequently
slits his wrists with a razor blade somehow smuggled in to him. Aileen’s husband is killed when CIA operatives
catch up to him and Aileen and blast automatic rifle fire through the walls of
their motel room. (She escapes.)
Even the henchman of Abu Nazir—the archenemy who
Carrie suspects is the mastermind behind a new plot to attack America—is nearly
strangled when Brody breaks into his house to confront him about his presumed
dead comrade, Tom Walker. Homeland invites viewers to watch with a
kind of vengeful pleasure as these brown men endure violence meted out by
righteous white men. Although the series
wants to disrupt our assumptions, its images nonetheless secure conventional ideology
about the Middle East as the dangerous, obvious locus of terrorist threats.
Danes plays Carrie, the smart, difficult, unruly
operative who receives the intelligence that a soldier has been turned and
rests her suspicions on Brody. Danes
does a wonderful job communicating the obsessions of someone high up in the CIA’s
ranks who takes it as her personal responsibility not to let 9/11 happen again. In fact, in Danes’ voiceover on the show’s
credits, Carrie insists that she should have caught the clues, that she should
have seen the 9/11 attacks coming and been able to prevent them. The weight of personal guilt for a national tragedy
fuels Carrie’s passion and her mania.
Homeland
suggests that only enormous ego or narcissism could explain one solitary CIA agent’s
single-minded pursuit of justice and her insistence that 9/11 was in some way
her fault. At the same time, the show proposes
that another terrorist event might in fact be foiled by a single agent.
The show seesaws between these two different
desires. It appeases our yearning for a
hero who can stop speeding bullets with his or her bare hands (like Kiefer
Sutherland as Jack Bauer in 24, on
which some of Homeland’s producers
previously worked). But it also underlines
that national security is a complicated priority that takes way more than a
village, let alone any individual.
Homeland
mostly resists 24’s fantasy that one man could save us
all. In fact, Homeland’s hero is a woman.
While the show admires Carrie for her superior intelligence and her
willingness to dedicate her life to her job, it also burdens her with an
unnamed but determining psychological problem. Carrie can’t tell the agency about her
condition or she’d be fired from her high-level security clearance position. She pilfers drugs from her impatient, unsympathetic
pharmaceutical rep sister to self-medicate and keep herself even.
By explaining Carrie’s obsessions as at least
partly the result of her illness, Homeland
cuts the character off at the knees. We’re
never sure if her paranoia is justified or chemical, and none of her reactions
can be trusted because we don’t know what really fuels her obsession.
Her superiors don’t know Carrie’s medical history;
they find her difficult because she breaks rules and resists censure. She is a loose cannon in a carefully
regulated world. In fact, Carrie’s
vigilantism is one of the least believable aspects of an otherwise smart show. Certainly, an agent who bugged the home of a
returning war hero without authorization would be summarily fired. And certainly, an agent who initiated a
sexual relationship with that war hero would be denounced. (But then again, indiscretions like these didn’t
hamper Jack Bauer, either.)
Instead, Carrie confesses her misdeeds to Saul
Berenson (Mandy Patinkin), her father-figure mentor. He scolds her, knits his thick eyebrows
together in deep disapproval, and then absolves her, hugging her tightly in
understanding parental embraces that free her to go on drawing outside the
lines of agency protocol. Saul, you see,
is also emotionally haunted. His obvious
though unnamed Jewishness—inescapable in any character Patinkin plays—emphasizes
his moral ambivalence.
Mandy Patinkin as Saul Berenson
Like Carrie, Saul’s obsession with his job compromises
his emotional and domestic life. In fact,
his South Asian wife has decided to leave him after 25 years of marriage to
return to her family in Delhi because he’s emotionally and physically
inaccessible. Their scenes together
allow Patinkin to indulge his hang-dog, maudlin side. The producers haven’t quite figured out how to
bring more nuances to a character caught between his righteous ambitions and
his sincere love for his wife. Their costly
commitments to their jobs make Saul and Carrie the show’s real soul-mates.
Damian Lewis performs Sergeant Brody as a
time-bomb set to detonate, controlled by unknown forces on an unknown schedule. Brody was isolated for eight years before
being rescued by an American SWAT team.
Lewis clarifies the force of will required to survive captivity, and
never shies from inhabiting Brody’s vulnerabilities. He makes palpable the depth of Brody’s need
for connection while he remained in captivity, after he was released from extended
solitary confinement and torture.
After sustaining himself by making unimaginable moral
choices, Brody returns to a domestic life that’s moved on without him. Brody finds that his wife, Jessica (Morena
Baccarin), has been sleeping with his best friend, Mike (Diego
Klattenhoff). But after being told that
Brody was presumed dead, how long was she supposed to keep her life on hold?
Likewise, Brody’s friend and fellow captive,
Sergeant Tom Walker, whom Brody is lead to believe he killed with his bare
hands, left behind a wife who’s since remarried. Both couples have kids who barely know their
fathers. One of Homeland’s conversations, then, also concerns the place of biological
fathers in families that survive without them.
The series implicitly asks whether men like Brody have any right to walk
back into their patriarchal roles without acknowledging how their domestic
spheres have closed around their absences.
Baccarin, as Jessica, plays Brody’s conflicted
wife with emotional depth and precision.
She’s given little to do—wouldn’t a soldier’s wife have to work for a
living when he was presumed dead?—and she mostly reacts to Brody’s
presence. But Baccarin communicates the
complicated feelings of a woman who has to pick up a marriage that was
suspended and presumed ended for eight years.
Her struggle to play the dutiful, faithful wife makes Jessica more
interesting in Baccarin’s performance than she is in the show’s dialogue.
Homeland’s
latest twists (Episode 9) stretch the credulity of an already somewhat confusing
story. (I’ve noticed the on-line concern
that the show might go the way of The Killing,
last season’s atmospheric new series that finally irritated viewers with its
cliff-hangers and unlikely plot turns.)
But I’ll keep watching to see how Danes continues to bring depth and
complexity to one of the more interesting roles for women on series television,
and to see how the writers unravel the current host of secrets and
complications and set us up for more in season two.
The Feminist Spectator
Homeland,
Showtime, Sundays, 10 p.m., ET/PT