Philip Drake (2016)Reframing Television Performance. Journal of Film and
Video, 68 (3-4). p. 6. ISSN 0742-4671
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Reframing Television Performance
philip drake
a decade ago, i wrote an article titled
“Reconceptualizing Screen Performance”
for a 2006 special edition of this journal. A
number of writers have gratifyingly engaged
with a range of the points I made there; however, it seems to me that the arguments I
presented neither changed doxa nor have had
an adequate refutation in the rethinking of
screen performance. My central argument was
that performance is fundamentally different
from representation and that all media texts
are essentially performative, constructing
particular relationships between performer
and audience. Further, I suggested that an
emphasis on discerning intentionality “in”
performance (and by an actor) is, for me, a
less productive approach than analyzing how
performances deploy a particular repertoire
of techniques and skills to structure meaning
and inference, regardless of whether the actor
may intend this or not. In my earlier article, I
also noted that there had been a relative lack
of attention given to critical analysis of screen
performance relative to the plethora of acting
manuals and studies of individual stars and
the considerable focus on acting in journalistic interviews (the latter usually conducted
in press junkets, carefully stage-managed by
philip drake is head of the Department of Media
and a professor of film, media, and communications at Edge Hill University, United Kingdom. He
recently coedited Hollywood and Law (BFI Palgrave, 2015) and has also written on image rights
in Hollywood, on television and deregulation, and
on screen performance and celebrity.
6
the actor’s publicist). A decade later, although
there has been more sustained exploration
of film performance, there is—and this was
missing in my own article—an even greater
lack of analysis of television performance.
This absence is especially odd considering the
significant attention given to what has become
termed “quality TV” in the past decade or so,
applied to TV shows in which, ironically, television performances are quite clearly central to
the shows’ achievements and audience engagement.1 The distinctiveness of such quality
television as The Sopranos, The Wire, Breaking
Bad, and House of Cards, it seems to me, is at
least in part due to their screen performances.
My starting point in thinking about performance in my earlier article was to place emphasis on framing, arguing that “conceptualizing
performance involves not just reading actors’
performances, important though this is, but also
a wider consideration of the ontology of film,
and the epistemological frames through which
screen performance makes sense” (Drake, “Reconceptualizing” 84). Only by opening up questions of ontology and epistemology, I suggested,
can we understand the particularity of screen
performance, how it is different from everyday
performance, and how it is meaningful. In making this point, I was drawing on a range of work
from symbolic interactionism, phenomenological sociology, ordinary language philosophy,
and media and performance studies, rather than
the limited theoretical work on performance in
film and television studies. Part of my article was
focused on star performers who bring extratextual celebrity signification to their roles, offering
journal of film and video 68.3–4 / fall/winter 2016
©2016 by the board of trustees of the university of illinois
audiences a multiply coded performance, where
the actor is recognized both as a star performing
himself or herself and as a character within a
narrative. However, I was also interested in the
performance of the nonrecognizable supporting
actors and the work they perform, anchoring
those stars to dramatic realism and verisimilitude through performances using indirect address. This services narrative and works with
rather than against mise-en-scène, reinforcing
fourth-wall staging, and uses effaced camera,
synchronous sound, and other conventions of
realist drama. My analysis of Marlon Brando’s
screen performance in the opening scene of The
Godfather (1972), for instance, considered the
performance of the star, Brando, playing Don
Corleone against the anchoring function offered
by the Italian actor playing Bonasera, Salvatore
Corsitto (Drake, “Reconceptualizing” 90–92).
Brando, I suggested, is positioned in order to
be presented as an ostended sign, mediated
through his star image. Brando’s performance
draws upon the other actor in the scene, who
performs according to a different, realist economy of acting. Corsitto—an actor who made very
few film appearances—secures realism through
his representational performance, anchoring the
narrative.
I now wish to turn to television. In his reexamination of television’s “personality system,”
updating the term used by John Langer in 1981 to
outline how television fame differed from cinematic stardom, James Bennett suggests a distinction between “televisually skilled” and “vocationally skilled” performers. He argues, “Televisually
skilled performers are defined by the performers’
lack of any skill, other than that of television
presenting, that informs their performance—the
content of the show is irrelevant to their ‘real’ life
or any ‘skills’ they may hold therein” (Bennett
36; author’s italics). Discerning skill is, however,
a matter of inference, so such distinctions can
be made by considering the framing of performance: the television presenter is placed within
a performance frame that gives her or his performance its particular authority and meaning.
Bennett argues for the distinction to be retained
between stars and television personalities, but
by insisting that personalities are not elided
with actors/stars. Making a distinction between
the television actor or star and the television
personality, he argues that “performers who play
themselves, mak[e] little distinction between
onscreen and private personas” (Bennett 35).
Freed from dominant conventions of realism,
such as indirect address and fourth-wall camera
placement, television performance is routinely
more varied: a news presenter, for instance, can
perform live and direct to camera; a quiz show
can acknowledge the camera; a comedy can
disrupt conventions of realism without breaking frame. Television performance includes not
only dramatic acting but also direct-address
performance of news presenting, hosting of quiz
shows, performing with non-actors in lifestyle
and makeover shows, performing “self” in reality television formats, and more (Lury). The exploration of a range of performances in Beverley
Skeggs and Helen Wood’s work on reality television audiences and the varied essays in Christine Cornea’s collection on genre and film and
television performance all demonstrate the wide
range of performers and modes of performance
at play across television.
The familiar relationship one has with television performances has also changed with shifts
in television technology (Newman and Levine).
The rise of high-definition television sets (1080p
and, more recently, 4K resolution “Ultra HD”
sets), as well as an overall rise in average television screen sizes and multiple-screen households, means that television performance can
be scrutinized more closely and in more detail
by audiences. The availability of video and then
DVD box sets and, more recently, video-on-demand (VOD) services has meant that audiences
can also experience television performances
in new ways: “binge-watching” an entire season, for instance, or watching episodes across
multiple devices in self-scheduled viewing
slots. As is the case for many people, my own
viewing practices have altered, and my viewing
is regularly done via “catch-up” and nonlinear
television services available through the Internet
rather than via traditional linear broadcast television. The example I discuss later in this article,
journal of film and video 68.3–4 / fall/winter 2016
©2016 by the board of trustees of the university of illinois
7
FX’s The Americans, I watched entirely online
via Internet services (in this case Amazon Prime
Video) rather than as a scheduled broadcast.
Television Performance:
Accumulation, Repetition, Pleasure
To address television performance in detail, I
wish to set aside debates over television stardom or personality systems: issues I have considered elsewhere in analyzing television entertainers and reality television celebrities (Drake,
“Celebrity”; Drake and Haynes). Through the
rest of this article, I wish to examine performance in television drama. In Bennett’s terms,
I am focusing on the television actor, who performs a role rather than personifies it, rather
than on the television personality. This is in
contrast to most work on television performers,
which focuses on television’s celebrity system.
Here I am less interested in the celebrity performer than on the actor who stars in a drama
but is not widely known publicly as a television
personality. Specifically, I want to explore the
accumulation of an actor’s performance across
a television series, or several series, and the
familiarity one builds in the repeated viewing
of that performer over a significant duration. An
example of this might be the accumulated performance of James Gandolfini in The Sopranos.
Although he was ultimately a star—and had a
career that spanned television and film—Gandolfini’s performances across work of several
years’ duration as Tony Soprano defined his
star image, rather than vice versa.
Accumulated performances—through socalled box-set viewing—present analysis with
some difficulties: Which part to analyze? How
was it experienced? In addition, a number of
writers—most notably, John Caughie—have felt
and expressed their sense of the lost potential in
television to provoke ideas and offer political engagement, lost in a seemingly endless supply of
global television content. The plenitude of television and the accumulation of programming, decoupled from a strong public service ethos and
committed political engagement, has—for these
writers—led to a loss of purpose, to television
8
no longer mattering in the ways that it did previously (Caughie, “Playing”; Caughie, “Telephilia”;
Caughie, “Mourning”). The “must-see” single
play of British television in the 1970s has, in the
United Kingdom, been partially replaced by the
“must-see TV” imported from US cable networks,
available to watch online. Accumulation and
plenitude can be a double-edged sword. For
Caughie, this “monstrous accumulation of television” (“Mourning” 418) has led to
the loss of a “seriousness” in which television
actually matters; of a “popularity” which is not
simply obedient to the market; the fading of
the possibilities of a different television which
seemed to open in the UK with Channel 4; or
the waning of an object of study which has
simply been overwhelmed by too many texts—
too many texts for the discipline of television
studies to discipline; too many texts and too
many carriers of texts. (“Mourning” 411)
The discussion of “seriousness” and the loss
of “mattering” might be related to debates
around what has become termed “quality TV.”
McCabe and Akass and also Newman and
Levine position “quality TV” as a discursive
construct, quoting HBO’s famous slogan “It’s
not TV. It’s HBO.” Through a range of writings
(especially that published by the journal Critical
Studies in Television), analysis of quality TV has
reignited debates about “serious” television
and the breaking of television conventions in
terms of content (sex, profanity) and aesthetics (“shaky” mobile camerawork, heightened
realism, naturalistic modes of performance,
and lack of cause-and-effect relations). Similarly, Robin Nelson’s analysis of “high-end” TV
drama places emphasis on both the aesthetics
and the thought-provoking cultural politics of
these television series. Such writing positions
performance, though often indirectly and without great elaboration, as key to such television
drama. Karen Lury points out the unruly nature
of television performance across different
genres, and Christine Cornea suggests that
the arrival of what is commonly called
“Quality” television has also increased the
journal of film and video 68.3–4 / fall/winter 2016
©2016 by the board of trustees of the university of illinois
relevance of performance as central to the
meaning and success of a genre series: if
film genres were often criticised for their onedimensional characters, then recent television drama series seem to have taken those
characters and added a depth, complexity
and degree of reflexivity that foregrounds the
work of the performer. Witness the bravura
performance of eccentric and dysfunctional
detectives and doctors (e.g. Monk, Silent
Witness, House), the complex ensemble performances in series/serial from The Sopranos
to The West Wing to Sex and the City, and the
compellingly elusive performances in series/
serial like Twin Peaks, The X-Files and Lost.
(10–11)
Depth, complexity, and reflexivity are, of
course, partly subjective. In my earlier article,
drawing on James Naremore’s analysis of film
acting, I discussed the way that individual
performers become associated with a repertoire of performance signs: their “idiolect,” the
performance signs strongly associated with a
particular actor. However, my analysis lacked
adequate elaboration of how idiolect functions
accumulatively for all performers, not just stars
(although the latter bring greater extratextual
signification into play). Naremore also argues
that performance can be considered with
regard to two key sets of rhetorical conventions: the “mode of address” and the “degree
of ostensiveness” (34). The mode of address,
he argues, can be read as operating along a
scale ranging from indirect to direct address,
which is loosely mapped to the continuum
from representational to presentational performance. Representational performance, he
suggests, tends to efface the production of the
performance in order to be read as “behaving,”
whereas presentational performance tends to
foreground the performer as performer rather
than character. Naremore uses the term “ostensiveness” to refer to the scale of the gestures
of the performance—the showing of the performance. Accumulated performances—the building up of detail and the use of familiar facial
expressions, gestures, movements, and vocal
signs—are just as important to an understand-
ing of character development for non-star and
supporting actors. Across a thirteen-episode
US television series, for example, a viewer will
spend approximately ten hours accumulating
knowledge of a character through the details of
performance, the repeated gestures, glances,
eye movements, expressive use of body and
face, inflection of voice, and so on. As I described in my earlier article, the face, eyes,
and voice of the performer are potent signs in
the performance idiolect in that they are often
read as the site of presence, anchored through
the body. The 2016 relaunch of The X-Files, for
example, draws on the idiolect of detectives
Mulder (David Duchovny) and Scully (Gillian
Anderson)—and the familiarity that the majority
of the audience has with the characters they
perform—as shorthand for understanding the
new episodes, some fourteen years after the
original show ended.
Scrutinizing such details is important, and our
analysis of screen performance in US television
drama can draw on the approaches elaborated
by Constantin Stanislavski and developed by
Lee Strasberg, Stella Adler, and others (Blum)
that have influenced actor training in the United
States. However, as I argued in my earlier article,
these models make assumptions of presence
and intention that tend to efface the inferential
work of the audience and the schema through
which such performances are decoded. Often
such schema draw on culturally situated knowledge, framing performance as meaningful in a
particular way. For instance, most US viewers
would probably recognize House (Fox, 2004–12)
star Hugh Laurie through his performances as
a taciturn, obstinate American hospital doctor.
Many UK viewers would note the shift in register
in this show from Laurie’s earlier performances—
well known in the United Kingdom—as half of
a double act (and a quintessential upper-class
Englishman) in the UK comedies A Bit of Fry and
Laurie (BBC, 1989–95), Blackadder (BBC, 1986–
89), and Jeeves and Wooster (BBC, 1990–93).
I now wish to offer a more sustained consideration of television performance through detailed
analysis of The Americans (FX, 2013–).
journal of film and video 68.3–4 / fall/winter 2016
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9
Playing at Being American, Revisited:
The Americans and Television Performance
In his 1990 article “Playing at Being American,” John Caughie discusses the reception of
US television from the perspective of one at
the margins of American culture. He recounts
engaging in a play of irony and knowingness,
watching as a detached spectator rather than
caught through cultural imperialism, engaged
yet also distanced. Recalling Raymond Williams’s famous description of watching US
television and his discussion of “flow,” Caughie
presents his viewing as a game of dissociation
and engagement, as ironic playing with the
cultural codes of “American-ness” that enable
local understandings and sometimes resistant
readings to be made (“Playing” 57). The globalization of television over the past twenty-five
years since Caughie’s account was written and
the rise of formats and global television celebrity have all weakened the possibilities of such
distanciated viewing. Adopting a similarly selfreflexive tone, I want to present an analysis of
a US television series, The Americans, brought
to the screen by a major US network (FX, owned
by Fox) yet experienced by me in similarly distanced ways as Caughie’s account.
The Americans (2013–) is a Cold War spy
thriller serial drama, commissioned and broadcast by the US cable network FX, a subsidiary
of Twenty-First Century Fox, and coproduced
by FX Productions and Fox Television Studios.
Beyond the United States, The Americans has
aired in numerous countries worldwide, including on ITV2 in the United Kingdom. Set in 1980s
Washington, DC, it follows two “deep cover”
KGB agents living as a suburban American married couple under the pseudonyms Philip and
Elizabeth Jennings, raising two unsuspecting
children. After widespread critical acclaim, FX
recently announced that it has commissioned
a fourth season of The Americans. The show
attracts a modest one million viewers per episode, a number that FX claims accounts for only
a quarter of the show’s weekly audience when
time-shifted viewing is included (Hibberd). Indeed, in a coup for Amazon (as a direct competi-
10
tor to subscription VOD market leader Netflix),
its Amazon Prime VOD service secured exclusive
US VOD rights to The Americans in January 2014
(Spangler), leveraging interest in “catch-up”
viewing of the series to recruit subscribers.
The Americans is an interesting example to
consider in analyzing television performance
for a number of reasons. First, it presents a
“quality TV” show that is reflexive about nation,
cultural context, and performance. Second, it
offers a layering of television performance that
rewards closer scrutiny—the very premise is
based on performing a deception, requiring
the actors to “play American” and sometimes
be “Russian,” yet within a 1980s US setting.
As a viewer I have a privileged insight into
the characters’ secret and thus can recognize
both “them” and “not them” in their acting.
Third—and referring to this section’s heading
and Caughie’s article—not only are they playing
at being American, but so am I, a British viewer
watching the show in Scotland, England, and
North Africa, streaming it on tablets and smart
TV apps and consuming one or two episodes
per evening, with gaps. I viewed the show via
Amazon Prime Video on a variety of different
screens (tablet, laptop, and streaming television app) and at different locations, which as
a viewer experience is removed from the traditional weekly linear broadcast mode yet is an
increasingly common way of watching.
An interesting aspect of much “quality TV” is
the casting of performers who are relatively unknown, or at least non-stars, yet highly trained
and accomplished actors, in major US television roles. The accumulation of signification
associated with major stars has the potential to
work against the emphasis in television drama
on character and performance over star as
spectacle. The casting of Welsh actor Matthew
Rhys as Philip Jennings follows a recent and
noted trend in which US quality dramas have
cast British actors in major roles, notable examples of which include Dominic West and Idris
Elba in The Wire, Andrew Lincoln in The Walking
Dead, and Ashley Jensen in Ugly Betty. According to Christopher Holliday, British actors are
recognized as “an economically viable alterna-
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©2016 by the board of trustees of the university of illinois
tive to American performers” with a “productive
anonymity” that “preserv[es] an authenticity
for viewers who do not identify them through
the prism of previous characters.” Furthermore,
“[t]he ‘Quality’ of ‘Quality television’ in the US
. . . becomes ascribed to the acting abilities
of the UK actor” (Holliday 66). Just like the
“spies next door” in The Americans, “a growing
wealth of British-born actors in contemporary
US television drama have managed to integrate
seamlessly and convincingly into their adopted
homeland” (Holliday 79).
The intertextuality of performance I noted
in my earlier article relating to previous roles
(“Reconceptualizing” 88–89) also occurs within
television performance, in which an actor can
become known for one long-lived role but in a
distinctly different way—hence, Keri Russell’s
performance in The Americans pilot was regularly assessed by US critics in relation to her
previous starring role as the eponymous character in Felicity (1998–2002). Given the decadelong gap between Felicity and her appearance in
The Americans, some critics in particular made
reference to her age (“A finely matured Keri Russell,” wrote Stuever) and the contrast in the new
role in comparison with the earlier one. For the
majority of UK viewers, with different cultural
capital, Russell was unknown, and therefore her
performance came unencumbered with such history. Yet the premise of the show means that performances are layered—or in Goffman’s terms,
laminated—containing sections where the
principal actors need to go undercover, keyed
through their ostensive use of wigs and glasses
alongside quickly changed clothes and makeup;
this layering is described by Matthew Rhys, who
plays Philip Jennings, as “an actor’s dream, because you’re playing parts within parts” (Geller).
The double-ness of performance here is notable
in allowing a commentary on the performance
within the primary frame. Rhys and Russell are
playing Philip and Elizabeth, but also a range of
other characters in disguise, and their performances need to cue the relevant frame for us to
determine which character they are performing.
The ostensively disguised “Clark,” another
one of Matthew Rhys’s American alter egos, is
distinguished from Philip by way of a floppyfringed gray wig and big fake glasses, along
with a greater propensity to grin broadly,
emphasizing his upper row of teeth. The pilot
episode of The Americans, which first aired on
FX in January 2013, introduced us not only to
Philip and Elizabeth but also to some of their
bewigged alter egos; additionally, via flashback, we see their younger selves in training in
Russia twenty years earlier and then see them
arriving in the United States and adjusting to
their arranged marriage. Interestingly, though
many critics were broadly positive about the
pilot episode, many criticized the use of costume changes and the flashback scenes, which
were seen as lacking believability in that neither actor looked convincingly younger. Critics
singled out the wigs in particular, describing
them variously as “comedy wigs” (Hogan),
“goofy wigs” (Stuever), “iffy wigs” (Higgins), “a
harrowing procession of wigs” (Donaghy), and
“an increasingly preposterous rotation of wigs”
(Nicholson). This suggests a critical wariness
of the use of props to rekey and accentuate or
draw particular attention to performance. However, Naremore notes how objects and props
can be used expressively in acting (83–96). The
Americans uses wigs and other devices as ostensive tools to rekey the actors’ performances,
indicating to the viewer that the character
onscreen is a performance of a performance.
The opening ten minutes of the pilot introduce us to the leads alongside other minor
characters, without initially explicitly drawing
attention to who is who; instead, the emphasis is on following several lines of action that
converge upon the abduction of a man later
revealed to be a Russian defector. As the
episode commences with a title card stating
“Washington DC, 1981” and the saxophone
solo from Quarterflash’s “Hand on My Heart,”
we glimpse a man and a woman sitting at a
dimly lit cocktail bar through a hazy scene of
smoke, martini glasses, and shadowy faceless men in suits. We will later come to realize
that the woman is Elizabeth disguised with a
peroxide-blonde wig, smilingly flirting with a
Department of Justice official. At this point, in
journal of film and video 68.3–4 / fall/winter 2016
©2016 by the board of trustees of the university of illinois
11
Figure 1: Elizabeth’s (Keri
Russell) introduction to the
audience in disguise.
this opening scene, we are not aware of her
significance or of her disguise. Here Keri Russell uses a specific technique that recurs in
several scenes in the episode—that of a serious
preoccupied glance away to the side, which in
this brief scene interrupts her smile. The glance
at this point is subtle and hidden by distracted
handling and drinking from her wine glass—a
combination of what I termed in my earlier
article “diversionary business” and “disclosive
compensation”—and her performance idiolect
signposts her character’s hidden agenda.
After a brief sex scene we follow Russell’s
character as she returns to her car. Sitting in the
driver’s seat, she seems to briefly lose composure, sighing exasperatedly, wiping her mouth
in disgust, and pulling off her wig, revealing her
“true” appearance and feelings to the viewer.
Thus, the opening scene of The Americans sets
up multiple performance frames, and the viewer
has privileged narrative information in order to
judge who is the “authentic” character (Elizabeth) through Russell’s performance, as distinct
from her character performing in disguise.
Similarly, in the next scene Philip is first
shown alongside another minor character,
without any initially clear indications of his significance or of the two characters’ relative importance. But unlike our first introduction to Elizabeth, he is not using an ostensive disguise at
this point, which we realize only retrospectively.
Instead, his superficial chat with the other character (a recruit) about sports is a performance
of normality, charm, and seeming “Americanness.” As their object of surveillance, a Russian
defector, gets closer, we first see an indication
of what becomes and is retrospectively understood, through repeated use, as a gesture of
“Russian-ness,” in which Philip stares with an
intensely stern facial expression, emphasized
by a close-up and lighting on his eyes alongside
the low-key lighting of this nighttime scene.
Figure 2: Philip (Matthew
Rhys) in close-up, using
facial expression and eyes.
12
journal of film and video 68.3–4 / fall/winter 2016
©2016 by the board of trustees of the university of illinois
Figure 3: Philip’s (Matthew
Rhys) sideways stare.
Philip’s stern-faced stare makes another
appearance within the first twenty minutes of
the pilot, after he has threatened the Russian
defector now trapped in the boot of his and
Elizabeth’s car and sent the kids off to school,
in a scene that involves dialogue only from
background police but shows him seated on a
park bench. In addition to Philip’s silence and
the use of close-ups emphasizing his stares,
the use of cross-cutting to point-of-view shots
incorporating crash zooms (as though Philip
has zoom lenses for eyes) further structures his
stare for the viewer, aligning our view with his
look via point-of-view shots.
Not long later, a scene in which the Jennings family gets ice cream together shows a
recurrence of Elizabeth’s signifying glance. In
contrast, Philip’s charming, jocular mode is in
full flight with no sign of his earlier stare. Here
we see Philip playing “ice cream Olympics”
with his children, while Elizabeth seems less
enthusiastic. This is not the first scene in which
we meet the children of the Jennings’, Paige and
Henry, but this scene uses their performances,
alongside diversionary business with ice cream,
to foreground particular characteristics of their
performance of themselves. The trope of the
family-who-are-not-what-they-seem has recurred
in American high-concept quality TV, with Breaking Bad and The Sopranos being key examples,
and this scene particularly emphasizes how we
(the audience) have more narrative privilege
than the children. Here audience knowledge
functions to inform an understanding of both
narrative and performance. As such, the relationships between performances are more sophisticated than usually ascribed to television acting,
and arguably, this privileges the long-form medium’s ability to illuminate the accumulation of
character knowledge through performance.
We might productively recall Roland
Barthes’s deconstruction of “italianicity” (in
Figure 4: The Jennings family
playing at being American in
The Americans.
journal of film and video 68.3–4 / fall/winter 2016
©2016 by the board of trustees of the university of illinois
13
his well-known essay “Rhetoric of the Image”)
in considering Philip and Elizabeth’s performance of “Russian-ness.” This is coded by
their performances, drawing on cultural stereotypes of the “unsmiling Russian” prevalent in
American culture and most famously voiced in
an outburst by Russian émigré and right-wing
author Ayn Rand in her testimony in 1947 to
the House Un-American Activities Committee.
This case concerned the Hollywood film Song of
Russia (1944), with Rand lambasting what she
regarded as the film’s suspiciously pro-Communist and “unrealistic” portrayal of smiling Russians. A number of television critics noted the
coding of “Soviet-ness” or “Russian-ness” and
“American-ness” in the various performances
in The Americans, not least in Rhys’s skin
and black eyebrows: “Rhys’s face dominates:
the contrast turned up to 11 on his pale skin
and black brows with cheekbones that could
slice kielbasa” (Raeside). In some flashback
scenes in season 1, we hear the two leading
actors speak Russian, but we never hear them
speak English with Russian accents. There is
the anchoring—a term used by Barthes—of the
two leading actors, neither of whom are Russian, with supporting actors who are some way
connected with Eastern Europe, Russia, and
the former USSR (Arkady Zotov [Russian actor
Lev Gorn], General Zhukov [Polish actor Olek
Krupa], and Nina [Annet Mahendru, whose
mother is Russian and who speaks Russian]).
An interesting exception is the American actor
Margo Martindale, who plays the “motherly and
deadly KGB handler” (O’Neill), although she
too is clearly coded as “Russian” and “playing
American” through her performances: the former as severe and unsmiling, the latter as jocular and friendly. As in my earlier examination of
supporting actors in The Godfather, the anchoring of the leading actors and their perceived
authenticity is, here, in part achieved through
the coded ethnicity of the supporting cast.
Their “Russian-ness” is anchored by Arkady,
Nina, and others, who provide the background
performances necessary for narrative realism.
The adversary of the Jennings family is Stan
Beeman, played by prominent character actor
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Noah Emmerich, an FBI agent who moves in
next door. The pilot introduces Beeman as having just started working in counterintelligence
after three years spent undercover among white
supremacists. Emmerich is a veteran character
actor, familiar from a range of film and television roles, with an understated presence,
characterized in particular by a deep voice
and an “actorly” diction that is camouflaged
with a casual drawl. Both the low pitch and the
drawl imbue his voice with warmth and key it
as sincere and “authentic” (a construct of its
laid-back and understated delivery). The visual
counterpoint to this is a physical presence that
combines a tall, commanding physique and a
chiseled, well-defined chin and forehead with
scarred and pockmarked skin, typecasting him
as supporting actor rather than leading man.
His performance style tends to avoid highly ostensive gestures—in the words of one critic, he
is regarded as “an actor’s actor” because “he’s
understated and he steals scenes” (Cardace,
original emphasis). Within the context of the
narrative, he is an enigma—we know virtually
nothing about his time undercover, although in
the pilot he clearly is suspicious of the Jennings
(at one point he searches their garage); he and
his family appear to befriend them, raising
questions regarding whether he is a dupe or
playing a long game with them. Furthermore,
his secret affair with Nina, a former KGB agent
(and then double agent) working at the Russian
embassy, demonstrates his capacity to conceal
the truth from his close family and colleagues.
His performance, combined with the warmth of
his voice and its understated apparent sincerity, codes his character as paradoxically trustworthy yet also enigmatic and hard to read.
As with the other performances, a game of
cat-and-mouse spying is produced through his
character’s engagement with other characters,
often producing narrative suspense.
One of the most memorable scenes of the
pilot episode involves the Jennings family
(Philip, Elizabeth, Paige, and Henry) and the
Beemans meeting for the first time, with Elizabeth carrying a tray of freshly baked brownies
to greet their new neighbors. As in the ice-
journal of film and video 68.3–4 / fall/winter 2016
©2016 by the board of trustees of the university of illinois
cream scene, Philip and Elizabeth’s performance of themselves as a suburban American
couple is thrown into relief by the presence of
the children, yet it acquires several more layers here, with the Beemans as an “audience”
for their performance. But also, it is unclear
whether Beeman is suspicious of the Jennings,
with Philip’s grin appearing more nervous as
Stan tells him about his job. The final shot
is held half a second too long on Philip and
Elizabeth, with Matthew Rhys’s nervous grin
reaching screwball comedy levels. Meanwhile,
Emmerich, with his warm, friendly voice and
welcoming demeanor, manages to be simultaneously “open” and inscrutable.
Television performers such as Emmerich are,
of course, aware of the way the camera frames
them, and they adjust the scale of their performance accordingly. The close-up, as Naremore
has noted, is often used to represent character
interiority and ostends even the slightest of
movements. This offers the performer the opportunity to work in minute detail, where even
a slight twitch can be registered by the camera.
The reaction shot, and its repetition and accumulation across a series, is also a key component in constructing a televisual performance
that is offered more time and space to develop
than film performance. Similarly, the relationship between performance and technology is
significant (Bode). The use of zoom lens, for instance, can flatten shot depth and thereby foreground the performer, or bring the minutiae of
the actor’s performance onto the screen. Multitrack sound-mixing and improved microphone
technology can enable television to present a
soundscape within which the actor’s voice may
be brought forward or reduced, often used as a
means of keying the actor’s performance.
Drawing on the work of Erving Goffman, I
have argued that recognizing performance involves evaluation. Goffman insists that the relationship constructed between performance and
audience—a particular kind of arrangement
involving interpretation by the latter—is fundamental to meaning, stating quite simply, “[N]o
audience, no performance” (125). Similarly,
Graham F. Thompson places emphasis on inter-
pretation, defining performance as the “mode
of assessment of the ‘textual/character/actor’
interaction” (Thompson 78). Part of this is the
connection between person (the actor) and
character (the role he or she performs) and how
this is then mediated to an audience, drawing
on social, cultural, and technological framing in
order to understand how each differs from the
other. This is by no means a simple relationship. For Goffman, “there is a relation between
persons and role. But the relationship answers
to the interactive system—to the frame—in
which the role is performed and the self of the
performer is glimpsed” (573). Although Goffman is here principally referring to the roles we
all play in different social situations, he also
considers dramatic performance—such as acting in television—as a rekeying and layering
(what he calls “laminating”) of this social process. In his terms the process of “lamination”
transforms one whole “strip” of activity into
another (e.g., through recording) (561). For dramatic performance, Goffman argues that keying
transforms the activity into a “staged being,”
stating that “the theatrical frame is something
less than a benign construction and something
more than a simple keying . . . a corpus of transcription practices must be involved for transforming a strip of offstage, real activity into a
strip of staged being” (138). The relationship
between “everyday life” and staged performance is therefore more than the performance
of self that Goffman famously described; it is
the inference of a performance of self engaged
in a performance of a character. The complex
interaction between text, character, and actor is
layered, and the inferred relationship we read
between performance and representation adds
to the semantic complexity. In The Americans,
as we have seen, the layered narrative adds
extra levels of detail to the pleasures of reading
the performance. The meaning itself does not
reside wholly “in performance,” then, but is
mediated through sets of contextual epistemological frames or schema that give performance
signs their relevance and meaning and that are
decoded by audiences through accumulated
forms of cultural capital.
journal of film and video 68.3–4 / fall/winter 2016
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Previously, I quoted Goffman’s maxim “no
audience, no performance.” The recognition
of performance is a pleasure and one that
viewers often share, especially in an era of
“second-screen” viewing, where the television or larger screen is often supplemented
by a laptop, tablet, or phone screen that is active during watching. Social networking sites
and applications such as Facebook, Twitter,
and Tumblr all showcase the fascination and
pleasure that audiences have with television
performances. Review and discussion sites,
both formal (critics’ reviews, interviews, the
show’s “official” website) and informal (blogs,
user-generated content), offer useful examples
of the everyday, sometimes vernacular, discussions about and engagements with screen
performance. This can be seen most overtly in
fan discourse, where the affective engagement
of the fan ostends and reframes performance
signs, leading to what Barry King has called
the “hypersemioticisation” of the actor (41),
whose expressions and idiolect can be quoted
and repeated for fan consumption and circulation, layering signification. A recent example
of this has been the sharing of animated GIFs,
or images of performances, on social media,
created by websites such as Giphy. In the case
of The Americans, a quick search on Giphy reveals 19,515 animated images, often catching
nuanced and memorable aspects of the actor’s
performances, especially facial expressions
in close-up (see links in this article’s notes for
animated GIFs), revealing the audience’s investment in the performers’ nuances, idiolects,
and idiosyncrasies.2
ality, and presence, alongside accumulation and
repetition, to consider the experience of watching television performances across different devices, different nations, different social spaces,
and different times. I have also discussed what
we might call the “accumulated performance,”
the experience we have living with and watching
a long-running series, building up knowledge of
the performances and close familiarity with the
actors/characters over time.
Television’s economies of performance are,
as John Caughie has noted, often rooted in
pleasures of “an aesthetic of detail” (“What Do
Actors” 167). Fleeting moments of performance,
brief glances, tiny gestures, and momentary
flickers of the eyes are replete with meaning,
yet so often difficult to grasp and hold up for
analytical dissection. The repetition of our
encounters with television means acting is,
as Caughie notes, “layered with little histories
which give no purchase to the theoretical divisions of identification and distance” in ways in
which performance is often theorized (“What
Do Actors” 168). Decoding television performance therefore relies on working through such
knowledge, informing and sometimes deconstructing conventions of interpretation, breaking frames that foreground and privilege some
modes of performance over others, and then
holding up and analyzing the pleasures of performance. As seen in The Americans, by reframing television performance, placing it central to
an analysis of television, we are better able to
understand the accumulated performances we
experience in television and their complex and
layered meanings.
Conclusions
notes
In his 1974 Cambridge inaugural lecture “Drama
in a Dramatised Society,” Raymond Williams—
a Welshman, like Matthew Rhys, and also an
acute observer of American television—argued,
“Drama is a special kind of use of quite general
processes of presentation, representation, signification” (qtd. in O’Connor 7). In this article, I
have revisited issues of performance, intention-
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1. For an exploration of “quality TV” debates, see
the range of essays in McCabe and Akass.
2. A quick search of Giphy, for example, shows a
number of animated GIFs that capture the wordless
glances of Philip and Elizabeth. For glances by Philip
and Elizabeth, see “#tv #fx #the americans #elizabeth
jennings” and “#tv #fx #the americans #310.” Another animated GIF captures Claudia’s (Margo Martindale) scowl as she unreassuringly reassures Elizabeth
that she is on her side (see “#tv #fx #the americans
#111”).
journal of film and video 68.3–4 / fall/winter 2016
©2016 by the board of trustees of the university of illinois
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“#tv #fx #the americans #310.” The Americans GIFs.
GIPHY.com. N.d. Web. 8 March 2016. <http://giphy
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“#tv #fx #the americans #elizabeth jennings.” The
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