Ugly “American”? part 2: Why we can’t ignore Sarah Caulfield’s “Americanness”

At a meeting in London’s Highgate Cemetery, Elizaveta Starkova (Paloma Baeza) informs Lucas North (Richard Armitage) of his first task as a Russian double-agent within MI-5 in Spooks 7.2. Source: Richard Armitage Online

As I argued previously, Sarah Caulfield’s accent was largely a red herring, something that (perhaps especially U.S.) viewers fixated on in their criticisms of Genevieve O’Reilly. At the same time, however, as the obvious code for Sarah’s Americanness, it was something that the script simply did not let us ignore in the way that we could brush off Paloma Baeza’s problems with the Russian accent. It’s true that Elizaveta’s Russianness was essential to the plot line of Spooks 7, as it made her susceptible to the offer to spy for Russia, but it also put her in a position to save Lucas from prison, and not even Lucas believed her statement, “I love Russia, too,” which was at least part of why he had to appear suddenly in her kitchen at the end of Spooks 7.2–he has to use her knowledge to verify that his version of the past is not a lie. And we saw Elizaveta’s personal life and ethics take on shape apart from her national or cultural loyalties in 7.4 when Lucas inadvertently trapped her with himself in the “Coventry dilemma.” In contrast, we could never simply conclude, “Sarah’s the villain, and she happens to be an American.” Instead, the script repeatedly placed the fact of Sarah’s “Americanness” at front and center not only of our perception of her, because it influenced her motivations for acting (which is not surprising), but more problematically in terms of its actual execution, her relationship with Lucas. The statements Sarah offered about her ethical position were made while esconced in a hospital bed in 8.8, shortly before she died, so that they had the lame effect of an ex post facto explanation. Oh, yeah, that’s why she was such a creep. But those sentiments, too, coded her aggressively as an American. It often seemed to me that Sarah was never allowed features that couldn’t be attributed to that fact about her character. It had to be, as it was almost the only major clue that viewers had to explain her behavior.

It’s certainly true that the nationality and culture of the partners play a significant role in how interactions can play out in a romantic relationship, and perhaps one reason I watched this relationship with attention is my curiosity over the years about the role my own Americanness plays in intimate relationships with natives of other countries. In my opinion, however, the way the Spooks writers handled this theme added a level of complexity to Sarah’s interactions with Lucas that overburdened not only the script and perhaps the actress, but also frequently scuttled our ability to figure out exactly what was going on at any given point between the two characters. 

I think this argument is going to be controversial, but not because it’s hard to see what I am talking about if you look carefully. Rather, I am having a hard time assigning responsibility to a single agent for this situation, and I find myself alternately fingering the script, the director, the actors, the core audience for the show, and myself as viewer. Part of the problem is that all I can see is the final product, not the documents about how it developed — and that’s the kind of thing that drives a historian crazy. We don’t like to speculate about responsibility, we like to pin things on people or say that we can’t. Talk about overdetermined! So we’ll see how it works out. Maybe you’ll think I’m nuts.

Knowing Sarah, knowing Lucas

In order to explain how it became the case that the most important clue we get as to who Sarah is her Americanness, I’m going to start with the question of how we can know who Sarah is. Yeah, identity and what we can know about it again. Well, at least Richard Armitage says things about himself, quite a lot of them, in fact, and other people who are in a position to know say things about him, too. In the case of Sarah, however, she’s given only a brief opportunity to introduce herself as the successor of Libby McCall and apparently a representative of the new U.S. administration. Other than that, when she speaks in an official capacity, she pushes the official Obama State Department line. And a strong proportion of the few pieces of content we learn about her from others are either mistaken or outright lies. So the most direct path to characterization is barred for this character, and we are always having to guess and / or make assumptions, and indeed the script relies on our propensity to do so in a way that must have created problems for Ms. O’Reilly. I’m sure she came up with a backstory for the character, but the lack of information in the script itself must surely have raised questions for her about how she was supposed to play Sarah.

In terms of knowing Sarah, one clear script failure was the insufficiently drawn relational aspect of the character. To understand her relationship to Lucas, we needed more information from her interactions with others so that we could contrast her different relationalities. Yes, she was a rogue CIA agent and she was supposed to be mysterious. But just as pudens functions by pointing to the hidden, paradoxically, mystery is created by the judicious disclosure of information. We don’t really live in a world “before interpretation.” Everything we learn gets put into the context of things we already know. If what we learn is incomplete, context takes on an ever greater role in explaining new information to us. The lack of specific information about the character made Sarah confusingly unknowable, so that we never understood why she was behaving the way she was from her perspective or those of others. We did not have enough information to understand what she was doing even when she was interacting with her Nightingale controllers. This failure was severe, as it’s the point at which we can assume the character to have been conforming most closely to her actual motivations and thus offers a baseline for understanding who she was.

This lack of relational information is significant for the question of any “Lucas and Sarah” chemistry not only because of what I understand about the constitution of a self, i.e., that we become different selves with different people, but also particularly because of how Mr. Armitage puts together his characters — to experience inner conflict as aspects of themselves collide when they encounter others. From the beginning, we do not ever see clearly how Sarah appeared (or appealed, something many commentators noted) to Lucas. And if Sarah did not have a discernable profile for Lucas, it could not be clear to him or us how he felt about her; indeed, it’s notable how often Lucas offers her glances of bewilderment. Which pieces of Lucas are colliding because of his attachment to Sarah? Attraction and obligation? Though that’s the most obvious answer, we can’t tell, really. If the dilemma is loyalty to Harry (read: to the principles that make MI-5 Lucas’s “home,” as he articulates in Spooks 7.2) vs. attraction to Sarah (read: to a return to a more human world in which love and loved ones matter, sometimes more than truth or principle or mere professional obligation, a problem the discussion at the opening of Spooks 8.4 raises and which is an echo of the questions raised in 8.1 by the murder of Ruth’s Cypriot partner, George), it’s surprising (a) how naive that makes Lucas look, since in the very first encounter with Sarah he states more or less that he believes she will lie to him; (b) how quickly Lucas abandons Harry for Sarah, given how important those principles and the feeling of home were to him for so long, and (c) how easily, later in the series, when he discovers what he must have known all along, that Sarah is a professional liar — just like him (Spooks 8.7)! better than him! what a surprise!– he abandons his lover to return to his principles. Even if we reduce this conflict to the conventionally masculine “balls vs. brains” dilemma, the script makes Lucas either a much more boring or a suddenly much more desperate character in series 8 than he had been in series 7. (Maybe the latter was part of what the script was seeking, and I’m bookmarking this possibility to think about more, later, but if that was the case, the project wasn’t pursued with much energy or conviction.)

Lucas North (Richard Armitage) glances after Sarah Caulfield as she leaves the morgue following their first encounter in Spooks 8.1. My cap. Is he evaluating her suspiciousness as a wily American operative, or her butt? Very subtle playing here — we can’t tell immediately. There’s just a tiny little quirk on the left side of his lips for a fraction of a second before the camera cuts to the next scene.

Oops, there it is, a split second later, along with a slight appreciative widening of the left eye. The guy is nothing if not subtle.

The lack of relational or other information about Sarah makes it hard to understand Lucas or his behavior; if we can’t see what aspects of Lucas Sarah is influencing, we learn little about her. But if we can’t interpret what Sarah is saying, we have to look to Lucas, because Lucas is her most consistent, sustained interlocutor. He is the figure in position to give us the most information about her. In Armitage’s characterization, a fair amount of what Lucas “says” always comes from things he doesn’t say, but it’s difficult to deduce what he’s “not saying” if we can’t figure out what Sarah is saying. The script thus puts us as viewers in a trap, in which we turn our head in confusion from one character to another, looking for some piece of interpretive context, and after watching this series again, I suspect it puts the actors in the same trap.

The viewer, at any rate, is stuck, because Armitage is a heavily relational actor in general (before you get angry, this is a compliment!) and his style is hyperexploited in Spooks, where all the characters are more likely to convey their opinions with their eyes than with their lips. In multi-person scenes in Spooks, the camera frequently catches him looking at the other characters and indeed such shots are used to bind conversations or tie pieces of information together (this happens a fair amount in Strike Back, as well). So our interpretation of his body language and signals is perhaps unusually reliant on context, but we get very little information from his context with Sarah. Admittedly, one could say that this script demanded a more declarative, open acting style than Armitage usually offers his audiences. But read from our spectator’s perspective, the regular and occasionally jarring use of handheld cameras in the tete-a-tete scenes to create an impression of extreme intimacy would have made a more explicit range of facial gestures read as overacting. Significantly, such explicitness would also have constituted a major departure from the strongly controlled, perhaps hyperdisciplined gestural and expressional repertoire Armitage established for Lucas in series 7. The occasional problems of characterization Armitage experienced with Lucas in series 8 are not, in my opinion, related to a failure to make Lucas’s emotions sufficiently open; on the contrary, they stemmed from playing a Lucas that was, given the character’s history, suddenly frighteningly open about his emotions. One wonders whether Armitage was tempted to throw out his entire prior characterization of Lucas and start over; luckily he doesn’t, but from time to time, one sees it fraying at the edges, unable to expand to make it describe not only himself, but Sarah as well.

Tying these two strands together: as viewers, because of the lack of information about Sarah, which is a script problem, and due to the relational quality of self, a cognitive problem of human existence that is underlined by Armitage’s acting style, how we feel about O’Reilly as Sarah becomes inseparable from how we feel about Armitage as Lucas. From my perspective, given the absence of reliable character clues in the script, our growing awareness of Sarah’s deviousness was developed much too heavily by giving the character of Lucas an ever greater vulnerability that eventually came to be too much. As the series proceded, this window into Lucas’s vulnerabilities snowballed into an almost lascivious voyeurism into his psyche with which I grew increasingly uncomfortable given what I learned about the boundaries of his persona in series 7. As I suggested above, charitable viewers could potentially read series 8 Lucas as more open than he had been in series 7, more ready to return to the world. The way that the script handled this personal development, however, by insisting on drawing the Sarah character almost exclusively through our impressions of Lucas and thus exposing every last minute of his pain about her, made it seem as if the script had lost respect for the character by insisting that he expose all the wounds that were obvious to any viewer but whose concealment in turn made up a vital part of Armitage’s stunningly convincing characterization of Lucas in series 7. An essential piece of Armitage’s professional toolkit is his preternatural awareness that we don’t have to see everything about a character to know that it is there–only clues. The series 8 script seemed to deny him this possibility in characterizing Lucas but apply it in a ridiculously exaggerated form to Sarah.

We learn so little about Sarah from the rest of the script that most of the time we are seeing her via the mirror of Lucas. In this sense, it was hard to avoid understanding the Sarah character as first and foremost a plot device for illuminating Lucas. I read Lucas in series 7 as noble but tortured — as Armitage said in the extras on the series 7 DVDs, “damaged”; in series 8 the writers seem to be trying to move him in the direction of seeking normality, but their treatment of the “noble/moral” aspect of his character was not developed in parallel with the “damaged/normal” axis of the character. Thus we can’t tell if Lucas is constitutionally unable to find an adequate partner for himself (damaged vs normal) or ran aground here on the basis of some unspecified ethical dilemma in which he found himself (the ultimate consequence of trying to be moral is that one fails).

Lucas North (Richard Armitage), a/k/a “the beautiful,” in blissful post-coital contemplation of what he’s going to tell Harry Pearce about his relationship with Sarah Caulfield, in Spooks 8.4. Source: Richard Armitage Central Gallery. Coordinating the sheets with Mr. Armitage’s eyes was a nice touch, if exploitative of the viewer’s aesthetic sensibilities. Would as haphazard a housekeeper as Lucas really think about such things?

Perhaps as a consequence, in series 8 much more so than 7, I felt exploited on a base level. It seems that the script sought to appeal to the lowest common denominator of the Armitage fan contingent: our desire to peek behind the curtain that Lucas (and perhaps by metonymic extension, Richard Armitage) puts between himself and us. Putting Lucas together with a pretty woman; dressing him strikingly; offering us a chance to see him naked from behind; and posing him topless in bed, gracefully initiating foreplay against a color of bedclothes that drastically underlined the ethereal extremes of Armitage’s complexion  — all these decisions made us into voyeurs who gaze at him, both vulnerable and aroused, as he initiates his first relationship since the end of his captivity. This strategy might have bothered me less had Sarah worked out for Lucas, but the decision of the script to hurt him so badly not only in terms of his still raw emotions but also in terms of his professional judgment ultimately made me extremely uncomfortable with viewing his shame. I wanted to look away from the screen, but could not. These elements make for great Lucas North fan fiction, I suppose, but we expect a bit more from this character and this particular drama. In particular, I suspect, we wanted to see Lucas with a woman we could respect — even if she was evil, Given that Lucas had a longer backstory with a surplus of reasons for us to find him credible despite occasional inconsistent scripting or problems in characterization, it was up to the scriptwriters to focus their attentions on creating a worthy opponent, and this they did not do.

Realistically speaking, there was no time for them to do so in only eight hours of television. As many viewers commented, the entire Nightingale project never really took on shape. All we saw were its concrete outcomes. Its aims, goals, and participants remained largely in the dark, so there was also little information coming from that direction for us to interpret. All this should make clear that the script had too many strands, a series of “too muches” that overwhelm the interpreter and which left many huge questions in the mind of the viewer. This conclusion, in combination with what I’ve written above about characterization, should make obvious that understanding Sarah made us much more heavily dependent than usual on contextual clues like stereotypes and common-sense assumptions. Writers frequently take advantage of such notions in crafting thriller scripts, but here this technique had additional implications for O’Reilly’s choices in playing Sarah Caulfield because most of the clues we could glean from the show related to her Americanness. Most of the time we could not learn enough about her to believe anything about her statements or actions. But what we did learn about her depravity again pointed to her Americanness.

So whatever she did with Sarah, O’Reilly had to make her “American.” It was practically the only option given to her by the script for any sort of detailed characterization at all. But I think the problem there, the reason that she was not convincing in her quality as an “American,” was much broader for Ms. O’Reilly than the mere matter of the fumbled accent. In “being American,” she had to deal not only with what the scriptwriters provided and her own characterization of Sarah, but also with audience expectations about how an American should be. That’s really the topic for tomorrow: how do prejudices about “Americans” affect portrayals of them by “non-Americans” in “non-American” shows, specifically Spooks 8? In turn, the way that she, the script, and the directors of these episodes defined and understood “American” and the way that O’Reilly played it created significant screen chemistry issues for Sarah and Lucas. I hope to get there the next day. Then, if you and I are both still interested, we can do a blow-by-blow of the relationship and the choices the actors appear to have made.

~ by Servetus on June 24, 2010.