In Which Homeland Renews Our Interest In Living

The Fifth Column

by HELEN SCHUMACHER

Homeland
creator Gideon Raff

Both last night’s episode of Homeland and the previous week’s ended with the playback of Congressman Nicholas Brody’s black-and-white avowal to hold the United States, namely the Vice President and members of his national security team, responsible for the deaths of 82 children. Still, throughout both episodes, Brody’s earlier commitment to the terrorist cause, or as he calls it, “fulfilling my oath of defending the country from threats both foreign and domestic as a sergeant in the United States Marine Corps,” seems to have become flimsy motivation since rejoining his family in Virginia. Rather he seems a man lost.

I had a hard time believing in such naiveté from a grown man. I would have thought that if eight years of being held prisoner by an al-Qaeda terrorist cell hadn’t jaded a person, than six months in politics would have. And here Brody is, still failing to grasp the fact that once you join the dark side, there’s no turning back. The man is in some serious denial to think he’s not bound for the rest of his life to do the dirty work of both Abu Nazir and Washington D.C. Yet every time Roya Hammad begins a sentence with “Need I remind you...” or Vice President Walden whispers a favor in his ear, he’s incredulous. Did he really think he was going to be able to renege on a deal with the CIA’s most wanted? You’re the fifth column, Brody!

Brody was also foolish to ever believe there was honor in his cause — that before those drone strikes, the soul of America was lily-white (I’m pretty sure that purity was lost the moment we stepped onto this continent and claimed it as our own) — and for thinking that Nazir wasn’t aware from the start that his family would be likely collateral damage in his crusade against America.

I guess that’s always been one of Brody’s biggest flaws — an aw-shucks belief in a binary good and evil. He thinks he knows better than anyone else the difference between the two and that he’s the last moral man on the Eastern seaboard. Look at the disgust in his treatment of former military buddies Mike and Lauder. Sleeping with your friend’s wife and developing a taste for booze both seem forgivable in comparison to Nazir’s nefarious agenda. The veneer on Brody’s fantasy may be finally wearing thin. Apparently power washing the blood of another man out of your clothing at a carwash late at night will elicit some soul searching.

Brody is also still figuring out how to lie. His wife Jessica accuses that they roll off the tongue, but really they more sputter. He wasn’t able to come up with a plausible cover for his day attempting to take the tailor to a safe house that entire drive to Gettysburg and back. The only thing that makes me believe Brody was ever a marine is his ability to improvise in the field. The carjack he jerry-rigged out of firewood seems like the work of a man who has had to repair a Humvee in an Iraqi battlefield.

There are a couple other ways Brody is still adapting to life stateside. He’s still getting the knack of contemporary cell phone usage. Texting mayday messages to Beirut using a Blackberry presumably paid for with tax dollars seems like the kind of thing that could be uncovered by any citizen that knows how to file a FOIA request. Also, your smartphone is a tracking device and if anyone was ever to question his story about attending union meetings in Culpeper, you’re busted. This one seems the most obvious, but if your wife calls you while you are in the middle of chasing down a fellow subversive, let it go to voicemail lest she hear you break his neck.

While Brody is having second thoughts about what is driving his life, Carrie Mathison is as obsessive as ever. I love the way she can hardly contain her excitement each time Abu Nazir’s name is mentioned.

As Saul shared the footage recovered from Beirut at the close of last night’s show, Carrie got the validation for her work and intuition that she needed. Up until that point, there was plenty to keep audiences wondering if she wasn’t about to slip back into oblivion. Signs included sitting in the dark listening to jazz and promiscuous sex. All that was missing was the alliterative speech. (Really you could make a drinking game out of most behavior on the show — impulse control, suicide attempts, alcoholism — take a shot every time someone exhibits DSM criteria!)

Even though previews of upcoming episodes show Estes learning that Carrie was right about Brody, it is still not clear if she’s ever really going to be able to get her security clearance back. It’s hard to believe there are not going to be Agency eyebrows raising each time her chin starts quivering. I suggest she get a job in the private sector. Contractors do all of America’s dirty work these days anyway.

So far this season, Claire Danes’ acting has continued to be a highlight. I was skeptical when the show began, but watching her question her judgment on the rooftop of the Beirut safe house and her defeat after being kicked out of the debriefing back at Langley headquarters, her raw vulnerability still impresses. And while some viewers may be worried about the believability of CIA operations as they have played out these past few episodes (Skype?!?), it seems par for the course given the Agency's real-life tactical operation success rate. For the first half of its existence, the main approach of the CIA was to either throw money at any con man claiming Communist intel or parachuting untrained student insurgents behind enemy lines.

Helen Schumacher is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Brooklyn. She tumbls here and here. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here. You can find her earlier reviews of Homeland here. She last wrote in these pages about recess.

"Sanguine (Please Say A Word)" - Jessica Bailiff (mp3)

"Your Ghost Is Not Enough (Be With Me)" - Jessica Bailiff (mp3)

In Which We Return To Action In The Field

Also A Woman

by HELEN SCHUMACHER

Homeland
creator Gideon Raff

"Over the years, the CIA had become less and less willing to hire ‘people that are a little different, people who are eccentric, people who don’t look good in a suit and tie, people who don’t play well in the sandbox with others,'" Bob Gates said. "The kinds of tests that we make people pass, psychological, and everything else, make it very hard for somebody who may be brilliant or have extraordinary talents and unique capabilities to get into the agency." As a consequence of its cultural myopia, the CIA misread the world. Very few of its officers could read or speak Chinese, Korean, Arabic, Hindi, Urdu, or Farsi. … Far too few had ever haggled in an Arab bazaar or walked through an African village.

- Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA

At the end of its first season, Homeland left us wondering how a show centered around a intelligence officer was going to work around the fact that the agent was fired and had lost her top secret clearance. The show's season two premiere was mostly about setting up a plausible scenario for getting Carrie Mathison back into the intelligence fold, and how Brody was handling double duty as terrorist and politician.

We rejoin our heroine (Claire Danes) following the bombing of several Iranian nuclear facilities by Israel, and as demonstrations denouncing the nation and its allies have erupted throughout the Middle East. Along the banks of the Potomac River, Carrie is attempting to find sanity in civilian life. Living with her father and her sister, she gardens, teaches English, swallows handfuls of Lithium, and sneaks glimpses at military intelligence blogs.

Her mentor Saul (Mandy Patinkin) is back in the field — holed up in the U.S. embassy in Lebanon, where one of Carrie’s old assets has made contact in the form of invisible ink on a banknote. Bobbing and weaving his way through Beirut, Saul manages to meet up with the source, Fatima Ali, first wife of a Hezbollah commander, who claims an attack on America is imminent but refuses to talk to anyone besides Carrie.

Brody has been elected to Congress and is doing a well-enough job to be shortlisted for a spot on the Vice President’s presidential ticket. But before he makes it official, the VP wants to know about any possible skeletons in Brody’s closet ... or garage. No doubt when you’re living a secret life as an Al Qaeda agent, the smaller lies and deception required of politics is a breeze.

Agent Galvez (Hrach Titizian) approaches Carrie at school about needing her help. When she gets home that evening, the pleas for help continue, this time from Saul. Justifiably, Carrie balks at the request, telling Saul that it’s her night to make dinner for the family and she has vegetable lasagna planned (cooking pasta — Virgil would be proud!).

Dinner will have to wait as Estes is outside, ready to brief her on Fatima, who doesn’t trust her intel with anyone besides Carrie. She needs to fly immediately to Beirut to meet with her. During their discussion, Estes rolls his eyes at Carrie’s anger over him having humiliated her and ruined her career. Clearly he’s still going to be a dick this season.

Back at work, Brody continues being stoked about the possibility of being Vice President until, like the devil coming to collect after a crossroads deal, one of Abu Nazir’s associates — juicy new character Roya Hamad — comes slinking into his office with an assignment: steal an encryption key from a safe in Estes’s office during tomorrow’s homeland security briefing and prove he’s still devoted to avenging Issa’s death.

A reluctant Brody complies, recording the information in his moleskine. In Brody’s homelife, daughter Dana (Morgan Saylor) still has a teenager’s bratty attitude. She’s transferred to a private school filled with the insufferable spawn of other politicians. During a morning Quaker meeting, when classmates are discussing the recent bombings in the Middle East, Dana a) shows up her fellow students by knowing the difference between Arabs and Persians and b) lets it slip that her father is Muslim.

That evening, Brody shows some backbone by admitting to his wife (Morena Baccarin), who is furious with Dana for having said her father is a Muslim in front of the entire school, that, yes, he is. Enjoying her role as politician’s wife, Jessica freaks out and ransacks the garage for evidence of his devotion, throwing his Koran on the ground. Later that night, Brody buries the holy book under a tree in the backyard, during which Dana creepily appears out of nowhere to help.

A flight to Cyprus and a box of Clairol hair dye later, Carrie is preparing for her Beirut mission and her prepper, Estes, and Saul share doubts about her competency. The mission is off to a shaky start, as she arrives in the city a bundle of nerves and self-doubt. As Carrie attempts to meet up with Saul, she’s followed around the market district by one of the men tailing Saul. Pursued through the bazaar, Carrie’s CIA instincts kick in and she manages to evade capture. We leave her grinning and triumphant.

As Carrie says midway through the premiere, Estes was right about her not belonging in the CIA, an organization best known for its fuck-ups, infiltration by moles, and recruitment of con men as informants. Carrie is the extraordinary talent mentioned in the epigraph. She is eccentric — possessing a preternatural ability to recognize patterns and predict behavior.

Carrie's obsessive tendencies may be pathological, but they also mean she tackles a puzzle to its resolution. She’s fluent in Arabic and able to negotiate her way around foreign cities with fluidity. She’s also a woman, which gives her an edge at recruiting other women as assets and better able to gain their trust, particularly that of women undervalued by fundamentalist sects and other agents. Just look at where it got her with Lynne Reed, the Imam’s wife Zahira, and now Fatima.

Helen Schumacher is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Brooklyn. She tumbls here and here. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here. She last wrote in these pages about recess.

"That's Who I Am" - Anna Graceman (mp3)

"You're A Mystery" - Anna Graceman (mp3)

In Which We Move To The Other Side Of The Range

This is the fifth in a series.

Nearly Every Recess

by HELEN SCHUMACHER

The playground at the elementary school was covered with a layer of woodchips, and during recess the game was to drag your foot through the chips creating a dirt pathway and modeling it into an elaborate series of lines and shapes until you had constructed a house. The labyrinthine structure then got embellished with rocks and weeds and we’d pick boyfriends to live there with us.

Our boyfriends were always The New Kids on the Block and, being low on the playground hierarchy, I always ended up with last pick — Donnie Wahlberg. Occasionally another girl would be feeling generous and share Joey with me.

The game soon lost its appeal. More and more I spent recesses with my new friend Anne, a slender girl with straw-colored hair, freckles, and a wide smile that her face had yet to grow into. Together we would build our own woodchip houses — ones that didn’t need boyfriends because we were Mary and Laura Ingalls and we were too busy darning Pa’s socks by lamplight, shaking locusts from our petticoats, and celebrating the end of the Long Winter by running around howling about the return of the Chinook winds to bother with NKOTB. Anne and I continued pretending to be the Ingalls sisters nearly every recess for the next four years.

The Little House on the Prairie books held a special appeal because we were growing up in Montana, an area steeped in frontier mythology. Imagining the hardships of settler life as we read our way through the Little House series added an element of adventure to living in the state’s rural grasslands — with its humble tourist attractions devoted to pioneers, mining towns turned ghost towns, landmarks dedicated to the Sioux Wars, and country landscape dotted with crumbling homesteads.

Out of school, Anne and I would dress in floral-print flannel nightgowns to perform farm chores like feeding her neighbor’s hens and collecting their eggs. We tried making recipes from the Little House Cookbook. Not even Anne’s dogs would eat our hardtack biscuits; the maple candies we made in the snow also didn’t turn out.

One Friday after school we built a claim shanty in her backyard with the intent of spending the weekend in it. However, the lopsided structure ended up just big enough for the two of us to sit in. We settled on merely eating dinner in the shanty, but that didn’t exactly work out either, as the scrap wood we used turned out to be infested with spiders. Pioneer life was hard.

Our attempts at homesteading may have failed but, playing the role, I felt like I was as resilient and independent as any member of the Ingalls family. The game was an exercise in grit that prepared us for the modern challenges of girlhood we would face together: detention, sadistic babysitters, Nellie Oleson-type bullies. Neither of us had a sister in real life, so we masqueraded as each other’s in play.

the author

There was of course some bickering, but I admired Anne. She was funny and imaginative and, like Laura Ingalls, adventurous and eager to prove anyone who doubted her wrong. As I progressed through the Little House series, I began to appreciate more and more these characteristics they shared and strove to be more like Anne. Without her, I would have been content sitting inside and reading about life on the banks of Plum Creek. Having a physical ease I lacked, Anne coaxed me into swimming in creeks and hopping over barbed wire fences.

The summer between fourth and fifth grade, Anne moved with her parents 70 miles east to the town of Big Timber on the other side of the Gallatin Range. At first we still saw each other a couple times a year: for birthdays, when her parents came back to visit friends, or if my mom wanted to do some shopping in the state’s metropolis of Billings, she would drop me off on her way. But by junior high these visits had ended. After Anne left, it took me several years to settle in with a new group of friends. Even then, it wasn’t until I moved away for college that I made another friend who meant as much to me and inspired me as she had.

Helen Schumacher is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Brooklyn. She tumbls here and here. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here. She last wrote in these pages about the opal ring.

"Heather" - Ponderosa (mp3)

"For Now I Am Born" - Ponderosa (mp3)