by Gloria Origgi and Ariel Colonomos. Published on the Berlin Review of Books, december 17th 2012.
“And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make
you free.”
John
8:32
This passage of the Bible is inscribed on the marble walls of the lobby of the CIA
Headquarters in Langley, Virginia. After passing through heavy security, this
is probably the first thing visitors entering the building would see. Homeland – the 2012 award-winning American TV series – Obama’s favourite, we are
being told – raises one important question: What is, then, the price to be paid for
knowing such truth?
“I have never
been so sure and so wrong”. This line
in the mouth of Carrie – a manic bipolar CIA officer determined to stop
Nicholas Brody, a former Marine and prisoner of war, who has been released from
Iraq after eight years of torture and has been “turned” by Al-Qaeda – is the
quintessence of the whole series, now in its second season.
Homeland brings together two essential
dimensions of truth and identity, in a breathtaking superposition of identity
of the self and political identity. The two main characters – Carrie and Brody
– have both multiple identities. Carrie goes through phases of mania and
depression. At the peaks of her condition – when she is hyperactive or utterly
dejected – she delivers essential truths about the identity of her counterpart,
Brodie, and about the future of the United States.
Brodie is Carrie’s enemy and her raison d’être. As such, naturally, he becomes her
lover. Brodie is an equally ambiguous character. He has been turned, yet not
completely: as such, he is a classic case of double allegiance. He is a congressman and yet is ready to blow
himself up in a room where the top US military and the vice-president are
gathered. Brodie is the reflection of the fantasies of the West, whose patriots
fear being invaded from within by their natural enemies: Muslim
fundamentalists. Last but not least, Brodie is also bisexual, another fear of
the “enemy within”, i.e. the deep drives of the unconscious we all have to deal
with. Believe it or not (for anyone who has not watched the show, this might
seem a bit of a stretch), Brodie has been sexually ‘turned’ by US number one
public enemy, Abu Nazir – a fancy Bin Laden.
There is no truth without ambivalence.
This is the striking message carried by Homeland.
Heroes are also traitors, and masters
of intelligence are also delusional.
Yet, there is something special in the way in which ambivalence is staged here:
the essential dramatic texture of the whole story is based on the fundamental
ambivalence not only of the characters, but of the values they embody and of
the emotions they solicit in us. As if the series was able to broadcast the
slow but inevitable loss of the monopoly of truth – the Good Truth, the Right Truth, the one we attain through the
appropriate methods – which America is facing today.
Carrie is a modern oracle. Her
outstanding ability to track the truth is invaluable, and her bosses at the CIA
know this very well. Yet, her methods are sometimes odd, based on intuition
instead of evidence, and her style of inquiry too disrespectful of rules. She
allows herself to make unauthorized moves in order to come up with results,
thereby putting herself and the CIA at risk. At the same time, she is a very
attractive woman, with a restless mind of rare subtlety.
Brody is the mirror image of Carrie’s
ambivalent truth: he has actually been turned by Abu Nazir, but now that he is
back, he hesitates, goes back and forth, from the horrible tortures he
underwent in Iraq, to the memories of the discovery of a new world of values
with Abu Nazir, who protected him, helped him and became his lover. His being
turned touches upon all the dimensions of his life: psychological, sexual,
political and religious. When – at the beginning of season 2 – his wife
discovers that he prays as a Muslim, she exclaims in horror: “This just can’t happen!”.
Brody elicits in us mixed feelings: we
are horrified by the intolerant and narrow-minded reaction of his wife, who
cannot acknowledge another religious credo, but are also horrified when we
discover that he is actually ready to kill the vice-president. Yet, his reasons
for losing faith in his country are the killing of civilians, including
children – notably, of Abu Nazir’s son.
Brody’s truth is unstable, Carrie’s
truth is volatile, and the audience is trapped in their ambivalent posture, going
back and forth between heroism and cowardice, between objective truth and
intuition, between reasons that are too many in number, yet seem all in all
plausible.
What is shocking to an audience of our
generation is that, for the first time, a U.S. TV show puts on stage the
duplicity of truth, as if discriminating between good and evil were a long by gone
endeavour. And this state of permanent moral ambivalence permeates the psyche
of the audience to the point of exhaustion: we simply cannot bear such an
uncertain world. We oscillate between the two sides of the truth as the plot unfolds
through a series of spectacular turns and twists that are the mirror of this
feeling of instability.
Carrie and Brodie are
imprisoned in their double truths and are looking for a way out. They disturb
the certainties of the people around them. They also dissolve the simplistic
commitment to “The Truth” and “The Good” of the other characters. Indeed, the other
characters are monoliths by comparison. Thus, Carrie’s mentor is a (good
Jewish) father figure, Saul Berenson, who has just broken up with his wife, an
Indian woman, whom we see (towards the middle of season 1) leaving her husband
to return “home”. There was no place to stay for her in Saul’s patriotic and
monastic life in Washington DC. Brodie’s wife is middle-class America at its
best, with all its limitations. Her truth is simple and transparent. She
strives for stability and a linear career that will land her husband in the
White House (and, as for herself, will ultimately allow her to host charity
dinners with the wives of other DC power brokers).
The uncertainty of the global order
becomes the psychical instability of its subjects, in a sort of “collective
manic-depression” in which we can no longer choose the right course of action,
but can only oscillate permanently between a two-sided truth. Ironically,
during the Cold War, bipolarity was used to refer to the stability of the
balance of power that ruled the relation between the Soviet Union and the
United States. In the post-9/11 era, bipolarity is internalized in the deep
instability of the self, which reflects the trouble relation between the US and
its ‘devils du jour’, both internal and external.
Homeland reminds us that the moral and political
order of our world and its cognitive/epistemic order are impossible to
disentangle. The ‘homeland’ that we all miss
today is the homeland of a simple objective truth about how things are and how
they should be. A truth that used to reassure us and made our decisions and
actions grounded on a firm footing. As Odysseus already knew, outside our lost
homeland, there is hell, permanent doubt and, in the end, loss.
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