A series that attempts to re-rehabilitate a defunct portrayal of government over-reach, torture, and invasive spying through its dishonest re-casting of those that do them as hip, honest patriots who listen to jazz.xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

This was a a series that started with promise. It began to explore some interesting dynamics between truth and untruth, honesty and dishonesty, and the performance of a role confronted with the ability to be something new in ambiguous situations. The moments in the first few episodes, when Carrie encounters Brody (for instance outside the church where he is going to a support group while she is surveilling him) are really interesting. We're unsure whether the characters are playing a role to avoid discovery or are legitimately acting according to their intimate feelings for one-another: saying something nice, flattering the other, coming closer comes-up against the realization that there may actually be something more to the interaction, that maybe this moment isn't just a time to deceive a 'target' or perform a role. The way the series was able to inter-weave these different plot-lines, how it was able to preserve the ambiguity of each of them so that when one narrative encountered the other it was never quite clear what actually was going on made the interactions interesting, made them into real relationships. Unfortunately, though, this only lasts for, perhaps, 5-episodes of the first season (until the moment when Brody is found to have broken into a house in the night, when he reveals his complicity in the terrorist plot we've basically discounted). After this point, the series becomes absurdly contrived and filled with stilted, empty performances of a narrative that's just simply gone off the rails.

However, the reasons for abandoning the series goes well beyond a simple critique of the series' production. More important is that it becomes an attempt to rehabilitate public perceptions of the CIA. By constantly presenting viewers with a CIA with heart, made-up of real humans, flawed and in-need themselves, just like everyone else; a CIA where classified information can be shared and the bureaucratic 'rules of engagement' compromised once the needs the country reaches a point where it becomes a matter of personal, citizen grievance; by making us feel sympathy for Carrie in an operating theater about to (wrongly) undergo electro-shock therapy and to want her version of the truth to come out to vindicate her so she doesn't have to undergo barbaric torture. It's exactly this that, when you take it in the context of the reality beyond the film, that it becomes toxic propaganda. Because the reality actually is that we're living in a post-9/11 world where surveillance has reached absurd proportions, beyond anything dreamed of in Stalin's Russia, in the East German Stasi: PRISM and all of the other programs revealed by Edward Snowdon tell us that unbelievable amounts of our private information, communications, phone calls, text-messages, emails, internet use is being swept up by the NSA and the CIA into databases to be processed by complex algorithms. No specific warranted threats, but just the bulk collection of private information for processing. There is a serious debate going on in the world, involving NSA spying on allied countries, on its own citizens, on the elimination of any presumption to privacy. And the reality of the arguments taking place are that this collection and these violations have not made the country any safer, have not led to the foiling of any single terrorist attack, but, due to the reduction of standard, on-the-ground policing and investigation, have made it more difficult to determine, from all this ocean of collected data, what is credible and what is not.

Nowhere in this series is this approach questioned. In fact, it is constantly reinforced and justified by what happens. Not only is it justified, but we are made to believe that those collecting all this information have nothing but the absolute best interests of the country at heart. And everyone, at every moment, decides to cooperate only once they see this. The wife of the imam, for instance, who doesn't want to jeopardize her role in the Muslim community but who cooperates because 'its her country too and she doesn't want to see it destroyed'. The series mobilizes the entire laundry list of justifications for warrantless wiretapping and government surveillance over-reach. Everything is here. Its conspicuous, in fact, that nothing is missing, no opportunity to put one of these justifications into play to rationalize some act of illegal surveillance is passed-up.

Why doesn't an ostensibly intelligent series introduce even one of the many alternate narratives out there, even indicate they exist or provide us with an avatar within the film for their expression? The film is claustrophobic in the sense that it circulates entirely in a dated, dying and basically discredited logic. How about the narrative whereby security is increased through demilitarization? That there is, in fact, some basis for the attacks the U.S. Sustained on 9/11 and, particularly now after 15-years of the global 'war on terror', even more reason for the production of anti-western terrorists from out of the battlegrounds of Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan--of ISIS, of Al-Nusra, or any of the countless other factions that have emerged from out of the sea of failed states in the region. The logic in this series is the logic of those that would not pursue peace with Iran, who want to 'carpet bomb' them into the Stone Age. Its a logic of people so fearful that they've forgotten that an essential element to any relationship where both parties is equal is the always present risk that the other party will abandon any deal and start to work against us. This is always the risk we take, whether its with a romantic partner or a country we enter into diplomatic dialogue with. This is the reality of human relationships (except for abusive, controlling people with no grasp on reality). Basically, the series is mired in an alternate reality where the past, at least, 5 years and, at most, 15-years simply haven't happened. Its a cynical reality where those who've produced it seem to think it's still possible to articulate this perspective with not only a straight face, but a cool, hip, ultra-Patriotic one.

So, when faced with a that series compels us, in the most cunning and sinister way to reconsider this entire objective history as merely the product of micro-political human-relationships, to see the whole macro political framework reflected and reinscribed into the petty and particular of the day-to-day such that this totally discredited narrative becomes revalorized according to an individualized ethics of a moral person's motivation, our response, as viewers has got to be: 'no thanks, enough is enough: there's too much actually good film and television being made now to simply lap-up what seems to be, on the surface, a jazzy, cool, hip, well-made television show whose topic is among the most important and relevant of our time'.

The Miles Davis that scores so many sad and lonely empty offices and provides the soundtrack to all the illegal spying in the film is decidedly not cool. The dogma-style incorporation of low-grade hand-held camera-work in the finished product is not indie, does not make this expensive Showtime production some small independent success, does not imply the expression of some valuable alternative point of view. Clair Danes does not make the CIA cool because her character acts so multicultural towards Muslims, speaks Arabic, understands their customs. Her willingness to pursue criminality in the government while committing her own violations systematically does not make her, on balance, a good gal. The poster of a trumpet being played on her wall does not make her creative. Just because one makes a series that wraps these people up in an entirely alternate and seemingly cool reality does not make it so.

Essentially, in Homeland one is confronted with the necessity to resist the allure and glamour of the cinematic, and its power to tie viewers' desires to a (fundamentally dishonest) world-view by looking beyond its surface sheen to the dull, dreary facts of life and recent history.