9. We Can Feel The Unsettling Forces That Invade Our Relationships
In ways similar to The Americans, Homeland effectively creates drama on the most intimate of levels. The politics of surveillance, covert governmental operations, and the dangers of terrorist operations are magnified and intensified in the personal struggles of the show's many characters. In season 1, Nicholas and Jessica's marriage rests on a knife-edge; throughout the series Saul and his wife Mira experience similar bumps in the road (including Mira's affair in season 3); in season 3, much to the chagrin of many fans of the show, Dana Brody's inability to deal with the stresses of her father's actions and all of the associated bad press leads to more estrangement with her mother; and, in what is the most pivotal of the relationships on the show, Carrie and Brody's feelings for one another vacillate between love and anger, trust and suspicion. While many of these intimate struggles seem at least a bit farfetched, we can nonetheless relate to them in a Shakespearean sense of their being analogues to our own lives.
Scott A. Lukas
Contributor
Scott A. Lukas has taught anthropology and sociology Lake Tahoe Community College for sixteen years and in 2013 was Visiting Professor of American Studies at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, Germany. He has been recognized with the McGraw-Hill Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching of Anthropology by the American Anthropological Association (2005), the California Hayward Award for Excellence in Education (2003), and a Sierra Arts Foundation Artist Grant Program Award in Literary–Professional (2009). In 2006, he was a nominee to the California Community College Board of Governors. He is the author/editor of The Immersive Worlds Handbook (2012), Theme Park (2008), The Themed Space: Locating Culture, Nature, and Self (2007), Fear, Cultural Anxiety, and Transformation: Horror, Science Fiction, and Fantasy Films Remade, (co-edited with John Marmysz, 2009), Recent Developments in Criminological Theory (co-edited with Stuart Henry, 2009), and Strategies in Teaching Anthropology (2010). His book Theme Park was recently translated into Arabic. He appeared in the documentary The Nature of Existence and has provided interviews for To the Best of Our Knowledge, The Huffington Post UK, The Daily Beast, The Washington Post, and Caravan (India).
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