Citizen Spy COMMERCE and MASS CULTURE SERIES Justin Wyatt, Editor
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Citizen Spy COMMERCE AND MASS CULTURE SERIES Justin Wyatt, Editor Citizen Spy: Television, Espionage, and Cold War Culture Michael Kackman Hollywood Outsiders: The Adaptation of the Film Industry, 1913–1934 Anne Morey Robert Altman’s Subliminal Reality Robert T. Self Sex and Money: Feminism and Political Economy in the Media Eileen R. Meehan and Ellen Riordan, Editors Directed by Allen Smithee Jeremy Braddock and Stephen Hock, Editors Sure Seaters: The Emergence of Art House Cinema Barbara Wilinsky Walter Wanger, Hollywood Independent Matthew Bernstein Hollywood Goes Shopping David Desser and Garth S. Jowett, Editors Screen Style: Fashion and Femininity in 1930s Hollywood Sarah Berry Active Radio: Pacifica’s Brash Experiment Jeff Land Citizen Spy Television, Espionage, and Cold War Culture Michael Kackman Commerce and Mass Culture Series University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis • London An earlier version of chapter 2 was published as “Citizen, Communist, Counterspy: I Led 3 Lives and Television’s Masculine Agent of History,” Cinema Journal 38,no.1 (1998): 98–114. Copyright 1998 by the University of Texas Press. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission. Copyright 2005 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by the University of Minnesota Press 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290 Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520 http://www.upress.umn.edu Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kackman, Michael. Citizen spy : television, espionage, and cold war culture / Michael Kackman. p. cm. — (Commerce and mass culture series) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8166-3828-4 (hc : alk. paper) — ISBN 0-8166-3829-2 (pb : alk. paper) 1. Spy television programs—United States—History and criticism. I. Title. II. Series. PN1992.8.S67K33 2005 791.45'6—dc22 2005002138 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer. 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 For Darlene, who taught me to read This page intentionally left blank Contents Preface: Doing Television History ix Acknowledgments xv Introduction: The Agent and the Nation xvii 1. Documentary Melodrama: Homegrown Spies and the Red Scare 1 2. I Led 3 Lives and the Agent of History 26 3. The Irrelevant Expert and the Incredible Shrinking Spy 49 4. Parody and the Limits of Agency 73 5. I Spy a Colorblind Nation: African Americans and the Citizen-Subject 113 6. Agents or Technocrats: Mission: Impossible and the International Other 144 Conclusion: Spies Are Back 176 Notes 191 Index 221 Preface: Doing Television History This project was sparked by my interest in the peculiar cultural politics of the Cold War. In part, my fascination was marked by a sense of distance and won- der—the hyperbolic anti-Communism of the early s seemed so anachronis- tic as to be comically naïve. Television, of course, is central to this too-common assumption about the superiority and sophistication of the present. Shifting social norms, enhanced production values, the dated grammar of popular cul- ture, and today’s ubiquitous reruns and remakes all make s and s tele- vision seem quaint, its representations diminished, its politics more charming than prescient. But this tendency to contain the past through nostalgia and irony overlooks two interlocking principles that have shaped the development of this book. First, the cultural Cold War’s underlying questions about national identity and citizenship, and the privileged means of representing them, are very much with us today. We need look no further than the daily headlines to see deeply impassioned arguments about who or what qualifies as “American.” Next, while the past is gone and buried, history tethers it to the present. Our ability to recognize citizens and national subjects hinges on our mobilization of history—on an articulation of values, ideologies, and identities that together cohere around the idea of America. Television, this book argues, is central to both these issues. Television is difficult to make sense of historically. This seemingly omni- present medium might be described as an economic institution, a form of nar- rative entertainment, an electronic public sphere, a mechanism of globaliza- tion, a cultural forum, a domestic technology, or a marketing device—and each such choice would foreground different historiographic priorities. Television ix x Preface doesn’t offer easily isolable, discrete objects of study. Does one study a particu- lar program, an episode, a network, a studio, an advertising agency, an audi- ence, a star? The methods of textual analysis that film scholars adapted from literary criticism don’t quite fit newer media. Whereas a given film might be studied as a relatively bounded narrative, television is complicated by episodic seriality and what Raymond Williams described as flow: an ongoing stream of information, in which individual programs, commercial messages, news, and public service announcements collide and combine.1 And not only is television broadly intertextual, its texts are impermanent. While the historical significance of the most popular programs is disproportionately magnified by being pre- served in the electronic amber of cable network syndication, countless impor- tant broadcasts now survive only as written transcripts or as residues in other historical accounts. Similarly, the supporting materials (scripts, production notes, correspondence, and so on) that offer insights into the circumstances of production are often discarded. This is in part due to the fact that television generates a vast amount of material, but it is also a product of the general low esteem in which this medium is often held—both by audiences and producers. Ironically, because television is seemingly “everywhere,”much that is important about it is at risk of disappearing from the historical record. But just as television is ephemeral, so too is the past. Ultimately unknowable, a foreign country, the past lingers out of sight, conjured only in the histories we write.2 Hayden White suggests that the common assumption that crucial explana- tory facts lie dormant—in the archive, in memories, in some endless public record—like little nuggets eager to be found (a-ha!) is a beguiling fallacy. We’d like to think that history is a sage process of first gathering data, then stringing it together in the most natural, coherent way—as if filling in the pieces of a pre- cut jigsaw puzzle, or to a box. White insists that narrative comes first; facts only become visible when placed in a covering framework within which they are rendered factual.3 That’s not to say that history is arbitrary, but a host of assumptions—in the case of this book, about the development of the tele- vision industry, its place within a national and/or global culture, its relation- ships to other media artifacts and practices, and so on—lead toward certain kinds of facts and away from others. Furthermore, it is not only the historian’s narrative frameworks that shape this process; unspoken assumptions also guide those who (whether at the studio, the network, or the archive) had to select what Preface xi kinds of materials to keep. Many TV collections in highly respected archives consist solely of final drafts of scripts—a ringing endorsement of the singular value of the final literary product if there ever was one. Much rarer are collec- tions that include information that hints at the kinds of decisions (representa- tional and otherwise) that shaped the production process. As a result, it’s impossible, in this history or any other, to gather compre- hensive data that are completely consistent from program to program, producer to producer, and network to network. It’s also impossible to make a singular unified argument that conclusively encapsulates all aspects of every program discussed here. The data available vary from program to program; some pro- duction companies retained exhaustive notes regarding script and casting deci- sions, others multiple script revisions, still others vital external correspon- dence, and some kept only kinescopes and release prints. Few kept everything; some kept nothing. How could they know that historians would want to root through their garbage? (This is, of course, the charitable interpretation; per- haps they wanted to make sure that their detritus went safely to the landfill via the shredder. Concerns over intellectual property have made some copyright holders increasingly reluctant to allow scholars to peer into the machine.) This book is thus not what Carlo Ginzburg calls a serial history, a broad narrative examining that which is homogeneous and consistent in a search for an underlying unifying structure.4 In that sense, this isn’t a genre study. Though it is very much concerned with the aggregate accumulations of meanings in texts that share certain narrative preoccupations, it doesn’t attempt to explain the evolution or devolution of a form that exceeds, or preexists, its individual expressions. Nor is it what Foucault calls a total history, which “draws all phe- nomena around a single centre—a principle, a meaning, a spirit, a world-view, an overall shape.”5 Rather than the “polished surface” of total history, this book’s sympathies lie toward what Ginzburg calls microhistory, a mode of historical inquiry that moves between levels of analysis, and in which “the hypotheses, the doubts, the uncertainties became part of the narration; the search for truth [becomes] part of the exposition of the (necessarily incomplete) truth attained.”6 This isn’t to say that my selection of methods and objects of study is ran- dom or idiosyncratic, but to acknowledge that the book’s shifting modes of analysis are part a matter of what evidence was empirically available, and part a xii Preface matter of what historical traces opened up fruitful lines of inquiry about TV’s place within American popular culture.