A deadly game of stories inside stories, masks behind masks
You probably don’t need to be told about the less than cordial relationship that US society has with its immigrant members. Real life provides daily reminders. Even though the country itself is a plurinational entity built of and by immigrants, the prevailing attitude among the white people in power is that the rest of ethnicities are on permanent probation. In the new spy TV series The Copenhagen Test, that seemingly incurable paranoia in the American psyche is the shadow hanging over our protagonist Alexander, a son of Chinese immigrants who has done more than should be asked of anyone to demonstrate his patriotic loyalty to the US, but who somehow keeps having to earn the country’s trust again and again. This is the story of a good man begging for some basic respect from a system that doesn’t deserve him.
At some point in the past, Alexander was in the US Army. Because immigrants are never done proving their allegiance, during an overseas rescue mission he was subjected to a secret test: there was only one available seat left in a helicopter, and he had to choose between saving a foreign child or an American adult. He had received explicit orders to prefer the American, but he took the correct option (it’s not the option the test prefers, but it’s indisputably the correct one): he saved the child. This moment has cascading consequences for his career. Because he was falsely led to believe he left someone to die, he lives with PTSD and repeated panic attacks, which he hides from his superiors. Because he supposedly didn’t show enough loyalty to the US, he’s been removed from field missions and assigned to an office job. And because his Chinese parents anxiously raised him to be more American than baseball and hot dogs, he feels like an impostor.
So we have a protagonist with more than enough inner complexity to lead the show. And that’s only the backstory; we still haven’t gotten to the part where an enemy faction puts nanobots in his head to turn him into a live streaming camera. That doesn’t help his chances now that he’s applying for a spy job.
Against all odds, he gets the job, at a super-extra-ultra-secret agency that watches the other US agencies (we’re told it was created during the Bush Sr. presidency, which means the immediate context for the project must have been the fallout of the Iran-Contra scandal). Alexander’s bosses are aware of the nanobots in his head, because he’s a walking radio emitter, and instead of kicking him out, which would alert the enemy, they decide to use him as a triple agent: he’s working for the US, but everything he sees and hears is still being broadcast 24/7 at the enemy, but he’s going to broadcast an edited version of his life in order to lure and catch the enemy. He’s not 100% sure his bosses aren’t planning to eliminate him in the end, and his bosses aren’t 100% sure he wasn’t complicit in hacking his own head, but they’re going to need to act like they trust each other if they want to reach any solution.
What follows is a fascinating pantomime, meticulously designed between Alexander and his bosses to give misleading information to the enemy without alerting either the enemy or the rest of the spies at the agency. And the architect of this believable fiction is a brilliant character: Samantha, an English lit graduate who was previously hired by the agency to concoct cover stories and predict threat scenarios. If you’re wondering why spies would need the services of a dramaturge, consider this: when you’re a spy, your entire life is a performance, and you need to be alert to subtextual clues in everyone else’s performance. You need to prepare against the most outlandish villain plans and push the right buttons to influence others’ behavior. Spycraft is about controlling information delivery and ascertaining human motivations, and that’s exactly where a creative writer excels.
So The Copenhagen Test isn’t the type of spy story that boasts shiny gadgets, cocktail suits, or acrobatic stunts. Its plot is more contained, less reliant on spectacle and more demanding of the viewer’s attention. Under Samantha’s direction, Alexander becomes a decoy of himself, letting his eyes and ears perceive only what his bosses curate, while being careful not to let the enemy notice that he knows he’s been hacked, or that his bosses know. As the story progresses, he starts suspecting that even his bosses are hiding stuff from him, so he adds another layer of pretense: he has to do all of the above plus conduct his own investigation without letting his bosses notice that he’s doing it.
With me so far? Great, because that’s only half of the complications.
The other half is another brilliant character: Michelle, an infiltration specialist who was originally hired by the agency to play the role of love interest for Alexander. But she has her own agenda in this whole mess, and she has ways of communicating with Alexander outside of either faction’s notice, so the visible faces of their relationship multiply thusly: the corny romance story they enact for the enemy’s eyes, the simultaneous digging into his loyalty that she does for the agency, the private messages they exchange when they’re in a place that blocks his head’s signal, and the extra level of subterfuge that she deploys in those moments, when she believes that he believes that she’s really on his side.
The result of this kabuki-grade dance of innuendo and misdirection is that Alexander, Samantha and Michelle play at all times the parallel roles of scriptwriter and actor and spectator. As I often say on this blog, the best stories are those about stories. And The Copenhagen Test uses this example of a man’s loyalty being under constant test to suggest a uncomfortable idea: if there’s no difference between being a patriot and acting like one, then patriotism is simply a performance, and our identities as citizens and as political subjects are stories we continually tell each other. The whole edifice of society and its reciprocal responsibilities rests on a sustained belief reenacted daily.
The show gives us a dark parallel of this idea in the figure of the villain, whom we meet rather early in the season. He was a spy from the communist bloc in the ’80s, who betrayed his country for the promise of immigration to the US, but was discarded once he was no longer useful. Once again we see the theme of a society that weaponizes its membership: whereas the American government has failed Alexander by refusing to believe he’s American enough, it also failed the villain by luring him into believing he could be. This self-sabotaging pattern on the part of the US is also related to the loyalty test in Alexander’s backstory: the rules of the test are based on the unquestioned assumption that American citizenship endows a human life with greater inherent worth.
That, in a nutshell, is the conceptual trap that makes American exceptionalism possible: the belief that people’s worth can be given and removed, instead of just acknowledged. It’s the lie that Alexander still accepts, the motivation that drives all of his mistakes: the promise of a society where people don’t aspire to be respected, but to be usable. Alexander’s parents are perpetually stressed about not coming off as true Americans, so they overcorrect to the point of self-negation. His bosses don’t care if he behaves morally or if he hates himself for the choice they forced on him years ago; they only care about how much use can be made of him. And as long as he agrees that that’s the proper way for the land of the free to frame his personhood, he won’t be free.
Even in a healthy society, there’s a degree to which each of us must play a public role to convince the rest that we’re good and reliable. But in the uniquely spectacle-poisoned US, the show must go on. People like Alexander (or like Samantha and Michelle, who also are nonwhite) aren’t allowed to truly experience their lives, only to perform them—look American, sound American, seem American. Because the test doesn’t end; because in a society built on suspicion, the tools of spycraft become necessities of survival; because if you can be certain of one thing in these uncertain times, it’s that there’s always someone watching.
Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.
POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.
