The Americans was a quality show, but it also was an example of a strangely American fear that even the most assimilated immigrant is secretly a spy or traitor. It's related to the root of a lot of American horror/thriller storytelling, what King called "Watching for the mutant"
There's an idea you see in a lot of horror movies from the 50's and 60's, that everything is just fine until THEY show up. Who THEY are doesn't really matter as much as their subversion of the norm. THEY aren't loyal because THEY don't truly seek to assimilate.
It's fascinating because this view takes any divergence as evidence of disloyalty, and it can be applied to any minority group. Anyone can be the mutant. Are you insufficiently patriotic? Too brown? Too gay? Or are you a premature anti-fascist? Anything can be suspect.
This manifests in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, of course, but it’s also there in I Was A Teenage Werewolf of even The Thing From Another World, this fear that order and security are threatened by any divergence
To me, the remake, Carpenter's The Thing perfectly encapsulates this American fear that people are lying to us about SOMETHING and it makes them a THING, a THEY, and if they're allowed they'll spread that THING to others. It makes the subtext text, so to speak.
I think about this and the roots of American hatred at immigrants all the time. I grew up in Rhode Island in the 80's, a state which was heavily settled by Italian/Irish immigrants and their children. Hell, look at my last name. I'm the child of such immigrant's children.
I realized when reading Lovecraft that I literally AM the monster Lovecraft feared. I'm the child of people he considered insufficiently white. I was raised in a religion he found abhorrent and cultish. I am not an Anglo-Saxon Protestant, and my whiteness is derived.
I mean, think about the horror in his stories at the idea of these people - MY people! He made an Irish immigrant Church in Providence the home of the Starry Wisdom cult. He grew up at the turn of the century, and saw everyone I'm descended from as invaders out to ruin his home.
It's fitting to me that Lovecraft's work has become so inextricably linked to fandom in America because his chief obsessions - a fear of the other, a revulsion at those he considered insufficiently pure to belong - are very much fandom's obsessions. Gatekeeping is Lovecraftian.
I am a product of a society that sees itself through the lens of immigration, assimilation and replacement in a way other societies do not. I have no idea what it's like to grow up Chinese or Russian or French or Japanese, I don't know what their particular racial stresses are
But looking back over American history, you can see from a very early period this terror of the insufficiently pure coming among us. It's affected us forever. Gerrymandering is well over a century old, it was used to help ram Prohibition through.
We have been elevating the right people (white, properly Western European, worshiping the right version of Christianity) and suppressing the mutant (everyone else) in America for actual centuries. The country is 242 and we've been at it since we signed the Treaty of Paris.
What amazes me is seeing how we replicate this, how the children and grandchildren of immigrants, people with last names like Arpaio and Guiliani who were barely considered human by many Americans in the 1910's and 20's, are now boisterously trying to do this to others.
If you're of Irish descent? Entire political parties were started because your ancestors were seen as subhuman. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Know_Noth… They wanted to force them back to a country where over a million had died of hunger. They wanted you not to even exist. That was in the 1850's.
This mindset exists in other countries, of course. It's just interesting to me how our fiction can serve as a kind of reversed map of our obsessions and a really key American obsession is this idea of conformity and purity, of being "a real American" and not rocking the boat.
Don't be too foreign. Don't keep your alien customs. (Irish people, Italian people, the fact that you liked to drink was seen as an alien custom.) Don't be too different. I see a lot of the backlash against LGBTQ people in this same context. "Why are you forcing this on us?"
"Why does X character have to be gay?" As if your identity is somehow an imposition. Because to them, it is. It's not conforming to the established norms, in their eyes. And they've been trained to watch for the mutant, to reject anything that isn't right, isn't purely "us".
Gatekeeping - the "You're not a real fan if you're not exactly like us" is just another example of a peculiarly strident xenophobia that America has always struggled with, from the Know Nothings to Lovecraft to now. And each generation recontextualizes it.
