Winona’s FLIGHT OF FANTASY
Famed aviator Charles Lindbergh as US president? It could have happened, and a new show with Winona Ryder imagines the fascist hell that might have followed
The opening scenes of new drama series The Plot Against America start gently enough. It’s June 1940 in Newark, New Jersey, and on the sunny streets children are marking out play areas in chalk while pinafore-wearing mums chat on doorsteps before going into their neat suburban homes to prepare dinner. Thousands of miles away in Europe the Second World War may be well underway, but you can barely feel its ominous presence here.
Yet these scenes of community harmony will not last long. Based on the 2004 Philip Roth novel of the same name, this compelling six-episode drama starring Winona Ryder poses the age-old question ‘What if?’, imagining a world in which the real-life aviation hero Charles Lindbergh defeats Franklin D Roosevelt in the 1940 presidential elections. A xenophobic populist elected on a ticket of antiUS involvement in the war, President Lindbergh turns the nation towards fascism and anti-Semitism, something the viewer sees through the eyes of the working-class Levin family — Herman, an insurance agent and an opinionated socialist, his wife Bess, brother Monty and sons Philip and Sandy. They experience open bigotry on the street first, then official singling-out from the powers-that-be in Washington.
This central premise may seem unlikely but the drama, which also features John Turturro as Lionel
Bengelsdorf, a rabbi who becomes a key figure in Lindbergh’s administration, is rooted in some historical reality. In 1927, aged just 25, Lindbergh had achieved global fame by making the first solo transatlantic flight, yet his renown was horribly compounded five years later when his infant son, Charles Jr, was kidnapped and murdered in what the American media called ‘the crime of the century’.
The Lindberghs went into exile in Europe, from where they returned home in 1939, Lindbergh apparently heavily influenced by the politics he’d witnessed there.
By then, this all-American hero had already attracted intense criticism for accepting a medal from Nazi military and political leader Hermann Goering, and he proved a vocal supporter of non-American intervention in the war.
It is against this backdrop that Roth, who died in 2018, formulated his story.
Viewers may see his account of a celebrity-turned-politician winning the presidency on a platform of popular fearmongering eerily prophetic. That is the view of the show’s co-creator David Simon — the man responsible for the cult series The Wire — who calls it ‘a story of an American dystopia’.
‘It seems startlingly prescient in that it anticipates a politician who seizes upon a simple message and is able to activate the worst fears and impulses of a significant number of Americans,’ he says.
It’s a view echoed by Winona Ryder, who plays Herman Levin’s sister-in-law Evelyn Finkel.
‘The fear of “the other”, what’s happening at the [US/Mexico] border, all of that is so outrageous and I think the last few years have been a mind-boggling nightmare in so many ways,’ she says. ‘A lot of this has been weighing on all of our minds.’
Kathryn Knight n The Plot Against America starts on Tuesday at 9pm on Sky Atlantic. Episodes are available from Tuesday on Now TV and Sky On Demand.