CORNER OF DYSTOPIA AVENUE AND TRUMP LANE
Aspects of ‘The Plot Against America’ seem plausible and horribly familiar, writes
When Philip Roth published his dystopian revisionist World War 2 novel The Plot Against America in 2004, some commentators, above the objections of the author, couldn’t help seeing it as an allegory of the George W Bush era of US politics. As we now remember, the second Bush presidency marked for some a low point in US politics — an idiot, rich-boy puppet in the White House whose strings were pulled by a nefarious backroom group of hardline neo-conservatives and military hawks intent on using him to advance their international economic interests.
Roth’s book imagined a fictional version of the author’s own World War 2-era Jewish New Jersey family, ripped apart by a politically disastrous event that didn’t happen — the election of aviation hero, known Nazi sympathiser and anti-war cheerleader Charles Lindbergh to the highest office in the land. In Roth’s version of events, Lindbergh runs for office on an anti-war platform and publicly disavows his sympathy for the Hitler regime in Germany — only to set about implementing disturbing echoes of the Fuhrer’s anti-Jewish policies against the Jews of the US.
Roth repeatedly brushed aside comparisons between his revisionist fiction and liberal fears of the unhinged threats to freedom and rational thinking exhibited by the Bush administration. But before the end of his life in 2018, he begrudgingly accepted that perhaps there could be some similarities between the events of his novel and the election of Donald Trump.
In a fortunate and timely move, Roth signed off on an adaptation of The Plot Against
America to be created by The Wire’s David Simon and his longtime collaborator Ed Burns, which arrives now care of HBO as a necessary, elegantly crafted and carefully focused sixepisode observation of the effects of bigpicture politics on an ordinary family caught in their very real and terrifying consequences.
The family are renamed the Levins and when we first meet them, they’re happy, ordinary members of the tightknit Jewish community of Newark, New Jersey. Father Herman (Michael Spector) is a tough but fair, politically aware, secular hard-working insurance salesman. Mother Bess (Zoe Kazan) is a dutiful, sometimes anxious but kind mother and stay-at-home wife whose own mother is suffering from early onset dementia not helped by worries about the failure of her other daughter, Evelyn (Winona Ryder), to find a good Jewish husband and settle down.
The Levins’ two sons, Sandy (Caleb Malis) and Philip (Azhy Robertson) have little to worry about other than the prospect of one day living in a house where they have separate rooms. But as their Uncle Alvin (Anthony Boyle) reminds his brother, there are disturbing things afoot in the world of politics, and these will soon intrude on the family’s domestic dramas and bring the distant terrors of Hitler crashing onto the streets of suburbia.
As Lindbergh’s run moves from sideshow to main attraction, Alvin heads off to Canada to fight in the war, Herman tries to work out whether he and the family should also leave for Canada before the borders are closed and Aunt Evelyn finally finds a nice Jewish boy — the Lindbergh-sympathising, Southern-born Rabbi Lionel Bengelsdorf.
Bengelsdorf’s support of Lindbergh eventually drives a wedge between Evelyn and Beth and will have terrible consequences for not only the family but the Jewish population of the US at large.
Ever since his breakout show The Wire, Simon has had a talent for linking social policies and seismic shifts with their effects on ordinary people. Here, he foregoes examination of Lindbergh and other historically dodgy characters, like Henry Ford, in favour of a focus on the Levins as stand-ins for the hopes, fears and terrors of ordinary Americans thrown into a frying pan by the insanity of an out-of-control charismatic leader who has dangerous affiliations to some of the nastiest people on the planet. It’s not hard to imagine this scenario as a reality. The moral dilemmas posed by Roth’s material are similar to those faced by Americans living under the irrational flipflopping of the Trump era.
As Covid-19 locks us indoors, immersed in escapist entertainment, Simon and Roth remind us that sometimes we need to face our fears because sometimes the worst version of what we imagine can come horribly close to the truth.
The Plot Against America is on Showmax, with new episodes added every Monday night.
This will have terrible consequences for not only the family but the Jewish population of the US at large