“I sometimes fear that
people think that fascism arrives in fancy dress
worn by grotesques and monsters
as played out in endless re-runs of the Nazis.Fascism arrives as your friend.
It will restore your honour,
make you feel proud,
protect your house,
give you a job,
clean up the neighbourhood,
remind you of how great you once were,
clear out the venal and the corrupt,
remove anything you feel is unlike you…”
– Michael Rosen
The kind of drip-drip, softly-softly approach to fascism Rosen describes is something The Plot Against America depicts perfectly. The show follows a Jewish family in the 1940s, so it’s hardly their friend, but nonetheless it doesn’t immediately jump to massive Triumph Of The Will-style rallies, jackboots, and invading Poland. It’s a far more insidious beast, one where you could almost wonder what all the fuss is about right up until the point when it’s too late – and, sure enough, more than a few characters in the show do just that.
Still, the US falls to fascism? Sounds like they’re making a heavy-handed point about a certain American President, ho ho ho – no, that’s not what this is. For one thing, it’s based on a book from 2004, the Bush II years (take what you want from that). For another, it follows in the fine tradition of alternate-history works like It Can’t Happen Here and All The King’s Men in which America becomes a dictatorship. Both of those had thinly disguised versions of Huey Long becoming President, rather than Charles Lindbergh, although The Plot Against America gives a shout-out to Long’s pal Father Charles Coughlin, an absolutely rabid anti-semite.
In its close-in focus on one family, The Plot Against America consistently denies us what you might call the ‘Hollywood’ version of the World War II years. Even when wayward nephew Alvin (Anthony Boyle) skips the country and goes to Canada to sign up and kill some Nazis, there are no battlefield scenes, no whizz-bang gunfights – that sort of thing is only for the newsreels.
Likewise, I had gone into this halfway expecting a hammy, bombastic Charles Lindbergh – but in fact, Lindy is practically ethereal. His wife actually ends up a greater onscreen presence. And Lindy’s other major claim to fame, the much-publicised kidnapping of his infant son, doesn’t even come up until some highly murky circumstances very late in the game.
In a world of cartoon Hitlers ranting and raving, this might seem like an odd choice, but it makes more sense when you consider creator David Simon’s propensity for trying to grapple with society as a whole. The approach of having Lindbergh as symptom, not cause, seems to mirror Terry Pratchett’s suggestion that “the dictator is merely the tip of the whole festering boil of social pus from which dictators emerge – shoot him and there’ll be another one along in a minute. Shoot him too? Why not shoot everyone and invade Poland?”
(And sure enough, the Lindbergh administration has the even more virulent Henry Ford waiting in the wings. While the real-life Lindy spied on Nazi Germany on America’s behalf, Ford was an outright admirer of Hitler.)
As said, Simon came to fame with The Wire dealing with vast, impersonal societal forces, so the decision to focus on one family may seem like an odd one – or maybe not. Those forces are still there, bubbling away in the background, and viewing them through such a limited lens (as opposed to the wide-ranging, God’s-eye view of Simon’s other works) perversely makes them all the more terrifying. When things do eventually come to a head, as of course they must, there’s a feeling of grim inevitability to it all, that this is just the other shoe dropping.
The contemporary viewer, knowing full well what WWII wrought, may well spend large chunks of The Plot Against America screaming at the screen, as one screams at teens in horror flicks to just turn the lights on or get out of the house altogether. Even the characters who know that fascism is bad news – and some of the older ones explicitly remember the pogroms of Tsarist Russia – seem, from the outside, horrifyingly complacent. Most limit it to grumbling about the news until the government’s on the point of rounding people up.
Never mind dividing the country, though – what’s particularly upsetting is that Lindbergh’s ascension manages to divide the Levin family. This isn’t simply a matter of them being pro- or anti-Lindbergh, but one of increased pressures splitting open the existing fault lines. Most obvious is the rift between Alvin and his surrogate father, the Levin patriarch Herman (Morgan Spector), although there’s some quietly stronger performances from Zoe Kazan and Winona Ryder as the women of the family.
Although Ryder’s lately gotten a lot of profile as an onscreen mother in Stranger Things, here it’s Kazan in that role, giving a nerve-wracking performance as someone trying desperately to both be a good mother and keep it together herself. Her highest point may be turning a simple phone call into one of the most terrifying scenes in the whole thing – you’ll know which this is when you see it.
Ryder’s character is shacking up with John Turturro’s Rabbi Bengelsdorf, who with his Southern accent and Confederate ancestry (speaking of dividing the country) is perhaps telegraphed a little too hard as a Quisling-type. But it’s worth remembering that Vidkun Quisling was tried and executed as a collaborator, and as much as Bengelsdorf is the same kind of villain-by-association, he’s also a somewhat tragic figure – particularly as we the audience already know what kind of hostile forces he’s bumbling into collaboration with.
Despite all the horrors on show, the most emotionally affecting moments of The Plot Against America are – as with The Wire – tiny, existential victories, moments when individuals manage to do good in the face of overwhelming external pressures. There’s one particular moment when the older son, Sandy, treats the nebbish eternal victim Seldon more gently than you’d expect any red-blooded 13-year-old to behave. Against a grim backdrop like this, you must take what you can get, but the way it’s presented makes it work – there’s no schmaltz to it, even a slight air of desperation, but this serves to make it more realistic and less of a performance.
The miniseries ends on an ambiguous note where the original Philip Roth book didn’t. This, if anything, is the most didactic part of The Plot Against America, that it’s never simply a matter of the fight against dictatorship being ‘over’. In an interview about the show, Simon quotes his own father as saying “democracy, and freedom, by extension, can never be completely won…freedom can be lost and lost quickly, and all you have to do is stop fighting for it”. It’s not quite at the level of suddenly pointing towards camera and telling the audience ‘the choice is YOURS!’, but it’d be a rare viewer who doesn’t take something along those lines from it.
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