More than 15 years have passed since the late Philip Roth published his dystopian semi-autobiographical novel, The Plot Against America. Only now has Roth’s powerful speculative fiction of 1940s America under a Nazi-sympathetic Charles Lindbergh administration been adapted for the screen, in a recent HBO miniseries. The adaptation is at once overdue and unfortunate. The story’s imagery — of swastikas adorning flags at American state dinners, of FBI agents harassing children on the artfully reconstructed streets of working-class Newark — is among its most potent tools for evocative storytelling, and the book should have been adapted years ago. But, perhaps inevitably, it has been repurposed as agitprop against the lurking fascist in the Oval Office, saturated with allusions to our current time and place.
Indeed, rather than producing a timeless warning of how structural and cultural bulwarks can fail in the face of charismatic totalitarianism, David Simon and Ed Burns have rendered The Plot Against America another Resistance screech against the Republican Party. Their production is beautifully presented and acted with great depth (Zoe Kazan particularly shines), but it is marred by this intentional timing. Burns’s admission that “if Hillary would have won the election, we probably wouldn’t be doing Plot Against America” reveals the problem. Burns and Simon begin to look less like deft handlers of a great piece of literature, and more like blinkered ideologues who happen to be good at making TV shows.
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