The Plot Against America, David Simon’s magnificent anti-Trump alternate history

Adapting a novel by Philip Roth, the author of The Wire wonders about America’s fascist potential.

It’s metronomic: after having put an end to each of its world-series (The Wire, Treme, The Deuce), David Simon continues with a mini-series of 6 or 7 episodes: Generation Kill in 2008, Show Me a Hero in 2015, The Plot Against America today. The form is shorter, collected, but these “minis” are in reality just as complex, bushy and worked as the river sagas to which they succeed. It is also a question here, again and again, of recounting a handful of human existences in an infinity of details, of making us smell the air of a parcel of territory, a piece of American history and geography. . If the arrival of The Plot Against America, a few months after the end of The Deuce (completed last October), is therefore in line with the logic of the inextinguishable appetite for fiction and the insane productivity of its author, the real surprise comes from the fact that David Simon is drinking here from a new source for him.

Simon’s horizon, as we know, is journalistic. He comes from there (from Baltimore Sun), only knows how to create from reality, uses fiction to report on the world, and, if possible, to change it. But he also always took care to surround himself with novelists (Richard Price, Dennis Lehane, George Pelecanos…) and his masterpiece, The Wire, fed like few others the idea that US TV series were the “great American novel” of today. The Plot Against America offers for the first time to Simon the opportunity to openly confront this mythical idea of ​​the “great american novel”. In the most frontal way possible: by adapting one.

The one, in this case, written by Philip Roth in 2004, The Plot Against America, an alternate history that imagined what would have happened if Charles Lindbergh, aviator adored by the crowds and notorious anti-Semite, had won the 1940 presidential election against Roosevelt and had been able, in the process, to conclude a non-aggression pact with Germany Nazi and set up a policy of discrimination against the Jewish community. A crazy derailment of history, witnessed by a Jewish family in Newark, New Jersey, torn between “anti” and “pro”, some Jews being blinded by the heroic dimension of Lindbergh. “Show me a hero and I’ll write you a tragedy” – “Designate me a hero and I’ll write you a tragedy“, said Fitzgerald, already quoted by Simon.

Fake news and old Packards

Philip Roth had written the book in 2004, in reaction to the dread that inspired the Bush presidency in him. David Simon adapts it in 2020, to underline its premonitory dimension. Because the question posed by the writer – does the United States have a propensity for fascism? – has probably never been more relevant than today. Not since 1940, anyway. With each new series, Simon seems to want to dive a little further, a little deeper, into the history of his country: post-Katrina New Orleans in Treme, the 80s of Show Me a Hero, the seventies of The Deuce, and now World War II. This is the best way he has found to digest the torrent of fake news, stupidity and hatred that falls on America daily, as he explained last January in an interview given to Liberation: “Reading the novel today, the world of Trump, Brexit, misinformation, xenophobia and fear becomes crystal clear. The parallels are clear and they underscore the usefulness of the story that [Roth] tells, incredibly relevant, to say something about a situation in which one is wading too deeply to be able to draw anything from it. I have so much contempt for Trump and what he stands for – I know it will take me at least five years to find something in this “moment” that can save him. In the meantime, I observe. (…) And I find stratagems to address Trump, because I am a political author. If for that I have to collect old Packards and Buicks on screen, and unearth streets that haven’t changed since 1939, so be it.“

The old Packards, Buicks and streets unchanged since 1939 that David Simon has collected are immaculate. Here is haute couture historical fiction, which never smells of polish, on the contrary, because it is traversed from beginning to end by the tempestuous humanist breath of the master of the house. The Plot Against America is a superb “neighborhood” series, telling the social fabric through the sensitive observation of gestures, faces, attitudes, always very concrete things: in which street, in which district, do we live? How much rent can you afford to put a roof over your children’s heads? Who are our neighbours? Who do you meet in the morning on the way to work? The “topographical” intelligence is still there, but impossible to notice at the same time that The Plot Against America is also what Simon has done wiser, more academic and, to use a notion that is usually never used about him, more “general public”. The situation is serious and Simon no longer really has time to finish – or to revolutionize television. It is always a question of accounting for the complexity of the American experience, but now by agitating more conspicuous symbols, stronger emotions. And besides, why complain about it? Led by Morgan Spector (handsome dark guy, a sort of neo-Oscar Isaac), overwhelming as a father frightened by the racist drift of his country, and by a barely mutt John Turturro as a collaborating rabbi, the cast performs prowess and you regularly breaks the heart. The Plot Against America is not a series to put on the shelf and hoard for later. It’s a fiction adapted from a novel but thought up by a journalist: that is to say, to look there, now, right away, while keeping an eye on the current US election year. A series that stands, like its author and a part of the planet suspended on the results of the next American presidential elections, on the very fine line of crest that separates hope and despair, combat and abandonment, struggle and resignation.

The Plot Against America, created by David Simon and Ed Burns, with Morgan Spector, John Turturro, Winona Ryder… From March 17 on OCS City.

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