(New York) American writer Philip Roth didn’t have Donald Trump in mind when he wrote his novel The plot against America. But in adapting it for television, screenwriter David Simon made the connection between this imaginary slippage of the United States towards fascism and the surprise electoral victory of the New York real estate developer.
Posted on March 15, 2020 at 6:00 p.m.
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Creator of the monument series The Wire, David Simon had received the blessing of Philip Roth, who died in 2018, before launching an assault on this summit of American literature, published in 2004.
The Plot Against America, broadcast from Monday on the cable channel HBO in the United States, draws from the register of uchronia, which delivers an imaginary version of history, as it could have happened.
A fashionable exercise, like that of dystopia (fiction of a totalitarian society), which has already been described in The Master of the High Castle, another adaptation of a cult novel, or more recently in the event series Watchmen.
But unlike most examples of the genre, radical, The Plot only makes a slight deviation from History, the real one.
Starting point of the series, the United States of 1940 as depicted by Philip Roth in his book and in the series by a very respectful David Simon of the work, are in many ways faithful to what they really were. .
And while he was never a Republican candidate for President of the United States, as in the series, aviator Charles Lindbergh was, at the time, a national figure and the face of the Committee for America d First (“America First Committee”), a powerful isolationist movement that counted up to 800,000 members.
The Plot Against America even takes up the most famous political speech of this national hero, the first aviator to have crossed the Atlantic solo, in which he condemned the Nazi aggression, but also accused Jews of wanting to draw the United States into war.
Just as it gradually turns History towards fiction, the miniseries in six episodes deconstructs the gradual shift of a society into barbarism.
To account for this slow and relentless progression, David Simon, associated with his friend from The Wire, Ed Burns, like Philip Roth, chose to anchor his story in the daily life of an ordinary Jewish family in Newark, the writer’s hometown.
And by opting for a small number of characters, the series does not disperse and offers itself the possibility of digging while avoiding shortcuts.
“Allegory of our time”
“Roth’s book is at its strongest when it studies what members of this American Jewish family […] do when they are faced with the rise of fascism in their country, ”said David Simon in an interview with public radio NPR.
“Where are you in an America that is turning into something that is no longer quite a republic?” “, He continues, claiming a parallel with the current era and the country ruled by Donald Trump.
“This is a bit like what is happening in the United States”, worries the former journalist of the Baltimore Sun, to whom we also owe Treme and The Deuce, also produced for HBO, just like The Wire.
In 2013, David Simon had already been approached to set up the project, but he says he declined, explaining then: “I do not believe that the country can still move in this direction”.
The election of Barack Obama and the evolution of American society seemed to him to have relegated for good the old demons of America which are racism and bigotry.
“I was very wrong,” he admits today.
“It’s crazy how much (the novel) is an allegory of our political time,” considers the one who relied on a high-profile distribution, including John Turturro as a rabbi, instrumentalized by Charles Lindbergh.
” I’m convinced that […] we are on a trajectory which leads us “to a shift towards authoritarianism, explains David Simon,” if we do not realize our vulnerability and the fragility of democracy.
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