Klaus wrote:
Claudius wrote:
I doubt Trump will be sending Jews or Mexicans to the hinterland to integrate them into American culture but it’s worth thinking about how far unchecked power and hate can go.
The thing about shows like this is that we have actual historical examples to lean on. It's like, the third reich actually happened. You don't need to dramatise it and narrativise it to make the American experience historically bigger than it was, just in order to explore the hate and unchecked power of fascism.
Not saying I won't watch it at some point (although I probably won't) but I'm not sure what the takeaway for me would be, and the trailer left me wondering that out loud too. "Imagine fascism but in America"? I don't really feel you have to make up alternate realities about the world's last remaining empire to do that. The Trump reference is obvious of course, and it actually leaves me with a bad taste in the mouth precisely because he, quite obviously, isn't Hitler. I think clown comparisons like that cheapen history. The world isn't divided into good people and nazis, and America blatantly hasn't experienced a third reich just because they elected that piece of shit. It's rather the people in places like North Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Iran, Yemen and Libya who have been treated to the blunt end of American ideology in the last several decades.
To me the show feels like an continuation of a long tradition where American culture seems incapable of taking interest in and reflect upon anything about history without making it about itself first, and it doesn't make me very eager to watch the show. The Man in the High Castle is a similar load of shit that left me scratching my head in disbelief.
So I watched this and while its very good and very well made I have to say you've hit a lot of good points on it. The other side of course is that its quite hard to take the allegory the way Simon (or Roth) intends because watching a Jewish family be thrown out of a hotel in the 30's in a fictional world can't help but make you think about the reality of the US at the time where Jews were actually considered white and its was black people who were the ones being denied rooms in hotels and worse. This is never reckoned with and we only occasionally see black people in the background of scenes or in large crowds.
Also the show leans heavily into the Trump analogy at the end as if the next election is a choice between a Linburgh-esque Trump and deified TV version of FDR. Where as when I was watching the families being torn apart and people being killed for nothing, the utter terror of a life in constant fear I started thinking about real world examples but they aren't in the US, they are in countries where the US either directly causes the terror or where they support the terror, the most obvious example being Palestine.
I also read an interview with Simon after it and he claimed that until 2016 you would have been ridiculed for saying "America First". That annoyed me more than anything, when has America ever not put America first at all costs? Especially since WW2 ended.
