This is our homeland. Isn’t it?

The Plot against America, Episode 1.
TV Review by Kerey McKenna.

The new HBO mini-series, The Plot Against America, has a refreshingly simple, though evocative, opening credits sequence that does a great job of setting what I hope will be the tone and methodology of the series as a work of alternate history:

The images are all, to my knowledge, real black and white footage from the ‘20s through the ‘40s. In quick succession we see aviator Charles Lindbergh’s fateful transatlantic flight, the jubilation of the roaring ‘20s, the dire poverty of the Great Depression, and the hope of the New Deal. After a bit of googling I found the jaunty song, “The Road is Open Again,” is an actual song of the period, written as boosterism for the National Recovery Act. However the images of an ascendent America become interspersed with the post-war rise of another nation...Nazi Germany: Hitler’s rise to power, persecution of the Jews, and the Blitzkrieg across Europe. Throw in snippets from American Nazi rallies and a last scene of goose-stepping troops and it instills a great deal of unease. Is the road now open for America, or for her enemies, foreign and domestic?

Contrast this with the opening credits for another recent series about fascism in America, The Man in the High Castle:

It contains so many clichés and tropes of the “What if the Nazis won?” school of alternate history. Starting with the “Map at the Beginning of the Book” convention of sci-fi/fantasy literature (not as on the nose as Game of Thrones, but it does establish the geography of this universe), and the somewhat off version of "Edelweiss," it is clear we are going to be dropped into a world where the Nazis have already defeated and occupied the US. Oh, and there's a zeppelin in the sky. Because zeppelins are to alternate history what dragons are to fantasy; in alternate history, expect to see at least one zeppelin in the sky.

I mention this up front because I think it is important to understand The Plot Against America is going for a very different kind of alternate history. This is not an alternate history where the characters are already living in a world that has become a drastic inverse of our own (In the Presence of Mine Enemies and Fatherland, to name a couple examples in addition to MITHC). Instead this is the story of characters living in a world that is very close to our own past and following the lives of the characters as their world changes around them. Furthermore, the point of divergence from history is seemingly played relatively straight at first. There are no Nazi wonder weapons or interference from time travelers and dimension hoppers. The historical figures are acting, so far, in character. The small change is simply that the American isolationist movement finds a champion in famed aviator Charles Lindbergh to challenge Franklin Roosevelt’s 1940 bid for a third term, instead of the actual dark horse candidate, the interventionist Wendell Willkie. That even today Lindbergh is a household name while Willkie is an extra hard trivia answer speaks volumes about the strength of Lindbergh's celebrity and name recognition.

In keeping with the spirit of the novel, this is the story of the Jewish American family as they experience the run up to, and then life in an isolationist America under a Charles Lindbergh presidency. Unlike the novel, where the family is named Roth after author Philip Roth’s own family, here the family name has been changed to Levin. We meet them living in their little slice of post-Depression, pre-war America, the idyllic suburb of Newark NJ. The opening tableau plays out similar to stories my mother tells me about growing up on Staten Island, save that this is a Jewish neighborhood so the weekend begins with a Sabbath dinner. Before sundown a man comes to the door asking for donations to support the Jewish homeland, which family patriarch Herman Levin (Morgan Spector) happily agrees to. The youngest Levin boy, Philip (Azhy Robertson), asks isn’t America their homeland, to which the father replies that of course America is their homeland, it’s just that the Jews of Europe need to escape to Palestine. But by the end of the episode he and the audience will be wondering just how safe the Levins and the Jews of America really are.

Expanding from the scope of the novel, which was told just from the perspective of the author’s younger self, the series follows all the Levin family: father Herman, mother Bess (Zoe Kazan), aunt Evelyn (Winona Ryder), older brother Sandy (Caleb Malis), and cousin Alvin (Anthony Boyle) as point of view characters. While the Levins are on an upward trajectory, being Jewish they can’t help but keep a close eye the Nazi Blitzkrieg across Europe, the plight of the Jews left on the continent, and the ever-present background radiation of anti-Semitism at home.

Most of the through-line of the first episode concerns the Levins potentially moving out of their Jewish suburb to nearby Union, should Herman get a promotion at his insurance agency. I was impressed by the way the plot illustrates the different life experiences of Herman and Bess, how their ideals and fears overlap and differ. At first it is Bess who is hesitant about the move based on her experience growing up in the only Jewish family in a gentile neighborhood. As she puts it, it was not that her peers actively harassed her, it was that they actively ignored her. This also explains her insistence on trying to get her son Philip to be friends with the dweeby Seldon, as she probably relates to being the child that was always left out at the school yard. Meanwhile Herman, natural salesman that he is, is more confident that the family can strike out on their own and overcome a bit of social awkwardness among the gentiles. However he is very aware of overt anti-Semitism, anxiously watching the news reels from overseas, following the rise of Lindbergh, and he ultimately shuts down the planned move when he sees that the neighborhood bar is a kitschy German beer hall with members of the German American Bund openly carousing and doing everything short of staging their own un-ironic production of Springtime for Hitler.

There are tertiary plot lines involving the cousin and the aunt. Alvin (who I do not recall from the book) is a bright young man who is unfortunately taking some bad turns in life under the influence of his wanna-be gangster friend “Shush.” The aunt’s story line seems rather innocuous at first as her heart is broken by a lover when it becomes apparent he intends to keep her as a mistress instead of taking her as a wife. By episode's end her prospects are looking a tad better when she is introduced to the influential Rabbi Lionel Bengelsdorf (John Turturro). As I said, a rather innocuous subplot but considering the actors that they’ve cast, not to mention what’s in the trailers, their relationship is going to play a big part in events as the series unfolds.

Now to address the elephant in the room.

As Nerds who Read Senior Editor Michael Isenberg pointed out in his review of the original novel, this story about a Republican celebrity with no prior political experience winning the presidency using dog whistles to bigots and allegedly to aid the ambitions of a foreign despot, was published in 2004, and any resemblance to the Trump Administration is clearly coincidental. As for the intentions of the creators of the HBO series, I can only report on what made it to the screen. In the first episode, from what we see and hear from Charles Lindbergh he is a lucid, charming, and well-dressed man. So therefore I can honestly say he does not read as a caricature of President Trump at all 😉.

Seriously, though, there are no attempts to drop in anachronistic slogans or gestures to make him appear more “Trumpy.” His speech on the radio about the FDR Democrats, the English, and the Jews trying to pull America into another world war is based on an actual speech Lindbergh gave at an America First event in September of 1941, and follows his accent and rhetorical style closely. (Here’s an excerpt from the real thing.)

Where any parallels to modern politics/culture really lie are in the regular people of the story. Of course there are no smart phones or Facebook, but as presented here, mass media still plays a crucial role in the characters’ lives. They don’t have newsfeeds on their phones but they have newsies belting out the headlines and selling papers on the streets. They have newsreels before every movie (and the subjects of the newsreels even rate space on the theater marquee). And off course the media that ruled the day, radio, is in the Levin's home and car. After listening to their favorite news pundit, people rush to the “comments section,” i.e., the sidewalk, to talk and debate with their neighbors about the events of the day. Even with people speaking face-to-face, there is still the echo chamber, so familiar to us in 2020; after all, everybody on the Levins’ street is Jewish and from the tri-state area.

After a scathing editorial from Walter Winchell berating Lindbergh for his isolationism, defeatism, and possible Nazi sympathies (again using turns of phrase used by the actual Winchell against the actual Lindbergh), Herman’s spirits are briefly bolstered and he is sure Lindbergh’s campaign can’t sustain such ridicule. Sadly, he is about to learn that a dressing down from East Coast media personalities doesn’t necessarily “play in Peoria.” It may not even play under his own roof as his eldest son and budding artist Sandy is compelled to sketch his portraits of “The Lone Eagle” Lindbergh, based on newspaper clippings, in secret. If the Lindbergh cult of personality has worked its way into the Levin household, what is going on in the rest of the country?

I front loaded this review with a comparison to The Man in the High Castle and a mention of some alternate historical fiction tropes because I really feel it is important to stress how much this book, and so far theis series, have steered away from the science fiction and military fiction that have come to characterize the genre. What sprung to mind while watching the series were not Dieselpunk nightmares of Nazis with Jet Packs or extrapolation for armchair military historians about what would have happened if Rommel hadn’t been forced to choose early retirement by way of a Luger.

Instead, what came to mind were other stories of the Jewish American experience and anti-Semitism on the homefront, like The Chosen and Focus. So all and all, The Plot against America seems to be a work not so much exploring a drastically different historical outcome but, instead ruminating on just how close we came to taking that darker path.

Kerey McKenna is a contributing reviewer to Nerds who Read and SMOF for the annual Watch City Steampunk Festival in Waltham MA, currently scheduled for May 9, 2020. Check it out at www.watchcityfestival.com.

Subscribe to Nerds who Read.

Photo source(s): Google, EW

Any Resemblance to Trump is Purely Coincidental

The Plot against America by Philip Roth.
Book Review by Michael Isenberg.

On September 11, 1941, Charles Lindbergh—the hero aviator, first person to fly solo across the Atlantic, and idol of millions—gave a speech to a rally of the America First Committee in Des Moines, Iowa. It was a passionate appeal for the United States to stay out of World War II. He argued that the American people opposed entering the war, and it would be a non-issue except for the agitation of three groups of people: British propagandists, the Roosevelt Administration---and the Jews. Of this last group he said “their greatest danger in this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government.” Classic anti-Semitic trope. The Jews control everything.

What if, instead of giving that speech in 1941, Lindbergh gave it a year earlier—before the 1940 election? And what if that, combined with his own enormous celebrity, propels him to the Republican nomination for president and, in a surprise to everyone, he defeats the incumbent Franklin Roosevelt in November?

That is the premise of Philip Roth’s alternate history novel, The Plot against America. The novel has been made into a mini-series starring John Turturro and Winona Ryder. It premieres on HBO next week. But as I always say, this is Nerds who Read, and so today I will review the original Philip Roth novel.

Once in the White House, Lindbergh signs an “understanding” with Nazi Germany to keep the US out of the war. But many people, especially Jews, fear he has a plan to impose fascism on America.

We see all this from the point of view a typical Jewish family of the time. Interestingly, it is Roth’s own family. The nine-year-old narrator is named Philip Roth, son of Herman and Bess Roth, brother of Sanford “Sandy” Roth, all residing at 81 Summit Ave, Newark, New Jersey, just as the real-life Roths did.

As in To Kill a Mockingbird, a child narrator puts an idyllic spin on the story, in which the great events often go on in the background, as Philip is engrossed in more pressing concerns. Especially how the latest news is going to affect the amount of time he has to spend with his downstairs neighbor Selden, a drippy boy who follows Philip around with a chessboard. Whatever he does, Philip can’t shake him.

One of the things that intrigues me about history is that it seems so much more confusing when you’re in the middle of it than when you’re looking back decades or centuries later. Today we all know the Nazis were some of the most despicable and evil thugs in history. But during their rise in the 1930s, it wasn’t so clear to many people. Sure there were some like Winston Churchill and J.R.R. Tolkien who saw right through them—and got dismissed as “warmongers” for their trouble. But many others were taken in. The Duke and Duchess of Windsor (the former Edward VIII and Wallis Warfield Simpson) visited Berlin in 1937 and met with Hitler—all smiles. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain sat down with der Fuhrer in Munich in 1938 to carve up Czechoslovakia. He returned to England with a worthless piece of paper signed by Hitler and an announcement of “peace for our time”—less than a year before the outbreak of World War II.

Lindbergh himself made a number of trips to Nazi Germany, including attending the 1936 Berlin Olympics, after which he wrote to a friend that Hitler “is undoubtedly a great man, and I believe has done much for the German people.” In 1938, at a dinner at the American embassy in Berlin, he accepted a medal, the Service Cross of the German Eagle, from senior Nazi leader Hermann Göring.

And so it is with the fictional Lindbergh Administration. The anti-Semitism of Lindbergh’s Des Moines speech turns out to be a one-off event, leading many people to believe that he didn’t really mean it. Perhaps he was just poorly advised. His wife, Anne Morrow Lindbergh even has a close Jewish confidante, Rabbi Lionel Bengelsdorf. By a remarkable coincidence, the rabbi marries Mrs. Roth’s sister Evelyn—a teacher and sort of younger version of Delores Umbridge. The marriage doubles as a convenient literary device by which the ordinary Roths, and therefore the reader, gain visibility into the inner workings of the White House.

In any case, nothing the Lindbergh Administration does is really that horrible, at least at first. Indeed Lindbergh seems to want to help the Jews become better integrated into American society. He sets up an Office of American Absorption (OAA), under Rabbi Bengelsdorf, which establishes the “Just Folks” program: Jewish children from urban areas are given an opportunity to spend a summer on a farm in the heartland. Sandy Roth is one of the first to sign up, over his father’s objections—which leads to a knock-down drag-out fight around the dinner table. Mr. Roth sees the sinister and intentional destruction of Jewish culture. You will be assimilated. “Just Folks was the first step in a Lindbergh plan to separate Jewish children from their parents, to erode the solidarity of the Jewish family.” Aunt Evelyn dismisses his concerns as the unfounded fears of “ghetto Jews,” a vile phrase which Sandy is soon imitating.

Aunt Evelyn wins the argument and Sandy goes off to a Kentucky tobacco farm and has a wonderful time. He comes back taller, more filled out—and thanks to the summer sun, blonder. The symbolism is not exactly subtle. The way he shows off his new agricultural vocabulary, words like “flyings” and “topping,” struck me as a very true-to-life portrait of a 13-year-old boy who has acquired some knowledge that the adults don’t share. Thanks to the machinations of Aunt Evelyn, he ends up as poster child for Just Folks with a string of speaking engagements. I can’t help wondering what the real Sandy Roth, who was still alive when the book was published, thought about his now-famous little brother casting him in the role of Collaborator.

The family quarrel over Just Folks turns out to be the first of many; they tear the family apart. The boys' father is still convinced that Nazi Germany is coming to America. Family and friends are skeptical. “Where are the Nazi Brown Shirts and the secret police?” they ask. “The Nazi criminals start with something small,” Mr. Roth warns, “and if they get away with it…” Still American boys aren’t dying on the battlefields of Europe. The stock market is going up and up. What’s not to like?

But amid all the debate over what Lindbergh has planned, and whether he is an anti-Semite, one thing is clear: he had emboldened less ambiguous anti-Semites to come out into the open. The Roths first encounter this on a sightseeing trip to Washington, D.C. As the descendants of victims of European pogroms, they know how much better off they are in America, and are passionately patriotic about it. They save for years so they can take their children to the nation’s capital and see all the monuments to great Americans. But Mr. Roth’s tendency to opine in an audible voice about how awful the Lindbergh Administration is, and how much better things were under Roosevelt, results in him being called a “loudmouth Jew” by more than one bystander. Further, when the manager of their hotel finds out they’re Jewish, he evicts them. They come back from sightseeing to find their bags packed and waiting for them in the lobby.

Sadly, these ugly incidents are merely a harbinger of much more terrible things to come.

My main criticism of the book was the ending (no spoilers, I promise). It was almost as if Author Roth got tired of it and just decided to wrap things up as quickly as possible. Some truly epic national events occur, but these are given rapid-fire in capsule format. Then we find out what the Roths were doing during these events, but since we already know the national outcome, there isn’t any suspense, and these pages really drag. Don't get me wrong, this is a good book. But had the national events been allowed to unfold at the pace of the rest of the novel, and the Roths’ lives intertwined with them in real time, as they had up to the final chapter, it could have been a much better one. Still, there’s a really clever twist near the end, which puts a whole new spin on the story, and which I won't spoil for you.

*           *           *

The celebrity president with the glamorous wife. No previous experience in elected office. Refuses to be a puppet to his handlers. The slogan, “America First.” The electoral upset. The polarization of Americans—even the polarization of families—as the president’s passionate detractors insist he’s a racist who is going to suspend civil rights and undermine the Constitution, while his supporters, equally passionate, claim it’s all fake news and everything he’s done is perfectly reasonable. It’s hard not to draw comparisons to President Trump.

Since The Plot against America was published in 2004, Mr. Roth obviously did not intend it as a Trump parable. Any resemblance is purely coincidental. As far as I’ve been able to determine, he didn’t have anyone in particular in mind other than Charles A. Lindbergh. He had heard that the Republicans had considered running Lindbergh in 1940, and he was intrigued and wanted to explore that idea. Of course, the intent of the makers of the upcoming HBO series is another matter entirely.

Whether the resemblance between the real-life Trump Administration and the fictional Lindbergh one is anything more than superficial, I leave as an exercise for the reader. Either way, The Plot against America is an intriguing story, with some vivid characters, and a timeless warning that, in the words of Thomas Jefferson, eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.

Michael Isenberg drinks bourbon and writes novels. His latest book, The Thread of Reason, is a murder mystery that takes place in Baghdad in the year 1092, and tells the story of the conflict between science and shari’ah in medieval Islam. It is available on Amazon.com Please follow Mike on Facebook and Twitter. Subscribe to Nerds who Read.

Flippant Entertainment

Is Hunters’ irreverent portrayal of the Holocaust kosher?
by Michael Isenberg.

Last week, Nerds who Read posted Kerey McKenna's review of Hunters, the new Amazon Prime series about Holocaust survivors seeking vengeance against Nazis who escaped to the United States. In it, he raised some questions about whether some aspects of the series were appropriate for a subject as tragic and grim as the Holocaust. “Not just set in 1970s America as a period piece,” he wrote, “Hunters also takes over-the-top steps to callback to 1970s action movies like fantasy sequences resembling 1970s era game shows, PSAs, and Grindhouse movie trailers…the jarring gear shifts between a reflection on historical atrocities to cartoon shoot-em-up against cartoon villainy was a bit hard to reconcile.” He concluded by wondering if “all that ham and cheese is ‘Kosher’ for such subjects.”

Indeed, Kerey was not the only one put off by the comic book vibe of the series, not to mention some historical inaccuracies. TV Critic Daniel Fienberg, writing in The Hollywood Reporter, called it “Jewsploitation,” in analogy to the Blaxploitation films of the 1970s; they were hyper-stereotyped and hyper-violent, and yet groundbreaking in portraying blacks as action heroes, instead of servants or comic relief, as had been the norm in prior decades.

The BBC reported that “Karen Pollock, chief executive of the Holocaust Educational Trust, told the BBC such portrayals risked fuelling Holocaust denial, and lent a tone of ‘flippant entertainment’ to the programme. ‘We have a real responsibility to protect the truth of the Holocaust,’ said Mrs Pollock, ‘particularly as we're moving away from living history, the survivors are few and frailer.’”

The inclusion of a human chess game at Auschwitz—in which the “pieces” get murdered upon being captured—was a particular point of criticism. There is no record of any such atrocity in the annals of the Holocaust. The Auschwitz Memorial, which according to its Twitter profile, “preserves the site of the former German Nazi Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp,” tweeted, “Auschwitz was full of horrible pain & suffering documented in the accounts of survivors. Inventing a fake game of human chess for @huntersonprime is not only dangerous foolishness & caricature. It also welcomes future deniers. We honor the victims by preserving factual accuracy.”

In my humble opinion, there is nothing wrong per se with a comic book-style series about the Holocaust, or including fictional incidents, or even injecting humor into a tragic subject. Any problems with Hunters is not because of what they set out to do. Whether they did it well is another matter.

Certainly comic book heroes confronting Nazism in general and the Holocaust in particular has a long and honorable history. From the March 1941 debut of Captain America, with its now-viral cover art of Cap punching Hitler in the face, to the more tortured portrayal of Holocaust survivor Magneto in the X-Men comics and movies, Nazism has been grist for the superhero mill almost as long as there have been Nazis.

Many reviewers have noted that Hunters was very obviously trying to capture the magic of another comic book-style movie about "killing Nah-tsees": Quentin Tarantino’s simultaneously gruesome and tongue-in-cheek Inglourious Basterds. In this, Hunters bit off more than it could chew. But then, it would be difficult for anyone who isn’t Tarantino to reproduce the dramatic intensity of Basterds’ opening scene, in which a Nazi "Jew Catcher" chats calmly with a farmer over a glass of milk while the Jews he’s looking for are hiding under the floorboards. Or the manic insanity of Shosanna’s fiery revenge against Hitler and his despicable crew in the climax.

Of course, Basterds departed from the history books in a major way, and indeed authors of historical fiction (a category which includes me!) have no obligation to confine themselves to actual events. It is not their job merely to chronicle real life. Historians do that quite well, thank you very much. The job of historical fiction is to entertain, to make the reader empathize with the characters, to explore the human psyche, and to show what life could be, not merely what it is. History can be a starting point. It need not be the ending point. The key word in the phrase “creative writing” is, after all, creative. Or as series creator David Weil put it, Hunters “is not documentary. And it was never purported to be…this show takes the point of view that symbolic representations provide individuals access to an emotional and symbolic reality that allows us to better understand the experiences of the Shoah and provide it with meaning that can address our urgent present.”

Weil had another reason for relying on fictionalized atrocities. As the grandson of a Holocaust survivor himself, he thought it would be disrespectful, in a piece of Holocaust fiction, to appropriate the stories of its real victims. This was the same reason “that all of the concentration camp prisoners (and survivors) in the series would be given tattoos above the number 202,499. 202,499 is the highest recorded number given to a prisoner at Auschwitz. I didn’t want one of our characters to have the number of a real victim or a real survivor.” One may disagree with Weil’s reasoning in this. One certainly can’t deny that his heart is in the right place.

Certainly there may be, as Auschwitz Memorial warns, some Holocaust deniers who idiotically think that the existence of a fictional incident in a fictional TV show somehow proves a cover-up. But there will no doubt be many more people who will be inspired by the series to learn more about the true history of the Holocaust. I know in my own case, vast swaths of the history I know was the result of seeing or reading some piece of historical fiction, 1976’s I, Claudius, for example, and then doing some research to find out which parts were true. Indeed, in the case of Hunters, it seems to be working. For instance, Google Trends showed a 17-fold increase in interest in “human chess” after the series was released.*

But it is perhaps the inclusion of humor in the series that is the most controversial aspect of Hunters in this age of political correctness and perpetually offended snowflakes. As with comic book treatments, people have been making fun of Nazis since the beginning: P.G. Wodehouse created the knee-obsessed would-be Fuehrer of Britain Roderick Spode in 1938. Charlie Chaplin mimicked Hitler in The Great Dictator (1940). The Donald Duck cartoon Der Fuehrer’s Face (1943) and the Spike Jones cover of its title song were two of the greatest pieces of war propaganda ever made.

After the war, there was Mel Brooks’s The Producers (1967) with its comically inept pro-Nazi musical, “Springtime for Hitler.”

TV’s Hogan’s Heroes (1965-1971) was particularly controversial in its day because of the inappropriate setting for a comedy: a prisoner-of-war camp. So it’s interesting that all four of the main German characters were played by Jewish actors—three of whom—Werner Klemperer (Col. Klink), John Banner (Sgt. Schultz), and Leon Askin (Gen. Burkhalter) had been born in Germany or Austria and had been fortunate to escape in time (The fourth, Howard Caine [Maj. Hochstetter], was an American Jew). Another Jewish cast member, Robert Clary, who played the French P.O.W. Le Beau, had actually been imprisoned at Buchenwald.

Klemperer once told The Houston Chronicle, “I had one qualification when I took the job. If they ever wrote a segment whereby Colonel Klink would come out the hero, I would leave the show.” Clearly, this was personal for him, as I’m sure it was for all the Jewish actors. I believe that was the reason the show was so wickedly funny. And if actual victims of the Nazis don’t have an issue with the humor, it seems foolish for the rest of us to object.

These examples all made fun of Nazism in general, but stopped short of jokes about the Holocaust. In recent years, even that taboo has been shattered. The 2004 South Park episode “The Passion of the Jew” is a particular favorite of a Millennial I know.

Laughter in the face of tragedy does serve a purpose. It helps us fragile humans deal. It's been said that the most oppressed peoples have the best senses of humor. This is believed to be especially true of Jews, who have faced more than their share of tragedy during their thousands of years of history. A 1978 Time Magazine article explored the question, noting that “Although Jews constitute only 3% of the U.S. population, 80% of the nation's professional comedians are Jewish.” “Why such domination of American humor?” it asked. “New York City Psychologist Samuel Janus, who once did a yearlong stint as a stand-up comic, thinks that he has the answer: Jewish humor is born of depression and alienation from the general culture. For Jewish comedians, he told the recent annual meeting of the American Psychological Association, ‘comedy is a defense mechanism to ward off the aggression and hostility of others.’”

Humor also allows us to explore difficult subjects which might otherwise make us too uncomfortable to confront. And when directed at our enemies, it makes them seem weaker and easier to defeat.

In short, laughing at Nazis is healthy.

Nevertheless, I had issues with the humorous elements of Hunters, which mostly took the form of Family Guy-style cutaways. They just were not well done. It’s difficult to put my finger on exactly where they went wrong, how they differed from Spike Jones, Hogan’s Heroes, and the rest. Part of the problem was most of the show was fairly serious, so when it hit one of the comedic sequences it was, in Kerey’s word, “jarring.” In any case, whatever the reason, they weren’t funny. In particular, a fake game show in Episode 8, “Why Does Everyone Hate the Jews?,” had me sitting in icy and uncomfortable silence as contestants yelled out negative Jewish stereotypes as if they were on Family Feud. As my father used to say, “Laugh? I never thought I’d start.”

Still, even though the series failed to rise to Tarantino-level heights, and the humor fell flat, I recommend it. Flippant entertainment has its place, and it is thoroughly satisfying to see the Jewish characters deal rough justice to the Nazis who once tormented them.

Furthermore, we live in a time of historically high levels of anti-Semitism. When white supremacists march through the streets of Charlottesville chanting “Hebes will not divide us.”** When too many Americans—especially the young—are woefully ignorant of the Holocaust. According to a Pew survey, 43% of American teens could not correctly identify the 20 year period in which it happened, 62% did not know the approximate number of Jews who died, and 67% did not know that Hitler became chancellor of Germany via a democratic process. Any TV series that raises Holocaust awareness, and sends its viewers to Google to find out more about the tragedy, is performing a valuable public service—especially if it’s the sort of irreverent series that might resonate with a generation brought up on South Park and Family Guy.

My cousin Louis lived through the Nazi occupation of Belgium. When the Germans invaded, they ordered all the Jews in his town to register with the authorities. Louis’s father was a tailor and one of his clients, who was the mayor of the town, told him to just not register. And so, when the Nazis rounded up the Jews to ship them off to the concentration camps, they missed Louis and his family (Other family members have told me that Louis’s father was going to register but never got around to it, so procrastination literally saved their lives). Louis’s brother Jacques went to Paris at one point where he got picked up by the Gestapo. “We never saw him again,” Louis told me. But Louis survived the war.

Sadly, Louis is no longer with us. He died last summer at the age of 91, after a long and happy post-war life. When I found out his daughter had watched Hunters, I asked her what her father would have thought of it. “Every Holocaust movie or series would upset my father,” she told me. “But he couldn’t turn away...he had to watch it. I think he would watch this and cheer for every murder of a Nazi.”

Michael Isenberg drinks bourbon and writes novels. His latest book, The Thread of Reason, is a murder mystery that takes place in Baghdad in the year 1092, and tells the story of the conflict between science and shari’ah in medieval Islam. It is available on Amazon.com Please follow Mike on Facebook and Twitter. Subscribe to Nerds who Read. Photo credit(s): Marvel Comics, Google, Historia Obscurum

*--I also checked Google trends for searches on "holocaust," and it is at an elevated level, but it was not clear whether that was the result of Hunters, or a residual effect from the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz a couple weeks before.

**--Contrary to popular opinion, I do not believe that the Charlottesville assholes chanted, “Jews will not replace us.” I listened to the video a number of times, and it sounded to me like “You will not replace us.” But, as I indicated above, they clearly chanted “Hebes will not divide us.”

The Best Revenge…

Hunters on Amazon Prime.
TV Review by Kerey McKenna.

Amazon’s new original streaming series, Hunters, is a historical fiction pulp tale about a shadow war between Jews and Nazis in 1970s America. Odd that Amazon is going back to the Nazis in America angle so soon after putting their previous series The Man in the High Castle to bed, but hey, at least in this series we didn’t have to wait four seasons for those goose stepping goons to get their comeuppance.

I turned on the first episode on a whim and wound up binging the entire 10 episode season on its premiere weekend. During the binge I was captivated by the series and kept on hitting the next episode button. However once I reached the end I wondered if what I had just had was enjoyable but perhaps not good for me or even made for me. Like when I used to party crash at Hillel parties in college just to binge on latkes.

Not just set in 1970s America as a period piece, Hunters also takes over-the-top steps to callback to 1970s action movies like fantasy sequences resembling 1970s era game shows, PSAs, and Grindhouse movie trailers. In fact the whole project probably owes as much to the pulpy B-movies and sensational pulp fare like Madmen of Mandoras and The Damned as it does to more “serious” Nazi hunting classics like The Boys from Brazil and The Odessa File.

The audience point of view character, Jonah Heidelbaum (Logan Lerman), is a mild-mannered comic book nerd just trying to survive “The Summer of Sam,” hang out with his nerdy friends, and scrape together enough money for college and to help his only living relative, his Holocaust survivor grandmother Ruth (Jeannie Berlin), who raised him. Unfortunately his world is torn apart when his grandmother is murdered one night by a mysterious stranger at their door. Jonah would be the first to point out that he is just a few details removed from being Peter Parker. At the shiva, he is approached by wealthy pillar of the New York Jewish community, Meyer Offerman (Al Pacino). Offerman reveals to Jonah that Ruth, who like him was a survivor of a Nazi death camp, was killed by a Nazi war criminal they both knew from the camps. Not only that but for the past year Offerman and Ruth had been working on their own, independent of the US authorities, Mossad, or even The Simon Wiesenthal Center to track down escaped Nazi war criminals and dispense justice. Simon Wiesenthal himself (Judd Hirsch) at one point even makes an appearance to wag his finger and say that he does not approve of Meyer’s methods and definition of justice, chiefly executing the Nazis or arranging for “accidents” and death traps that mirror the atrocities they committed. Like in the first episode, when we see a former Nazi chemist (now a NASA scientist) discovering in her final moments that her shower has been rigged to dispense the same gas she developed for the death camps.

Of course, thirty years after the Holocaust, Meyer and Ruth were a bit long in the tooth, so they recruited a cadre of interested parties and mercenaries, “The Hunters,” to assist in the location and then the execution of the Nazis. Joining them on their crusade are B-list actor Leonard “Lonny Flash” Flazhenstien (Josh Radnor), Vietnam Veteran Joe Mizushima (Louise Ozawa), nun and (former?) MI6 agent Sister Harriet (Kate Mulvany), kick ass hood girl Roxy Jones (Tiffany Boon channeling classic Pam Grier), and fellow camp survivors Murray and Mindy Markowitz (Saul Rubinek and Carol Kane). Interesting fact: Jewish actor Saul Rubinek was actually born in a post-war refugee camp after his parents had successfully hidden for over two years in Nazi-occupied Poland.

While these are the titular “Hunters,” it would be fair to argue that the show is actually about three groups of hunters. The main conceit of the series is that not only did far too many Nazi war criminals escape the hangman’s noose, sometimes with the aid of the US government (as they did in real life), but that some of these Nazis are working together in secret to bring about a new Fourth Reich. So the Jews and the Nazis are hunting each other.

One such nasty Nazi was even able to completely reinvent himself as red-blooded American and Washington insider “Biff Simpson” (Dylan Baker) and turns out not only to be an adept master of disguise, but as dangerous as a rabid animal when cornered. When we first meet him his brilliant solution for preserving his cover after being outed at a family BBQ by a Holocaust survivor, is to gun her down, and his guests, and his own family.

While Biff has problems with impulse control, that is not so for the Nazis’ ringleader, the mysterious SS She Wolf known only as “The Colonel” (Lena Olin). As the terrorist mastermind behind the efforts to build a new Aryan America, she is not only keeping the old guard in line but raising new generations of blond-haired blue-eyed operatives, and radicalizing them with a twisted ideology in which Nazis are portrayed as the real persecuted minority.

The final point of this Axis of Evil is one of these young neo-Nazis, Travis Leich (Greg Austin). In a character arc that is a malicious mirror of the arc of the heroic Jonah, Travis struggles to prove himself among the more seasoned veterans of his faction. He always seems to be taking crap from the other Hitler youth, probably either because he likes contemporary musicals instead of the traditional Wagner, or because the Teutonic Tossers just don’t recognize a self-radicalized American as a true peer. Huh, I guess even OG Fascists hate Illinois Nazis.

Finally trying to make sense of the trail of murder and mayhem left behind by both groups is FBI agent Millie Morris (Jerrika Hinton). Poor Morris has the thankless task of being the Inspector Javert of the piece and having to do so as a “triple threat” minority in 1970s law enforcement.

Eventually the cat and mouse game leads to a grand shootout not just to find escaped Nazi war criminals, but to thwart their doomsday plot to ensure a Fourth Reich on American soil. Once the dust settles, and after setting up an “adventure continues” plot hook for the second season, the show reveals one hell of a final twist. Well it was clearly trying to set up two incredible twists for the finale but you can see the second one coming a mile away as soon as the caption “Argentina 1977” pops up.

As I said, I was captivated by the show as I watched it and I think its heart is in the right place, but sometimes the jarring gear shifts between a reflection on historical atrocities to cartoon shoot-em-up against cartoon villainy was a bit hard to reconcile. But maybe there is something in that. Late in the season the show’s soundtrack uses a song that had been running through my head since I heard the premise of the series: Tom Lehrer’s “tribute” to former Nazi rocket scientist, turned head NASA rocket scientist Wernher von Braun.

I had known the song for years (I had a hipster “classic” music satire phase as a teen). Yet by that point in the series, I was reflecting truly how dark the satire was. That maybe we should be more embarrassed that Von Braun built the space program. Frankly I was a little unsettled when I realized that von Braun had personally narrated a piece about space travel for Disney that I had enjoyed when I was young. Which ultimately is the point of good satire, not just to make us laugh but to challenge us.

As for the final verdict on Hunters? I enjoyed it. The maudlin parts were done well and I think I read its campy sensibilities as intended. But then again maybe I’m not the best person to decide of all that ham and cheese is “Kosher” for such subjects (Check out our follow-up post, "Flippant Entertainment," in which Nerds who Read Senior Editor Michael Isenberg weighs in on exactly that issue.).

Kerey McKenna is a contributing reviewer to Nerds who Read and SMOF for the annual Watch City Steampunk Festival, coming to Waltham MA May 9, 2020. Check it out at www.watchcityfestival.com.

Subscribe to Nerds who Read.

The Law of Club and Fang

The Call of the Wild by Jack London.
Book Review by Michael Isenberg.

Last night I saw the new movie version of Jack London’s The Call of the Wild, starring Harrison Ford, which opens in theaters this weekend. It was good family entertainment. I was concerned, at first, to see so many children in the audience, but they behaved themselves, clearly enthralled by the various twists and turns. They gasped at the handful of instances of (very sanitized) violence and laughed at the far more numerous funny bits.

But this is Nerds who Read and we're all about the book. So today I will review the classic Call of the Wild novella, which first appeared as a serial in The Saturday Evening Post back in 1903. As it was not originally written for children, it features a lot more violence and a lot less humor than the movie.

The Call of the Wild is the biography of a dog, a St. Bernard/Scotch Shepherd mix named Buck. Although stories with animal protagonists go back to Aesop, for the most part they're fantastic and allegorical tales in which the animals are anthropomorphized, really just stand-ins for humans. They talk. They plan. They build advanced societies with written Constitutions.

But by the turn of the twentieth century, a new school of animal literature arose, a realist school, in which an animal was an animal, with all the limitations and glory that entailed. As Gerald Carson explains in his article “T.R. and the ‘nature fakers’,” these stories captured the imagination of “a generation just becoming aware of soil depletion, of the consequences of the unlimited harvesting of timber on the headwaters, the decimation of various species of wildlife, and the disappearance of the frontier.” Led by such writers as Ernest Thomas Seton, Charles G. D. Roberts, and William J. Long, and of course London himself, their works stirred bitter controversy as to just how realistic their animal realism was; the authors were attacked by no lesser luminaries of the conservation movement than John Burroughs and Teddy Roosevelt.

As The Call of the Wild opens, we find Buck living happily on the estate of one Judge Miller in the Santa Clara Valley, at the south end of San Francisco Bay:

Buck was neither house-dog nor kennel-dog. The whole realm was his. He plunged into the swimming tank or went hunting with the Judge’s sons; he escorted Mollie and Alice, the Judge’s daughters, on long twilight or early morning rambles; on wintry nights he lay at the Judge’s feet before the roaring library fire.

Alas, “because men had found a yellow metal in the North, and because Manuel was a gardener’s helper whose wages did not lap over the needs of his wife and divers small copies of himself,” Buck was not destined to remain in this idyllic life. “What a puppet thing life is.” It was 1897, the Klondike Gold Rush was in full swing, and sled dogs were in high demand. In order to fill the gap between his wages and his expenses, Manuel lured Buck away from the Miller estate on the pretext of taking him for a walk—and sold him. Buck is shipped north, first to Seattle where a man in a red sweater beats him with a club until he is broken to obedience. Only then is Buck fit to be sent to Alaska, where he begins his new life of servitude, a life governed by “The Law of Club and Fang.”

London himself—barely twenty years old at the time—had taken part in the Klondike Gold Rush, where he ended up with swollen gums and lost teeth from scurvy and a rich set of characters and experiences to draw upon for fiction. Buck changes hands several times and his masters cover the gamut of colorful characters London encountered in the Yukon. Some are strictly business, some genuinely loving. Some of the most vivid, although not particularly likable, are of a trio of newcomers to the Yukon: the pampered woman Mercedes, her husband Charles, and her brother Hal. Because of the excessive quantity of luxury items and canned goods they supplied themselves with, the dog team is unable to move the sled, so the trio “solve” this problem by adding more dogs.

And they were proud, too. They were doing the thing in style, with fourteen dogs. They had seen other sleds depart over the Pass for Dawson, or come in from Dawson, but never had they seen a sled with so many as fourteen dogs. In the nature of Arctic travel there was a reason why fourteen dogs should not drag one sled, and that was that one sled could not carry the food for fourteen dogs. But Charles and Hal did not know this. They had worked the trip out with a pencil, so much to a dog, so many dogs, so many days. Q.E.D. Mercedes looked over their shoulders and nodded comprehensively, it was all so very simple.

Reminds me of Michael Bloomberg talking about how simple farming is.

In any case, things go from bad to worse for the trio, and in one of the few humorous passages in the book, we learn,

The result was a beautiful and unending family quarrel. Starting from a dispute as to which should chop a few sticks for the fire (a dispute which concerned only Charles and Hal), presently would be lugged in the rest of the family, fathers, mothers, uncles, cousins, people thousands of miles away, and some of them dead. That Hal’s views on art, or the sort of society plays his mother’s brother wrote, should have anything to do with the chopping of a few sticks of firewood, passes comprehension; nevertheless the quarrel was as likely to tend in the direction of Charles’s political prejudices. And that Charles’s sister’s tale-bearing tongue should be relevant to the building of a Yukon fire, was apparent only to Mercedes, who disburdened herself of copious opinions upon that topic, and incidentally upon a few other traits unpleasantly peculiar to her husband’s family. In the meantime the fire remained unbuilt, the camp half pitched, and the dogs unfed.

Needless to say, things end badly for them.

Of course those unfed dogs are the real heroes of the piece, and their personalities are as varied and memorable as the humans. Given my lifelong respect for dedication and hard work, I was especially partial to Dave and Sol-leks:

They were the new dogs, utterly transformed by the harness. All passiveness and unconcern had dropped from them. They were alert and active, anxious that the work should go well, and fiercely irritable with whatever, by delay or confusion, retarded the work. The toil of the traces seemed the supreme expression of their being, and all that they lived for and the only thing in which they took delight.

In a passage that brings tears to my eyes, Dave becomes ill and can no longer pull his weight on the sled team. The driver cuts him loose and allows him to run along behind the sleds.

With the last remnant of his strength he managed to stagger along behind till the train made another stop, when he floundered past the sleds to his own, where he stood alongside Sol-leks. His driver lingered a moment to get a light for his pipe from the man behind. Then he returned and started his dogs. They swung out on the trail with remarkable lack of exertion, turned their heads uneasily, and stopped in surprise. The driver was surprised, too; the sled had not moved. He called his comrades to witness the sight. Dave had bitten through both of Sol-lek’s traces, and was standing directly in front of the sled in his proper place. He pleaded with his eyes to remain there. The driver was perplexed. His comrades talked of how a dog could break its heart through being denied the work that killed it, and recalled instances they had known, where dogs, too old for the toil, or injured, had died because they were cut out of the traces. Also, they held it a mercy, since Dave was to die anyway, that he should die in the traces, heart-easy and content. So he was harnessed in again, and proudly he pulled of old, though more than once he cried out involuntarily from the bite of his inward hurt. Several times he fell down and was dragged in the traces, and once the sled ran upon him so that he limped thereafter in one of his hind legs. But he held out till camp was reached, when his driver made a place for him by the fire. Morning found him too weak to travel. At harness-up time he tried to crawl to his driver. By convulsive efforts he got on his feet, staggered, and fell. Then he wormed his way forward slowly toward where the harnesses were being put on his mates. He would advance his fore legs and drag up his body with a sort of hitching movement, when he would advance his fore legs and hitch ahead again for a few more inches. His strength left him, and the last his mates saw of him he lay gasping in the snow and yearning toward them. But they could hear him mournfully howling till they passed out of sight behind a belt of river timber. Here the train was halted. The Scotch half-breed slowing retraced his steps to the camp they had left. The men ceased talking. A revolver-shot rang out. The man came back hurriedly. The whips snapped, the bells tinkled merrily, the sleds churned along the trail; but Buck knew, and every dog knew, what had taken place behind the belt of river trees.

Ultimately, though, this is not Dave’s story—or Mercedes’s story or Charles’s story, or Hal’s story. It’s Buck’s story. Through all his many adventures, something stirs within this noble canine. Ancestral memories come flooding back, calling to him. Hence the title. What this means for Buck, and what that tells us about London’s view of nature—a view that’s very different from what you’ll get if you watch the new movie—will be the subject on Part II of this review.

Michael Isenberg drinks bourbon and writes novels. His latest book, The Thread of Reason, is a murder mystery that takes place in Baghdad in the year 1092, and tells the story of the conflict between science and shari’ah in medieval Islam. It is available on Amazon.com Please follow Mike on Facebook and Twitter. Subscribe to Nerds who Read. Photo credit(s): Deseret, Wikipedia

Margot Robbie OWNS the Character

Birds of Prey and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn.
The Boomer Review by Cecilia Calabrese.

I saw this movie in magnificent “XD” format. It was a feast for the senses…almost to the point of overload. If you like splashes of color and action on a gigantic screen, see Birds of Prey in XD!

Margot Robbie OWNS the character, Harley Quinn! Unlike the numerous actors who created the multiple iterations of “Mistah J”, Batman, and Robin, no one can credibly recreate the cartoon/comic book personality, Harley Quinn, like Margot Robbie. I suspect she would be willing to make as many Harley Quinn movies as the DC Universe can turn out because she clearly has fun in that role. And if she is not having fun, she is a better actor than I give her credit for.

Rounding out the ensemble cast: Rosie Perez (Renee Montoya), Mary Elizabeth Winstead (Helena Bertinelli), Jurnee Smollett-Bell (Dinah Lance), and Ella Jay Basco (Cassandra Cain) mesh well. The interactions among these main characters feel genuine and left me guessing just where all this was going to end up.

Ewan McGregor lost himself as the sadistic Roman Sionis. I greatly appreciate when actors not only portray a character well, they seem to actually BECOME the character so well that I have to wait until the Cast Credits to find out who played that part.

The action revolves around Harley Quinn’s life after her final (?) break-up with the Joker, following the exploits in the movie Suicide Squad (For Harley’s exploits before Suicide Squad, check out “Truly Madly Deeply: The Definitive Origin of Harley Quinn” here on Nerds who Read). For the first time, Harley is trying to find her place in the world without having a significant other in her life. Her internal conflict centers on deep seeded trust issues: in herself and others. She is protector and antagonist at the same time. The conflict with Roman Sionis sets up a scenario that brings our four Sirens of Swat (my description) together. As such, the women ultimately must decide whether it is in their own best interest, and the future of Gotham, to protect or betray a young pick-pocket that stole something of value from Sionis.

The stunts, the action, the vivid colors, the pithy dialogue, even the '80s-style cliches (as a Boomer, I offer a tip of the hat to the writers on that) all result in a classic comic book movie. Gotham City was portrayed just as seedy and disturbed as I am used to, but not quite as visually dark as we see in other representations. Gotham, being a character unto itself, has been represented in many styles. This Gotham was a bit of a departure.

Now, did I like this movie? That’s hard to say. Sitting here, right now, having just finished watching the film about two hours ago, my jury is still out! I had major issues with the continuity of the story line. Narration of the initial animated introduction made a point of stating that to tell a story, you start at the beginning [unless you're Quentin Tarantino -Ed.]. Well, this movie did do that. But then frequent sequences of the story line became frenetic, disjointed, and, at times, hard to follow. I suspect it may be helpful to have read the actual comic books before seeing the film. That, I did not do. However, there is one HUGE plot inconsistency that I found distracting to the point of getting lost in the time line. Because of it, I was confused regarding whether what I was watching was happening in “present” time, or as “flash-back” action. Part of my confusion was on account of a costume accessory. I’m a bit of a stickler for details like that, especially when they play a prominent part in the story-telling.

This movie really wasn’t my cup of Jamba Juice. It seemed as though the director, Cathy Yan, was infusing the campiness of the Batman that I grew up with (Adam West) into Gotham City of 2020. For me, the movie did get more enjoyable as the film progressed to its conclusion. I’m not quite sure what that says about the film as a whole. But, if you are a DC Universe fan, this film is meant for you. Stick around for the little end-credit nugget if you are so inclined, but if you had the large soda, it’s not worth the bladder distress.

Cecilia Calabrese is the Vice President of the Agawam City Council and will serve as President of the Massachusetts Municipal Association in 2020. She is a licensed attorney in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts as well as a Registered Dental Hygienist and a rental property manager. Married to her husband, Michael Calabrese, for 34 years, they have two grown children, Charles and Michaela Calabrese.

Cece has written featured articles in The Valley Advocate (Tom Duggan, Editor), as well as various opinion pieces in The Springfield Republican and The Agawam Advertiser News. She is currently on the pre-production crew for daughter Michaela’s graduate film project. Filming starts later this month! Please give your generous support to the project at GoFundMe.com.

Subscribe to Nerds who Read.

Photo credit(s): Movieweb

Truly Madly Deeply

The Definitive Origin of Harley Quinn.

The Batman Adventures: Mad Love by Paul Dini and Bruce Timm. Artwork by Bruce Timm and Glen Murakami.
Comic Book Review by Kerey McKenna.

Hello Nerds Who Read!

Back in 2016 the DC Cinematic Universe at Warner Brothers launched its answer to Marvel Universe’s Guardians of the Galaxy with Suicide Squad, a tale of villains forced to do the dirty work for a shadowy US intelligence organization. And the reviews, including my own, were mixed to poor. Frankly I was being charitable when I rated it the 3rd best superhero/anti-hero heist movie, even below a direct-to-video project. Four years later I would have to rate it lower as we got two more comic book heists in the Ant-Man movies.

However, one thing that did work about that poorly written, underlit, glum exercise in franchise building was Margot Robbie as Harley Quinn, partner/victim of the murderous clown prince of crime The Joker (no, not either of the Oscar nominated ones). Since Harley’s debut in the epic 1990s Batman: The Animated Series, the character has been a fan favorite, appearing as a mainstay in other Batman projects prior to Suicide Squad (save for the WB movies and the Gotham TV series). Robbie’s performance knocked it out of the park with her Punch and Judy bat capturing the energy of a magic pixie dream girl that’s equal parts Bonnie Parker and Suicide Girl.

And since part of the success of the DC Cinematic Universe course correction was building upon the break-out heroine from another glum movie and giving their fun, larger-than-life characters epic and colorful visual palettes, it makes sense to bring Robbie’s Harley Quinn back to the big screen in Birds of Prey and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn premiering today.

To mark the occasion, and to emphasize the Read in Nerds Who Read, I thought I’d do a quick retrospective on the origin comic book of Harley Quinn.

The Eisner award winning 1994 comic Mad Love was not Harley Quinn’s first appearance because, as noted, she had debuted on Batman: The Animated Series two years prior. Harley Quinn was an odd new addition to the Batman rogues gallery, introduced not as a villain in her own right but as a member of Joker’s gang. It seems the Joker, vaudevillain as he is, appreciated a lovely assistant around for certain gags and heists. However what soon became apparent to the creators of the show, and fans, was that Harley Quinn added exciting new possibilities to the Batman formula.

In the tie-in comic Mad Love, Dini and Timm went about giving their creation a proper spotlight and tragic origin story like they had other villains Mister Freeze, Two-Face, and Poison Ivy. They did such a good job that this comic was later adapted into an episode of the animated series, also called “Mad Love,” which certainly contributed to her growing popularity

If you have not seen the animated adaptation or have not seen it in a while I would highly recommend you seek it out. Arleen Sorkin as Harley Quinn, playing a part that was literally written for her, shows a great deal of range and has amazing chemistry with both Mark Hammil’s Joker and Kevin Conroy’s Batman. Pretty much everything in the show was also in the comic, save for some scenes that were cut presumably for pacing and for standards and practices of what was ostensibly a children's show.

As I discussed in my retrospective of the series as a work of film noir, Dini, Timm, and their collaborators were very much about capturing the feel of classic noir and pulp tales. After its opening scene of Batman preventing Joker and Harley from assassinating Commissioner Gordon, the story pumps the brakes on the action and becomes a story of a woman falling into madness, criminality, and love.

We learn that Harley Quinn used to be Doctor Harleen Quinzell, one of the psychiatrists at Arkham Asylum treating insane criminals, including the Joker. Over the course of their one-on-one therapy sessions, the Joker seemingly opens up to Doctor Quinzell, winning her over with his charms and tales of an abusive alcoholic father. Eventually she falls in love with the Joker and comes to see Batman as the true aggressor and bad guy when he and Joker fight for the fate of Gotham.

Completing the “Good girls don’t, bad girls do” morality play, Doctor Quinzel turns her back on normal society, adopts the name “Harley Quinn,” and joins the Joker in a life of crime. After reflecting upon her fall from grace she starts to face facts that she, the Joker, and Batman are stuck in a Love/Hate Triangle. So she decides it is time to go behind the Joker’s back if she’s going to get where she really wants to be in life.

If you’ve seen the episode you will remember how this ends and if you haven’t...well I’m not going to explain the joke.

Kerey McKenna is a contributing reviewer to Nerds who Read and SMOF for the annual Watch City Steampunk Festival, coming to Waltham MA May 9, 2020. Check it out at www.watchcityfestival.com.

Check out our review of Birds of Prey and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn here at Nerds who Read!

Subscribe to Nerds who Read.