“Travel companions” were called those who, without being communist militants, shared revolutionary purposes, spirits and tasks. Many fell under McCarthyism, with the charge of anti-American complicity. Travel companions is now titled (although untranslated, Fellow Travelers) a miniseries that adapts a novel by Thomas Mallon about McCarthyist Hollywood, with a plot of clandestine homosexual loves, suicides and political persecutions.
I have not read the novel, which in Spanish is titled The Lavendersbut the series has interested me a lot because it departs from the codes of the thriller and the ideological pamphlet. Its creator, Ros Nyswaner, has taken it as an arthouse whim that imitates the texture, color, format and narrative of the 50s. The viewer cannot completely suspend disbelief, because the aesthetics do not It allows you to abandon yourself to the emotion of the story.
This defeats the purpose of historical fiction, which wants the public to feel transported to the time. Seeing Fellow Travelers We never turn off our conscience as guys watching a series on a couch from the year 2024, and this inoculates us against presenteeism. We do not live in McCarthyism. No matter how much the angry masses and the desire for cancellation fuel fears of censorship, we do not live threatened by the ghost of the inquisitor. Or, at least, today's Torquemada trainees don't look like yesterday's Torquemadas, who set the FBI on you.
Nyswaner's series – otherwise magnificent – ridicules the constant hyperbole of those who feel suffocated without any hand squeezing them. Which is not to say that today's cancellation and harassment campaigns are not execrable, but they cannot be compared to that terror. As the grandparents of old used to say: I gave you a good McCarthy so that you would know what armed puritanism is.
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