red scare

The Pembertons live across the street from the O’Connells in Bartleby, Indiana during the height of the Cold War. Joe McCarthy’s Soviet paranoia has been put down by his Senate colleagues, and all of America is basking in the perfume of the good life. New cars for everyone. Low-interest mortgages for everyone. Bomb shelters for everyone. Low-cost, clean water for everyone. Flouride. Television. Consumer goods like there’s no tomorrow. But maybe there is no tomorrow. Brian Pemberton and John O’Connell are both eight years old. Brian’s older sister, Katherine is seventeen and his brother Stanley is nineteen. John’s sister, Eleanor is sixteen going on thirty. Little by little, these neighbors begin assembling a complex scenario of personalities and problems that threaten to bring-down the entire house of cards that is the American fifties. European ideas. Rockabilly music. The collapse of tradition and the rise of subversion. Strange, new ways of looking at the world – of looking at ourselves. And with the tapering-off of anti-Communist hysteria, the time is ripe for a new wave of Socialist undermining of American values. Welcome to the early stages of Amerika. Katherine Pemberton wants to be a journalist. Her mentor, Professor Donald Wilcox, not only wants her to succeed, he wants her – period. Stanley Pemberton is studying to become a doctor. But his original plan to heal the planet is sidetracked by the opportunity to make a lot of money as a plastic surgeon. And Eleanor O’Connell, the dark and intense girl that everyone assumes will go off the deep end, is really the only voice of true reason in either of the two families. Red Scare is like an industrial or sex education film from the fifties, a sometimes-frightening, sometimes-satiric look at how history often stands our own values on their heads.