New York's Times Square in the cold and dark world of Amazon's 'The Man in the High Castle'
So much of history is happenstance, where a combination of choices and random events aligned just right to create the world we know. Oh, where would we be if things had gone just a little differently? From red scare films like
Red Dawn to authors like Harry Turtledove, many have made careers out of imagining worlds where our history went either a little or a lot differently.
But Philip K. Dick's Hugo Award-winning novel, The Man in the High Castle, is not only one of the best examples of alternate history, it's also a little different from most of the other works in the genre. One of the big themes in Dick's assorted works is "mind screw" where the true nature of reality is questioned, and how thin a hold his characters have on their perception of it. The Man in the High Castle is set in a world where the Axis powers won World War II, and the United States has been split in two. From that starting premise, things get much more complicated and involves the I Ching and Taoism, as well as a subversive work within the work called The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, made by the titular man in the high castle.
Produced by Ridley Scott, who has some experience adapting Dick's material, written by Frank Spotnitz (The X-Files) and directed by David Semel, The Man in the High Castle pilot for Amazon has created a lot of positive buzz.
Follow beneath the fold for more.
Set in a very different 1960s America, Amazon's The Man in the High Castle does not give us an info dump of exposition to explain how a world where brownshirts roam the streets of New York came to be. However, we do learn through dialogue the Germans have nuked Washington, D.C., and that "V-A Day" occurred in 1952.
The West Coast is under Japanese occupation, what's left of the United States government still exists as a puppet client of the Third Reich (a la Vichy France) in the east, and a neutral zone has been created along the Rocky Mountains. The story follows Julia Crain (Alexa Davalos), who is spurred into action after her sister was murdered by Japanese authorities for possessing The Grasshopper Lies Heavy. Julia is dating a Jew-in-hiding, Frank Frink (Rupert Evans), and decides to investigate the nature of the man in the high castle. While this is happening on the West Coast, Joe Blake (Luke Kleintank) convinces the resistance in New York to trust him with transporting a package to the Rockies. As the story for those two characters converge, Mr. Tagomi (Cary-Higoyuki Tagawa), a Japanese diplomat, discovers the Nazi regime, held together by an ailing Hitler, is about to fall into chaos. But nothing and no one are exactly what they seem.
Alexa Davalos as Julia and Luke Kleintank as Joe in 'The Man in the High Castle'
What this pilot does really well is establishing the look of this alternate world. I have a strong dislike for an overindulgence in fake CGI settings, but the visual wizardry works here in establishing a mood. As the camera pans across familiar New York City landmarks that have been redecorated by fascists or looks down the streets of a San Francisco that's been influenced by Japanese colonists, we see a world where the meaning of being an "American" has been completely and utterly devalued of self-worth. A true defeat is not only the violent end of war against one's favor. It's the bending of will, attitude and norms towards one's enemy. That's pretty evident in this hour of television when a Nazi from Florida appears on a
What's My Line-esque TV show wearing a red, white and blue Swastika.
A German supersonic commercial airliner lands at Hirohito International Airport in San Francisco.
What's less clear about this show is how well it will handle some of the more mind screwy elements of the story if it goes to series. I'm not going to spoil the details for those who haven't read the book, but there are definitely hints of those bits from the book in this pilot. In the broadest sense, the viewer/reader should by default recognize Nazi ideology as absurd and want the characters to declare its absurdity and break free from the nightmare of the story. But there are other nightmares, even some in this present world. A big theme of Dick's story is whether we accept the illusions, go along to get along, or are we able to break from them? Spotnitz's screenplay reshapes and changes aspects of Dick's original, but the same was true of how Scott's
Blade Runner uses
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? as a foundation to explore ideas in different ways.
- The opening titles: The credits use what I've seen described as either a sorrowful lament or sinister version of "Edelweiss" from the 1959 Rodgers and Hammerstein musical The Sound of Music.
- An alternate history of the early 20th century: While the series doesn't delve into the exposition of how the Axis won, Dick did outline a series of events in the book. The point of divergence between our timeline and this one is Giuseppe Zangara's assassination attempt against President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The resulting presidencies of John Nance Garner and John W. Bricker are unable to bring the country out of the Great Depression and promote a foreign policy that keeps the United States isolationist. During the early years of World War II, the United States is unable economically to send material and support to the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union, and both nations fall. When the eventual attack against Pearl Harbor occurs, it is far more devastating and the country is ill-equipped to rally for war and defend itself.
- But: It's not a given that this is the way history transpired in the television adaptation, since some aspects are different. For example, Hitler is said to be dying in both iterations, but the reasons are different. Here he is suffering from Parkinson's disease. In the novel, he's crazy and dying from syphilis, and it's used as a commentary on the depths of how tragic a Nazi victory would be. The Nazi dream is given form, but even some of the Nazi characters realize it's really the nightmare of a syphilitic loon.
- The Grasshopper Lies Heavy takes a different form: In the original novel, The Grasshopper Lies Heavy is a book within the book. Here it is a visual medium inside of a visual medium, taking the form of a newsreel depicting a world where the Allies won. One of the most effective scenes of the pilot occurs when Davalos's Julia breaks into tears of joy watching the Japanese surrender on the deck of the USS Missouri. However, this is a shift from the book as well. While it's still a bit unclear, the newsreel seems to depict events as they happened in "our" world, which was not exactly true of The Grasshopper Lies Heavy in Dick's novel.
From Adi Robertson at
The Verge:
The first time we see The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, it's in protagonist Juliana Crain's dingy apartment. "It shows us winning the war!" she exclaims, brushing off her boyfriend's insistence that the tapes are only well-produced fiction. "They look real because they are real." In our reality, she's right, of course—it's newsreel footage of the Iwo Jima flag, the Japanese surrender, and celebration in Times Square. It's as if she's known all along that the world she's living in is just a contrived "what-if" scenario, one that will collapse as soon as the credits roll. She's just been waiting for the evidence.