The Man in the High Castle, season one, episodes 1 and 2: "The New World," "Sunrise" (Amazon Prime, 2015)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night Charles and I took her second excursion into the world of “streaming” via the Amazon Prime channel, which I subscribed to largely to get quicker free deliveries on Amazon.com orders but which I also wanted to investigate as a streaming channel. Charles had asked if there were a way we could continue to watch movies without accumulating more DVD’s (as our apartment gets more cluttered with books, CD’s, DVD’s, Blu-Rays and more) and so I decided to check out the streaming channel offered with Amazon Prime. The first night we did that (last Tuesday) we watched a glitch-free showing of Michael Moore’s Trump documentary Fahrenheit 11/9 and quite liked the film, even though my intention to write an extended commentary on it for my moviemagg blog got lost because obviously I also want to do an article for the Zenger’s blog on Trump’s bizarre (not so bizarre, really, since he’s already raised a quarter of a billion dollars from loyal donors for his fund to set aside the election results, most of which is going to a Trump “Leadership PAC” with whose funds he can do anything he wants, including live on them -- so Trump is probably making even more money losing the Presidency than he made holding it!) refusal to concede the election and his endorsement of one crazy lawsuit after another to disenfranchise whole states for having had the temerity to vote against him. So I went ahead and renewed my subscription to Amazon Prime and agreed to start paying for it after two months’ free trial, and last night Charles and I took our second excursion into the “streaming” world via Amazon’s original production of a TV series based on Philip K. Dick’s novel The Man in the High Castle.

This, perhaps coincidentally, is also a depiction of a fascist-ruled America, a so-called “counterfactual novel” in which the author imagines how the world might have gone if a particular major historical event had turned out differently from the way it actually did. In Dick’s case the major historical event he imagined turning out differently was the outcome of World War II: in his version the Nazis were the first country to develop an atomic bomb and they dropped one on Washington, D.C., destroying it and essentially ending the war on their terms. The book was published in 1962 and won the Hugo Award for best science-fiction novel the next year, and the film version kept the novel’s 1962 setting. The victorious Axis powers have divided the United States into three occupation zones: the Japanese Federal District in the West, direct Nazi Germanr rule in the East and Midwest, and a so-called “neutral zone” in the Rocky Mountains between them. (The same year Dick wrote his novel, William A. Shirer published his history The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and followed it up with a magazine article explaining that this was how the Axis powers actually planned to divide up the U.S. if they’d conquered it: the Japanese would have ruled the western third of the country and the Germans the rest.) Adolf Hitler is still alive but is suffering from Parkinson’s disease and is expected to die soon, and the world in general and the Japanese in particular is bracing for the succession struggle they expect after Hitler’s death. The Japanese are particularly worried about this because the two top contenders to succeed Hitler are Joseph Goebbels and Heinrich Himmler, and the Japanese are concerned that either of those new Fuhreren will break the German-Japanese alliance and launch a war of conquest against Japan.

The MacGuffin is a series of films called The Man in the High Castle depicting an alternative universe in which the Allies won the war (the films are represented by actual newsreel footage of the real events), and the Nazi and Japanese authorities regard mere possession of 16 mm copies of these films as an act of treason. The central characters are Joe Blake (Luke Kleintank), who’s ostensibly a Resistance fighter who gets the assignment to drive a large truck full of coffemakers from Nazi-ruled New York City to Canon City, Nevada in the neutral zone, though about two-thirds of the way through it’s revealed that he’s really a Nazi agent in constant communication with an Obergruppenfuhrer, an American who’s a low-level Nazi officer (and who’s seen at home with his family, including a son who’s proudly showing off a Hitler Youth uniform the way real American boys in 1962 would have shown off a Boy Scout uniform -- it reminded me of Hannah Arendt’s phrase “the banality of evil” and also of the Law and Order rerun I recently saw in which one of the characters is a hit man who has a wife and a normal suburban life and who takes his dog with him when he’s on the job -- he’s an ordinary suburbanite who leaves for work in the morning like anyone else, only his job is killing people and this ordinary suburban family man’s job is torturing and killing enemies of the Reich); Juliana Crain (Alexa Davalos), who takes over as courier of some of the films to Canon City after her sister is caught and summarily killed by Japanese agents; and Frank Frink (Rupert Evans), who’s marked for death by the Nazis for being one-quarter Jewish, though they keep him alive under torture long enough to extract the information of just where his girlfriend was going. They successfully get him to talk by threatening to execute his sister, nephew and niece, whom they seal in a locked room and introduce the killing gas “Zyklon-D” (the actual gas used in the Holocaust was Zyklon-B but Dick assumed there would be at least two generations of improvements in it by 1962). Later, when Frank finally talks, the Nazi officials who questioned him say they had promised to free his relatives if he cooperated, but word of his cooperation reached the people holding them too late.

Indeed, the most powerful aspect of the film throughout (at least the two episodes we’ve seen so far) is its dramatization of just what it’s like to live under occupation, and under an absolutely ruthless occupation at that. At any moment you can be picked up by police or just shot on the street, which might be preferable because if they arrest you they will bring you to a place where you’ll be tortured and ordered to give “information” about the Resistance whether you have any or not. After (the real) World War II, the governments and populations of France, the Netherlands and other countries that had come under Nazi rule tended to see people’s lives under the occupations as either black or white, either collaborator or resister, when I suspect the vast majority of people neither collaborated nor resisted but simply survived, stayed out of trouble as much as they could, maybe went along with the regime to an extent simply to make more money and advance their careers, but never really cared one way or another and gave up being concerned about politics because the risks were too great. That’s certainly the way most of the people in The Man in the High Castle behave, and the filmmakers (the first episode, “The New World,” was directed by David Semel from a script by Frank Spotnitz, and the second, “Sunrise,” was also scripted by Spotnitz but directed by Daniel Percival) do an excellent job of capturing the sheer arbitrariness of absolute authority, the extent to which your life becomes like walking on eggshells because you never know just what innocuous-seeming thing you might do to catch the attention -- and the wrath -- of the authorities.

What I found missing in The Man in the High Castle was any sense of the wild, paranoid world you usually enter when you read a Philip K. Dick novel. I’ve never read The Man in the High Castle, but I’ve read enough Dick to know what his world feels like and the sort of style a filmmaker should bring to it. I’m not necessarily suggesting that every movie based on a story by Philip K. Dick should be shot like Blade Runner (the movie, ironically made the year Dick died -- 1982 -- that established that his works were filmable), but Ridley Scott managed to create a cinematic equivalent to Dick’s writing style and make a movie that was as seemingly off-kilter and thematically elusive as Dick’s prose. It’s the same flaw I’ve found in most of the movies based on works by F. Scott Fitzgerald (ironically, Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons came closer to a filmic equivalent of Fitzgerald’s prose style than any of the films I’ve seen that actually adapted Fitzgerald, partly because of Welles’ gifts as a filmmaker and partly because the Ambersons source novel was written by Booth Tarkington, a writer who was a major influence on Fitzgerald): filmmakers can tell certain writers’ stories but finding a cinematic equivalent to these authors’ unique voices eludes them. Still, I quite liked the first two episodes of The Man in the High Castle and look forward to watching more of them -- if only they don’t keep glitching out!