The Man in the High Castle, season one, episodes three and four: "The Illustrated Woman," "Revelations" (Amazon Prime, 2015)

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

Last night Charles and I logged on to Amazon Prime (the only “streaming” channel we’ve ever subscribed to, more for the free and quick shipping on my Amazon.com orders than for the streaming feature) to watch the third and fourth episodes of season one of their TV adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, his 1962 counter-factual novel imagining what life would be like in America if the Nazi Germans and their Japanese allies had won World War II. (There’s also an alternate future to Dick’s alternate future -- a world in which the Allies won the war but not in the same way they actually did.) We managed to watch episodes three, “The Illustrated Woman” (imdb,com summary: “Joe and Juliana must act quickly as a vicious bounty hunter known as The Marshal arrives in Canon City. Tagomi makes plans with Wegener to pass valuable secrets from the Reich, and Frank plots his revenge against the Japanese”) and four, “Revelations” (imdb.com summary: “Joe is increasingly torn between duty and his growing feelings for Juliana. While Ed tries to stop Frank from making an irrevocable decision, Smith's investigation is interrupted when he has trouble with his witness, and Tagomi's plan goes awry as events take a dramatic turn at the Crown Prince's speech”), glitch-free, but the freeze-ups and warning signs that we’d lost our Internet connection kept coming fast and furious through episode five, “The New Normal” (imdb.com: “Juliana returns home, only to discover new clues that lead her closer to unraveling the mystery behind the films. Meanwhile, Joe faces a tough debriefing upon his return home. Kido begins his investigation into the events surrounding the Crown Prince's speech, while Tagomi and Wegener make a last-ditch attempt to complete their mission”), until the damned thing froze up completely in the middle of the episode and we switched it off and went back to normal TV.

The Man in the High Castle is a quite compelling drama about divided loyalties and the sorts of psychopathologies brutally dictatorial regimes like Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan encourage -- the most compelling (if totally loathsome) character in these episodes is “The Marshal” (an excellent performance by Burn Gorman), a shotgun-armed assassin who gets off on terrorizing the people he’s about to kill (or maybe not kill if he gets more of a charge out of scaring them shitless than actually offing them -- he reminds me of a statement one of Charles Manson’s friends made to prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi to the effect that the key to understanding Manson was that ‘fear turns Charlie on”),who comes to Canon City, Nevada (part of the “neutral zone” between the Japanese occupation zone in the West Coast and the Nazi-ruled East and Midwest) in search of another Nazi assassin, one who folds origami cranes (thereby linking the German and Japanese wings of the fascist alliance that, according to this story, are about to have a falling-out and go to war against each other once the terminally ill Hitler dies and an even more fanatical German nationalist -- either Joseph Goebbels, Heinrich Himmler or Martin Bormann -- takes over as the second Fuhrer).

The key figures in this story (at least so far) are Joe Blake (Luke Kleintank), tall, handsome and the kind of character who in any other writer’s story would be an uncomplicatedly sympathetic leading man but here is a typically conflicted Philip K. Dick “quest” character who’s a Resistance fighter who’s really a Nazi spy, only with which side (if any) do his true loyalties lay?; Juliana Crain (Alexa Davalos -- an appropriate name for the star of a series produced by Amazon.com!), who was apolitical until she more or less accidentally took her sister Trudy’s place in the Resistance after Trudy got killed smuggling one of the anti-Nazi films depicgting Dick’s alternate-alternate future in which the Allies win the war; Frank Frink (Rupert Evans), struggling with grief over the deaths of her sister and her two children at the hands of the Japanese secret police with German gas technology; Nobosuke Tagomi (Cary-Hiroyuke Tagawa), the Japanese trade minister in San Francisco; and Rudolph Wegener (Carsten Norgaard), a German official posing as a Swedish businessperson as part of a plot with Tagomi to assassinate the Japanese Crown Prince when he visits San Francisco to make a speech.

Frank uses his job as a machinist to build himself a replica of a Colt .45 to assassinate the Crown Prince (he can only get three bullets for his gun and has to pay an astronomical price for them because they’re considered contraband -- the fact that the occupiers have ended all this nonsense about the Second Amendment is actually one of the few good things about them!), though in the end he draws back and someone else in the pay of Tagomi and Wegener (one wonders if Philip K. Dick named this character after Paul Wegener, who played the monster created by a Jewish rabbi to defend the Jewish community against medieval pogroms in the 1920 film The Golem) shoots the Crown Prince instead (though I suspect Dick and his adapters are setting up Frank to be the fall guy for the assassination attempt the way the Nazis blamed the 1933 Reichtag fire on a crazy Communist). After two relatively straightforward opening episodes The Man in the High Castle is starting to look more like a Philip K. Dick story, with convoluted plot lines (in the opening “The Man in the High Castle” was merely the title of the anti-Nazi films showing a version of the war in which the Allies won; here he’s an actual person, the secret leader of the Resistance whom Joe is trying to track down on behalf of the Nazis … assuming that’s where his true loyalties lay), characters of uncertain loyalty and morality, and an overall air of seedy decadence. There are so many grungy-looking cafes and bars in this story one expects Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe to come in any moment -- and the Black cafe owner in Canon City, who initially seemed like just an obnoxious boss, turns out to be a Resistance leader and one of the people on The Marshal’s hit list.

During a previous episode Charles had a problem with the anachronistic use of Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” on a record Joe plays, though as I pointed out that record was made in early 1939 and therefore would have existed before World War II, whatever its outcome -- but these episodes featured a lot of music that probably wouldn’t have existed if the Nazis and their Japanese allies had won the war, including a beautiful Ella Fitzgerald performance of George Gershwin’s “Summertime” with only a piano accompaniment and a record of Memphis Minnie singing “Nobody’s Fault but Mine.” It’s hard to believe these records -- particularly one by a Black singer doing a song from an opera about Black people written by a Jewish composer -- would even have been made, let alone publicly played, in a Nazi-ruled America, just as it’s difficult to imagine one in which Black people would not only have been allowed to remain free but even own and run businesses. Indeed, the theme song for the entire series -- “Edelweiss” from the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical The Sound of Music, a show created by two Jews about the heroid escape of an anti-fascist Austrian family from the clutches of the Nazis after their 1938 takeover of Austria -- would almost certainly never have existed in this world!