The Man in the High Castle on Amazon Prime

Athelstane

Athelstane

The Atlantic has a new review up, with Noah Berletsky getting a little more political than the norm in highlighting the differences between book and novel:

Superficially, perhaps, the novel isn't all that different. Dick also imagines that the Nazis have won World War II, and the world under the Nazis is certainly horrible enough: The novel mentions several times that after their victory in the war, the Germans set about murdering everyone in Africa. Slavery has been reinstituted in the southern United States (an uncomfortable detail that isn't mentioned in the pilot episode), and American Jews in Nazi-controlled areas have been systematically gassed. One of the Jewish main characters, Frank Frink (née Fink) is arrested on the Japanese-controlled west coast and scheduled for deportation to Germany. Meanwhile, in the TV series, Frink (Rupert Evans) only has a Jewish grandparent, which seems a bizarre alteration.

But while life in the novel’s alternate reality is certainly awful in many ways, it's not exactly a dystopia, which is precisely why it's so chilling. Dick's book has little of the pulp melodrama of the TV pilot; there are no torture scenes, no supervillains, and not even a single scene set in the repressive Nazi-controlled region of the former U.S. Instead, the action occurs in the independent Mountain States or on the Japanese-controlled Pacific areas, and most of the characters go about their daily lives just as most of us do now. They have small problems and worries and cares, they adapt to quotidian injustices. But they do so without great urgency about the genocidal violence being inflicted on people on the other side of the world, continent, or neighborhood. The frightening thing isn't the dystopia. It's that the dystopia is so familiar it doesn't really feel dystopian at all.
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I'm not quite sure that Dick didn't feel the dystopian aspect strongly, though. It troubled him enough that he couldn't bring himself to write a sequel. "Somebody would have to come in and help me do a sequel to it. Someone who had the stomach for the stamina to think along those lines, to get into the head; if you're going to start writing about Reinhard Heydrich, for instance, you have to get into his face. Can you imagine getting into Reinhard Heydrich's face?"
 

rvbomally

I actually liked that there were scenes in Nazi-occupied America. Not only is that a draw for the average viewer, it's also a great way to get even more worldbuilding in.
 

Goldstein

Banned
Now that I've expressed praise, I'd like to point out at something that strikes me as a big failure.

I'm not talking about DAS GROBE NAZI-REICH; you can barely notice that, except that there's a lot of people watching who would inmediately detect it, including all native German speakers. I'm more worried about the Nazi-Reich part. I guess it makes sense not to use Greater German Reich if you're talking about an international system that goes beyond that... but, what are the chances of the Nazis officially calling themselves Nazis? Correct me if I'm wrong, but it was a rather casual term for them, even with derogatory tones. It would be like an English speaking Communist country calling itself "The Commie Republic".
 
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Kaiser K

Goldstein said:
what are the chances of the Nazis officialy calling themselves Nazis? Correct me if I'm wrong, but it was a rather casual term for them, even with derogatory tones. It would be like an English speaking Communist country calling itself "The Commie Republic".
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The Greater Nazi Reich thing is the only thing that annoyed me in honesty, but I am not sure how realistic it is either; doesn't seem very realistic.

I'd expect the Nazis to call the state the "Greater Aryan Reich" before they call it the Greater Nazi Reich.
 

MetalSlimeHunt

It might be an allowance for American Nazis, who are ubiquitously familiar with the word. Like a really, really dark version of reclaiming an insult.

There are a few details which suggest the regime in East America is going with the tactic of making things fairly comfortable for loyalists: you see how the one cop in the Midwest speaks proudly about his time as a veteran in WWII even though he now wears the armband and does internal transit checks. I think it all makes decent sense, the Nazis have to control a population and landmass larger than that of (actual) Germany with an existing idealism towards fighting tyranny, so bread and circuses are absolutely necessary to stave off mass revolt until the next generation is indoctrinated.

This also reminded me of another detail I really liked, and that was the decor of the Nazi Embassy in Japan. Particularly the opaque window with the metal frame that is a fairly Japanese style, except for the Swastika in the middle of it.
 

Kaiser K

MetalSlimeHunt said:
It might be an allowance for American Nazis, who are ubiquitously familiar with the word. Like a really, really dark version of reclaiming an insult.
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That actually makes a fair bit of sense, hadn't thought about that before; but it does make a fair bit of sense.

There are a few details which suggest the regime in East America is going with the tactic of making things fairly comfortable for loyalists: you see how the one cop in the Midwest speaks proudly about his time as a veteran in WWII even though he now wears the armband and does internal transit checks. I think it all makes decent sense, the Nazis have to control a population and landmass larger than that of (actual) Germany with an existing idealism towards fighting tyranny, so bread and circuses are absolutely necessary to stave off mass revolt until the next generation is indoctrinated.
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I'd have to concur, and it makes perfect sense, and is actually a smart way to write how the Nazis manage America; so I personally sort of liked that.
 

Richmond_Pope

In any case, what would be the best strategy for a resistance? You've got a Germany insane enough to use nukes as tactical weapons. Any revolt that draws a fair amount of blood is going to see Chicago or St. Louis or some other big city vaporized.

I suppose the "best" case would be to lie fallow and wait what remains of the Russians and/or Chinese to rise up. That is, if there are any left of them...
 

politicalnomad

Watched It, Liked It

I found myself asking which half of America I'd rather live if forced. The Japanese half actually seemed somehow better than the American Reich; I was expecting it to be about even. New York seemed much darker than San Francisco, which was surprising considering how brutally the Japanese treated everyone they conquered in WW2.
 
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occam

politicalnomad said:
I found myself asking which half of America I'd rather live if forced. The Japanese half actually seemed somehow better than the American Reich; I was expecting it to be about even.
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Which is more or less the view expressed by the characters in the book.

I literally just now started watching it, and I can't believe they opened with "Edelweiss". You know, the song everyone thinks is an Austrian folksong but was in fact written by Hammerstein.
 

Strategos' Risk

Guys, I preemptively take credit for this:

Strategos' Risk said:
Scene opens with black and white, vintage film footage of war, bombings, no sounds. Pearl Harbor. Sea Lion landings. Then, attacks on the U.S. Zeros over San Francisco, Golden Gate hit. Panzers rolling into New York. Finally, silent, cheering German troops.

Screen Text
If history had lost a leader​

SFX: A gunshot.

CUT TO: Zangara assassinates FDR​
​


SFX: Tense music, or possibly drumbeats

Quick-Cuts: inauguration, Newspaper with headline “President Bricker declares neutrality!” A fictional conference with smiling Hitler, Tojo, and Mussolini, then colored versions of the earlier scenes of an invasion of U.S.​


Screen Text
What would result?​

SFX: Sad, patriotic music.

CUT TO: Defeated, dirty American troops standing in the bombed-out ruins of Chicago. Patton ceremoniously hands Rommel his sidearm/sword.

Screen Text
If evil had triumphed​

SFX: Again, tense music/drumbeats

Quick-cuts: Images of the Todt Plan, American working on reconstruction under Nazi overseers, refugees running through a dark city, millions of Luftwaffe jets fly over an African savannah, Japanese officials shaking hands with new PSA puppet gov't, German soldiers (actually the SD from the scene late in the book) storming an office building, final shot is of rebuilt New York City, with Nazified architecture​

SFX: Shifts, holds a note, makes an odd ethereal sound

CUT TO: Pan over the length of the Nazi Space Rocket, magnificently huge, zoom out until you realize that its launch pad isn’t on Earth.​


Screen Text
Who could oppose it?

BAYNES (in hushed tones)
And there are others of us. Do you hear? We did not die. We still exist. We live on unseen.

Screen Text
If hostile nations had conquered America​

SFX: No sound, tense silence

Hold shot for 1.5 seconds: Map of U.S. divided into Pacific States, Rocky Mountain States, and the United States​


Screen Text
Where would we be?​

SFX: Once again, tense music/drumbeats

Quick-cuts: Juliana leading a class of judo students; Frank Frink kneels in front of a I Ching oracle book and tosses sticks into the air, prompting the camera to zoom onto them momentarily; Mr. Tagomi peeks out from behind a wall that has an American Civil War recruiting poster prominently displayed; Ed McCarthy holds up something shiny in his hand though we can't see it clearly; an ornate jewel box opens to show a Mickey Mouse wristwatch on a bed of plush velvet; slaves take Childan's luggage as he disembarks from a rickshaw.​


NARRATOR (v.o.)
In this world we see not only the horrors of totality...​

SFX: Tenseness/drumbeats near a crescendo of intensity

Quick-cuts: Imperial Japanese troops execute a Japanese man (profiteer mentioned in the novel), a Nazi rocket passes over the Rockies as Juliana watches, an army of SS troops carrying huge portraits of Heydrich marches towards an army of blackshirts carrying huge portraits of Goebbels into an inevitable fight, "Joe" kills a British officer in North Africa.

CUT TO: Two American cops, one holding Frank Frink.​


COP #1
Back to Germany.

FRANK FRINK
I'm an American!

COP #2
You're a Jew.

NARRATOR (v.o.)
...But the shame of normality.​

SFX: Nostalgic music, slowly fading and becoming more sinister

Quick-cuts: 1950s suburbs, mixed in with some '30s Gernsback-styled art deco technocratic futurism in a way Ray Bradbury would have approved. Kids playing on lawns with hula hoops, roller skates, dressed in odd khaki uniforms. Pan across city, showing well-kept lawns, happy people, neoclassical civic buildings, then...

Shot: The city is surrounded by scorched earth, hundreds of acres of cleared rainforest, images of burnt villages, and as you drift further away, you can see flat, square factories with tall smokestacks spewing out the ghosts of billions of people in the form of midnight-pitch smog.​


[[[In the actual film, a caption would be on the bottom left of the screen: Dakar, Senegal]]]

NARRATOR (v.o.)
A shadow of the truth is awaking.​

SFX: Desparate, dramatic music

Hold shot for 1.5 seconds: A hardcover book with a picture of a grasshopper prominently displayed.

Cut to: Juliana puts hand on cover carefully, picks the book up and looks at it carefully, curious look on her face.

Quick-cuts: A crowd of Japanese and Americans walk out from a bookstore displaying copies of The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, Wyndan-Matsom throws his head back in loud laughter as he drives, Childan (in the Kasouras' living room) flips the cover over, Reiss angrily throws the book across the room, Mr. Tagomi sits on park bench in a trance​


HAWTHORNE ABDENSEN (darkness hiding his face)
I'm not sure of anything.

Juliana
Believe.

Fade in and out for each different line

Screen Text
Based on the alternate history classic about the nightmare of a Nazi victory.

The Man in the High Castle

Directed by Stephen Spielberg

HAWTHORNE ABDENSEN (v.o., passionately)
Germany and Japan lost the war!

Screen Text
A Philip K. Dick Story

Fade to black​
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Major Crimson

Major Crimson

I really liked it, sets and props were great and as far as I'm concerned, it's one of the best TV/Film adaptation of AltHistory I've ever seen.
 
Athelstane

Athelstane

Among the pilots on offer, it looks like THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE is pacing the field. Promising.

But fill out that survey if you haven't already.
 

JjeeporCreepor

I've managed to watch this now, and just to add my thumbs-up (I completed the survey to let Amazon know I enjoyed it). I agree with others that there were a couple of things about the world-building that seemed unlikely or clunky, but I think on the whole they were there to make the setting more explicable to a general audience, so I can live with it.

Although the Obergruppenfuehrer with the American accent for some reason made me think of The Blues Brothers. :D

One thing that really intrigued me is that the newsreels clearly were, as has been said, real films from OTL rather than in-universe fakes, and I don't think this was accidental. One of the themes implied in the novel is that the Nazis-win TL the characters inhabit is in some way a false reality - and that OTL might be too with Abendsen's novel representing the "truth". Which is in line with some of the philosophical ideas Dick expanded on to a rather worrying extent in his later writings. So, I wonder, if it goes to series, will the TV version expand on that aspect and make it more explicit? Could we see some sort of strange veering off into Matrix-style territory at some point? According to the Wiki article on the book, the couple of chapters Dick wrote for the abortive sequel featured time-travelling Nazis hopping between parallel timelines... Interesting.
 
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