(Pictures from
here and
here.)
I have this nasty habit of bringing up
Philip K Dick in any SF conversation
with the slightest pretext. Other people like
Heinlein or
Asimov or
Bacigalupi—which I do as well. Don’t get me wrong. But PKD is the SF author I
consult when I need to get my head bent. Which happens a fair amount.
PKD’s most famous novel (which some consider to be his best) is
The Man in the High Castle. Which is an alternate history where the Nazis and the
Japanese won World War II. Sort of. The Japanese and Nazi part is correct. But
there’s also a novelist who has written a book in which the Japanese and Nazi’s
lost—but not in the way that it happened in our world.
So, when Amazon put together
The Man in the High Castle as a
television series I was both excited and scared. Excited that someone might
actually do it right.
From here on out, there are spoilers for both. Be warned.
There have been a slew of PKD works that have been visualized. With one
exception, pretty much every one missed the mark. (For those of you who think
Blade Runner is an accurate depiction of PKD’s
Do Androids Dream of ElectricSheep, I humbly invite you to read the book.) The single exception is
Richard Linklater’s A Scanner Darkly. Linklater realized the novel
accurately. However, 1) it’s one of PKD’s weakest novels and 2) Linklater
managed to make it boring.
I hadn’t read TMITHC in over forty years. I chose to watch it on Amazon
first and then reread the novel to see what I thought.
It’s 1962 in the novel. Hitler is dead. Bormann is Chancellor but he’s on
his last legs. Japan occupies most of the western US. Germany occupies most of
the east. There’s an independent area between the two. The relationship between
Japan and Germany is uneasy and that is expressed in the uneasiness of the
Japanese officials and flows down to the populace. The atrocities Germany did
during the war have continued into Africa. In contrast, Germany is sending
spaceships to Mars. Discovered Jews in Japanese territory are deported to the
eastern US.
The novel braids together five stories involving the five main pov
characters of the book. And there I’m going to stop talking about the plot. Every
site I looked at for guidance on how to discuss the plot in a paragraph or two
failed. They all took pages. So I’m referring you to the Wikipedia article
here. The rest of this discussion presumes you know the plot.
Like most PKD books, it is convoluted. It is personal. It is adult. PKD rarely
talks about good. There are only varying shades of decay interspersed with
moments of mercurial joy.
Every book
PKD ever wrote is personal. By that I mean that though he might discuss things
close to his heart, they are of the characters investigation of self. Unlike
many of his contemporaries, PKD didn’t pontificate about How Things Ought to Be
in his work. If his characters didn’t think it, he didn’t write it.
I have always liked PKD’s characterization of people. He talks about adults.
People are worried about jobs. Affairs. Existential crisis. Impending war. They
are concerned with each other the way that adults are concerned about other
adults: concern mixed with the knowledge the other is not a child and has to
take care of themselves. Not that he does not have compassion in his writing.
He does. Think of it like two alcoholics in AA: they take care of each other.
But they do not dictate to one another.
PKD is limited by his upbringing and the time he wrote: his characterization
of women is not as realized as his characterization of men.
I have heard discussions of PKD that suggested his characterization was
wooden. I disagree—but this may come from the idea that I’ve met people very
much like the people PKD writes about. Mildly neurotic, self-involved people
who think about life and death and evil where such concerns are trumped by
making a living. People that are on the edge of things. People who are just a
few paychecks away from bankruptcy and view their personal travails as
judgement.
Since PKD is interested in these things, his books contain people who are
similarly interested in such things. Consequently, there is a similarity of
character between his novels. I don’t think this is a flaw. John Updike did the
same: he wrote about people and lives that interested him. Consequently, there
is a similarity between the people in his novels.
In TMITHC these same sort of people have to confront the reality of an evil
that is beyond their own everyday lives. The Japanese, for all their faults—and
there are many—are considered morally superior to the Germans. The Germans have
continued towards the Final Solution, first the Jews in Germany and then the
Jews in the US. More recently in the novel, they have taken on Africa. They may
well be about to take on Japan.
Threaded through this book is another book:
The Grasshopper Lies Heavy. This is a novel that describes the
world as if they Allies won the war—but it doesn’t quite get it right. The
Nazis think this novel is a threat and ultimately want to assassinate the
author but that happens towards the end of the novel.
It is this broken mirror aspect of the novel that is the most interesting.
The Allies lost and the USA is occupied—twenty years later the occupation is
accepted. There is no overt underground in the novel. This is perhaps the most
disheartening part of the novel: the easy way people accept occupation. At
least on the Japanese side. The novel extends into the neutral territories
between the two areas of occupation but never goes east. It does not confront
Nazi occupation directly.
There’s a certain metafictional element to the novel but PKD never breaks
the fourth wall. He never nods to the reader. The reader has to pick it up
solo.
An mechanism in the book by which people divine their fate is the
I Ching, a book of Chinese divination
brought to the USA by the Japanese occupation. People continually consult it.
Ultimately, it is discovered the book was, in effect, written by the
I Ching. The author of
Grasshopper consulted it on every plot
point. Every character creation. One of the characters in TMITHC, Juliana,
wonders why the
I Ching would need to
write a book. She concludes that
Grasshopper
is correct: the Allies won. And that the world she’s known is mere illusion.
Amazon’s TV show is considerably different. (It’s plot summary is
here.)
This can’t be too surprising. Given the internal nature of TMITHC, how could
it be otherwise?
One couple is together where in the book they have divorced. In the TV show
there is an actual underground. The
Grasshopper
novel has become a collection of newsreel photos. The assassin of
Grasshopper’s author is looking for
whoever is producing the films—no one knows. The
I Ching is not mentioned.
One major change is that half the series takes place in Nazi occupied
America. PKD was satisfied for people to ruminate on what the Nazis did. The
series has to show it—unless you’re Ingmar Bergman, there’s no room on the
screen for verbal introspection.
There’s a lovely scene where Joe Blake is driving a truck to the neutral
territories. Joe Blake is the equivalent character to the Italian assassin in
the novel. He has a flat tire. A state policeman comes by and at first Joe
thinks he’s going to have to kill the officer to protect his mission. But the
officer just helps him. He was an Allied soldier but now works for the state. When
they’re done, the it seems to snow. Joe is surprised. The officer looks up and
says, “It’s Thursday. They run the incinerator up at the hospital on Thursdays:
cripples, old people, the terminally ill.” The officer says it as calmly as if
he were discussing the price of eggs.
This is what I liked best about the show and what is most in keeping with
the novel. In both cases, the evil is apparent. At no point in the novel does
PKD let you forget the evil is there. Every time a character turns there’s more
evidence of it. His treatment of it is introspective but that does not make it
any less compelling.
The series does the same. Often in books or movies about terrible things,
there’s a moment where the camera looks away. Perhaps it’s a point of artistic
license (
Spielberg’s red little girl amidst the black and white landscape in
Schindler’s List, for example.) Or it’s
a quip or joke or madness. These are moments for the audience to breathe. To
for a short second remind themselves it’s a movie or television. Amazon’s
series never looks away. It also doesn’t let the Japanese off the hook like the
novel does—the Japanese secret police may not be the Gestapo but they can
recognize them down the block.
And, like the novel, the characters carry the evil. It’s not something
extrinsic like Sauron or Lucifer. Each character carries heaven and hell
within. It is their act of adult choice that determines which gets expressed.
So: the series has some plot similarities to the novel. Not a lot. But it
doesn’t matter. They seem to carry the same spirit.
At
least at the moment. It is only the first season. I can’t imagine it
going more than one more—it feels like the story is at the half way
point. If Amazon tries to push it forward as a cash cow, I’ll just quit
watching.
.jpg)
.png)
Posts
