As I read in the above link of my initial review of
The Man in the High Castle I can sense
my own uncertainty. Is it fair to judge an entire series from just the first
two episodes? I think not; so I decided I would watch a couple more; and by the
end of the week I had binge-watched the entire four season programme. I pretty
soon totally changed my mind about it. It is a gripping story in an excellently
constructed setting. The production design is fascinating and the costumes
outstanding. The producers thought hard about what the American Nazi uniforms
would look like and I think Hugo Boss himself couldn't have done a better job. The
premise is that the entire history of the world changed on
the 15th of February 1933 when Giuseppe Zangara murdered
the president-elect Franklin D Roosevelt. In the real universe Zangara failed
and was arrested. The death of
Roosevelt caused the
entire future to change, including the proceedings and outcome of World War II
being entirely different. The characters in the series are secretive and have
obscure personalities. Their loyalties are undecided and sometimes changeable,
and I found it hard to work out exactly whose side everybody was on. One
character, Helen Smith, does a complete about turn from being very partisan
towards one side to supporting their bitterest enemies. The heroes and/or
villains come across some reels of film that come from parallel universes; some
of them are real life archive news footage of the Allies winning World War II.
They then go on a quest to find out where the films come from and how they are
made with only one clue: "the man in the high castle". The trail
eventually leads to the perfect ingredients for pulp sci-fi horror: underground
Nazis doing evil experiments to break open the space-time continuum. In fact
that part of the story is very original and proficient. There is a secret
laboratory in an old mine run by Dr Josef Mengele, a real person known as
"the Angel of Death" because of his experimentation on non-consensual
live humans from the concentration camps. In the series the same man has built a
machine that opens up an interdimensional portal and has a plan for the Nazis
to conquer other worlds across the multiverse. This reminds me a lot of the
Large Hadron Collider, see:
https://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.com/2015/07/cern-progress-or-apocalypse.html.
The resistance fighters plan to put a stop to this.
The Man in the High
Castle is very absorbing. Some of the characters are delightful, like
Hawthorne Abendsen who is very eccentric and free-spirited, rather like Howard
Beale from
Network, see:
http://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2020/05/network.html.
Even when he is locked in a Nazi prison he never stops singing cheerful songs
as an act of defiance. Another amiable character, Trade Minister Tagomi, is
very spiritual and studies the IChing. Although he is Japanese, he is very
humanitarian and opposes the occupation of the Pacific States. He is a
"traveller", somebody who can teleport between dimensions
spontaneously or at will. Several of the characters have this power. The
special effects are amazing. The virtual
Berlin
is the most impressive because it shows what
Germania
City would have been like. This
refers to Adolf Hitler's proposed post-war redevelopment of
Berlin.
It involved wide streets, parks and tall buildings. The centrepiece is a huge
domed arena called "the People's Hall". It is a thousand feet tall
and dominates the skyline of
Berlin.
For obvious reasons it was never built, but the production designers of
The Man in the High Castle have
recreated it for the series in magnificent realism. There is also a reference
to
Atlantropa, a construction mega-project
to put a dam across the Straits of Gibraltar and drain the
Mediterranean
Sea. Despite all this pure Aryan grandeur, the post-war Reich has
its own underworld though. There is a lesbian club in
New
York City and a swingers' society in
Berlin
where people have orgies and take LSD. Some of the storylines are remarkably
topical considering they would have to have been concocted before the events
they symbolize, a strangely common occurrence in fiction. There is a plan in
Nazi America for
Jahr Null, literally
"Year Zero" in which all the history and memorials of the former
United
States are destroyed. This includes the
demolition of statues... Remind you of anything? See:
http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.com/2020/06/rhodes-statue_10.html.
In one scene there is a national celebration where the Statue of Liberty is pulled
down and replaced with a gigantic Nazi sculpture. Following this defacement,
gangs wander the streets of
New York
burning libraries. This is rather like
Kristallnacht,
a real life incident in November 1938 where Germans went on a nationwide
rampage targeting Jews and their homes or businesses. It is also similar to the
global riots of 2020. The series shows a very good awareness of the many-worlds
interpretation of quantum mechanics, sometimes known as "M-theory".
Philip K Dick was very interested in this idea, see background link above and
those below. There are scenes from alternate universes, including our own one,
in which the same characters appear, but living different lives. Despite it
being such a riveting programme that I was unable to look away from it until
I'd watched all forty episodes, some of my initial criticisms remain. In the
society depicted, the combination of democratic libertarian elements with
fascism makes no sense. On the one hand there exists merciless brutality and
even genocide of which no serious attempt is made to hide it from the
population. In one scene, one of the characters, Juliana, tries to find the
body of her sister who was shot in the first episode. She is led to a mass
grave where the
Kempeitai, the
Japanese state police, dump the corpses of their victims. It is in an open
field behind an unlocked gate right beside a bus stop. The aforementioned Helen
Smith character also discovers a "secret" document that details how
the Reich exterminated its black, Jewish and Hispanic population using gas chambers
and crematoria... in a locked office drawer; however, in another scene earlier in the series, as I detail in
the background link above, a policeman casually eats his packed lunch while the
ashes of dead disabled people fall on him like snow. One of the most tragic
scenes in the series is where Rufus Sewell's character, the American Nazi leader
John Smith, loses his son to that same eugenics programme. When the time comes
to have his two younger daughters tested for "physical imperfections"
his wife begs him to try and avoid it. He replies that he must set a good
example for the people by obeying the same rules they do. In this way he is a
leader accountable to the people, even if it means the death of his children.
This doesn't fit in with a fascist regime where corruption is rampant and the
elite class set themselves different standards to the populace. I'm pleased to
say that the programme is quite politically incorrect. There is a black power
movement in the later seasons, but it is fighting back against the oppression
of the Japanese, not white people. They even team up with white people to rebel
against the "Pons". Leftwing viewers might find that unacceptable. There
is a sinister element to the series and the viewer is reminded of it at the
beginning of every episode by the chilling titles which include the downbeat
performance of
Edelweiss, a song
written for Rodgers and Hammerstein's
The
Sound of Music. In this rendition the feel of the song is completely
different. All in all,
The Man in the
High Castle is well worth watching. See here for the trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzz_6dmv03I.
