Thursday, August 10, 2017
You may not believe it is possible, but you are wrong.
THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE
FRANK SPOTNITZ – PHILIP K. DICK – THE MAN IN THE
HIGH CASTLE – 1962 – TV SERIES – 2015 (Review August 10, 2017)
The novel from which this TV
series is adapted is an old dystopic novel of 1962, entirely positioned in an
alternative world in same year. But first of all let’s speak of the novel
itself.
This book is an old book, in fact
a classic, rather confidential at the time of its first publication and even
when recently republished because of its theme, but it has been brought to new
awareness in the public because Amazon has just decided to produce an
adaptation of it for video streaming. Is it a good decision to bring it back to
fame, because it will be fame this time? We’ll see right now why it should not
have been kept more or less confidential for more than fifty years.
The genre is difficult because it
is RETROSPECTIVE
SCIENCE FICTION. Science fiction is supposed to imagine what the
future will be or may be according to one or two parameters that are changed in
our present in absolute or relative value. Of course you can cheat the way
“Back to the Future” did at least three times, and we may regret it does not go
on at least one more time, but things are what they are and life is a truck
full of manure as we all know. Here the author imagines in 1961-62 what the
world would have been if in 1945 Germany and Japan had won the war. It is the
basic hypothesis so many people work in their minds or in bar and saloon
discussions: what the world would be if… And there is no limit to these IF’s.
As they say in Paris the Eiffel Tower could be put in a bottle if… and the same
for the Empire State Building or the Chrysler Building in New York if …, and
for the >Washington Monument in Washington DC if … And after every
presidential election in the world people imagine what it would be or would have
been if the loser had won. Follow my eyes and read my lips.
But what is the main and basic
interest of this book?
First the world is cut in two
with Japan on one side and Germany on the
other side. The Communists have disappeared due to a strict eradication of all
Slavs by Germany .
The racial problem has also disappeared by the elimination of all black people
in the world and first of all in Africa by Germany . In the same way the
holocaust of Jews was continued though here the Japanese refused to cooperate.
Imagine the world without Black people even in Africa ,
with maybe a few survivors surviving since it would be their only function as
absolute slaves to be used, and abused, by any one of a paler complexion
including children and even babies. I regret the book does not expand on this
subject as much as it does on Jews, and particularly the few Jews who managed
to get out of the influence of Germany and be de facto protected by the
Japanese.
But the most frightening part is
that Germany is in the hands
of the few people who were leading Germany in the war. In spite of the
fact that Hitler is dead in 1961, it is his direct lieutenants and underlings
that have taken over and are fighting for dominance, Goebbels first of all. The
book is quite explicit on what happens in such a totalitarian state that is
like a pot with a dozen spiders locked up in it who can only manipulate the
crowds of people through the glass wall that protects them (the leaders only)
and of course they have their legions outside that can eliminate all those who
have to be eliminated for the dominating underling(s) to remain dominant, and
at the same time these legions can go on some blood baths of their own for the
fun of shedding and drinking the red stuff we call blood and they call a
delicatessen though the Jews would consider it to be the soul of man, the
divine part of man.
And yet the book is fascinating
for other reasons. It explores the very contemplative and oracular culture of
the Japanese who have some kind of portable oracle in two volumes they consult
regularly to know the meaning of the present and try to cope with the future.
It provides the believers with Hexagrams that are both sibylline and
enlightening in the shape of Haikus of six or about six lines. But the inner
psychology of these Japanese is explored in depth: contemplative, extremely
civil and polite, courteous and maybe even servile, but never revealing their
true feelings and avoiding expressing any emotion and sensation. Cold for sure
and yet tremendously empathetic, but unexpressed and unaired empathy. It is
this very quality that makes them resist the German Nazis because they are able
to communicate with the deepest forces in the universe, what every geological
element carries, atomic forces and the power of any design, the design of
molecules, or human-created designs and there we have a tremendous surprise.
Two people launch a jewelry production unit in San Francisco and the main worker of the two
is a Jew running incognito under a false name and under the de facto protection
of the Japanese, a little bit more at the end of the book. And it is this Jew
who is the creative jeweler, the creative artist, the craftsman who is
producing with his hands the world of tomorrow as the Japanese main character
tells us over and over again.
That would symbolically tell us
the German Nazis tried to eradicate the Jews because they represented the
future and the Nazis represent the past. Simple, symbolical but is it really
cathartic? There I cannot answer because anti-Semitism is slightly more complex
than just a simile or a metaphor. It has to do with the fear that developed
somewhere in the Middle East some 10,000 years ago in the vast confrontation of
three cultures emerging from the ice age and trying to invent the future of the
planet: The Turkic peoples, the Semitic peoples and the Indo-European
(Sumerian) peoples. We are still living on that heritage, the heritage of an
anthropological rivalry that became the differentiation of three linguistic
families, and of three cultures with three religions, and what’s more the
Semitic community got split in two along a social differentiation (exploiter
and exploited) and a religious antagonism (Judaism and Islam). Christianity is
the third religion branching out of Judaism and it is more or less assumed as
part of the European, hence Nazi definition. The Christian religion is vastly
absent from the book.
Of course in this book the Arabs
and beyond them the Muslims are totally ignored and unconsidered, being
replaced by the fourth human group that never had any role to play in the
previous triad, the Buddhist and Confucian human family who are also from
another linguistic family, isolating languages, here represented by the
Japanese. That’s the main element that is absent from this book. Northern
Africa, Egypt were essential at the end of the Second World War and still
enormously influential in 1962, but yet the Arabs and Muslims are just not
considered at all. That’s the shortcoming of the book in our modern times
because since 1960-62 it is the community that has emerged most strongly from
the initial triad and today the Asian isolating family is no longer represented
by Japan but China . But of
course this book did not aim at telling us its future which is our present, but
only the present in 1961 if …
The last element I would like to
show is that the book has no end, precisely because of what I have just said.
It does not open on the future in 1961 so it cannot have any end. It is coming
to several open-ended dead ends, open-ended because we can imagine what we like,
but dead ends since it does not tell us anything about what may happen after
1961. That’s the doom of retrospective science fiction. It is dramatic,
frightening but at the same time it leads to no vision of the future. It is
some kind of castrated science fiction that cannot tell us anything about our
real world, the world of the real readers of the book, particularly those who
read it a long time after the writing time. And that’s where the video
adaptation will be fascinating since it will have to be adapted for today’s and
tomorrow’s publics. But we’ll have to wait for it to be available in the whole
world to add a paragraph, in fact a few paragraphs, to this review.
Let the few who can access the
video adaptation celebrate! God Bless the Child! (Review published on December
23, 2015, See further down for the original)
Now let’s move to the TV series.
The TV Series, the Blessed Child
I have just mentioned, whose first two seasons are only available so far, is an
expanded vision and the expansion seems to be changing quite a few details,
especially since television must be visually acceptable and it does not have to
be logically or even concretely possible. The Man in the High Castle is
apparently making disturbing films that describe the world the way it developed
after the victory in WW2 against Germany and Japan and his “studio” is a big
warehouse somewhere in the San Francisco area, at least till he decides to move
on and to torch his film producing “high castle.” We are not told then where he
decides to move to.
The second remark is that the TV
series can easily jump from San Francisco and the Japanese Pacific states, to
New York and the Greater Nazi Reich and to Berlin, the capital of this Greater
Nazi Reich. To enable this, some characters have to be invented and the series
becomes the story of these characters.
In San Francisco the central
character is Juliana Crain who moves to the Neutral Zone, a buffer zone between
the Japanese Pacific States and the Greater Nazi Reich, in fact Canon City,
Colorado, after her sister is killed by the Japanese police, leaving her
partner Frank Frink behind. She will come back and later she will move to New
York as a refugee from the Pacific States where she is wanted by the Japanese.
Frank Frink is also essential in San Francisco because of the role he plays
little by little with the resistance against the Japanese. Frank is surrounded
by several other characters and he is very complex since he is connected to the
Japanese mafia who manages to liberate him and later his friend Ed McCarthy
from the accusation of having shot the Japanese Crown Prince, though it was
done by a Nazi agent. And on the Japanese side you have one more character
(apart from the police and the general organizing the production of an atom
bomb), the Trade Minister who is lost between the reality of these Japanese
Pacific States, the recollection of his wife before this time (she is dead) and
for him the alternative world of Kennedy’s USA in 1962 and the Cuban crisis
with the Soviet missiles. He is able to navigate from one level to the other
thanks to some kind of typical Zen meditation.
San Francisco then is divided
between the Resistance, the Japanese and the Americans who try to survive and
strive in this colonized situation, with the Neutral Zone behind and direct bus
lines used by the Japanese to transport uranium from the Neutral Zone to San
Francisco, unprotected and thus killing all the “American” passengers, which
does not count for anything for the Japanese since they are “American” and this
ruse enables the uranium to be transported unnoticed by the Germans.
New York is not in any way simpler
since it has been totally expurgated like Europe of all the Semites, meaning
the Jews, and of all the Blacks since all Africans have been sent back to
Africa which is a big German colony, meaning a slave territory for all kinds of
work. The main Nazi master of New York and the American Nazi states is a
certain SS Obergruppenführer John Smith, and his family. We discover them from
the inside because of Juliana Crain who is integrated into the Nazi elite by
John Smith himself because he thinks she has some inner information about the
resistance and the man in the high castle. The Nazi Reich practices total
eugenics and John Smith’s son has the genetic disease John Smith’s brother had.
He has to be eliminated. But John Smith is cheating with the system with the
plan of sending his son on a patriotic trip in Latin America where he will be
kidnapped by some “Semites” and thus will be able to remain alive.
But John Smith is trying to get
another young person, Joe Blake, into the position of a special agent but it is
difficult because when Joe Blake was sent to Canon City in Colorado he came
across Juliana and another Nazi agent who had the order to get the film she was
transporting and kill her. Joe Blake saves her and the result is the death of
the Nazi agent and the delivery of the film (in fact two because Joe Blake was
also transporting one to enter in contact with the resistance) to the
resistance represented locally by a black man, Lem Washington. And after that
“encounter” entirely based on unshared secrets they go their separate ways
though the next mission of Joe Blake will take him to San Francisco to
recuperate another film and he will escape the Japanese police thanks to Juliana
who manages him to be taken on a boat to Mexico, and he will escape the
resistance thanks to a Nazi bribe of the resistance people on the boat who are
transporting him to Mexico, but the bribe delivered by air is poisoned and the
black people on the boat will all die, both as criminals and as black people,
hence duly eliminated from the surface of the earth. The Nazis seem to be
waiting for the death of Hitler to seize power, or rather to start fighting to
seize power. Himmler started too early so he is killed by Smith. But Hitler
does die and the power chase starts.
Berlin is of course the heart of
the Nazi Reich and we discover it by following Joe Blake there. He is summoned
to Berlin by his father, the main minister of the Reich, and he discovers little
by little who he is. Not only the son of his mother who eloped to New York with
him, but the genetically selected son of both his parents who could have been
raised in a special institution to produce the next generation of SS fighters
if his mother had not escaped away from Berlin, probably though not entirely
clear with the assent of the father who was already an important character in
the Nazi regime. He thus discovers his birth place and early infancy
institution (closed by then in 1962) with his father, who he hates. But his
father puts a young woman his age and coming from the same selective program as
him, and the chemistry of hormones and common experience brings them together
and though at first he wants to go back to New York where he has a life partner
and a son, he decides against his father’s will, after he had been appointed
acting Chancellor waiting for the official announcement of Hitler’s death, to
stay and be sworn into the SS. He thus endorses the role he was playing in one
of the films he has actually viewed and delivered to the Nazis: in this film he
is an SS officer who shot the surviving resisting people after San Francisco is
flattened by an atom bomb, and among those he shot there was Frank and several
other people we have met.
In our present times of tension
between the USA and Asia (not only North Korea but the whole of Asia, including
Russia of course) the debate about the use of nuclear weapons to conquer the
half of America either the Japanese or the Nazis have or do not have is
particularly welcome. In the film the Germans already have atom bombs, but the
Japanese have to build one and they received the blue print of such a device
from a German high-ranking officer who betrayed the Nazi Reich, in the name of
equilibrium, peace and the deterring power of nuclear weapons, under a fake
British identity and then a fake Japanese diplomatic visa. He was captured in
New York by John Smith. The series is slightly light on the question of the use
of nuclear weapons that have not been used yet in the dystopic world, though
the Japanese Trade Minister in his “trip” to our real world in 1962 discovers
about Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They deal with nuclear warfare in the dystopic
world as a matter of need: strike first and conquer the Pacific States, first
meaning before the Japanese have a nuclear weapon of their own. Of course the
real world of 1962 and the possible use of nuclear weapons against Cuba is set
in parallel with the dystopic world. There is a peace movement in the USA
against the use of nuclear weapons in Kennedy’s time, but there is no peace
movement in the dystopic world, just a resistance that is not really concerned
by the use of nuclear weapons and on the Nazi side the inner conflict to seize
power after Hitler’s death.
We have to think twice about this
debate. Only terroristic and dictatorial regimes can actually use nuclear
weapons in the TV series, and yet it is the USA who used such weapons twice in
our real history. True enough Truman had not been elected President but only
Vice-President under Roosevelt. But will a fully elected President of the USA
use nuclear weapons against a country that has managed to develop such nuclear
weapons and the ICBM necessary to deliver them who knows where? Will a fully
elected President of the USA take the risk of a nuclear war just because one
little country is challenging his narcissistic authority? I will not answer
these questions. Only history will answer them though it is obvious for anyone
who is not a narcissistic person that negotiating is always, absolutely always
better than using force: think of Afghanistan and Iraq and Syria to wonder what
two wars started to answer a foolish terrorist attack from Al Qaeda have led
to. Certainly not a viable and sustainable democratic and peaceful situation
and the coming decade or even decades will not solve the “problem” and bring
things back to “normal.”
In short then a visionary novel
turned into a deeply reflexive series that we should all watch to just ponder
on the question of the use of force and forceful ideologies to conquer the world
rather than the use of negotiations to develop and improve the same world.
PHILIP K. DICK – THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE – 1962
(December 23, 2015)
This book is an old book, in fact
a classic, rather confidential at the time of its publication and even recently
for a classic because of its theme, but it has been brought to new awareness in
the public because Amazon has just decided to produce an adaptation of it for
video streaming. Is it a good decision to bring it back to fame, because it
will be fame this time? We’ll see right now why it should not have been kept
more or less confidential for more than fifty years.
The genre is difficult because it
is retrospective
science fiction. Science fiction is supposed to imagine what the
future will be or may be according to one or two parameters that are changed in
our present. Of course you can cheat the way “Back to the Future” did at least
three times and we regret it does not go on at least one more time, but things
are what they are and life is a truck full of manure as we all know. Here the
author imagines in 1961-62 what the world would have been if in 1945 Germany and Japan had won the war. It is the
basic hypothesis so many people work in their minds or in bar and saloon
discussions: what the world would be if… And there is no limit to these IF’s.
As they say in Paris the Eiffel
Tower could be put in a bottle if… and
the same for the Empire State Building
or the Chrysler Building
in New York
if … And after every presidential election in the world people imagine what it
would be or have been if the loser had won.
But what is the main and basic
interest of this book?
First the world is cut in two
with Japan on one side and Germany on the
other side. The Communists have disappeared due to a strict eradication of all
Slavs by Germany .
The racial problem has also disappeared by the elimination of all black people
in the world and first of all in Africa by Germany . In the same way the
holocaust of Jews was continued though here the Japanese refused to cooperate.
Imagine the world without Black people even in Africa ,
with maybe a few survivors surviving since it would be their only function as
absolute slaves to be used, and abused, by any one of a paler complexion
including children and even babies. I regret the book does not expand on this
subject as much as it does on Jews and the few Jews who managed to get out of
the influence of Germany
and be de facto protected by the Japanese.
But the most frightening part is
that Germany is in the hands
of the few people who were leading Germany in the war. In spite of the
fact that Hitler is dead in 1961, it is his direct lieutenants and underlings
that have taken over and are fighting for dominance, Goebbels first of all. The
book is quite explicit on what happens in such a totalitarian state that is
like a pot with a dozen spiders locked up in it who can only manipulate the
crowds of people through the glass wall that protects them (the leaders only)
and of course they have their legions outside that can eliminate all those who
have to be eliminated for the dominating underling(s) to remain dominant, and
at the same time these legions can go on some blood baths of their own for the
fun of shedding and drinking the red stuff we call blood and they call a
delicatessen though the Jews would consider it to be the soul of man, the
divine part of man.
And yet the book is fascinating
for other reasons. It explores the very contemplative and oracular culture of
the Japanese who have some kind of portable oracle in two volumes they consult
regularly to know the meaning of the present and try to cope with the future.
It provides the believers with Hexagrams that are both sibylline and
enlightening in the shape of Haikus of six or about six lines. But the inner
psychology of these Japanese is explored in depth: contemplative, extremely
civil and polite, courteous and maybe even servile, but never revealing their
true feelings and avoiding expressing any emotion and sensation. Cold for sure
and yet tremendously empathetic, but unexpressed and unaired empathy. It is
this very quality that makes them resist the German Nazis because they are able
to communicate with the deepest forces in the universe, what every geological
element carries, atomic forces and the power of any design be it natural, the
design of molecules, or human-created and there we have a tremendous surprise. Two
people launch a jewelry production unit in San Francisco and the main worker of the two
is a Jew running incognito under a false name and under the de facto protection
of the Japanese, a little bit more at the end of the book. And it is this Jew
who is the creative jeweler, the creative artist, the craftsman who is
producing with his hands the world of tomorrow as the Japanese main character
tells us over and over again.
That would symbolically tell us
the German Nazis tried to eradicate the Jews because they represented the
future and the Nazis represent the past. Simple, symbolical but is it really
cathartic? There I cannot answer because anti-Semitism is slightly more complex
than just a simile or a metaphor. It has to do with the fear that developed
somewhere in the Middle East some 10,000 years ago in the vast confrontation of
three cultures emerging from the ice age and trying to invent the future of the
planet: The Turkic peoples, the Semitic peoples and the indo-European
(Sumerian) peoples. We are still living on that heritage, the heritage of an
anthropological rivalry that became the differentiation of three linguistic
families, and of three cultures with three religions, and what’s more the
Semitic community got split in two along a social differentiation (exploiter
and exploited) and a religious antagonism (Judaism and Islam).
Of course in this book the Arabs
and beyond them the Muslims are totally ignored and unconsidered, being
replaced by the fourth human group that never had any role to play in the
previous triad, the Buddhist and Confucian human family who are also from
another linguistic family, the isolating family, here represented by the
Japanese. That’s the main element that is absent from this book. Northern
Africa, Egypt
was essential at the end of the war but then the Arabs and Muslims are just not
considered at all. That’s the shortcoming of the book in our modern times
because since 1960-62 it is the community that has emerged most strongly from
the initial triad and today the Asian isolating family is no longer represented
by Japan but China . But of
course this book did not aim at telling us its future which is our present, but
only the present in 1961 if…
The last element I would like to
show is that the book has no end, precisely because of what I have just said.
It does not open on the future in 1961 so it cannot have any end. It is coming
to several open-ended dead ends, open-ended because we can imagine what we
like, but dead ends since it does not tell us anything about what may happen
after 1961. That’s the doom of retrospective science fiction. It is dramatic,
frightening but at the same time it leads to no vision of the future. It is
some kind of castrated science fiction that cannot tell us anything about our
real world, the world of the real readers of the book, particularly those who
read it a long time after the writing time. And that’s where the video
adaptation will be fascinating since it will have to be adapted for today’s and
tomorrow’s publics. But we’ll have to wait for it to be available in the whole
world to add a paragraph to this review.
Let the few who can access the
video adaptation celebrate! God less the Child!
Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU
# posted by Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU @ 2:01 PM 
