Interim review: _The Man in the High Castle_

[jducoeur]

The Man in the High Castle was one of the shows that put Amazon Prime on the map as a creator of its own content. I've been meaning to get to it for years, and finally started about six months ago. It was slow going at first, until I got into it. Now -- well, I'm not quite bingeing it, just doing 1-2 episodes per week, because it is bloody intense. I'm in the middle of Season 3 right now, and here are some impressions so far.

The story starts out in the early 1960s, with two obvious protagonists. On the one hand, there is Juliana, a martial arts student still finding her way in the world in San Francisco, the heart of the Japanese-ruled Pacific States. OTOH, there is Joe, getting by doing manual labor in New York City, capital of the American Greater Nazi Reich, nestled amongst a bucolic and perfect suburbia for The Right Kind of People.

Yes, it's an alternate-world story where the Axis won WWII. But it is by far the deepest treatment of that idea that I've encountered. It is a world very much in the grip of the cold war, just with different powers, where the main proxy battleground is North America instead of central Europe. Having split the world between them, the Japanese and Nazi empires are dancing around, searching for advantage in a world that only ever had one atom bomb dropped -- on Washington DC.

But it's a lot more than just that. Underlying season 1 is the films -- canisters of short films, hunted by the great powers, showing things that didn't happen, that couldn't happen. These films are the mysterious Macguffin at the beginning, and a simpler story would just leave it there. But this is an adaptation of a Philip K. Dick story, and suffice it to say, you get slapped hard in the face with that as the story moves along. As always for PKD, this is a tale about identity and reality, with a lot of layers being slowly peeled back.

It works, brilliantly IMO, because despite all that conceptual complexity it stays squarely focused on the characters, and keeps them deep and complex. Our heroes are by no means simply good, and by season three several of our most obvious antagonists have become protagonists in their own right -- people whose priorities are very different, but who are trying to do the best they can, as they understand the world.

(And yes, they do some pretty monstrous things -- as do our heroes -- and the story doesn't forgive them for that, it just lets you see how someone could think that it was necessary.)

The series isn't perfect. It reflects the time period and the dominant cultures, and winds up quite male-heavy: Juliana is the only woman in the primary characters, although there are several interesting women in the supporting cast, especially by the time we get into season 3. It comes with content warnings for non-trivial violence (although nothing like The Boys level gore: it's mostly brief and often off-screen), as well as for a horrifyingly realistic number of swastikas. (This is a world that is mostly run by an aging Adolf Hitler: there are swastikas and goosesteppers everywhere.) And suffice it to say, this is a world that is not kind to Jews, Blacks, gays, or -- if you're in the Reich -- basically anyone who doesn't live up to Aryan ideals. (There are a bunch of Jewish characters; they are largely fighting just to survive at this point.)

But overall, it's packing a hell of a punch, and is one of the best series I've seen recently. It is a story that is very much about fascism, and while it is deep and realistic, it is by no means sympathetic to that.

Note that I'm only halfway through season 3, out of 4 so far. I don't know whether the series has ended, or will land a good ending -- please don't tell me, since at this point I'm going to watch the rest of it come what may. But so far, it gets a very strong recommendation if you can deal with the subject matter. It's very much science fiction, but mostly it is a story about people trying to figure out how to live through and fight against a world gone very bad.

Comments

[writerkit]

The intensity is pretty much the reason I'm *not* trying to watch it-- I stopped watching Jessica Jones a bit more than halfway through season 1 because it hit too hard and too close to home, and I feel like especially given the current political environment this would probably be similar...

[jducoeur]

I don't find it as rough going as Jessica Jones, which was just plain brutal. This one is more nuanced -- less psychotic, rather creepier. In particular, Kilgrave in JJ is just about the most horrible monster imaginable. By contrast, the thing about Man in the High Castle is that one of our main characters is one of the leaders of the Nazis in America, and he's really kind of sympathetic in his own way -- which is skin-crawling when you step back and look at him with perspective.

Let's put it this way: JJ is cranked up to 11 for basically the entire series, and is super dark. High Castle isn't -- it's much quieter, more muted and more gradually paced, which means that it can punch you that much harder when things kick into high gear here and there. It's not the tension of "the monster is just around that corner", it's the tension of "there's a monster somewhere, and we don't know when or where it is going to strike".