Friday, March 29, 2024

AdvertiseDonateSubmit
NewsSportsArtsOpinionThe QuadPhotoVideoIllustrationsCartoonsGraphicsThe StackPRIMEEnterpriseInteractivesPodcastsBruinwalkClassifieds

Second Take: Amazon breathes new life into ‘The Man in the High Castle’

(G.P. Putnam’s Sons)

By Joshua Greenberg

Dec. 12, 2014 8:00 p.m.

After a long delay, one of Philip K. Dick’s unreal worlds just became slightly realer.

Amazon has finished filming a pilot for an online ongoing series based off of Dick’s “The Man in the High Castle” after years of languishing in pre-production, including a canceled Syfy miniseries. It’s being produced by Ridley Scott, of “Blade Runner” fame, and directed by David Semel.

A noted science fiction author, Dick was obsessed with differentiating the real from the unreal. The movies adapted from Dick’s body of work include “Blade Runner” (from “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”), “Minority Report,” “Total Recall,” “A Scanner Darkly” and 2011’s “Adjustment Bureau.” What these and Dick’s work in general share is an almost paranoid emphasis on telling the difference between fake and genuine worlds as well as objects and people.

Where “The Man in the High Castle” departs from others is in its situation. It’s set in a “reality” where the Axis powers won World War II and divided control of a conquered United States. Nazi Germany, in a tumultuous transition between führers, teeters on the brink of war with its erstwhile allies in the Empire of Japan.

Dick presents the cruel and casual barbarity of genocidal regimes in the background. People care little for the loss of human life in a world where the Nazis have killed billions. But the foreground is relative normalcy. Americans in San Fransisco defer to the Japanese and try not to think about the war they lost. The people in the world of “The Man in the High Castle” live normal lives in the conditions under Japanese occupation, selling counterfeit antiques to their hosts, hiding their Jewish identity from the authorities.

The setting is different – and horrifying – compared to the spread of recent dystopias, like “The Hunger Games” or “Divergent,” where the overthrow of a corrupt dictatorship is driven by a single individual. Those dystopian books tell stories about heroes. Ursula K. Le Guin once said, “There are no heroes in Dick’s books, but there are heroics.” They’re the heroics of ordinary people, struggling against the tide of history.

Within the world of “High Castle,” characters find comfort or a source of derision in a suppressed but incredibly popular book, “The Grasshopper Lies Heavy.” It’s written by reclusive fictional author Hawthorne Abendsen in the wild mountains of the buffer zone between Japan’s west coast and Germany’s east. It’s set in a reality where Franklin D. Roosevelt lived, the Allies won World War II and divided up the world between them. This setting is still fiction and not our world – Roosevelt steps down after two terms, Winston Churchill keeps going until the 1960s, and a Cold War rages between America and Great Britain.

Fake, nesting worlds were mind-blowing in 1962, when “The Man in the High Castle” was published and won a Hugo Award for best novel. Now, pop culture influenced by Dick, like “The Matrix” and “Inception,” has inoculated the general public to these ideas, while Dick still goes further than these movies dare.

The climax suggests in several simultaneous plotlines that “The Grasshopper Lies Heavy is no more or no less real than the “real” world of “The Man in the High Castle.”

Which means – Dick implies – that our own, supposedly real world might only be as real as the world of his novel.

“The Man in the High Castle” is in balance between the two extremes of Dick’s work. It’s not as shrouded in setting as his earlier work and not as incomprensible or abstract as later titles, like “The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch.” It’s heady and mind-blowing, while keeping enough of Dick’s pulp science fiction roots to be easily accessible. It never feels like homework.

Dick’s fiction was never anywhere close to the kind that predicted technological progress, but his concerns are increasingly modern society’s concerns – privacy and security, differentiating between phished emails and the real thing.

What little is known about the Amazon pilot is somewhat worrying. In making the leap from a self-contained novel to an ongoing series, the plot may center more on Juliana Frink (Alexa Davalos), who in this version goes to meet with a secret American resistance after the Japanese government kills her half-sister.

The temptation with a series is to put the more exciting elements of Dick’s book first at the expense of ideas. “Paycheck” and Nicolas Cage’s “Next” fell into that trap. I hope this series avoids it.

If the show keeps the weirdness of Dick at the center, as it very well might, I think it has the potential to be a breakout hit for Amazon’s video ambitions. If it really exists. If I really exist.

– Joshua Greenberg

Email Greenberg at [email protected].

Share this story:FacebookTwitterRedditEmail
Joshua Greenberg
COMMENTS
Featured Classifieds
More classifieds »
Related Posts