The Man In The High Castle

I don’t want people thinking I only watch Netflix.  There’s also a password for Amazon Prime in the household, so I’ve been spreading my muck about when it comes to content streaming services.  People don’t seem to be as enamoured with Amazon.  It’s not made it into common parlance; nobody asks Tinder prospects about Amazon and chill.  Maybe we can’t move past the fact that it basically used to be an online bookshop.  Soon, it will control every aspect of our worthless lives, and, frankly, Amazon is welcome to them.  Their only content heritage lies in their acquisition and dissolving of Lovefilm, the postal DVD rental service that helped me pull together one of the most shameful film lists of all time (since my taste in cinema is as questionable as my predilections in telly).

Amazon’s big hitters, as far as my biased views are concerned, are Vikings and Mr Robot, but I’ve already done them.  So let’s do The Man In The High Castle.  I also haven’t finished anything new recently as I’ve been spending the last ten days clutching a Lonely Planet while strolling about Japan, like the middle-class cliché that I am, away from my beloved boxsets and sofa.  Now the karaoke caterwauling and onsen (thermal bath) modesty-shielding are over, I might as well use some downtime on my journey home for another one of these posts (because they’re not going to stop, by the way).  I’m speeding from Kyoto to Tokyo on a bullet train, before another train, a night in a pod, a plane, a stopover in Helsinki, another plane, three Tube lines and a bus till I am back in front of my favourite screen.  So I’ve got time to kill.

Is that enough about me?  Probably.  So, what’s The Man In The High Castle, then?  Well, there are two series and the opening credits make it seem like it’s going to be very strange.  And that’s because it is.  Based on a book by Philip K Dick, the drama unfolds in an alternative imagining of reality where World War II’s victors were the Axis countries, led by Captain Moustache himself.  That said, things are mostly set in the USA, as that’s where TV drama happens.  On the losing side, the States are split between the Japanese Empire on the west coast, and the Nazi Reich on the east, a bit like 1990s hip hop rivalry.  In between, there is a curious buffer zone which helps the plot along when people can’t be in the other two territories.  The US is basically a shit sandwich – suddenly this history doesn’t seem so alternative.

It takes a while for the storylines of a disparate bunch of folk on all sides to come together, but when they do, things get very tense.  I was about to see if I could type out a beginner’s guide, but let’s just take some examples.  There’s Obergruppenführer John Smith, played by Rufus Sewell, a classic Nazi with a heart-sy (does that work?  Probably not).  High up in NYC Nazi HQ, he has inner conflict about the regime’s view of his son, forcing him to choose whether his loyalties lie with his ideologies or his family.  Seeing his white-picket fence lifestyle harbouring and promoting racist ideology is not that much of an alternative reality from the Trumpism of today (oh right; I’ve already made this statement but just in case anyone isn’t keen on subtlety).  Over in San Francisco, there’s Robert Childan, played by Brennan Brown, an antiques dealer whose coping mechanism to the occupation is to suck up to the Japanese as much as possible.  His obsequiousness makes your skin crawl, but his severe anxiety makes him a highly identifiable character for an Asperger’s spectrum kid like myself.  Then, watching him get sucked unwillingly into the resistance movement is even more entertaining.

Ironic then that I should be writing this from Japan, the politest nation on earth.  The ticket inspector just bowed at the whole carriage in case we didn’t feel respected enough cruising along at 230km per hour in luxurious comfort (though me tapping away on the keyboard is hopefully ruining it for some people).  Tokyoites are so polite, that even when you’re a gormless tourist blocking their path while they rush around, they will go out of their way to get out of your way (and there’s a lot of getting out of ways in that place).  People in Osaka are a bit more prepared to shove but, either way, it’s hard to picture this nation ruling California under an iron thumb.  But it’s all about creative license and this has really just been another excuse to brag about my travels.

But, the question I hear you all asking is who is this man and what’s this high castle that he’s in?  Well, I can’t really work that bit out.  People in the show keep finding films that seem to show our reality (I think) of the war’s end.  Not clips of box office-gold Dunkirk featuring Harry Styles with wet-look hair, but old newsreels and that.  Suddenly, the drama is poised to take a potential shift into the paranormal – are the characters about to try and swap their reality?  I’m asking it as a question as I haven’t followed the plot as closely as I should, as the pace can be a little slow and people keep Whatsapping me.  In the background, a threat also builds from the deteriorating relationship between the world’s two superpowers, Japan and Germany, so nuclear war might arrive before anyone has a chance to get in the high castle and find this man with the films.  Keep up.

Ethically, I know questions have been asked about whether it’s right to imagine alternatives to history where the baddies won.  HBO and Amazon have both caused controversy with their reported development about shows where the American Civil War ends up with the shoe on the other foot.  It’s not a new phenomenon.  Robert Harris’s amazing book, Fatherland, uses a Nazi victory as the setting decades later for a story whose incredible narrative tension is only possible because of its framing.  There’s also SSGB by Len Deighton, a very dated spy classic, ripe with period misogyny, recently turned into a drama by the BBC where everyone mumbled their lines so much I had to give up.  With The Man In The High Castle, you’re rooting very much for the characters who represent opposition to the regimes in which they find themselves.  Even those who probably loved the evil at first are seen to be having second thoughts, so it doesn’t feel like Amazon is asking us to look at what we could have had in an attempt to cause a Nazi uprising.

Hopefully these ramblings have given some insight into the mystery and intrigue available to those who take up the challenge of watching The Man In The High Castle.  In fact, I’ve just read them back and they make hardly any sense at all, so it’s a tick in that box as far as I am concerned.  Most importantly, I’ve proved I don’t just watch Netflix.