Some thoughts on the first season of The Man in the High Castle (2015)
Amazon fooled me. With a laughable ease I fell into the classic trap of the free trial for 30 days. Enter your credit card to confirm safely the beginning of your trial period. Feel free to cancel whenever you want. They said that I could receive the package in just two days, adding to this benefit the extensive range of services offered by the Prime platform. I bit the hook and, as you can imagine, by the end of the month, I had completely forgotten that I subscribed the service. Four weeks later my breath was cut off when I noticed that the balance of my card was 120 dollars above my expectancy. I even began to question my shopping habits even though I had never been particularly prominent as a consumer. Soon, I found out that, although I already had my suspicions, the person responsible for the slip —prompted by Jeff Bezos' mischief— looked at me from the mirror every morning.
The episode, now hilarious, made me forget about online shopping for more than a semester. I even discouraged potential buyers from my social circle, “objectively” presenting to them the disadvantages of the service, extolling with a shameful poignancy the millenary tradition of face-to-face commerce. Barter, exchange networks, old-fashioned capitalism. After a prudent time, in an early morning of insomnia (like all dawns), I suddenly had the sour wit to examine carefully the set of services that I had acquired involuntarily.
Alexa Davalos as Juliana Crain in The Man in the High Castle (2015, first season), a co-production of Amazon Studios, Big Light Productions, Electric Shepherd Productions, Headline Pictures, Picrow, Reunion Pictures and Scott Free Productions. Photography courtesy of Amazon Studios, Big Light Productions, Electric Shepherd Productions, Headline Pictures, Picrow, Reunion Pictures and Scott Free Productions.
What does this have to do with the series and why have I stretched so much this introduction? At first instance because, without putting this into context, the certain viscerality that could be detected later in my annotations will result indecipherable. Also, due to the need of remarking and appreciating the excessive contingency which covers the fact of having given an opportunity to Frank Spotnitz's project. As you can infer by now, The Man in the High Castle, flagship series of Amazon Studios, based on the book by the same name of the American writer Philip Kindred Dick, and produced —among others— by Ridley Scott (rediscovering the work of Dick 33 years after Blade Runner) and Isa Dick Hackett (daughter of the writer), was in that restricted menu. I share below my thoughts on its first season.
Enemies of the State
Summertime, and the livin’ is easy. What do the Old West and the Real Book have in common? Can we flood with standards a curfew? A state of siege? A neutral zone? This is what The Man in the High Castle has done, making us return 60 years to a post-war past that never existed. We were then in 1962; but those are not our sixties of protest, sexual freedom and great revolts and counter-cultural demonstrations, but the beginning of a lugubrious and tense decade in which La Résistance has been shattered and the Axis powers have dispensed the planet in two. The West Coast has become the new Pacific States of the Japanese Empire, while the Great Reich has annexed the East Coast and the entire South and Midwest Regions. Right in the heart of the States, the Rockies rise up as the natural component that separates, in a neutral zone, both colossus. One of these mornings you're gonna rise up singing.
Burn Gorman as The Marshal in The Man in the High Castle (2015, first season), a co-production of Amazon Studios, Big Light Productions, Electric Shepherd Productions, Headline Pictures, Picrow, Reunion Pictures and Scott Free Productions. Photography courtesy of Amazon Studios, Big Light Productions, Electric Shepherd Productions, Headline Pictures, Picrow, Reunion Pictures and Scott Free Productions.
This is how the stories of Juliana Crain (Alexa Davalos) and Joe Blake (Luke Kleintank) are presented to us, who, accompanied by an outstanding cast, share the weight of a plot that is strengthened as the narrative split approaches to the point of completely disappearing. The details of the story can be found both in Dick's novel (broadly speaking, since the series is an adaptation), and in many specialized internet sites. Therefore, it would be fruitless to undertake the same enterprise again. What brings us here is the interest to highlight some elements, perhaps minor ones, that enrich TMitHC's plot proposal.
And you'll spread your wings and you'll take to the sky. In an unequal contest between armed idealists and two hegemonic and ruthless powers that cooperate as much as they fear each other (although this first season makes clear the fragility of the Japanese empire), the preponderance of the individual issue stands out. Would you let your beloved ones die for an idea that is not even yours? When it is said that being an enemy of the State, especially in an apocalyptic context such as the one that presents the series, puts everything at risk, the own life is the last and most expendable of the assets that are included within that totality. Because death does not hurt the dead, nor softens them to confess, nor does it allow any cooperation depending on the interests of the repressive apparatus. It's the deaths of others that mitigate the vivacity of any will. We are only unbreakable when we are already smashed to pieces. It is the threat of living their death, of wiping our conscience with the blood of loved ones without having participated in their execution. Whoever holds noble feelings for another, in a fascist and totalitarian world, exposes all vulnerabilities. But till that morning, there ain't nothin' can harm you.
Frank Frink's case (brilliantly portrayed by Rupert Evans) becomes almost paradigmatic to illustrate this kind of conjuncture. The fear that impels silence and moderation in the face of revenge that requires blood to silence the condemnatory voices of the chronic insomniac. Right in those interstices, when the stirrups are lost, they appeal with more vehemence to our decency, to our humanity. If they annihilated what anchored us to this unfortunate species, what compassion they expect? However, our characters show us that, against their will, changes are taking place at an accelerated pace. The eyes of other child cannot be the same when you have lost your own. The silhouette of a murdered sister does not stop appearing in every market until her putrid body is found in some mass grave on open field. We were as happy as they let us be.
Rufus Sewell as John Smith in The Man in the High Castle (2015, first season), a co-production of Amazon Studios, Big Light Productions, Electric Shepherd Productions, Headline Pictures, Picrow, Reunion Pictures and Scott Free Productions. Photography courtesy of Amazon Studios, Big Light Productions, Electric Shepherd Productions, Headline Pictures, Picrow, Reunion Pictures and Scott Free Productions.
Southern trees bear strange fruit. The series rejoices celebrating the greatness of the small actions, although it is never clear in defining the paradox of any project of resistance. And as I have thought, it does that deliberately. Do you resist against the system or from the system? While insisting on articulating visually some intricate conversations through mirrors, the courage to pray the kaddish (קַדִּישׁ) is praised solemnly, underpinning the impotence of living occupied and segregated by the terror of tears that still do not deserve the family that has been stolen. Blood on the leaves and blood at the root.
Brave New World
In a fictional universe where there is no place for hope —attention to the extravagant irony— Stalin was executed in 1949. The Man in the High Castle offers us an exquisite sighting of the possibilities of destiny, of the flip side of the coin. But, among the gloom of the dark side of the moon, it knows how to move between the stages which cut across the human condition, regardless of the prevailing regime. It raises fascinating hypotheses in which the Führer, implacable leader, already deteriorated by age, is the embodiment of concord, peace and political stability, while Reinhard Heydrich, SS-Obergruppenführer und General der Polizei, having survived the 1942’s Operation Anthropoid, wants Hitler's head and investiture. We owe our mind and our heart to an idea, not a man.
Likewise, it achieves, with extraordinary dramatic effectiveness, a staging that, from the contemporary cultural coordinates (at least in the minds where decency still reigns), seems contradictory and improbable by antonomasia. But it must be remembered that its inadmissibility is not a matter of concrete possibilities, but of the hierarchy in the dominant value system. We speak of the "boldness" of humanizing a Nazi, especially in the case of a high command of the SS. The Obergruppenführer of New York, John Smith (Rufus Sewell), epitomizes an exceptional example of how disconcerting such a scenario can be. The degenerative genetic disease of his son Thomas, a kind of muscular dystrophy, serves as a subterfuge to get us into three outstanding narrative trajectories. On the one hand, the personal suffering of a family man who, although fully dedicated to break down the lives of others who also have their own, despairs in denial, believing himself —because of the nature of his position– still above all medical criteria. This nature of his occupation, in conjunction with the terror of losing one of his children, takes us to the second instance: in this apocalyptic past, existence and intimacy are totally institutionalized, that is, they do not exist. This is the warning that the doctor presents to Smith, when he demands a second opinion. For the virtue of your position, it would be better not to ventilate to the health authorities the details of Thomas’ clinical record, the doctor said. A political system that sinks its principles into a social philosophy such as eugenics, cannot afford to allow congenital conditions, much less normalize that its high officials can be involved, by blood or spontaneous social bond, with individuals suffering such symptoms of weakness. The only possible way for the Obergruppenführer is filicide, if he wants to maintain prestige among his peers. The doctor gives him a syringe with the precise dose so that Smith himself ends the life of his little boy, who, although part of Hitler's Youth, would soon begin to stop fulfilling the physical demands required by the Aryan ideal. The father soul collapses when he sees his kid faint on the stairs showing the first signs of deterioration. Magnificent sample of the dialectical tension of interiorities and exteriorities in a man, whose military decorations are not enough to live as he says he believes.
Rarsten Norgaard as Rudolph Wegener and Ray Proscia as Reinhard Heydrich inThe Man in the High Castle (2015, first season), a co-production of Amazon Studios, Big Light Productions, Electric Shepherd Productions, Headline Pictures, Picrow, Reunion Pictures and Scott Free Productions. Photography courtesy of Amazon Studios, Big Light Productions, Electric Shepherd Productions, Headline Pictures, Picrow, Reunion Pictures and Scott Free Productions.
In an electrifying dialogue, Heydrich (Ray Proscia) —almost showing off his telepathic abilities— points out to John that what is inside a man cannot be known. His intentions are political, but to achieve them, it is necessary to bend a few wills. The third way, concatenated with the pressure exerted by Heydrich (and whose subsequent interests are fully unleashed in the last episdode of the season), is the family and social repercussion. Smith must lie at home while he finds a way to tie his head with his heart. He responds with elongated silences, when Hellen, his wife, noticing him insomniac nostalgically observing the photos of his brother with dystrophy, reminds him that they have the privilege of living in better times, in Leibniz's best of all possible worlds, because, on their version of the ‘62, when someone is terribly sick, they are not allowed to suffer. Chilling.
Seppuku or the Book of Changes
Japanese culture receives a privileged treatment, without a doubt, in this first season. Not only because Juliana Crain, the protagonist, was born and raised in the Pacific States, but because it is nourished by a past (the Japanese) that —although censored— was not fully banned. The aesthetic in which the series presents the colossal magnificence of the city of Berlin, under Nazi rule during the sixties, could not get inspiration from any other source than history books, research carried out on the architectural and urbanistic project of Speer, and audiovisual records of that obscure period. In the Japanese case, even with the sanctions of the Potsdam Declaration and Western interference, their culture maintained a relative constancy and historical homogeneity, at least during the first two decades after the 1945 surrender.
Alexa Davalos as Juliana Crain in The Man in the High Castle (2015, first season), a co-production of Amazon Studios, Big Light Productions, Electric Shepherd Productions, Headline Pictures, Picrow, Reunion Pictures and Scott Free Productions. Photography courtesy of Amazon Studios, Big Light Productions, Electric Shepherd Productions, Headline Pictures, Picrow, Reunion Pictures and Scott Free Productions.
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth. To materialize this verisimilitude, TMitHC exudes reliable rigor and good taste in the design of scenery and costumes, complementing it with a clean and refined photographic aesthetic. This reaches its best moments, as has been said, when it's set in San Francisco. On Californian territory, Nobusuke Tagomi (Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa), the Japanese Empire's trade minister, shows a warm sensitivity to cultural differences and global projects in favor of the pacification of international relations (seeking a reduction in tensions between the hegemonic powers), even though in this first season the scope of his true intentions is not fully displayed. The nostalgia for the time lost or the abandoned love, gets Juliana closer, with whom he begins to establish a bond that transcends the rigidity of the work environment within a Japanese government building. Tagomi, until now, seems to be the embodiment of the best attributes of a people and culture that has found the way to walk with one foot in the distant future while the other sinks strongly into millenary traditions (perhaps esoteric), which brought them successfully until 1962. The minister not only submit himself to the oracular consultation of the I-Ching (易經) with solemnity and attention for the planning of his bureaucratic tasks, but is also pretty conscious to recognize that the yarrow stems or the 64 hexagrams mean very little, when their interpretation is not translated into the concrete praxis of the philosophical precepts, which, as is well known, advocate change and the universal ubiquity of a dialectic of opposites. Therefore, according to Tagomi, the Heisenberg machine (the atomic bomb that the scientist had to develop in the Uranverein, directed from the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut für Physik— and which, according to his statements, never ended for moral reasons), launched in the fictitious context of the series with devastating efficacy over Washington DC, was a project with the correct intentions, as a surpassed obstacle for humanity, but driven by the wrong hands.
Joel de la Fuente as Takeshi Kido in The Man in the High Castle (2015, first season), a co-production of Amazon Studios, Big Light Productions, Electric Shepherd Productions, Headline Pictures, Picrow, Reunion Pictures and Scott Free Productions. Photography courtesy of Amazon Studios, Big Light Productions, Electric Shepherd Productions, Headline Pictures, Picrow, Reunion Pictures and Scott Free Productions.
Inspector Takeshi Kido, head of the Kenpeitai (憲兵隊), probably inspired by the Marquis and Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal of Japan, Kōichi Kido, represents the antithesis of Tagomi, even as a compatriot and a defender of the same cause (the stability of the Empire). Kido (an extraordinarily fierce Joel de la Fuente) not only shows himself relentless in fulfilling his duties as leader of the military police, but he personifies the nationalist alienation (imperial, in this case) carried to the extreme of self-sacrifice. However, his behavior cannot be dissociated from the social conventions that still bond Japanese culture, where prestige and honor are still required with severity. His inquests, as ominous as mathematically arranged, reveal a ruthless man who grace his work with the full awareness that his actions strengthen or weaken the omniscient power of the empire he serves. Recognizing that the events that have shocked Japan, after the prince's visit to the Pacific States, hide huge aims against the interests of the empire, Kido is disposed, towards the end of the season, in an elegant cinematographic sequence, to perform seppuku (切腹). This is a man who prefers to bleed to death than to see his country bleeding. Tagomi and Kido, as is evident, are two sides of the same coin. There comes a time when all men must bear the weight of their responsibility.
Then the sudden smell of burning flesh
Luke Kleintank as Joe Blake and Alexa Davalos as Juliana Crain in The Man in the High Castle (2015, first season), a co-production of Amazon Studios, Big Light Productions, Electric Shepherd Productions, Headline Pictures, Picrow, Reunion Pictures and Scott Free Productions. Photography courtesy of Amazon Studios, Big Light Productions, Electric Shepherd Productions, Headline Pictures, Picrow, Reunion Pictures and Scott Free Productions.
The second season, sponsored by the trap that Amazon orchestrated against my already deteriorated financial condition, will receive me with the uncertainty of a love triangle that demands unconditional loyalty to all parties (since their survival depends on it), more lists with names to exchange (or sacrifice) for their own life and the answers to certain cross-cutting questions of the plot: What does the chilling tape of the penultimate chapter mean? Who is the man in the high castle? Was Tagomi's lucid dream/hallucination in the last scene of the season an apology for the Truman Doctrine? Meanwhile, I should take advantage of the forced fast health benefits, while I wait for the oracle to announce to me, hopefully sooner than later, a radical mutation in the thickness of my wallet. Appeasement and resignation, it's nobody's fault but mine.