As in the television show, Dick’s counterfactual world includes a counterfactual narrative, The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, only in this case the narrative is not a series of newsreels but a novel written by the “Man in the High Castle,” a novel-within-a-novel rather than a newsreel-within-a-television show. Later in the novel, as Juliana is reading The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, we learn about “the fabulous television.” In the novel’s alternate history novel, Juliana is enthralled to read about how through Yankee know-how and mass-production, inexpensive little television sets were shipped off to backward people in Africa and Asia where, through educational TV shows, they learned how to read and dig wells and heal their sick (p. 157). Meanwhile, in the “real” present of Dick’s alternative history novel, television is mostly absent. Characters largely depend on radio and the printed page, whether The Grasshopper Lies Heavy or the I Ching, plays a dominant role.
Amazon Adapting Dick Adapting History
Two vignettes involving two Julianas living in two very different worlds. One Juliana revolves around the printed word and the search for the truth behind a novel. The other Juliana revolves around screening images and searching for a way out. Reading and watching our two Julianas together ought to inspire us to think about the place in our lives of images and screens, the printed word and the electronic media.
Amazon’s television adaptation of Dick’s novel offers something of an alternative take on the printed page, this from a company that started out as a bookseller. Where television is largely absent from the book, books are largely absent from the television show. In episode 3, Joe and Juliana separately visit a used-book store, where the books, according to The Marshall, have “got the stink of their owner. Cigarettes and coffee, cat piss, smell of decay.” Joe had never heard of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and selling Bibles gets the bookstore owner killed. This world is not a print-based world but a world of the visual image. As Frank Spotnitz, the show’s creator, observed to ScreenerTV.com in November of 2015, he was much more interested in creating a visual culture that works better on television.
In the novel, Hawthorne Abendsen has written a novel where the Allies won the war. In the TV series, it’s a film showing we’ve won the war. I did that because this is a visual medium and a film is going to be so much more powerful to watch than hearing about a book that people have read. . . . That one change obviously changes an awful lot, because a film is a physical object and there’s a reality to that that we have to account for in the series that wasn’t dealt with in the novel.
There’s more going on here, though, than Spotnitz lets on, for that “one change” indicates a far greater shift in the worlds of our two Julianas. It’s not just that we have newsreels rather than novels. It’s that the televisual world of The Man in the High Castle is fascinated with images and our visual culture. Consider that the series is bookended by two movie references. In the opening scene we see an extended shot of a movie marquee advertising The Punch Party, starring Rock Hudson and June Allyson, a totally fictional film. The season closes with Tagomi in a counterfactual San Francisco staring up at a billboard for Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita.
Consider, too, that the television show is fascinated with the visual iconography of the Nazi regime, going so far as to unfavorably compare the films of Leni Riefenstahl to the newsreels. As Erich comments to John Smith in episode 2, “Reich Minister Goebbels says that not even Fräulein Riefenstahl could make films of such sophistication.” In Dick’s novel, no scenes are set in the Nazi-occupied states and we only hear about Berlin second-hand. In the television show, though, numerous scenes take place in New York and it relishes presenting us with images of Americana into which it can insert the swastika. In a November 19th 2015 interview with Village Voice, Spotnitz recognizes the links between Hollywood and the Nazis:
Hitler, tragically, was an incredibly evil and dangerous villain who managed to kill people with a hateful ideology and on an unprecedented scale. He also happened to have costumes and production design that were tailor-made for Hollywood. They really were amazing, their aesthetics for their cause: their buildings, their military uniforms, their parades, their marches, their Leni Riefenstahl films.
While recognizing the evil of the Nazis in one breath, Spotnitz is attracted to their made-for-Hollywood glamour in the next. The buildings! The uniforms! Leni!
Then there’s the role of photographs in the television show. Frank’s sister and her two children are photographed just prior to their being gassed and it’s all that Frank has left of her. John Smith learns that his son has a rare genetic disease and we later see him going through a family photo album, which includes pictures of his dead brother in a wheelchair. Juliana’s search for her sister leads her to an abandoned house where she finds a photo of Trudy. Tagomi often stares wistfully at photos of family members arrayed on his desk. We’re very much in a visual-based culture of the image.
And we shouldn’t forget that The Man in the High Castle is a television show debuting during television’s second golden age and facing what John Landgraf (proclaimed “the philosopher king of FX” by Slate’s television critic Willa Paskin) has called “peak TV,” the problem of keeping up with the overwhelming number of scripted shows being produced for television—more than four hundred in 2015. And it’s a television show adapted from a novel in which television shows were absent, an adaptation that comes from a mammoth former bookseller adapting to our new digital environment and battling for dominance of our media ecosystem. What are we to make of all this?
Newsreels for Novels
We might find a clue in the year 1962—the year that Dick published The Man in the High Castle, the year in which both novel and television show are set, and a pivotal time period in our social and cultural history. We’re moving from the age of print to the age of television and the full-blown emergence of media culture. Our two Julianas are facing a world about to change, and not because of some crack in the Axis powers, but because of the changing media environment.
Dick’s novel is still a literary world. It’s a world where people read—whether the I Ching or The Grasshopper Lies Heavy. It’s a world that still doesn’t have television. It’s a world where people can still look forward to television’s being fabulous. But the world of the TV show is a world that already revolves around the visual image: television, movies, newsreels, photographs. And it’s debuting in a world already remade by the media. Where Dick’s own world was just entering the media-dominated 1960s and he could still look forward to the possibility that television was fabulous or educational, Amazon’s TV show is looking at a world already remade by television and now being remade yet again by social media, smart phones, and peak TV. For good or ill, we’re all now living in a visual, image-dominated culture.
This suggests that as we watch The Man in the High Castle, a television show coming from a bookseller trying to make it as a media giant, what we’re really watching is a show about the cultural shift we have lived through and continue to live through. It is indeed a new day, as Joe is reminded sitting in a movie theater and watching the latest Nazi propaganda commercial. Spotnitz implicitly recognizes what’s happening here when he suggests that with that “one small change” of novel for newsreel, “an awful lot” changes.
Writing is linear and focused on the diachronic while the world of electronic media is more fragmentary and synchronic. Neil Postman famously characterized the world of television as the world of “and now . . . this,” suggestive of the manner in which the televisual world lacks order and meaning. The world is made different by the introduction of TV. As we skip from one channel to another we inhabit first one world then another. In The Medium Is the Massage that sage of media philosophy Marshall McLuhan sums up the implications of this change from print to pixels:
Electric circuitry has overthrown the regime of “time” and “space” and pours upon us instantly and continuously the concerns of all other men. . . . Its message is Total Change, ending psychic,
social, economic, and political parochialism. . . . Nothing can be further from the spirit of the new technology than “a place for everything and everything in its place.” You can’t go home again. (p. 16)
In No Sense of Place media scholar Joshua Meyrowitz explores the shift from a print-based culture to an electronic-based culture and argues that the emergence of electronic media in the 1960s, especially television, caused fundamental shifts in the structure of society and social behavior, which led to the transformative social developments of the 1960s and 1970s. By merging formerly distinct public spheres, blurring the dividing line between private and public behaviors, and severing the traditional link between physical space and social place, electronic media are deeply implicated in the restructuring of our sense of space, time, and place. As places lose their distinctive characteristics we feel increasingly rootless because our roots can no longer be defined in terms of some distinctive location.
Our world may suddenly seem senseless to many people because, for the first time in modern history, it is relatively placeless. The intensity of the changes in the last thirty years . . . may be related to the unique power of TV to break down the distinctions between here and there, live and mediated, and personal and public. (p. 308)
Television, Meyrowitz argues, reprocesses our physical and social environment in a revolutionary way and thereby creates a new metaphysical arena (p. 146).
Seeing with Many Eyes
This new world created by electronic media was a constant source of inspiration for Dick and probably accounts for his continuing popularity as a source of movie and television adaptations. In “The Second Coming of Philip K. Dick,” Wired magazine suggested that Dick’s vision “all but defines contemporary Hollywood science fiction and spills over into other kinds of movies as well.” Dick’s novels and short stories explore themes of illusion, authenticity, simulation, multiple realities and their impact on the human condition, themes that emerge out of the media revolution taking place at the time he is writing.
Returning to Amazon’s television show, this new metaphysical arena created by the media helps illuminate some of the more interesting features of the television show, especially the connection between Juliana and Tagomi. Consider that our two Julianas, for all their differences, initially share a pursuit of the truth. Both are impelled by their different encounters with The Grasshopper Lies Heavy to search for the truth behind the novel or newsreels. Dick’s Juliana confronts the author of the novel and ultimately turns to the I Ching to vouchsafe the truth of the novel’s alternative narrative.
Our television Juliana, though, follows a different path. Initially the newsreel suggests a way out, another reality, perhaps the reality. Initially she hasn’t broken through to the recognition that she’s living in a different world, a world constituted by the media in which our screens don’t promise us Reality with a capital R—whatever that might be. Indeed, our own experience of reality TV ought to inform our appreciation of this series. We no longer look to Reality TV as a window on to reality. We know that it is edited, constructed, spliced. Juliana too is learning how to look at her screens. Over the course of the series she goes from being transfixed by the images on the screen to doubting their veracity.
In the first episode she is transformed by the newsreels, leading her on her path to Canon City. The season’s final episode, “A Way Out,” opens on the lens of a film projector as it screens another newsreel, suggesting that the reels are indeed a way out. But even as we witness the film’s images reflected on the eyes of Frank and Juliana, Frank asks, “What was that?” and Juliana responds, a tear running down her cheek, “A nightmare.” Juliana is now less sure about the status of the newsreels and less sure that they provide a way out. When confronted with the possibility that Joe Blake is a Nazi who murders Frank Frink, Juliana makes a choice to trust Joe and not the film. As she says to Joe in episode 10: “I don’t believe the film. I don’t believe it. I believe you.” As Juliana learns more about the newsreels, including their possibly competing and contradictory visions of the future, she ultimately disavows them as a possible way out. Having repeatedly violated the Resistance’s core principle—“You don’t ever watch the films. No exceptions. It doesn’t matter to us what you saw.”—Juliana gains a newfound skepticism regarding the media’s power to provide a way out.
Juliana has learned to see with new eyes. In Postphenomenology, the American philosopher of technology Don Ihde has suggested that as image technologies reshape culture they induce a kind of bug-eyed compound vision which has an acidic effect on more foundational and romantic visions of culture.
Compound vision is multiple vision. One scans the multiple screens, focusing here, then there and, out of the mélange, forming new directions and possibilities. (p. 29)
Ihde compares this compound vision to the multiple displays found in newsrooms and suggests that the compound eye gives a panorama beyond the boundaries of binocular vision. Juliana’s experiences over the course of the first season of The Man in the High Castle perhaps endow her with something like Ihde’s compound vision and suggests to her new possibilities for “a way out” other than looking to another reality. Juliana is learning to navigate this new, image-dominated, electronic media world.
Something similar is perhaps suggested for the most puzzling scene of the series—Tagomi’s seeming immersion in another reality, a scene that occurs as well in the novel. While in the novel, Tagomi and Juliana have nothing to do with one another, the television show clearly suggests a bond between the two. Living in their mediated world, they long to see differently. Tagomi and Juliana both learn to see with many eyes. Treating Dick’s source material less as metaphysical fiction and more as media fiction might suggest that rather than breaking through to some alternative timeline or parallel universe, Tagomi’s intense meditation leads to the recognition that reality may be a lot like television.
As Meyrowitz says, television breaks down the barriers between time and space, here and there, live and mediated. Tagomi comes to embrace compound vision and the recognition that new directions and possibilities can be found in new ways of seeing. If you don’t like what you see, find a way to change the channel and see things differently. Our novel’s Juliana wonders what it would be like to see the whole world on a little grey glass. Wouldn’t it be fabulous?
It may not help feed starving Africans but perhaps in inducing a new media metaphysic and instilling compound vision television shows us, if not a way out, at least a way forward.
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Say Heil! to Architecture
FERNANDO GABRIEL PAGNONI BERNS AND EMILIANO AGUILAR
The last scene of Season One of The Man in the High Castle (“A Way Out”) rests heavily on the viewers’ ability to understand how monuments, architecture, and spectacle work in social settings.
Trade Minister of the Pacific States of America, Nobusuke Tagomi, meditates in the middle of a public square. He is circled by Nazi iconography ornamenting the buildings. He closes his eyes and when he opens them up, all his surroundings are now completely different in aspect, but the same in some ways. There is no Nazi imagery anymore, but there are, indeed, monuments and visual spectacle. He’s in the same location in a timeline in which America won World War II.
He gazes upon the billboards and colorful scenery decorated with red, white, blue, Lolita posters, and Ronald Reagan ads for cigarettes. This change is enough for viewers to understand that an uncanny journey has taken place. Audiences recognize the other reality by seeing the buildings.
This ending connects full circle with the sequence of credits opening each episode. The title credits roll, backed by the tunes of a seriously creepy version of “Edelweiss.” Almost every image accompanying the titles refers to American monuments, thus underlying the importance of this theme within the series. First, Nazi and Japanese flags are projected on the outline of a United States map, pointing to an alternative historical stream in which the Axis powers have won World War II. Next are
briefs shots of well-known American monuments, all of them familiar and yet eerily changed: Mount Rushmore and the Statue of Liberty, both of them cohabiting with Nazi effigies such as the Imperial Eagle. Viewers know that one of the official posters of the series has the Statue of Liberty wearing a Nazi flag, another sign indicating that monuments are significant. Audiences see American emblems transformed into National Socialist monuments since they now stand for Nazi America. The Man in the High Castle reminds viewers of the culpability of architects and architecture in furthering a totalitarian political agenda.
The series pilot begins, after the initial credits, with Joe Blake watching a newsreel in a theater. Monuments and movies are both tools which tell us about history. In a show about alternate history, monuments are critically important. Monuments and architecture can be “read” in a similarly way to literary texts. Monuments provide indexes for remembering and forgetting that accompany any political or cultural change. Their durability through history exposes them to multiple readings that make monuments fascinating material for philosophical thinking about the unstable nature of the past, wrongly believed as fixed.
What’s So Bad about Monuments?
Monuments are very visible in many parts of the world and tend to highlight significant historical events or individuals. Monuments are interesting artifacts, since they tell about a past event that has been so important that it deserves a monument. And why we know that that past event has been important to history? Because it has been memorialized through the creation of a monument. What comes first? The importance of the event, which warrants a monument? Or, we understand the episode as important precisely because it has a monument erected in its honor?
Still, how many times we, common citizens, stop our walking to carefully observe a monument representing some person when we have no idea who he or she is? But we think that he or she has been important for history. Because a monument has been erected about him or her. The chicken or the egg? A monuments refers not only to an event, but also to itself, who constructed it, and why. Monuments point to something more than the past: they become monuments of power.
The Man in the High Castle and Philosophy Page 2