The bigger the monument, the bigger the statement. A colossal monument is someone screaming at us how important the event was (all the same, viewers may have no idea who she or he was).
Monuments run the risk of turning historical events into myths through a recounting of history that is far from the truth. Monuments have the virtue (or, sometimes, defect) of fixing a story. They are not malleable, versatile. They scream history, and the big ones are really hard to ignore. When a regime falls, monuments and statues are torn down, so the community can begin to write a new history. This is easy to see in some of the newsreel films that the fabled “Man in the High Castle” distributes. The anti-fascist images depict Americans tearing down Nazi imagery. In one of the scenes, an Imperial Eagle is knocked down from a cupola. Juliana Crane, watching the scene in “The New World,” immediately infers what the scene represents: an alternate history. A statue is knocked down so that another (alternative) stream line can be written. Monuments record memories or, better say, selected memories. They are selections about what is to be told and what is to be forgotten. That’s why monuments are potentially dangerous.
Nazism and fascism in general loved with passion the fixity and immutability of big buildings and monuments. Fascist parties felt that monuments and displays of giant architecture represent them: big, strong, spectacular and, more important, everlasting. No one can ignore them. The huge monuments bespeak power, even when they can be ugly. Architecture and monuments were considered indelible “words in stone.” The Nazi intention was that the built heritage would endure and continue to “speak” about the National Socialist glory over time. Fascist parties were inclined to monuments on a massive scale, so the reconversion of America into Nazi architecture observed in The Man in the High Castle rests on real assumptions.
Huge monuments and architecture are forms of spectacle that allow wider dissemination. Big works of architecture are there to impress people. In “The New World” episode, the swastika can be observed prominently adorning buildings and bright advertisements decorating facades. There’s a direct link between spectacle and monuments: the latter are mostly architectural arrangements meant to impress an audience. Just like any spectacle. As the German philosopher Walter Benjamin argued in his classic essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” fascism turned political life into spectacle as a way to narcotize people, and this idea is central in the construction of The Man in the High Castle.
What You See Is What You Get
In the first episode, Nobusuke Tagomi prepares the visit to America of the Japanese prince and his wife. The scene takes place inside a huge Nazi embassy within the Japanese Pacific States. The camera offers a wide shot of the embassy’s monumentality, the embassy dwarfing the buildings circling it. The next shot depicts the Nazis preparing ceremonies using a scale model of the same building. Tagomi, however, feels uncomfortable. He considers that the furniture and all its pieces within the room are “wrong” because it lacks “chi,” the spirit of good or bad faith living within material things.
The German Nazi surreptitiously mocks the idea, but Tagomi, in turn, mocks Nazi philosophy: they believe only in things they can see. Big things. Tagomi points to the preference of German Nazis for visual spectacle, as the building where the scene takes place testifies. In the episode “The Illustrated Woman,” the SS headquarters in New York City is highlighted. The building is clearly taller than all the skyscrapers circling it. The building includes the Imperial Eagle at the top, thus literately taking Nazism to new “peaks.” In contrast, the Kempeitai headquarters also consist of tall buildings, but not especially striking in altitude or architectural form, with only a tiny Japanese flag on the top. They mostly blend in with the other buildings (“Kindness”).
All the Japanese festivities and receptions (as seen in “The Illustrated Woman”) are elegant but not exactly “spectacular.” They tend to be rather simple and performed in natural spaces: they are spiritual rites of respect for the ancestors rather than demonstrations of power. When the Japanese prince is presented to the people, however, the parade is organized by Germany, so it has to be a huge spectacle. The audience is shown an aerial shot from high altitude, with the Imperial Eagle at the center of the image.
The use of monuments and architecture as fascist tools is emphasized briefly in two episodes: in “Kindness,” John Smith takes Captain Connolly to the highest balcony of the Nazi headquarters. His purpose is interrogation, and the altitude is both oppressive and foreboding. Any viewer familiar with Western film and TV fiction knows that Smith will push the man into the abyss to kill him. And he does so. In that scene, the incredible altitude links three items: Nazism, death, and noteworthy architecture.
In “A Way Out,” Heydrich states his motto: the strong must overcome the weak. Cut to the next scene in the Austrian Alps, where we see Hitler’s headquarters, a monumental castle dominating the surrounding mountains. The castle is positioned at a peak. The Führer resides in a monumental structure at the top of the world. Nazi ideology is speaking through this architecture.
In this sense, one of the most important holidays within The Man in the High Castle is Victory Day, another form of spectacle. VA Day comes to replace July 4th as the national holy day par excellence. Every building is adorned with Nazi flags. Fireworks dominate the night sky, and all give a cheerful “Sieg heil!” The Pacific States, however, choose not to observe these festivities, another example of the differences between Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany (“Three Monkeys”). Japan chooses instead to celebrate Marine Day, more related to military efforts, imperialism, and honor, all issues important to Imperial Japan before the American occupation (in the real world).
Walter Benjamin warned of the dangers of allowing spectacle to infiltrate politics to disguise the workings of totalitarian regimes. The recurrent use of huge architecture and monumental spectacle “traps” people within a visual regime that downplays a critical attitude, stultifies the masses, and turns them into passive spectators whose only action is to cheer. Sieg heil!
Countermonuments or Flow My Tears, the Americans Said
Why do Mr. Kasoura and his lovely wife decide to begin a lifestyle that pays homage to American culture (notably in “Truth”), considering that the American occupation and Americanization of Japan has never taken place in this alternative history?
Beyond the obvious symbols—Kasoura saying “Call me Paul”—the interest in American culture by the Japanese conquerors has subtle causes. This concern for forgotten cultures (and in this alternative history, American culture has been colonized by Nazis) is connected with memory and the forgotten. For example, when dinning with “Paul and Betty”, Robert Childan calls jazz “nigger music.” American culture has lost its values at the hands of other cultures and ideologies, Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, the ones in charge of composing history through social discourse and architecture. But alongside official memory, fixed in monuments and Victory Days, there are other objects that we could call “countermonuments”, indexes of the past which, unlike common monuments, highlight the fleeting and the overlooked.
A memory contrary to the official one evokes alternative memories of the past. Many times, this “counter-memory” is materialized in the form of counter-monuments. When Mr. Tagomi gives Juliana one of his chrysanthemums (“Truth”), he is not only giving her a present in honor of her sister, but through a subtle movement, he seeks to reaffirm the memory of Trudy, killed by the terrorism of the State. There is hardly anything more counter-hegemonic than Tagomi’s gesture. That same flower, which represents Juliana’s search for truth, also refers to the memory of Tagomi’s family, whom he lost in a war that Japan won but that brought him only loneliness. Later, Juliana begins to bring him flowers (“End of the World”), thus strengthening her connection with the past and reaffirming the need for that memory.
Alongside monuments there are counter-monuments, which challenge monumentality as an index of the past. The counter-monume
nts serve to destabilize the idea that the past is fixed and help us to reconsider the ways in which history is narrated and magnified by the symbology materialized in the big monuments. Juliana and Tagomi’s exchange of flowers is the perfect countermonument. Flowers work here as links to the past but, unlike Nazi architecture, they are small and fragile, ephemeral objects doomed to quickly disappear.
There are other counter-monuments within the series. Amid the displays of fascist political theatricality, film as a medium emerges as the means for the very reproduction of the masses, in contrast to more traditional aesthetic categories, such as “creativity” or “genius.” Film is a more “democratic” medium. Unlike monuments, which represents only someone important enough to be recreated in stone or marble, home movies or photography can recreate anyone, a member of royalty or someone from the working class. In this sense, the medium of film is an enemy of fascism within the series, a form of counter-monument.
The films show the possible existence of an alternative world in which the political and social reality would be completely different. The notion of the isolated image blasted out of the continuum of history is important within Benjamin’s philosophy of history, reflecting one of his most interesting preoccupations and claims: that the past is constructed by the present, and must therefore be read in and through that present. The short films circulating illegally, in turn, constitute different interpretations of history. Film is here an art made for the masses, bringing new points of view, since more people can access the means for recording. Monuments can be erected only by the State (with large sums to spend, of course). Filmmaking, even in 1962, was more accessible than the construction of monuments.
In turn, the films must circulate in an underground way, rather than being a proud display of history as Nazi monuments are. The problem is that all counter-monuments tend to disappear underground in the course of time. The nature of counter-monuments is frailty, minimalism, all things that tend to disappear or to go unnoticed. Memory is best represented by the big monuments, which serve to fix memory and historical references. Counter-monuments survive only through circulation: the clandestine circuit of exchange must not die. Regardless of whether the Man in the High Castle really exists, the films must be produced and continue to circulate as a counter-narrative to the monuments.
A counter-monument is counter-cultural, a piece looking to break with the “aura” of empowerment of monuments. That is why the newsreels in The Man in the High Castle work against the grain without denying the existence of history, because, “the counter-monument does not intend to negate memory but to call attention to the impossibility of permanence” (Kattago). History is not fixed but malleable according to your point of view. Ultimately, this is a brave statement within the show. A kind of anti-hegemony prowls around the newsreels, and the fact that these movies show possible futures opens up paths to hope and routes of rebellion.
Little Actions, Big Meanings
A counter-monument is not necessarily an object; it also could be an action. In “Three Monkeys,” after arguing violently with Juliana, Frank Frink roams the streets, ending up at Mark Sampson’s house. In the privacy of his home, they both dedicate a prayer in Hebrew to the dead. The ceremony and all the manifestations of pain must be attended underground.
Something similar happens in “Truth”: Frank tells Juliana about his foiled assassination attempt during the reception for the Japanese prince, and how he feels himself reflected in the eyes of a Japanese boy. For Frank, the reception was a farce, a fake. The chosen word is interesting if we keep in mind that both Frank and the antiquarian work together to create fake historical pieces to sell. This action confirms that history is a performance, a practice that can be literally fabricated by means of fake documents, or through the exhibition of monuments that point to a seemingly univocal past.
At the beginning of “Three Monkeys,” in a context that might have come from a mid-twentieth-century American story, or from a family home video, Joe plays baseball with Thomas Smith as they talk about their experiences within the spectacular frame of Victory Day. As in real life, baseball, a typical American practice, has survived the Nazi occupation. Its presence points to something absent: American freedom. The game is a memory. Even more, during their conversation, Thomas realizes that Joe does not possess a stellar record with the Nazi espionage service. In other words, a critical recuperation of the past is done in a double way: through the practice of baseball and through dialogue. Both practices question the idea of a perfect, pure regime. In the same episode, the denial of Obergruppenführer John Smith regarding memories of fishing shared with the traitor Rudolf Wegener presents a dilemma, because, despite the former following strictly the law when he punishes his old friend, a hint of nostalgia overwhelms Smith: the longing for the little things of the past, the counter-memory of what might have been.
Hitler, ill and frail, is kept out of sight of the citizens until the last episode. Recurrently through the series, the Führer’s health is brought up, confirming his delicate state. Hitler exists through his monuments, all of them indexes of his presence. Frailty is not a characteristic of a monument. Hitler’s body makes him subject to ephemerality, and that is exactly what monuments hide from citizens. Hitler-as-body is, at the end, a counter-monument. He will, eventually, pass and become invisible.
Monumental Invisibility
In “Three Monkeys,” Wegener and Smith discuss spectacle. Smith talks about Berlin and its grandiosity, while Wegener interrupts him, pointing to the fact that nobody seems to care about the decorations any more. This exchange foregrounds some problem with monuments. After a while, they work only with tourists, who mostly take pictures, sometimes without noticing to whom or to what the constructions refer. Monuments run the risk, big as they are, of being naturalized as part of the landscape. Their effect upon history fades away. Nobody in The Man in the High Castle seems to notice these colossal structures anymore, since they undermine, as most monuments do, the complexities of history.
As Robert Musil put it, “There is nothing so invisible as a monument.”
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Saving Hitler’s Life
DONALD MCCARTHY
In 1943, painter Norman Rockwell debuted Freedom from Want, a painting that portrayed a family setting down for Thanksgiving dinner, with the matriarch of the family placing the Thanksgiving turkey in front of the patriarch, who sits at the head of the table.
In The Man in the High Castle’s sixth episode, “Three Monkeys,” a warped version of this image plays out: Obergruppenführer John Smith cuts a turkey in front of his wife as they await dinner. The scene has a more suburban element than Rockwell’s painting as it is set outside on a sunny day, in the backyard of Smith’s house. In the background is a flag: at first glance it looks American, but where one would normally find the stars on the flag is the swastika. It’s a perverse joke, taking one of the most iconic images of Americana and twisting it into the darkest vision possible.
While “Three Monkeys” is not the most pivotal episode in terms of plot, the above scene is imperative to understanding The Man in the High Castle’s relationship with duality, a relationship that extends outside of the show, wrapping in the viewer. Duality is usually associated with the idea of two opposites existing together, such as yin and yang, but it comes from a much wider background. The philosophy of dualism, which is where duality comes from, explores how the mind and the body exist as separate entities.
The human body and the conscious mind are not opposites, this line of thinking states, but they are distinct from one another and should therefore be treated as separate entities. This can easily be taken in a religious direction, but The Man in the High Castle instead looks at dualism via speculative fiction, specifically alternate universes. By presenting multiple alternate universes, The Man in the High Castle shows the audience various forms of history playing out on the same physical sphere. The place is the same, but reality is different. In this sense, the world is the
body and history is the mind. However, where dualism tends to present two entities, The Man in the High Castle eventually presents many entities existing at once, taking dualism and dividing it again and again
Previous television shows, such as David Lynch and Mark Frost’s masterpiece, Twin Peaks, used dualism to explore the darker side of the American Dream. David Chase’s The Sopranos also used dualism, specifically at the start of its sixth season, exploring how Tony Soprano would be if he was not a mobster. Because of the long form nature of television, character development can take interesting routes that a film, which is limited to so short a period of time, cannot go down.
The Man in the High Castle goes a step further than most other television shows, breaking the characters not into two, but into many. It is aware of television’s prior history with dualism, showrunner Frank Spotnitz worked on The X-Files, which had a number of episodes revolve around this very concept, but it is moving the conversation forward. It also uses dualism in its original meaning to establish a relationship with the audience that is unique in television history.
The Fracturing of the Single Person
In the first episode, appropriately titled “The New World,” Juliana Crain discovers the newsreel movie The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, which displays footage from a timeline where the Allied powers won the war against the Axis powers. While watching the movie, Juliana seems to have a personal philosophical awakening. She begins to cry, both from the shock of the video and the possibilities it offers. She is becoming aware that the nature of the world is broader than she had previously thought. Her fiancé, Frank Frink, on the other hand, wants to get rid of the movie, seeing it as a threat.
The Man in the High Castle and Philosophy Page 3