The Man in the High Castle and Philosophy

by Bruce Krajewski

  The scene encompasses the two main reactions people have to a revelation: awe and fear. Director David Semel shoots the scene so that the viewer feels both reactions. By cutting back and forth between a close-up of Juliana’s face as she reacts to the footage and to the footage itself, film that the audience is already very familiar with because it is from the actual Allied victory, he preps the audience to feel the fascination she does. When Frank enters the room, he is first framed in a dark doorway and then through a window pane, signifying how his reaction will be different from Juliana’s, and the audience becomes suspicious, not necessarily of Frank, but of the situation in general. Should Juliana have access to what she is seeing? She sees it as a blessing, but Frank sees it as a curse, that seeing this other world will only make theirs worse; is he correct? Whether ignorance of the wider world is, in the end, better is left for the audience to decide as the series unfolds.

  However, the specifics of this scene come back in the ninth episode, “Kindness,” when Juliana and Frank see yet another film. By this point, the two have evolved, especially Frank who has gone from a laid-back blue-collar worker to a man with a deep sense of anger and betrayal. Frank is as suspicious of the film as he was in “The New World,” but he is ready to see it, to accept what it will reveal in a way that he had not been nine episodes earlier. Juliana, on the other hand, is not quite as capable of accepting this film as she was at first. Because her first experience was one of awe, the opposite nature of the second film comes as a blow, which results in her character coming across as unmoored after the newreel, similar to Frank’s in “The New World.”

  To show the evolution of the characters, this scene, directed by Michael Slovis, is staged opposite from the scene in “The New World.” Here, Juliana and Frank stand next to each other in an empty auditorium. They are no longer separated nor are they in a confined space. The reality of the world, of its multifaceted nature, is no longer a secret. It is well that their viewpoints have changed, because the Frank and Juliana at the start of The Man in the High Castle could not have stomached what this video presents. Gone are scenes of victory. Instead, they are first presented with footage of a nuclear wasteland in the United States. The footage then cuts to prisoners of war being forced to their knees by their German captives. One of the captives is Frank. He is then shot in the back of the head by Joe Blake, a supposed ally of Frank and Juliana’s in the timeline most of the season takes place within.

  The moment is chilling, but in a fashion only The Man in the High Castle can deliver. Frank and Juliana don’t learn anything about Joe’s allegiances in the universe of the show; they are both well aware that they are seeing an alternate history. Yet the fact that Joe can become such a cold-blooded killer, even in an alternate timeline, is unnerving and forces them to view him in a different light. It’s not that Joe has changed, but rather their perception of what Joe could become has shifted. Now that they know what he can do, they view him differently.

  It’s tragic, in its way, because just the thought of what a person could be, not what they are, can change perspectives. They embrace a dualistic viewpoint of humanity in this moment, one where a person who is good can just as easily be a person who is evil. Yet, The Man in the High Castle does not entirely embrace this concept even as it plays with it. The direction of this scene certainly plays as an opposite of the scene in the first episode, but the writing adds an extra layer, questioning if the idea of a person flipping between good and evil is as simple as it sounds.

  Unspoken is also the fact that both Juliana and Frank must have the capability of being different individuals, like Joe. The show has alluded to this on multiple occasions in previous episodes, even if the characters are only just realizing it in the ninth installment. Juliana spends time in Canon City from the second to fifth episode, and here she’s more daring than the Juliana seen in the first episode. While Juliana is away, the mild-mannered version of Frank is replaced with a homicidal one after the death of his sister, leading to a scene where he attempts to assassinate the crown prince of Imperial Japan. These changes are not just to increase the drama; they signify the various possibilities for joy and violence hidden not just within each person, but within the world itself. Juliana and Frank do not go back and forth between good and evil, but they do show how there are many facets of the same person.

  The Limits of History

  In “A Way Out,” the first season’s finale, the relationship between the audience and that of The Man in the High Castle fully reveals itself, showing that the themes the show has explored with the characters are also being explored on an even broader level. During “A Way Out,” the audience meets Hitler in the flesh; it is he who has been collecting at least some of the footage that Frank and Juliana found. However, what makes Hitler’s appearance so shocking is not that he has been hoarding the mysterious films, but rather that the audience wants him to survive an assassination attempt.

  In a deft bit of writing, showrunner Frank Spotnitz and his writers set up Hitler as an evil man who has even worse men just beneath him (there is at least some historical precedent to the idea that Himmler and Goebbels were worse than Hitler when it came to brutality). Should Hitler be assassinated, a war between imperial Japan and Nazi Germany will break out, likely ending the lives of all the characters the audience has grown to know and, to some extent, love. For the audience to want a world where Adolf Hitler is not assassinated sounds disturbing, but The Man in the High Castle manages to craft the story in a way that makes Hitler’s survival a moral necessity.

  Not content to end there, the two characters who are involved in ensuring Hitler’s survival, and thus the two characters the audience cheers on, are also Nazis: the previously mentioned John Smith and Rudolf Wegener. Wegener is sent by a faction of Nazis, led by Reinhard Heydrich, who want Hitler dead, to assassinate the Führer during a visit to the Führer’s castle (which is quite high, I might add, leading to some convincing speculation that Hitler is the titular character of the show; barring a future reversal, this appears to be a legitimate read). Wegener, though, does not want to be a partner to this; he has, in fact, been one of the key behind-the-scenes players in orchestrating peace between Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany. However, both his life and, implicitly, the lives of his family members are being threatened by Heydrich.

  At the same time, Heydrich, who is in America, senses that John Smith’s loyalties lie with Hitler and not with the overall values of the Nazi party. Heydrich takes Smith on a hunting trip into the woods, leading him to a cabin where he holds him prisoner, giving him an ultimatum: throw his support behind Heydrich before Heydrich receives the call Hitler has been assassinated.

  Episode director Daniel Percival cuts between these two plots, escalating the tension. Before long the audience is worried John Smith will die and that so, too, might Adolf Hitler. During Wegener and Hitler’s confrontation, Hitler makes it clear that he is aware of the fractured nature of life. He has been watching footage from alternate universes for some time, he reveals, and from each of them he learns something new. He declines to go into details—understandable since he also has to talk Wegener out of killing him—but, considering the schisms within the Nazi ranks, it seems likely that Hitler has embraced a new perspective on global conquest.

  What once seemed paramount to Hitler, now seems a little less important. No matter what occurs, Hitler knows there are other worlds where he lost, some where he won even greater than he did in The Man in the High Castle’s main universe, and some where he landed somewhere in the middle. He understands the fickle nature of the universe, how the world’s history is not set in stone, how factions and people can morph under the right circumstances. This reflects the journey the audience has made, as well. At the start of the season, The Man in the High Castle seemed to reflect the worst possible world; by the end, it shows that, no, it could be even worse.

  The unique sympathies The Man in the High Castle managed to bring out of viewers did not go unnoticed
by critics upon the show’s release. Todd VanderWerff, Vox’s television critic, had this to say: “By the end of its finale, this is legitimately one of the weirdest things on television, a show that takes questions of just what evils we’re willing to be complicit in when living in any society, then gives them a sci-fi coating that makes them go down a little more easily.” Salon’s Sonia Saraiya also picked up on this: “The most amazing thing Spotnitz’s show pulls off (in the finale—spoilers!) is in bringing you to the point where you see someone able to kill Hitler—pointing a gun at his head—and as you are watching, you are hoping that he won’t. The unstable alliance between Japan and Germany will crumble if the old man is assassinated; nuclear war will surely follow. The man holding the gun is a good man—a Nazi who loves his family, who cannot sleep at night because of the atrocities committed by his party. But he can’t do it.”

  The power of forcing the audience to align, even briefly, with Hitler, is one of the show’s lasting accomplishments, because it forces the audience to question just how easily its allegiances can be swayed under the right circumstances. By using an actual historical figure, The Man in the High Castle starts to become metatextual, which brings it to a new, darker level, one that challenges the audience’s own humanity and sense of self.

  The Dualism of the Viewing Experience

  The Man in the High Castle TV show is adapted from the novel of the same name by science-fiction author Philip K. Dick. The differences are many, but one of the most telling is that in the novel, The Grasshopper Lies Heavy is not newsreel footage; it’s a book. That Frank Spotnitz changed it to video shows that the medium the story is being told within, originally a novel and now a streaming television show, is part of the story itself. Most television dramas do not call attention to the fact that they are television dramas, but The Man in the High Castle does this several times, most noticeably in the opening credits which features images of video footage played across a map of the conquered United States. This forces the audience to be aware that they are watching images within an image. That Juliana and Frank also watch video footage is key, because they are, in fact, doing what the audience currently is doing: watching an alternate narrative of life.

  The message Juliana and Frank received from the first video is the opposite of the message received by the audience, which is, in the simplest of terms: this world could be yours. You could live in a world where a Nazi regime is in power. You could be the police office Joe meets on the highway who casually comments that those who are mentally ill or physically handicapped are burned alive. You could be Smith’s neighbors who jovially say “Heil Hitler!” Or you could be John Smith, an American hero and an American Nazi.

  This does not need to be taken literally, just as the alternate universes do not need to be taken literally. The Man in the High Castle is not stepping into the scientific debate on whether alternate realities exist or if there is an America that lost to Germany and happily became National Socialist. Instead, it is questioning the historical narrative that America is necessarily a place that fights off oppressors. The show is telling the audience that simply because a country is democratic does not mean it will always remain so. There are many possibilities within every country, and the possibility for fascism is one of them.

  Just as Juliana and Frank are forced to witness other versions of themselves, either directly through their experiences or through what they see on the footage, viewers of The Man in the High Castle must confront that they are watching a possible version of themselves whenever they stream another episode. The Man in the High Castle is a television show; it’s also a presentation of our own alternate reality, meaning the show is, by its very nature, dualistic, existing at once as fiction and a very skewed version of history.

  In its relationship with the audience, The Man in the High Castle uses dualism in its original sense: providing a fictional world and contrasting it with the real world, subtly asking the audience how different the two are.

  II

  The World Dick Made

  4

  Cruel Optimism and the Good Nazi Life

  LUKASZ MUNIOWSKI

  Lauren Berlant’s term “cruel optimism” describes what happens when the object of your desire, the goal of all your strivings, keeps you from enjoying a full life.

  The term “cruel optimism” is used especially in reference to something that can be summed up as “the good life,” which may be understood as a typical suburban life, dominated by notions of family, community and work. The attachments and expectations that are supposed to make Frank Frink and Obergruppenführer John Smith happy are actually the cause of their misery. Their vision of “the good life” and everything that it promises is more important than what actually makes them feel good. In order to fulfill society’s expectations they forfeit their own happiness, which leads to a dismal existence.

  The first episode of The Man in the High Castle opens up with a propaganda movie about what can be summed up as the Greater Reich’s version of the American dream: people are happy no matter whether they spend time with their families or at work, as they are contributing to the greatness of their country. The shots used in this film-within-a-film look as if they might have been taken directly from the propaganda of 1950–1960s America, while the voiceover informs the viewers that in order to achieve happiness they should produce and consume, fueling the economy with their labor and earnings.

  Joe Blake leaves the theater as the message is being delivered, moments after we learn that he’s there only to get directions for his assignment. His early exit suggests that Joe is either resistant to the propaganda or has internalized it to the point that he does not need to hear the message—he knows it by heart. Whether he believes it or not is a different story, as proved by his actions throughout the first season of the series. Not so in the case of John Smith and Frank Frink, who are completely caught up by the American dream.

  The vision of suburban happiness is powerful and suggestive. It should be, as it is key in sustaining the current order. The citizens of the Greater Nazi Reich are supposed to contribute to making their country stronger, as it will benefit them in the long run. The same is the case with the citizens of the Japanese Pacific States, although here the propaganda is more about respect and control. Calm and collected, no matter the current events, Japanese characters want to instill the same mentality within American citizens.

  Two characters who are almost obsessed by the idea of the good life are John Smith and Frank Frink. Frink wants to fit in, start a family and have children. He stopped being an artist in order to provide for himself and his girlfriend, Juliana Crain. Smith already has a wife, three kids, and a house in the suburbs. His American Dream is fulfilled, so it is in his best interest to sustain the current order. Both characters fall victim to what can be characterized as “cruel optimism.”

  In her book Cruel Optimism Lauren Berlant writes that “a relation of cruel optimism exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing” (p. 1). The term is used to describe your relation to a goal—usually an object of your desire—that’s supposed to make everything better, yet the end result is usually the opposite. The relationship with the object is problematic, because obtaining it usually involves a lot of time and effort.

  The supposed happiness is delayed, which makes it more promising and precious. Instead of focusing on the present, your activity is directed towards the future, which means that all action is concentrated on saving for later. This is at the heart of the capitalist model, as the citizen is supposed to blindly follow the ideal of the good life, stuck in a cycle of creation and consumption. The attachment to the postponed happiness gives the worker motivation and creates an appealing storyline for him to follow. If he fails to reach his goal it will be his fault, as this story is supposedly written by the system and the worker’s “job” is simply to “connect the dots.” The blueprint for happiness is in front of him, he must just follow it.

  The idea o
f the good life varies across times and cultures. Its most basic and concrete definition was presented by Bertrand Russell, one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century, who argues that “the good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge” (What I Believe, p. 10). Only a combination of both leads to a certain fulfillment in life, but Russell gives love the upper hand, as without it knowledge is basically useless.

  Knowledge is best used to benefit our loved ones. Russell writes that “in a perfect world, every sentient being would be to every other the object of the fullest love,” but in reality we are simply unable to do this, as we are repulsed by some people or by creatures like fleas, bugs, or lice (p. 12). Coincidentally, these names are used throughout the series by the Nazis to describe Jews. That sort of hostility proves that Russell’s ideal vision, originally conceived in 1925, is out of reach for the citizens of the 1960s Greater Nazi Reich and Japanese Pacific States. If fellow man cannot evoke any positive feelings among them, and his race is the sole reason for the lack of compassion or empathy, than this vision of the good life seems far from ideal. Still, a vision of the good life must exist in order to keep the society under control and give its members something to aspire to.

  The opposition between the idea of the good life and the ideal of the good life is based on the relationship between social desire and social need. Henri Lefebvre, another influential twentieth-century philosopher, recognizes the opposition as essential to constructing human reality. He observes that “need is determined biologically and physiologically,” hence it is natural and essential to human existence, while “desire is at the same time both individual and social; in other words it is recognized—or excluded—by a society” (The Critique of Everyday Life, p. 301).