After watching the first two episodes of Amazon’s The Man in the High Castle I asked myself what I ask of all TV these days: does this series have anything important to say about the world we live in today?
Based on the dystopian novel by Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle revises history and explores what the U.S. would look like in 1962 if the Axis had won World War II. John F. Kennedy isn’t president. There’s no burgeoning civil rights or women’s movement. There’s no United States of America either. Instead the land has been broken up into three parts: the east coast becomes the Great Nazi Reich, the west turns into the Japanese Pacific States, and everything in between is called the Rocky Mountain States—neutral territory. Despite the resounding changes, it’s still a time of unrest; The Man in the High Castle is interested in a new kind of tension that begins to appear in the '60s, a Cold War of sorts between the two ruling and rival powers: Germany and Japan.
Even with these alterations, the new world presented in The Man in the High Castle never feels farfetched. As removed as it is from our time and situation, the series, at least in its early episodes, introduces a country where racial intolerance is the norm, where its citizens are surveilled by the higher ups, and police brutality is an everyday occurrence. It’s pretty familiar territory.
One of the earliest scenes in the show offers a look at Times Square under the Nazi regime. New York in the ‘60s is a police state, devoid of Jews, people of color, queers, or anyone the Nazis view as inferior. It’s a disturbingly white New York, one populated by complacent occupees and a brutal police force who march around the city in swastika-bearing uniforms that never cease to be bone-chilling.
Joe, a good-looking twentysomething New Yorker who’s too young to know firsthand what things were like before the Axis dropped the bomb, wants to join in a rebellion against the Reich. In the first few minutes of the pilot we see him meet a group of rebels at a warehouse. The gathering is tense, and we are immediately made aware of how dangerous it is to talk about the good old days—anyone could be watching, and reminiscing and plotting is punishable by death. The New York we’re shown has been turned on its back, and as Joe’s new allies get shot down one by one by the Nazi’s—who raid the warehouse—our worst nightmare for our own world comes to fruition.
Across the country, the situation is equally bleak—although it doesn’t seem so at first. We see the city through the lens of Juliana Crain, a practitioner of aikido martial arts who is seemingly content blending into a Japanese-ruled San Francisco. In this San Francisco white people are the minority, and the English language appears below Japanese characters on every sign, street, and billboard. It initially appears more peaceful than New York, but Juliana is soon dragged into conflict when her younger sister, a rebel, is killed by Japanese forces trying to deliver a controversial film reel to the Rocky Mountain States. The dissemination of media against the State is obviously a capital crime.
While The Man in the High Castle poses a magnificently twisted inversion of New York, in its depiction and characterization of San Francisco, the show falters. As established above, the New York we get is an eerie place, and the exclusion and racial injustice is pretty obvious. In San Francisco, however, there’s an opportunity to show a different kind of community, to show what happens when white people become minorities, marginalized. But The Man in the High Castle never goes here. Instead, we get a caricatured and stereotyped presentation of Japanese characters and cultures, a significant inconsistency present in the drama.
The Man in the High Castle, at least initially, aims to expose some of our own realities through a dystopian vision, but, almost ironically, it ends up posing an issue that already exists in our own world. Even under Japan’s rule, there’s an overarching sense of orientalism, whether intentional or not, that is ill-fitting considering that in this world the Japanese are supposed to be in charge. This never feels exactly true. There still seems to be a white gaze of sorts, and the Japanese segments of the show feel cosmetic, not thoroughly researched or considered. In one of Juliana’s first scenes, as an example, we see her being asked out by a Japanese aikido student. As famous video game localizer Agness Kaku points out in her criticism of the show, there’s an uncomfortable exoticism that becomes present.
“Listen to the scene of Juliana being hit on by a young Japanese man, and what you hear is an immigrant kid humbly asking out a white lady who lets him down easy with all the self-possession of the privileged class,” Kaku writes. “Instead of giving us an unsettling look at an inverted racial dynamic—and with it, the devil’s bargain that women under occupation routinely face—the scene simply gives us back a slice of our own reality.”
Kaku also points out the sloppy Japanese script that makes up the signs, billboards, and posters that mark the city, the disproportionate amount tea shops on every street corner, and the strange, almost cheesy accent in which the Japanese characters speak English (all the Germans speak in a flawless American accent). It’s a curious oversight.
It’s unfortunate because other than that, The Man in the High Castle is wise in its critiques of some of our more destructive institutions. It shows us an America that’s essentially a police state with no accountability for its misdeeds. People are being shot left and right, there’s nowhere to run, hide, or discuss, and even in the dynamics between the Germans and Japanese—there’s race-driven hatred. The first two episodes of The Man in the High Castle effectively creates a claustrophobic reality that ultimately gives way to a creeping feeling that this could be us.
As citizens are gunned down, tortured, and forced to hide their backgrounds in fear of persecution, The Man in the High Castle starts to look less like the past and more like our present, our future. Sure, it’s an embellishment, a fantasy, and it’s not an overtly political drama or “statement show.” But beneath the lavish set pieces, the period feel, and the only-can-be-seen on TV drama, there are elements of The Man in the High Castle that hold true.
