It might, in fact, look a lot like the America we already know. For those not targeted for elimination, the show suggests-for nice young white men like Joe Blake in particular-the American Reich would not be terrifying at all. “Drags on the state.” Then, after the friendly Nazi offers Joe his own lunch and some tips for the road, he goes on his way. The Nazi fixes Joe’s flat, the two men chat about their memories of the war, and-in passing-the sheriff explains that the strange dust floating down on them, like snow, is ashes from the local hospital crematorium: “Tuesdays, they burn cripples, the terminally ill,” he says. A local sheriff in a Nazi armband stops to assist him and demands to see his papers, but the tension in their exchange quickly fades to a disquieting nothing. In a chilling scene in the pilot episode, for instance, Joe gets a flat tire as he is driving a truck carrying one of the contraband newsreels west across the American Reich. The show, like Dick’s novel, is most provocative when it shows Americans adapting to fascism with an alarming smoothness.
won the war-and then the sister is seemingly killed, Juliana sets out to find the mysterious collector behind the reel, “the man in the high castle.” In her quest, she gets entangled with the young Joe Blake (Luke Kleintank), an undercover Nazi who has embedded with the Resistance to find and kill the collector.
When Juliana’s sister entrusts her with a newsreel that appears to show a different version of reality-in which the U.S. In San Francisco, Juliana Crain (Alexa Davalos) studies aikido and lives with her mother her boyfriend, Frank Frink (Rupert Evans), hides his Jewish ancestry and works in a factory that supplies American kitsch for patronizing Japanese customers.
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On the East Coast, white Americans have made an easier transition to fascism: non-Aryan people, and their culture, have been eradicated, and what remains is uncomfortably reminiscent of the most “white bread” American culture of the nineteen-fifties and sixties-a Nazi version of “Dragnet” always seems to be playing on TV in the background, while Rock Hudson and Doris Day are in the movies and on the radio.
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The series opens in 1962 on the West Coast, where the Japanese empire rules with an iron fist: Americans are second-class citizens, bowing and deferring to occupiers whose racial and cultural superiority have become a fact of life and law. And though Amazon has been eager to capitalize on this unexpected timeliness, the show’s substantial flaws, especially in its second season, are only magnified by the moment into which it has arrived. As a man with a vocal admiration for authoritarian leaders is about to be sworn into the White House, the show has attained a grim new resonance that its creator, Frank Spotnitz, could never have predicted. policymakers citing Second World War-era internment camps as legal precedent for a Muslim registry. A year later, the show’s second season has arrived amid a resurgence of real-life white nationalism, a post-election spike in hate crimes, and the bizarre spectacle of G.O.P. When a TV adaptation of “The Man in the High Castle” first premièred, on Amazon, in late 2015, a profoundly misguided promotional campaign decorated New York City subway cars in the iconography of Nazi Germany and imperial Japan, forcing passengers to get a taste of life in the show’s alternate world. The ads were met with immediate and widespread protest-even the Mayor of New York condemned the campaign-and were quickly removed. Like many works of counterfactual history, this nightmarish fictional world provokes a sense of relief mixed with horror: it didn’t happen here, but it all too easily could have. What had been the United States is now divided between an eastern Nazi-ruled “American Reich” and a West Coast partially occupied by the Japanese empire. Decades later, the world is ruled by fascist powers. neither recovers from the Great Depression nor enters the Second World War. In 1933, Franklin Delano Roosevelt is assassinated at a rally in Florida, setting off a chain of disastrous events: after Republicans take power and reverse the New Deal, the U.S.
Dick’s alternative-history novel “The Man in the High Castle,” from 1962, a single, terrifyingly plausible shift in history has produced a radically transformed world.
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