The Man in the High Castle, by Philip K. Dick, is an acknowledged classic of the alternative-history genre — the sort of books that imagine a world in which something important had gone differently. (In this case, it’s if the Axis powers had won World War II.) The TV show of the same title, whose pilot is currently streaming on Amazon, is unlikely to meet as much success, not least because the alternative-history genre of TV isn’t something that exists. In general, TV has been uniquely bad at conveying dystopian fantasies. So far, The Man in the High Castle is worse than it could be — but it’s hard to call it a disappointment, given how low expectations should have been.
The power of books that imagine the apocalypse (or a far worse alternate present) is their power to parcel out information about the state of the world we’re witnessing through context. When television attempts to do the same, it feels sledgehammer-level unsubtle. In a book, a mention of a popular current movie or song, or a quick description of a poster or work of art, can be easily absorbed in the flow of information. In Amazon’s Man in the High Castle pilot, when the camera pauses on a movie theater marquee or poster of a Third Reich soldier, it feels as though we’re being nudged in the ribs: This will be important later! The important stuff that’s actually interesting gets withheld to a frustrating degree, in favor of fairly dull characters who are on quests we don’t get enough information about to care. What would it really be like to live under Nazi rule in America? We don’t get a strong sense, aside from a vague feeling that the police would be far more aggressive.
Subtlety isn’t television’s strongest trait, but shows like The Man in the High Castle, which exist in a wildly different universe than our own, only exacerbate the medium’s problems with obviousness. We want to know how America ended up overrun with German and Japanese soldiers — just as how, in Under the Dome, we want to know how the town ended up under a dome, or how in the late ABC reboot of V we wanted to know the alien’s plots. Those last two shows are but two easy examples of an irritating phenomenon: when they did parcel out information about the world in which their characters found themselves, it was heavy-handed in a way that only emphasized how much the rest of the show was wheel-spinning.
In The Man in the High Castle, the popular movies and songs of Nazi-controlled America are lingered upon, as though they’ll be important later. The mechanics of a bus trip to a free zone are straightforwardly stated by a character whose function is largely pure exposition. But the mechanics of how the Germans and Japanese conquered and then divided America are easily hopscotched over. TV can give very obvious information very quickly, through exposition. What it can only do far more effortfully and over a longer period of time is convey a complex society very different from our own. With characters as schematic as the ones in High Castle and a plot so reliant on shoulder-tapping obviousness, it’s hard to imagine tuning in for that long.
What would make the show more watchable in the long run? The twist at the end of the pilot is a good sign: Prior to that, the characters had behaved exactly as we might expect them to. The central question of this show hinges upon a collision between American and Third Reich ways of life, so giving us characters who are morally compromised or hazily in-between — rather than, as many are, firmly situated on one side or the other in an intractable war — will allow the ideas of the show to reach their potential.
Only the first episode is available, so far, which is exactly the wrong amount; those characters who are on one or the other side seem just like chess pieces waiting to play their part in the drama, thanks to how little we know. The lack of information about the most interesting aspect of High Castle, its bizarre geopolitical setting, isn’t tantalizing. It’s a reminder that the show isn’t, yet, getting down to the business of showing us what its world is really like and how it got that way.
World War II: Photos We Remember
In a picture that captures the violence and sheer destruction inherent in war perhaps more graphically than any other ever published in LIFE, Marines take cover on an Iwo Jima hillside amid the burned-out remains of banyan jungle, as a Japanese bunker is obliterated in March 1945.W. Eugene Smith—Time & Life Pictures/Getty ImagesIn this and dozens of other, similar pictures made at New York's Penn Station in 1944, LIFE's Alfred Eisenstaedt captured a private moment repeated in public millions of times over the course of the war: a guy, a girl, a goodbye - and no assurance that he'll make it back. By war's end, more than 400,000 American troops had been killed.Alfred Eisenstaedt—Time & Life Pictures/Getty ImagesDuring 1940's Battle of Britain, Luftwaffe bombers tried to destroy British air power ahead of a planned invasion of the UK. When that failed, Hitler resorted to terror attacks on civilians, including the full-scale bombing of London (pictured) and other English towns. The attacks killed tens of thousands of Britons, but "The Blitz" fizzled: the invasion never materialized.William Vandivert—Time & Life Pictures/Getty ImagesThree American soldiers lie half-buried in the sand at Buna Beach on New Guinea. This photo was taken in February 1943, but not published until September, when it became the first image of dead American troops to appear in LIFE during World War II. George Strock's photo was finally OK'd by government censors, in part because FDR feared the public was growing complacent about the war's horrific toll.George Strock—Time & Life Pictures/Getty ImagesThe Statue of Liberty, photographed during a blackout in 1942 - an eloquent expression of the nation's mood in the first full year of a global conflict with no real end in sight.Andreas Feininger—Time & Life Pictures/Getty ImagesMembers of the Women's Auxiliary Army Corps, commonly known as WAACs, don their first gas masks at Fort Des Moines, Iowa, in June 1942. The female troops were famously praised by General Douglas MacArthur, who called them "my best soldiers."Marie Hansen—Time & Life Pictures/Getty ImagesA photo taken by Hitler's personal photographer (and later acquired by LIFE) shows a 1939 rally in which Hitler salutes Luftwaffe troops who fought with Francisco Franco's ultra-right wing nationalist rebels in the Spanish Civil War.Hugo Jaeger—Time & Life Pictures/Getty ImagesSoldiers goose-step past the Fhrer in honor of Hitler's 50th birthday, April 20, 1939. Less than five months later, on September 1, the Third Reich's forces invaded Poland.Hugo Jaeger—Time & Life Pictures/Getty ImagesAustrians cheer Adolf Hitler during his 1938 campaign to unite Austria and Germany. In the rapt faces, straining bodies, and adulation of the crowds swept up in Hitler's mad vision, one senses the eagerness of millions to forge a "Thousand Year Reich" at, literally, any cost.Hugo Jaeger—Time & Life Pictures/Getty ImageIn a photo that somehow comprises both tenderness and horror, an American Marine cradles a near-dead infant pulled from under a rock while troops cleared Japanese fighters and civilians from caves on Saipan in the summer of 1944. The child was the only person found alive among hundreds of corpses in one cave.W. Eugene Smith—Time & Life Pictures/Getty ImageThe home front: At Sportsman's Park in St. Louis, a visiting New York Giant is caught in a rundown in the summer of 1943. At a time when seemingly everything in America - race relations, gender roles, the country's very idea of itself - was undergoing profound change, the national pastime offered an antidote to anxiety and dread. Namely, something familiar. Something unchanging.Wallace Kirkland—Time & Life Pictures/Getty ImagesMembers of the U.S. Army Air Corps' legendary 99th Pursuit Squadron, the Tuskegee Airmen, receive instruction about wind currents from a lieutenant in 1942. The Tuskegee fliers - the nation's first African American air squadron - served with distinction in the segregated American military.Gabriel Benzur—Time & Life Pictures/Getty ImagesA welder at a boat-and-sub-building yard adjusts her goggles before resuming work, October, 1943. By 1945, women comprised well over a third of the civilian labor force (in 1940, it was closer to a quarter) and millions of those jobs were filled in factories: building bombers, manufacturing munitions, welding, drilling and riveting for the war effort.Bernard Hoffman—Time & Life Pictures/Getty ImageArmy medic George Lott, wounded in both arms in November, 1944, grimaces as doctors mold a cast to his body. When Lott embarked on a 4,500-mile, seven-hospital journey of recovery, photographer Ralph Morse - astonished by the high level of medical care wounded troops received both at the front and behind the lines - traveled with him, and chronicled Lott's odyssey in a revelatory cover story for LIFE.Ralph Morse—Time & Life Pictures/Getty ImagesPhotographer W. Eugene Smith's picture of a Marine drinking from his canteen during 1944's Battle of Saipan is as iconic a war picture as any ever made. In fact, when the U.S. Postal Service released a "Masters of American Photography" series of commemorative stamps in 2002, Smith was included - and this image was chosen as representative of his body of work.W. Eugene Smith—Time & Life Pictures/Getty ImagesUnpublished. An exemplar of a bitter, grueling land battle, Iwo Jima also saw prodigious air and sea power brought to bear as American and Japanese troops clashed over control of the tiny Pacific island. American forces finally captured Iwo Jima - and its two strategic airfields - in late March, 1945.W. Eugene Smith—Time & Life Pictures/Getty ImagesUnpublished. A crew maneuvers an enormous piece of artillery during the Battle of Saipan, 1944. In the waning days of the struggle for the island, thousands of Japanese civilians and troops committed suicide, rather than surrender to American troops. Many leapt to their death from the top of sheer cliffs that fall 200 feet to rocks and surf below.Peter Stackpole—Time & Life Pictures/Getty ImagesUnpublished. American troops chat near a dead Japanese soldier on Iwo Jima. The degree to which the Japanese were willing to fight to the death, rather than surrender, is summed up in one remarkable statistic: Close to 20,000 Japanese soldiers were killed during the battle; only around 200 were captured.W. Eugene Smith—Time & Life Pictures/Getty ImagesGIs tramp in review across an English field, 1944, as the long-planned Operation Overlord - the D-Day invasion of France - draws near. With 160,000 Allied troops taking part, the cross-Channel attack was the single greatest air-land-and-sea invasion in military history.Frank Scherschel—Time & Life Pictures/Getty ImagesUnpublished. An American Marine readies to land on Guadalcanal during the five-month struggle for the island between late 1942 and early 1943. Three thousand miles south of Tokyo, Guadalcanal was a major shipping point for military supplies. The Allied victory there in February, 1943, marked a major turning point in the war after a string of Japanese victories in the Pacific.Joe Scherschel—Time & Life Pictures/Getty ImagesAmerican troops in the Philippines celebrate the long-awaited news that Japan has, finally, unconditionally, surrendered in August 1945.Carl Mydans—Time & Life Pictures/Getty ImagesPeace at last: V-J Day, Times Square, August 14, 1945.Alfred Eisenstaedt—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Image
