‘The Man in the High Castle’ as a Metaphor for Trump? Alas, It’s Not That Interesting.
The reviews for the new second season of The Man in the High Castle, now streaming on Amazon Prime, have taken a noticeably bleak turn. I’m not talking about the quality of the show — although opinion remains mixed as to whether this adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s famous 1962 alternate-history novel is an artistic success, and I’ll get to that in a second. No, I’m talking about how, since the first season concluded, the presidential win of Donald Trump has suddenly put reviewers in a bit of a tizzy.
The series posits that Germany and Japan won World War II, and the victors divided the conquered America between them. Fascism reigns, and there is a passionate underground of American resistance fighters seeking to overthrow their new rulers. The A.V. Club began its review of High Castle talking about Trump’s election: “Now many of us feel like we’ve woken up in an alternate universe dystopia, where white nationalism is on the rise and democracy itself is in peril.” The review went on to comment on the show’s marketing campaign, saying it was “not comforting to see Manhattan draped in banners bearing the image of the Statue of Liberty giving the Nazi salute” in the wake of Trump’s victory.
Newsweek asserted that “watching in the aftermath of the recent presidential election, on the precipice of Trump’s America, the series feels different,” and found a history professor at Fairfield University in Connecticut to say, “Everyone’s sensitized to the parallels between 2016 and 1933, between present day America.” Overseas, The Guardian wrote, “It’s hard to imagine that Donald Trump and his rhetoric, which often panders to far-right views, wasn’t on the writers’ minds as the episodes unfolded.”
Art, and good entertainment, provide its consumers with multiple layers to enjoy and interpret creative enterprises, be they TV shows, novels, movies, paintings, and more. But using this Amazon show, and Dick’s source material, as a direct metaphor for the incoming Trump administration seems a tad premature, perhaps an example of doomsday wish-fulfillment, and more heavy-handed than Dick — an adroit, if willfully eccentric, social commentator — ever was. Those opposing Trump’s campaign rhetoric have by no means lost the equivalent of World War III yet — there’s a lot more democracy in the streets even as I write this than there is in the gloomy world created by The Man in the High Castle.
As for the second season itself, I still find its pacing awfully slow, but certainly not without some attractions, not the least of which is Stephen Root’s performance as — spoiler alert — Hawthorne Abendsen, aka The Man in the High Castle. It’s Root at his Rootsiest, eccentric and woolly, operating on his own wavelength. Root hasn’t had a role this juicily eccentric since his days on NewsRadio. But for me, the series suffers from the flaw of so much science fiction: It’s devoid of the full range of human emotion — no humor, even the rueful kind; and what little love or romance that’s allowed to surface is kept under the pressure of constant, imminent danger. As a consequence, there’s little buildup to the suspense. The show operates as one long jangling nerve.
The series remains beautifully art-designed, and carefully thought through in its vision of what an America overrun by Nazi ideology would look and sound like. But I find it difficult to remain engaged by Luke Kleintank’s waffling Nazi-or-hero Joe Blake, and the amount of noble suffering Alexa Davalos must endure as brave fugitive Julianna limits the range of her performance. The most interesting character remains Rufus Sewell’s high-ranking Nazi official John Smith — mostly because he’s embodied by Sewell, who always seems to bring a complex welter of emotions and ideas to his characterizations. Like the lives of many of its protagonists, The Man in the High Castle most frequently implies that it is something to endure rather than to experience with anything so vulgar or selfish as enjoyment.
The Man in the High Castle is streaming now on Amazon Prime.
