Philip K. Dick’s “The Man In The High Castle,” a story about the residents of a Nazi- and Japan-occupied United States, has long been famous for its alternate history inside an alternate history. The book, which arrives as an Amazon TV series tomorrow, follows a group of characters, among them a young woman named Juliana (Alex Davalos) who discover a story (a book in the novel and a series of films in the TV show) about what it might be like if the United States had won World War II and emerged as the predominant global superpower. (Standard disclaimer: Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)
The series was an opportunity for creator Frank Spotnitz to create a visually rich riff on the ’60s that captures some of the “Mad Men” vibe while unsettling audiences with the sight of Nazi regalia in New York City and Japanese flags in San Francisco. And at a moment when the United States is grappling with another existential struggle, “The Man In The High Castle” also hopes to unsettle viewers by making them identify with the sorts of characters who have long been stock pop-culture villains.
While Dick’s novel meant that the producers had “a lot of the world already imagined,” for Spotnitz it was still an enormous leap to take that world from the page to a more immersive screen.
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“What you realize, when you go into production, that now you have to make this real. What are the people wearing? What do the buildings look like?” Spotnitz told me when we spoke in Los Angeles in August. “There’s a thousand specific, concrete decisions you have to make. And you go, so, okay, if there was a Times Square and the Nazis were occupying New York, what would those billboards look like?” Producer David Zucker said that they even debated whether rock music might have happened, or if they could change the timeline on when certain books were published because of ways that Nazi and Japanese occupation might have shifted the timeline of cultural development.
Follow this authorAlyssa Rosenberg's opinionsThose debates were influenced by Matthew Weiner’s “Mad Men,” which aimed for accuracy about even minute details. And because “The Man In The High Castle” is set in the same period as “Mad Men,” albeit under different circumstances, Spotnitz said that he and his colleagues had to navigate audiences expectations while recognizing that “our conversation’s more about what would be the same, and what would be different, and why. The hard part about doing an alternative history, you still have to recognize it as our past, but it’s not our past. It’s got to overlap significantly and yet be different.”
Spotnitz credited Amazon with giving him “the financial support to make [these ideas] come to full life … it’s something that makes an additional pleasure of writing the project, that you’re able to venture, our lens isn’t so narrowly focused. The characters are ultimately and centrally the life-blood of the series. But it is always fascinating to get these kinds of glimpses into aspects of history and nostalgia that we recognize, and what has been done to it.”
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Alternate history exists for more than the pleasure of seeing familiar things seem strange, of course.
“We, of course, have the sort of science fiction advantage that we can have these films of another world, which I think is a big, latent opportunity to discuss what’s the state of our world versus another world,” Spotnitz explained of one of the novel and series’ central devices, the alternate history the characters discover.
“But I think what makes the show provocative is when the similarity between that world and our world is so close that you feel uneasy,” Spotnitz continued. “There’s a scene in episode two where John Smith, the Rufus Sewell character, is having breakfast with his family, he’s sort of telling his son about what his values are, and you listen, and you go ‘I almost agree with everything he said, but he’s a Nazi.’ And you’re forced to think about ‘Why don’t I agree with him? What about what he’s saying is different? What makes America different from that?’ And that’s where the show is at its most provocative and most interesting to me.”
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Zucker said he was particularly interested in the way “The Man In The High Castle” gave the show’s creators an opportunity to explore the lives of the individuals who were part of the Nazi and Imperial Japanese regimes, upsetting viewers’ easy sense of moral superiority.
“The thing that’s fascinating to me is there were many, many, many good people in Nazi Germany. And there were many, many, many good people in Imperial Japan. And they were caught in evil regimes. In a terrible, destructive regime,” Zucker explained. “And when you take a Nazi and you give him an American accent, you hear them differently. I think we’re so conditioned by decades and decades and decades of the German accent, it’s become a cartoon character. And when you hear him with an American accent, you have to listen to what he’s saying. And you have to ask, ‘What’s the difference between us and them?’ It’s not as obvious as it seems sometimes.”
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