The Man In the High Castle

If you liked the novel “The Man in the High Castle,” I think you’ll like the Amazon miniseries. I’ve read the book by Philip K. Dick more than a dozen times. It won the Hugo Award for best science fiction novel, back when that meant something. It’s on my all-time favorites list, even though it’s confused, confusing, and ultimately doesn’t achieve half what it set out to.

In the first episode, there are two little clues to what the creators intend. First, the heroes travel to Canon City, Colorado, a place which does not appear in the book at all. Then, underlined in both dialogue and road signs in the foreground, they leave Canon City behind, following the plot where it leads them.

Since “Canon” means “the text”, I interpret this to mean the producers telling me, “we’re going to leave the events of the book now.” Which is par for the course for video adaptations, of course – Blade Runner didn’t have a lot in common with Dick’s novel “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” – but they’re admitting it up front. Why bother, I wondered?

And the second clue is that when one of the characters is ordered to drive nonstop across America, he’s given amphetamine pills to keep him awake. This incident also does not appear anywhere in the book. So why add uppers to the story?

Philip K. Dick used amphetamines extensively to write faster, being paid by the word. By the time he became well-known, the drugs had permanently damaged his mind. He had lifelong trouble maintaining his focus and, more seriously, telling what was real and what wasn’t.

This became the theme of his best-known stories. The story that became Blade Runner is about imitation: at what point does the fake human become so humanlike that it deserves to be treated as a human? The book also explored the demands of industrial society for men to behave in a simplified and predictable manner, almost like poor imitations of genuine human beings, and the craving of post-apocalypse man for real empathy, as expressed both in the mechanically-induced empathy of the Mercerist religion and the overwhelming social desire to own and care for real animals.

“We Can Remember It For You Wholesale” became the film Total Recall, in which the question is memory. Dick’s self-described masterpiece, “A Scanner Darkly”, takes on drug-addled psychosis head-on – the hero Bob Arctor is playing several roles and once, all of which are real in the moment, but only one at a time. Soon he can’t remember who he’s trying to be at any given time.

Dick’s use of amphetamines and his consequent focus on questions of reality vs. illusion are at the heart of his best work. The novel “The Man In the High Castle” is superficially not about illusion at all, except that it’s set in an alternative 1962 where Germany and Japan won World War II. But it’s only a short way into things that we start, along with several of the characters, to wonder what’s really going on, because Nazis winning the war doesn’t explain the other oddities that start to take over the narrative.

But, although Dick raised some fascinating questions, he didn’t pursue them. The well-known twist ending of the book leaves everything upside down, as a twist should, but doesn’t resolve its central theme very well. It’s exactly as complete as ripping a rubber mask off your mother, to reveal that she isn’t your mother at all, on the very last page of a murder mystery.

I suggest that Philip Dick, because of his drug use, wasn’t able to develop “The Man In The High Castle” as it deserved to be developed. I have no proof, but will believe unless otherwise shown, that the novel which saw print was less than he wanted it to be, but as much as he was able to make it.

But the producers of the miniseries had ample time, clear heads (one presumes), and several writers to compare notes with. I think they set out to make the story Dick wanted to tell, as perfectly and completely as he intended, better than he told it himself.

Which, yes, is a lot to deduce from one mention of drugs in the first episode. Maybe I’m seeing things.

Except then I saw the rest of the series. Which is, indeed, the realization and perfection of the novel. Some scenes are word-perfect from the novel; others are parachuted in. And some of the most powerful scenes in the novel are still there, but moved around so they make much better dramatic sense. It’s not the same story, except it is, not in the details but in its essence.

I don’t see any need for a second season. Mission accomplished.

Age of Ultron

Age of Ultron left me waiting for it to end, which is hard for a superhero story to do.

I was going to put up a long post about all the things wrong with it, but they're all some variation of this: the movie does too good a job capturing the comics it's based on. Those comics sprawl endlessly over month after month, hinting at but never delivering a satisfying resolution (big fights don't count), and are honeycombed with events dropped in to promote other comics, or the crossover du jour, or make fun of Bush (yeah, still).

And now, Marvel movies do too.

But that's not what I want to say today. No, I'm thinking about an interview Joss Whedon gave in which he said Marvel wouldn't let him do something with the Hulk, at the end, which would have been "the single greatest fist-pumping moment in the Marvel Cinematic Universe,"iirc.

He wouldn't say what it was; he said he liked it so much he begged Marvel not to throw it away, because they could use it in another movie.

So what could it be?

Whedon understands structure. So when he puts in two different unsuccessful attempts to control the Hulk, it's possible that was meant to set up an epic payoff, which then got deleted.

First, we see the Black Widow's way of handling the Hulk: soft talk and a drug injection. Basically, lying. Then Iron Man has his way of dealing with a Hulk problem: hit him really, really hard. That doesn't work out so well either.

What we don't see is Banner handling the Hulk. Wouldn't it have been cool if, when Black Widow says she loves him, but she needs the other guy, he'd said something like, "There is no other guy. I am the Hulk." And turned all Hulked-out, but gray, and said, "What do you need me to do?" in Hulk's voice.

Tricking him didn't work and beating on him didn't work, but Banner yielding halfway to the Hulk to create a new personality would have worked, and been way cool.

Maybe that's not what Whedon had in mind. Maybe it was even better!

But who knows, because the writer doesn't get to decide the ending of an Avengers movie any more. That's up to the suits in the boardroom

Just like the comics.