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.
