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The pilot is telling a different, more comforting story than Philip K. A young couple is drawn into a plot to distribute it, and Joe Blake begins a mysterious cross-country trip for the resistance. The Nazis seem determined to stop the spread of an underground film called The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, which shows a world where America wins the war in preternaturally realistic detail.
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Things get much more complicated, and as in the book, no one is what they seem. "My father told me what it was like before the war," says fresh-faced rebel Joe Blake, who's found one of Nazi-occupied New York's small pockets of resistance, in the opening scene. Despite it all, we are assured from the first minutes that America is still fighting. By the time things start getting genuinely weird, reality breaking down in true Dickean fashion, we understand just how strange it is for characters to see their world change.Īmazon's pilot manages to look as grim as Dick's book feels (despite some early establishing shots of the kind of vaseline-focus steampunk cityscapes that characterize budget-conscious CGI dystopias) everything is fittingly rough, grimy, and cramped. Here, resistance doesn't mean fighting a guerrilla war it means preserving your self-worth in a society in which you've become inferior. Even the most steadfastly xenophobic American is plagued by doubt and humiliation, half-convinced that the country deserved to lose. They're less interesting, though, than seeing characters - a Japanese trader, a German secret agent, an American antiques dealer - navigate two empires obsessed with racial and national differences. Africa has been blasted into a wasteland, the Mediterranean was drained for farmland, and Bob Hope does comedy routines about the Nazis' plans to colonize Mars. The book is full of bizarre speculative fiction details. Hitler's impending death has created a power vacuum, the Japanese are well aware that they're not safe from the Nazis' genocidal ambitions, and Americans are either erasing their culture or selling it off piece by piece to kitsch-obsessed Japanese businessmen. Most of it speculates on a familiar theme: what if the Allies had lost World War II? Two decades after an Axis victory, Germany and Japan each rule half the United States in an uneasy truce, and no one is satisfied by how things turned out. No matter how much we want to identify with the conquered, we can't seem to imagine actually living as themĬompared to unfilmable fever dreams like Ubik and VALIS, The Man in the High Castle is one of Dick's less mind-bending books. And apparently, that's true even in Ridley Scott's well-recieved Amazon pilot adaptation of Philip K. No matter how much we may identify with the conquered, though, we can't seem to imagine actually living as them. In our politics, it can manifest in nasty ways - nothing's more dangerous than a powerful group with a persecution complex - but in fiction, it's what gives us classics like Red Dawn and any number of alien invasion stories. We love the idea of re-fighting the Revolutionary War, reduced from a global superpower to a scrappy band of rebels.
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White middle-class Americans, as a rule, love pretending to be underdogs.