Aaron Bady's The New Yorker article
http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/philip-k-dicks-intellectual-vision-for-living-in-a-fascist-america?mbid=social_facebook
I hardly know where to begin. First off, he gets a lot of things just wrong. In an attempt to show how Season 1 bad guys (Kido and Smith) turn into Season 2 characters of "fascist normalcy" and are objects of the show's "insistence on humanizing fascists", he states this:
In Season 2, [Kido] struggles to keep the Crown Prince of Japan safe on a visit to San Francisco
Sorry, that was season 1.
As the second season progresses, Smith is rocked by the discovery that his only son has an inherited genetic disorder—and is therefore condemned to be euthanized by the state.
Ditto.
All of that started in Season 1 by design, for anyone that's actually been following the story. The purpose of those plot points is neither of those things Bady mentions above quoted in my first paragraph, but rather to bring into sharp relief the fallacy of the fascist state, the cracks in the totalitarian system. And if we feel empathy for those finally waking up to the faults and dangers of Der Führer's vision (season 2 spoiler: much less those even worse ones of his eventual successor), then the show has done it's job.
Keep reading the article, but you might not be prepared to stomach what he has to say about the resistance fighters. It's not likely that this author has studied much of the real life atrocities that both sides committed during WWII.
This nihilism would have been alien to Philip K. Dick. It is telling that Obergruppenführer John Smith, Chief Inspector Takeshi Kido, and the Resistance are all original inventions of the Amazon series.
Telling... what? It's clearly not a faithful adaptation (again, by design). See below:
Dick’s “The Man in the High Castle” focussed on how everyday people struggle to carve out lives of integrity in the face of evil, even while knowing—perhaps especially while knowing—that their actions will not ultimately change the course of history.
True, that difference, the show is showing hope in the outcome of the character's endeavors and has already demonstrated a change in the course of history.
Most of us here know that the show is only loosely based on the book and pretty much left it behind in the first season.
This guy is like a country / western music fan that was entrusted in writing a review for a progressive rock / jazz fusion release.
Thoughts?
Brevity is the soul of wit. share