Years Released: 2015-2019
Created by: Frank Spotnitz. Loosely based on Phillip K. Dick’s 1962 novel.
Starring: Alexa Davalos, Rufus Sewell, Rupert Evans, JD Qualls, Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, Chelah Horsdal, Joel de la Fuente, Luke Kleintank
(16 Years and Older, 4 seasons, 10 episodes, each approx. 1 hour)
Genre: Science Fiction, Drama

“Evil triumphs when good men do nothing.” Attributed to Edmund Burke

Like the best of science fiction this fine series causes us to reflect on our own reality. And The Man in the High Castle is even more relevant than when it first aired in 2015 through 2019.

The supposition – that the Axis powers, Germany and Japan, won World War II – is intriguing, but it is the fleshed-out details that shock us into a new consciousness.

So much comes from the imagery itself – the swastikas draped over our American icons, the Sig Heil salute, and the ever-present military uniforms. The black boots that have been a proud part of in my English riding attire, here ubiquitous among the Nazis, become frightening and foreign. Especially as worn by the American Nazi official Obergruppenführer John Smith (a mesmerizing Rufus Sewell).

And the Sig Heil salutes are psychological weapons themselves, straight and as lethal as any blade of steel. The simultaneous clicking of the booted heels sounding too much like a gunshot.

The police State tactics, civilians gunned down for the least signs of resistance, shock as well. But maybe even more so are the many Americans who so easily comply with their new America, or as it is now called the GRU, the Greater Nazi Universe or the JPS, the Japanese Pacific States.

One of the most riveting scenes involves a friendly highway patrolman of sorts who helps change a tire for a stranded trucker. There is no asking for papers, just friendly chit chat as he does the task willingly. Yet the chit chat is chilling. The officer only vaguely remembers his time fighting for America – the year is now 1962 – and confesses he doesn’t even recall what he was actually fighting for. Then when ashes fall from the sky, he casually tells the trucker they are from the nearby hospital, where old people and the terminally ill are “relieved of their suffering or purposeless existence.” Later on someone refers to them as “useless eaters.”

Double images flood our minds. First, the horrible concentration camps (The Boy in the Striped Pajamas) with their gas ovens, killing and then incinerating Jews who thought they were going to take showers. And then the rapid spread of euthanasia in our world, like the story of a disabled Canadian army veteran paralympian who blasted her government for offering to euthanize her when she complained about how long it was taking to install a stairlift at her home.

Other scenes show the resistance forces often as brutal as their oppressors, as in The Army of Shadows, hunting down those they suspect traitorous to their cause, although the resistance alone allows women positions of power, unlike the Stepford Nazi Wives or the bowing Japanese women, with one notable excpetion.

The most ironically poignant scenes show that the façade of normality is a thin veneer on an America now divided into the Nazi Eastern U.S. and the Japanese West, with a kind of Wild Wild West Neutral Zone in between.

Our remembered American classic songs, everything from “Happy Days Are Here Again,” Gene Autry’s “Back in the Saddle Again,” Elvis’s “Can’t Help Falling in Love,” The Beach Boy’s “Surfin’ U. S. A,” Woodie Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land,” and Frank Sinatra’s “Witchcraft” blast from radios, taunting us with their illusion of normalcy.

One of the first compliant and then committed early resisters, Frank Frink ( Rupert Evans) says it best: “They think this is normal and it’s not.”

Even the names are caustic. Our main villain is named John Smith, probably the most common American name there is.

One of the other high ranking American Nazis is a triple crown winner of American Nostalgia: George Lincoln Rockwell. We even have J. Edgar Hoover assisting the Nazis, perhaps no more compromised and ruthless as he was in reality. Both were real figures in America.

It is a complete surveillance state, except for the Wild Wild West Neutral Zone, where human spies have to do the leg work … and the killing. Each side’s belief system justifies their barbarism, as most so easily adapt to being subjugated.

Only when it hits close to home do some finally rebel, perhaps the head Stepford Nazi wife, Helen Smith (Chelah Horsd), being the most surprising. When her children are victims of a system that rids itself of anyone not perfect, she cannot adjust. The Nazi Utopian vision is just what its etymology implies, literally “a place that does not exist.”

Perhaps most relevant to today’s culture is the pervasive antisemitism that stains our campuses and large cities. In our film even a trace of Jewish blood is a death sentence. Frank Frink, one-quarter Jewish, sheds his complacency when reprisals hit his family.

Frink is one of the triumvirate of courageous heroes, including his lifelong friend Ed McCarthy (DJ Qualls) and the woman he loves, Juliana Crain (Alexa Davalos), who becomes the beacon of goodness and valor in this devastated world.

The actual Man in the High Castle (Stephen Root) sees that in the films he somehow finds or creates. Juliana Crane is in almost every film, which is the key to understanding something called the multiverse, where alternate realities exist.

However, DifferentDrummer refuses to get bogged down in the plot, which is so complex at times, one cannot completely follow each separate set of characters and circumstances. There are, after all, 40 hour long episodes.

The structure is loose, chaotic, and jarring, switching time and place at a moment’s notice, but perhaps that is purposeful, making the audience feel as discombobulated as all the humans trying to survive this dystopia.

An ultimate irony of the series (2015- 2019) is that many of the predictions they thought were current did not occur until the next 4 years (2020-2023). The Nazi desire to “erase U.S. history,” its “reset to Year Zero.” the talk of
re-education camps,” and the removal of American historic icons occurred after the series was released.

And one headline blared recently, “When is it OK to Pull Down Statues, “ suggesting that “…if a society removes its outmoded memorials to retrograde mentalities, is it guilty of erasing its past? Or should we see these excisions more as amputations of gangrenous limbs, necessary to the body’s survival?”

Dive into this series. It is painful to watch at times, but that pain is worth it if it makes you see our own world as dangerously close to this brutal one. Will you wake up or mindlessly comply with our increasing authoritarian world?

The choice is up to you.

–Kathy Borich
🥁 🥁 🥁 🥁

Trailer

Film-Loving Foodie

Perhaps it is not the Swastikas that drape our buildings, nor the jack-booted Nazis running the Eastern USA that shock the most. It is instead the illusion of normalcy encouraged and expected in the new Nazi Eastern America.

In one instance Thanksgiving is now called Reichgiving, and Helen Smith appears on a television show to cook Käsespätzle or Cheese Spaetzle. Different Drummer already has that recipe posted right here.

But what is more American, excluding of course Apple Pie, than a Pot Roast? Not pricey or fancy, the meat (chuck roast) and the whole meal is affordable for ordinary people. It’s the Middle Class America’s version of Boef Bourguignon, though not nearly so pretentious.

So having Helen Smith, wife of the high ranking American Nazi official Obergruppenführer John Smith and one time queen bee of the elite American Nazi wives, serve it is another façade of the new Nazified America.

Don’t let that put you off, though. Our recipe is melt in your mouth delicious and offers several easy ways to cook it, including the slow Cooker, the Insta Pot, and the oven.

And I don’t think real Americans will miss Helen’s own side dish, Sauerkraut.

Guten Appetit!

Sig Heil

Just Kidding, of course.

Enjoy your meal.

Chow Down.

God Bless