Imaginary Worlds - The Man In the High Castle

Episode Date: December 1, 2016

The Amazon series The Man in the High Castle is based on a 1962 novel by Philip K. Dick, which imagines what would've happened to America if the Axis Powers won World War II. In this scenario, Nazi Germany imposes their ideology on the East Coast and the Midwest, while Japan rules the West Coast through cultural imperialism. The storytelling from director and executive producer Dan Percival is top notch, but the production design from Drew Boughton also takes center stage -- all posing the same disturbing question. How much would we resist fascism? Season 2 begins on December 16th. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A special message from your family jewels brought to you by Old Spice Total Body. Hey, it stinks down here. Why do armpits get all of the attention? We're down here all day with no odor protection. Wait, what's that? Mmm, vanilla and shea. That's Old Spice Total Body deodorant. 24-7 freshness from pits to privates with daily use. It's so gentle. We've never smelled so good. Shop Old Spice Total Body Deodorant now.

This episode is brought to you by Secret. Secret deodorant gives you 72 hours of clinically proven odor protection free of aluminum, parabens, dyes, talc, and baking soda. It's made with pH balancing minerals and crafted with skin conditioning oils. You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Malinsky.

If you're a longtime listener to this podcast, you probably know two facts about me, which I mentioned from time to time. I'm Jewish, and I grew up in Boston. I don't usually talk about those two things at the same time, but growing up Jewish in Boston was interesting. My grandparents, my aunts, my uncles, had huge civic pride in the neighborhoods that they lived, Quincy and Brookline. But there was also this constant low-level anxiety. Are we really welcome? Could it ever happen here? And we all knew what it was.

It would probably sound something like this scene from the Amazon series The Man in the High Castle. I was back east at the end of the war, in Boston. Jesus. Yeah, you had to see it to believe it, Frank. Overnight, lynch mobs were murdering Jews because suddenly we were less than human. The Man in the High Castle is based on a novel by Philip K. Dick, which imagines what would have happened if the Axis powers won World War II. In his scenario, the Nazis developed the atomic bomb before we did and dropped it on Washington.

And then they threatened more American cities if we didn't surrender. The Germans took the eastern half of the country. The Japanese took the west coast. Those two characters you heard were Jews in San Francisco trying to hide their identity. There are no Jews left on the east coast. My family would be gone. I would have never existed. Needless to say, this show struck a nerve with me.

But it has struck a nerve with a lot of people because it doesn't ask, could it happen here? It happened. The show actually asks a more disturbing question. After all is said and done, how many Americans could live with it? You mind I ask, did you have two on your arm? Oh, a soldier so fierce he'd kill a rose. That was you? Oh, a long time ago. We lost the war, didn't we? Now I can't even remember what we were fighting for.

Like in this scene where Joe, a character from New York, is pulled over by a friendly cop in the Midwest. And then these white flakes fall from the sky, but it's not snow. What is that? Oh, it's the hospital. The hospital? Yeah, Tuesdays. They burn cripples, they terminally ill.

Drag on the state. There you go. You have a safe trip, son. In a moment, I'll talk with two of the creators of Man of the High Castle about a world we don't want to imagine, but we need to. There's an expression in science fiction and fantasy genres called world building. And I love that expression because it's so empowering, like you can build these worlds with your imagination and invite other people inside.

And I want to focus on the world building of Man in the High Castle because it's some of the most creative, subtle, and disturbing work I've ever seen. And the production design itself raises profound questions. Season two, by the way, starts streaming on Amazon on December 16th. Now, one of the many interesting choices they made was to set the first season in 1962. That's when the novel by Philip K. Dick was published. Hitler is still alive, but he's old, his health is failing, and there's a power struggle to succeed him. The resistance movement in the U.S. has mostly been killed or captured, but some of them are out there, deep undercover. And a new generation has come of age that only knows this world. So what do they think of it? Do they really understand what's been lost? One of the greatest challenges of this show was to do a piece of a period that never existed.

Dan Percival is one of the executive producers, and he directed a lot of the episodes. He says when imagining this world, this fascist America of the 1960s, you can only rely so much on archival material from World War II. One of the dangers of Man in the High Castle is the aesthetic slips to the 40s. And of course, that would have evolved too, with technology, with design, with 17 years of peace and relative prosperity under the Nazis in a world that was no longer in conflict. Setting it in the 60s also has disturbing parallels. This should have been the dawn of the civil rights movement and the women's movement.

But watching this reality unfold only reminded me that progress is not inevitable. It's fragile. That's right. It is enormously fragile. Drew Boten is the production designer. You know, the post-war America included several things, and those are the things that we needed to really remove from our visual world. For example, the exuberant post-war Times Square didn't happen. 1957 Chevy cars and consumerism did not happen. So rock and roll would never have happened.

Dylan Ginsberg, all these people would never have happened. The Beatles would never have happened. None of those things that define our version of 1962 would never have come into existence. And no bright, bold colors either. People in fascist countries typically don't want to stand out or make a splash. But the main theme that they wanted to explore was how fascism co-ops the culture that it absorbs and corrupts your own icons and imagery until you're not sure what's yours and what's theirs.

Glenn, welcome to Guess My Game. Thank you, Phil. It's a pleasure to be here. For example, the game show where, you know, the young Nazi is speaking in an American accent and answering about his exploits in cornfields and so forth. Is your game something you trained for in Hitler Youth? Yes, it certainly is, Phil. How did you approach New York? I mean, living in New York myself now, every time you cut to the skyline, I want to pause to see what you took away, what you added. It's fascinating.

We decided that if you look carefully as a New Yorker, you'll notice that the Nazi HQ building is positioned exactly where the United Nations building would have been. I did notice that. Yes. So that didn't happen, and the Nazis built a big building there. We gave the entire city a haircut because prior to World War II, there were not that many tall buildings in Manhattan anyway. So it was really a combination of looking at the research from the period and then making a few choices about how much the Nazis would allow any other building in New York to be taller than theirs. And, you know, we have decided, of course,

they would not. The dominant character in New York is John Smith, who is the rank of Obergruppenführer. At home, he is father knows best. At work, he's a Nazi in every sense of the word, except with an American accent. He's played by the British actor Rufus Sewell. You torture men. Do you have a problem with beating a man to death? No, overgroup, I'm sure. Good. And do as you're told. Good. And do as you're told. Rufus and I talk endlessly about John Smith and his backstory and what made him who he is.

And John Smith was not a character from Philip K. Dick's book, actually, but he was a necessary and important character for the TV show. Dan Percival imagines that John Smith fought for America in the war, and he would have stayed a patriotic American if things didn't change. But once the war was lost, Nazism offered a kind of stability for men like Smith. What you also have to remember is America pre-war, for a great many of the population of America,

was not such a great place. You know, it had been through a horrific depression. There had been many people who were in desperate poverty. There'd even been cases of people dying of starvation. You know, so is this an America anyone wanted back? For a lot of the white population coming out of, you know, seven years of brutal conflict, Nazism would not have been an unappealing option. Like in this scene at the breakfast table, Smith's son Thomas says that

he's bothered by another boy in his class who has long hair and an attitude. A boy like Randolph wants only to gratify himself. This is the path to moral decay. The decadence ruined this country before the war. You will grow to be a useful member of society. We'll make our nation stronger. Randolph will not. Whatever his test score. Your father's a wise man, son. One of the disturbing things about Manama High Castle

is other things that remain and retain. And the things that should make us most uncomfortable about it is, you know, once you accept this political reality and you keep your head down and you get along and you're white, life isn't so bad. It works, it's a successful economy, you've got a fixed price system, it's technologically advanced, and some of the ideas of Nazism are not unappealing to a passive majority, as long as you're not on the victim side of the scale.

I asked Drew Boten how he approached designing the suburbs of Long Island. In a very interesting related thing, Yaffank, New York, has a very interesting history and unfortunately includes a very large American Nazi period. Wait, what was this town you're talking about? It's called Jaffink. But it was a Nazi stronghold in the 30s? Yeah, there was an American Nazi camp and there were parades down the main street. You can Google all this. Wow.

And there's a sort of a spectacular, some spectacular images of, you know, people's garden hedges in the shape of a swastika. Oh my God. This happened here. And this happened here. I did Google Jaffek, New York. I saw pictures of the streets named after Hitler and Himmler.

I saw the hedge in the shape of a streets named after Hitler and Himmler. I saw the hedge in the shape of a swastika that he was talking about. In the show, he put that hedge at the airport. But then I called somebody at the Yaffank Historical Society, and she told me a slightly different story, which was actually more disturbing. She says, yes, there were a lot of German-Americans who were pro-Nazi in that town, but they were a minority. Now, that may sound like an excuse, but the parade that Drew talked about, which had 5,000 people in it, the town had a population of 2,000, and the city council was working with the federal government to get rid of the Nazi element. This town got a reputation as being a bad apple, but Nazi sympathizers were coming from

Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens to spend their summers there. 20,000 of them went to a, quote, pro-America rally in Madison Square Garden. The pictures are shocking. There is a huge, glowing image of George Washington standing between swastikas and American flags. One of the common misunderstandings people make of the show, particularly in this country, in America, is they read the show as, isn't it terrible we've been occupied by Germans

or we've been occupied by Japanese and we've got to fight back, you know, get America back. This should be a resistance story, if you like. It's not. This is about how we become Nazis. Sieg Heil. Sieg Heil. Glad you could make it.

Saw you in the parade on TV. It was really something. Yes, it was. Hey, Harry. Sieg Heil. Sieg Heil. So, that's the East Coast. It sucks. But the West Coast isn't a lot better.

To imagine a Japanese-occupied San Francisco. The production designer, Drew Boten, looked at how imperial Japan dealt with the territories that it conquered in real life. Now, Japan didn't care about imposing an ideology like the Nazis did. That's why in the show, some Nazis speak with German accents, but most of them are American-born. But the Japanese in the West Coast are very much foreign occupiers. For our world in the Japanese Pacific states, we wanted something less formal,

essentially more indifferent or disrespectful to the existing Caucasian population. White people would be towards the bottom of the scale, not a class to be exterminated, but a class to be disrespected and subjugated. This San Francisco has a thick layer of Japanese culture spread on top of it. So a character like Juliana Crane, who grew up after the war, is culturally fluid. She speaks Japanese, she eats Japanese food, and takes martial arts, much to her mother's disapproval. They killed your father. Come on, Ma. Mr. Nakamura's one of the good guys. Pushed my poor John to his death, and now his Mr. Nakamura's one of the good guys. I pushed my poor John to his death,

and now his own daughter thinks they're one of the good guys. Juliana soon learns the hard way that cultural adaptation can only take you so far when you're living under fascism. Now, the landscape where Juliana lives feels very California to me, which is impressive because the show is filmed in Vancouver. I asked Drew Boten how he pulls that off. Thank you for asking. We have three different

color palettes for the show for this purpose. And for the Pacific states, we use the uniform colors of the Kampatai military, which is a kind of a warm yellowy green color. But mostly we use watery aquatic colors in the wardrobe and the paint colors on interior sets and locations and vehicles in the street to give a general sense of West Coast watery kind of aquatic colors. So interesting. So my wife's from San Francisco, and so we go back there a lot. And so it's something I'm always very aware of, the differences between New York and San Francisco, which made the show even more creepy to me because I'm seeing how both cities are being co-opted. There is one more locale in the United States.

The Axis powers set up a neutral zone that runs from the Grand Canyon up through the Rocky Mountains. I find that world just as unnerving because it's rife with spies and double agents. It feels like a combination of a Western and a film noir. The neutral zone is perhaps my favorite place in our story world because it's the place where everybody who is unsafe in these other two areas can go and can be themselves. So in that situation, what we chose to do is let there be all colors to represent all people, but that they're faded and that they are sun bleached and rusted. And so that created a kind of a,

some have called it a nostalgic kind of hold on an American past. I'm so sorry I can't pay you. You what? Someone stole my wallet, all my money. I'm really sorry. This ain't no charity, lady. No, I know I'm really embarrassed.

How are you going to pay me? I told you I can't. Wrong answer. How are you going to pay me? I told you I can't. Wrong answer. How are you going to pay me? I'll pay for it. No, I don't need your money. Whoever you are, I... Oh, yes, you do.

It's two marks. Please. There you go. Finally, they had to imagine Berlin. Hitler and Albert Speer had enormous plans for Berlin post-war. Again, Dan Percival. They wanted to create an entire city within the city called Germania. And the plans for this existed.

They even started experimenting with concrete foundations for the world's most vast building called the Volkshall. And the Volkshall was a dome. I think it was at least 10 times bigger than the next biggest dome created. It was so vast that they thought it would have its own weather. You would have been able to put the Eiffel Tower inside it. So we create this, we built this in 3D design, but also in set stages. Now as a production designer, Drew Baten says he uses sets and real locations more than you'd expect.

I mean, they're still on a TV budget, and digital effects are expensive. But that's not the biggest challenge. I think the biggest thing to overcome was convincing people when we would go to shoot at one of their locations or one of their buildings that we meant well. Just because we're a TV show and we're going to hang swastika flags on their building, that we're coming with an anti-fascist intention. It's not just the swastika flags. In one scene, there's an advertisement on the wall for The Punch Bowl, starring Rock Hudson and June Allison.

The Punch Bowl was not a Hollywood movie from that time, but it was the most popular movie in Nazi Germany. And Drew thought the Nazis would want to remake that here. We certainly knew that Aryan actors would be preferred from the perspective of the Nazi sort of culture police. Then we went through a number of them, and then we only found a few estates that would be willing to have their parents portrayed as having survived the war and playing ball in the new media movie world. That's fascinating. It is.

And by the time we get somebody, it isn't necessarily – Rock Hudson is a terrific actor for us to feature in that ad, but he was not the first person that we looked at. That's it. So Rock Hudson's estate basically said, yeah, we think you're doing something important and you have permission to use his image? That's right. Yep. Well, I don't know if you're going to go to Hollywood this season,

but someday I think that would be so fascinating. I mean, unfortunately, of course, you'd have to, it'd be even worse in terms of what actors, given that most of them probably would still have survived, you know, you have to figure out who's going to be playing ball. And I'm sure that'd be a legal minefield, but it would be fascinating. It really would be. I mean, you know, we had speculated that Leni Reifenstahl would have basically taken over all film production in the greater Nazi world, including any Western stars. But those Western stars would probably be in New York rather than, because they couldn't be in the Japanese Pacific States. So Hollywood disappeared effectively. Ah, okay. Yeah, I was wondering about that. I

was imagining suddenly like this little island of Nazis allowed to live in Hollywood, right? They just rebuilt it on the East Coast. Absolutely. But when we attempted to contact the Reifenstahl estate to do that, they denied us. So we were not allowed to sort of create or invent a Eleni Riefenstahl film unit. Now, just to complicate things more, there is one more element of the show that I haven't mentioned, but it's really important. The Resistance has been smuggling newsreel films. In the first episode, Juliana Crane gets a hold of one of these contraband films. Crane gets a hold of one of these contraband films. She puts it in a projector in her basement apartment, and she sees actual newsreel footage from our World War II. And then her boyfriend Frank walks in. Frank. Hey. What is this? It's a newsreel film.

Yeah, I see that. It shows us winning the war. Well, we didn't win the war. That's what they told us. Jesus, I know what this is. What? The man in the high castle. Who?

Some guy Ed told me about. He makes these anti-fascist movies. Makes them. G.I.s and Times Square? No, I know they look real. Yeah, they look real because they are real. No, but they can't be. Can they? That's right. They're living in a multiverse. Then again, it's Philip K. Dick. I mean, what did you expect?

Although in his novel, the other timelines are hinted at. But in the TV series, they are unmistakably real. Juliana and Frank are not the only characters to discover this. The most sympathetic character among the Japanese occupiers is a trade minister named Tagomi. We must all have faith in something, Miss Green. We cannot see ahead alone. I'll have faith in something, Miss Green. We cannot see ahead alone. He's from Nagasaki,

a Nagasaki that survived the war without a scratch. In the first season, he also gets a glimpse into our timeline. And this is what it looks like to him. A good man who sees our 1962 as an appalling place. Japan was defeated. Nagasaki and Hiroshima were obliterated. And where the world he's in, in 1962, in September, October 1962, is on the verge of nuclear annihilation.

This isn't a better world. It's just another alternate option. Yeah, I was thinking for people like Juliana or Frank, who would be much happier in our reality, I also sort of feel their frustration as well, that you can't sort of fantasize your way out of this, the world that you are in. Yes, it's absolutely true. You know, I think you're right, you know, Juliana and Frank would be happier in our version of 1962, without a doubt, they would be leading a very different life. What I find extraordinary

about the world we live in now is how, you know, depressed, miserable, addicted it can be, even when we have all these things. I think back to my grandfather, he fought through the Second World War, and his whole generation were a generation that compared downwards. They always looked at the world and said, oh, I'm so grateful for, I'm so much better off, you know, at least my life isn't as rocky as that. And they lived through hell. They went through appalling experiences. You know, the Blitz in London, my father and grandmother were separated for five years during the war. And by the time he came home, he said, the rest of my life was just heaven.

Nothing mattered compared to that. rest of my life was just heaven. Nothing mattered compared to that. For the generations of us who grew up in post-war consumer culture, affluent society, we always compare upwards. I'm not as pretty as, I'm not as good as, I don't drive a big enough car, I should be richer, I should be happier, I should be better looking, I should be... We look at our world and feel resentful. A lot of critics have written about the parallels between Man and the High Castle and our politics today. It is a particularly interesting and potentially dangerous time, not just in America but in the Western world. But Dan Percival doesn't like taking the high moral ground in real life or in judging the characters on his show. Philip K. Dick was very keen to point out that, you know, we fit into the circumstances

we're dealt. We adapt to them. And all our characters have adapted to the world they're in. And their moral compass is very well established to that world, whether they're rebelling against it or whether they're supporting it instrumentally. That's why I find the characters in The Resistance so inspiring. Because some of them, like Juliana, have seen another world where they would probably be happier. But they're not obsessed with trying to get to that world or fantasize about it. It just makes them more committed to fight to that world or fantasize about it. It just makes them more committed to fight for the world that they live in. Well, that is it for this week. Thank you for listening.

Special thanks to Dan Percival and Drew Boten, who keeps getting asked whether he'd rather live in the East Coast or the West Coast in their world. And he's like, what about the neutral zone? I mean, why would I want to live in either of them? You know, that would that I don't really remember any question that was more sort of like, you got to be kidding me. Yeah, I know. I'm not very outdoorsy. So that would be a problem that we'd be out there. We'd be chopping wood and, you know, making, you know, whatever. We'd be out there. We'd be chopping wood and, you know, making, you know, whatever. God, it's so powerful.

It's funny. Every time I watch the show, I turn off and I'll say to my wife, the Nazis were horrible. I'm like, the Japanese were horrible. It's just like you needed that show to tell you that? Yeah. It's weird, you know, because I sometimes look at the show and I think, well, are we being horrible enough? It seems like we're maybe not as bad as actual history. But there's something so horrible about the banality of it.

Yeah. You know? Yeah. Imaginary Worlds is part of the Panoply Network. You can like the show on Facebook, where, by the way, I asked recently if people have ideas for stories that I could do in 2017, and I got a lot of great responses. I also tweet at emolinski, and you can support the show on Patreon. I'll include a link on my site,

imaginaryworldspodcast.org.