So... Why Edelweiss?
SPOILERS
The opening of the TV show is... creepy, but sadly when you take a song from a beloved musical like The Sound of Music and creep it up you're drawing my attention to it. If Germany won the war there is no Sound of Music... it's a story about a famous singing family who escaped the Nazis but in this alternate reality they wouldn't have. Nor would either Rodgers or Hammerstein have lived long enough to write music or words for the song (even if they could have hidden being Jewish it wouldn't have left them in a position where being famous was a survivable option). So why go out of your way to introduce an impossibility like Edelweiss? It's an American made fake-Austrian folk song... is some deep meaning going to be revealed, or is this a warning that the world-building will suck?
Okay, it's going to be dumb world-building... and there's a resistance! of course there's a resistance. Americans always resist even if they don't appear to be able to organise their way out of a paper bag. I feel like I'm watching the original version of 'V'... where resistance is shooting at an alien shuttle with a handgun that one time and other heroic stuff. Yes, Resistance, by all means use a whole truck to transport a reel of film, that's the absolute best use of your limited resources.
And they're totally going to make Julianna a 'strong female character' aren't they... *facepalms* because the Julianna Frink was way too much woman for them. I would point out that in the book she taught Judo to Yankees... she was not associating with Japanese men as an equal let alone getting to throw them around.
Holy cow, Julianna and Frank live together but aren't married. Where did this permissive society come from? And why are the clothes so drab and colourless? And how did Frank study to be an artist and discover modern art if modern art has been erased for the past decade and a half, how could he get into art school and not be yanno in the advertising business or making use of his training the way most art students end up doing? None of these people know any creative folks do they? And why does Frank have to be middle-classed? An artist instead of a craftsman?
The entire Japanese businessman/German agent storyline is being turned into a joke - the secret agent gets collected from the airport, from the steps of his rocket-plane, by a high-ranking Japanese official... that's so very very secretive.
It's sad watching a story that's different from the usual being cookie cuttered into being properly 'the same'. The monoculture rules as heavy handedly as fictional Nazis.
In the book the Japanese are not gunning people down in the street. Nor are they evil. Nor working with the Nazis. They treat the Yankees with about the same disdain as Americans showed in Japan in our timeline. They are the conquerors and superior. But the young Japanese couple Childan so wants to impress go shopping in authentic American shops to make a perfect American meal for their guest, listen to Negro music, and read books like The Grasshopper, and they and the reader are somewhat repelled by Childan's opinions, spoken and unspoken. I am kind of shocked that they included the bootlicking racism of Childan and cut the opposing viewpoint.
Dick's world-building is slight but masterful and works in ways the TV show's doesn't and doesn't understand. The TV show has, I think, serious faliures in imagining how the Axis powers would govern after achieving their immediate aims, and this in an age when we've more information to work with than Dick.
[Because, sure the Nazis hate disabled people... but it doesn't take long to dispose of the existing disabled population, so why would a hospital still be burning corpses once a week? Why would you burn them and cause a noisome reminder when the death camp crematoria were developed entirely because there were too many bodies to bury. Once you're back to a few at a time it's easier, cleaner, and cheaper to dig a hole. Most of them are going to be small bodies, after all, and America has a lot of land for cemetaries. And when it comes to killing older children and adults, now that it's all in the open why should it not be a quiet word with the parents, and a health worker giving a vitamin injection, rather than whatever scariness the family doctor was going to let Smith avoid by killing the boy himself? No mess, no fuss, official second opinion from a collegue and a visit from a 'nurse'.]
This does go on and on. Kind of endlessly, so that a relatively small book, if somewhat packed, turns into a very very large number of minutes. Seriously, it's a short novel but ends up with the same screen time as the Lord of the Rings, which is a good six times as thick :P. Lots of added angst and drama and a plot against Hitler that doesn't exactly make sense. How does Heydrich attempting to kill Smith further his desire to assassinate Hitler? Doesn't it just show he's plotting? Or is Hitler meant to be reassured that the man is plotting but only against a relatively minor target? Why would anyone move against the dying Hitler rather than your extant rivals for the crown when he drops dead?
The added stuff makes no sense. None of it. None... of... it. It is all quite stupid. (Hey I worked for the Japanese since the war ended and you never knew, my wife never knew, and for over a decade no one ever had a clue I was lying about my job, apparantly not even the step-daughter who was working for the resistance, who watch the building where I work...)
The films make no sense. People find them and know who wants to buy them... and contact the resistance because... Where do they find them? Celluloid is is not the most stable or durable of recording mediums. Dick didn't actually present a mechanism for objects to cross between realities. Dick probably wasn't playing with the usual multiple realities in any case.
But probably worse than being boring and very silly is...
Am I being encouraged to want Hitler and a bunch of Nazis to live? (And Heydrich seemed to be a little bit gay for the historical figure... which is also disturbing.) Maybe I'm just too old... In the book the Nazis are the bad guys. There's an idea that some Germans are less bad than others but not a lot of 'hey you committed unspeakable acts but you're attractive so wooo!'.
In the mean time the Japanese have been tranformed by the show into almost entirely bad people. Seriously, the Japanese have been shown doing much worse things than the Nazis.
It's... disturbing, and not like that in the book.
It feels almost like a Trump world where the white folks do stuff, sometimes strong-arm stuff, because they have to to protect their way of life while the coloured people are in the US without being invited and are not the good kind of immigrants but rapists, thieves, and murderers. Oh, and they bring gun control.
(But you can escape them by going to South America??? Tell me the world-building in this show is good and I will have to laugh at you because explaining how bad it is would take too long, much as explaining how bad the characterisation is... again because characterisation is not back story so however much back story you give you can still have zero characterisation)
And not long ago there was a high degree of Twitter-rage about a woman writing a romance where a Jewish woman was in love with a Nazi commander. I haven't heard a word about Amazon giving us a Nazi to root for, who seems pretty unrepentant about having committed terrible acts. And a second younger Nazi who I guess we're hoping is redeemable, despite giving up the names of other people without hesitation?
Is he Rolf? Is that the whyfore of Edelweiss? Do I have one mystery answered in ten episodes?
That aside, no outrage either that we get dialogue with several repetitions of 'disabled people being a drain on society' and 'better dead than suffering' and not a single counter-speech or even a character who is disabled and not suffering. That's... troubling me. A lot.
And the only memorably 'good' Japanese is the elderly Tagomi... (we are not, I think expected to fall in love with any Pons) who, ironically, would be old enough to have participated in war crimes.
So let's see, take a work of fiction that is specifically praised for concentrating on ordinary people and having the 'arts and crafts' plot mixed with the 'saving the world' and 'saving the writer' plots... mess with everything, introduce the usual 'we must put history right' plot and the 'love triangle' plot and the 'save the Hitler' plot and... dear god so many sadly awful new plots... remove the creativity, add racism, strip the woman protagonist of sense and intelligence and have her saved by men quite a bit, let Nazi ideology go unchallenged, leave people thinking the Man in the High Castle is Hitler
(and I'm pretty sure we're supposed to want Julianna to get with Joe rather than killing him - and thus she is a girlfriend to Frank not his wife - she couldn't be his ex-wife because otherwise there'd be no connection to drive the 'they killed my sister and her kids' bit for the failed assassination plot that... dear gods it's a swamp of dumb plots...)
I do have one theory about Edelweiss - in the book the arts and crafts plot indicates a potential resurgence of American creativity, over making fakes/copies. There is the suggestion from Childan that the Japanese can only copy/steal technology and not originate, but is the Americans at this point who're not creating new things but selling fakes of the old. Edelweiss, in the original, is a fake Austrian folk song, but here it's changed, distorted into something new and disturbing... Which would be cool if they'd kept the arts and crafts plot from the book, but maybe the theme song stuck in someone's mind before the rest of the show turned to crap :D
So... Man in the High Castle the TV show... I will have to look sideways at the people who said it was good. I am very glad I pirated it. I probably won't watch a second series (a second series???) even pirated, because life is too short even to have it run in a subwindow while I play a game. I may read the wiki episode guide at some point, if I even remember the show exists by that time.
Two main lessons from it - one, that Amazon thinks there's an audience for hot Nazi's and their ideology, and two, that Dick knew what he was doing (and these guys don't).
The opening of the TV show is... creepy, but sadly when you take a song from a beloved musical like The Sound of Music and creep it up you're drawing my attention to it. If Germany won the war there is no Sound of Music... it's a story about a famous singing family who escaped the Nazis but in this alternate reality they wouldn't have. Nor would either Rodgers or Hammerstein have lived long enough to write music or words for the song (even if they could have hidden being Jewish it wouldn't have left them in a position where being famous was a survivable option). So why go out of your way to introduce an impossibility like Edelweiss? It's an American made fake-Austrian folk song... is some deep meaning going to be revealed, or is this a warning that the world-building will suck?
Okay, it's going to be dumb world-building... and there's a resistance! of course there's a resistance. Americans always resist even if they don't appear to be able to organise their way out of a paper bag. I feel like I'm watching the original version of 'V'... where resistance is shooting at an alien shuttle with a handgun that one time and other heroic stuff. Yes, Resistance, by all means use a whole truck to transport a reel of film, that's the absolute best use of your limited resources.
And they're totally going to make Julianna a 'strong female character' aren't they... *facepalms* because the Julianna Frink was way too much woman for them. I would point out that in the book she taught Judo to Yankees... she was not associating with Japanese men as an equal let alone getting to throw them around.
Holy cow, Julianna and Frank live together but aren't married. Where did this permissive society come from? And why are the clothes so drab and colourless? And how did Frank study to be an artist and discover modern art if modern art has been erased for the past decade and a half, how could he get into art school and not be yanno in the advertising business or making use of his training the way most art students end up doing? None of these people know any creative folks do they? And why does Frank have to be middle-classed? An artist instead of a craftsman?
The entire Japanese businessman/German agent storyline is being turned into a joke - the secret agent gets collected from the airport, from the steps of his rocket-plane, by a high-ranking Japanese official... that's so very very secretive.
It's sad watching a story that's different from the usual being cookie cuttered into being properly 'the same'. The monoculture rules as heavy handedly as fictional Nazis.
In the book the Japanese are not gunning people down in the street. Nor are they evil. Nor working with the Nazis. They treat the Yankees with about the same disdain as Americans showed in Japan in our timeline. They are the conquerors and superior. But the young Japanese couple Childan so wants to impress go shopping in authentic American shops to make a perfect American meal for their guest, listen to Negro music, and read books like The Grasshopper, and they and the reader are somewhat repelled by Childan's opinions, spoken and unspoken. I am kind of shocked that they included the bootlicking racism of Childan and cut the opposing viewpoint.
Dick's world-building is slight but masterful and works in ways the TV show's doesn't and doesn't understand. The TV show has, I think, serious faliures in imagining how the Axis powers would govern after achieving their immediate aims, and this in an age when we've more information to work with than Dick.
[Because, sure the Nazis hate disabled people... but it doesn't take long to dispose of the existing disabled population, so why would a hospital still be burning corpses once a week? Why would you burn them and cause a noisome reminder when the death camp crematoria were developed entirely because there were too many bodies to bury. Once you're back to a few at a time it's easier, cleaner, and cheaper to dig a hole. Most of them are going to be small bodies, after all, and America has a lot of land for cemetaries. And when it comes to killing older children and adults, now that it's all in the open why should it not be a quiet word with the parents, and a health worker giving a vitamin injection, rather than whatever scariness the family doctor was going to let Smith avoid by killing the boy himself? No mess, no fuss, official second opinion from a collegue and a visit from a 'nurse'.]
This does go on and on. Kind of endlessly, so that a relatively small book, if somewhat packed, turns into a very very large number of minutes. Seriously, it's a short novel but ends up with the same screen time as the Lord of the Rings, which is a good six times as thick :P. Lots of added angst and drama and a plot against Hitler that doesn't exactly make sense. How does Heydrich attempting to kill Smith further his desire to assassinate Hitler? Doesn't it just show he's plotting? Or is Hitler meant to be reassured that the man is plotting but only against a relatively minor target? Why would anyone move against the dying Hitler rather than your extant rivals for the crown when he drops dead?
The added stuff makes no sense. None of it. None... of... it. It is all quite stupid. (Hey I worked for the Japanese since the war ended and you never knew, my wife never knew, and for over a decade no one ever had a clue I was lying about my job, apparantly not even the step-daughter who was working for the resistance, who watch the building where I work...)
The films make no sense. People find them and know who wants to buy them... and contact the resistance because... Where do they find them? Celluloid is is not the most stable or durable of recording mediums. Dick didn't actually present a mechanism for objects to cross between realities. Dick probably wasn't playing with the usual multiple realities in any case.
But probably worse than being boring and very silly is...
Am I being encouraged to want Hitler and a bunch of Nazis to live? (And Heydrich seemed to be a little bit gay for the historical figure... which is also disturbing.) Maybe I'm just too old... In the book the Nazis are the bad guys. There's an idea that some Germans are less bad than others but not a lot of 'hey you committed unspeakable acts but you're attractive so wooo!'.
In the mean time the Japanese have been tranformed by the show into almost entirely bad people. Seriously, the Japanese have been shown doing much worse things than the Nazis.
It's... disturbing, and not like that in the book.
It feels almost like a Trump world where the white folks do stuff, sometimes strong-arm stuff, because they have to to protect their way of life while the coloured people are in the US without being invited and are not the good kind of immigrants but rapists, thieves, and murderers. Oh, and they bring gun control.
(But you can escape them by going to South America??? Tell me the world-building in this show is good and I will have to laugh at you because explaining how bad it is would take too long, much as explaining how bad the characterisation is... again because characterisation is not back story so however much back story you give you can still have zero characterisation)
And not long ago there was a high degree of Twitter-rage about a woman writing a romance where a Jewish woman was in love with a Nazi commander. I haven't heard a word about Amazon giving us a Nazi to root for, who seems pretty unrepentant about having committed terrible acts. And a second younger Nazi who I guess we're hoping is redeemable, despite giving up the names of other people without hesitation?
Is he Rolf? Is that the whyfore of Edelweiss? Do I have one mystery answered in ten episodes?
That aside, no outrage either that we get dialogue with several repetitions of 'disabled people being a drain on society' and 'better dead than suffering' and not a single counter-speech or even a character who is disabled and not suffering. That's... troubling me. A lot.
And the only memorably 'good' Japanese is the elderly Tagomi... (we are not, I think expected to fall in love with any Pons) who, ironically, would be old enough to have participated in war crimes.
So let's see, take a work of fiction that is specifically praised for concentrating on ordinary people and having the 'arts and crafts' plot mixed with the 'saving the world' and 'saving the writer' plots... mess with everything, introduce the usual 'we must put history right' plot and the 'love triangle' plot and the 'save the Hitler' plot and... dear god so many sadly awful new plots... remove the creativity, add racism, strip the woman protagonist of sense and intelligence and have her saved by men quite a bit, let Nazi ideology go unchallenged, leave people thinking the Man in the High Castle is Hitler
(and I'm pretty sure we're supposed to want Julianna to get with Joe rather than killing him - and thus she is a girlfriend to Frank not his wife - she couldn't be his ex-wife because otherwise there'd be no connection to drive the 'they killed my sister and her kids' bit for the failed assassination plot that... dear gods it's a swamp of dumb plots...)
I do have one theory about Edelweiss - in the book the arts and crafts plot indicates a potential resurgence of American creativity, over making fakes/copies. There is the suggestion from Childan that the Japanese can only copy/steal technology and not originate, but is the Americans at this point who're not creating new things but selling fakes of the old. Edelweiss, in the original, is a fake Austrian folk song, but here it's changed, distorted into something new and disturbing... Which would be cool if they'd kept the arts and crafts plot from the book, but maybe the theme song stuck in someone's mind before the rest of the show turned to crap :D
So... Man in the High Castle the TV show... I will have to look sideways at the people who said it was good. I am very glad I pirated it. I probably won't watch a second series (a second series???) even pirated, because life is too short even to have it run in a subwindow while I play a game. I may read the wiki episode guide at some point, if I even remember the show exists by that time.
Two main lessons from it - one, that Amazon thinks there's an audience for hot Nazi's and their ideology, and two, that Dick knew what he was doing (and these guys don't).