While I Was Away Part 1: An Interview with Salon

I didn't cease my Dicking entirely with my abandoning of this blog. In the coming days and weeks, I'll share with you some of the stuff I did.

Scott Timberg, I miss you, man

First up is this interview I did about Amazon's The Man in the High Castle with Salon.com. You may remember the interviewer, Scott Timberg, and his awesome feature about PKD for the LA Times in 2014. Unfortunately, Scott committed suicide last year. I still can't wrap my head around it. I owe him quite a debt as he quoted me for a piece about Anne Dick for the New York Times, and interviewed me for this piece. Both serious feathers in my raggedy ol' cap. It still bums me out.

I never got beyond the first season of The Man in the High Castle. I'd only seen a few episodes when I did this interview. My opinion of the show never improved. Don't get me started.

Anyway I think this interview gets to the substance of my issue with it. I said:

"They basically stole Phil Dick’s pitch — and then deployed it in their own inimitable style. I find the show fairly compelling to watch. But I also find myself saying, “I don’t know that this is what Dick was getting at.”

It seems much morally simpler, less ambiguous. There were some suggestions in [the novel] that America and Nazi Germany were not all that different — that’s not a particularly P.C. idea, but it is important. While the Germans were extinguishing Jews, we were excluding black people from the lunch counter. It was a matter of degrees.

We had [racial] superiority here … The Nazi fantasy of the blond, blue-eyed book and how it overlapped with California dreamin’ … The idea of the blond, perfect teeth, riding on the wave like some übermensch. It’s not without its resonance, and to leave all those out and make it a simple good vs. evil — that’s a travesty. A betrayal of Dick’s intention. But probably works better on TV."

One of the few things that stuck out to me about the series was the iconography associated with it. Particularly the juxtaposition of classically fascist or Nazi tropes and American icons, like the Statue of Liberty giving the ol' Sieg Heil.

Remember when Amazon plastered these ads all over the subway right after Trump won the election, and people flipped out about it, so they pulled the ads?

That was wild. That was a real PhilDickian moment. Here's my favorite quote from the article from the show's producer, who had this to say:

“It’s very difficult with a show with subject matter like this to market it tastefully, so I understand they’re walking a very difficult line[...]If they had asked me, I would have strongly advised them not to do it.”

Implicit in all of this is the very reason that Amazon's MiTHC had to depict a much more active rebellion against Nazi occupation within the series: we, as a society, are not ready to accept one of Dick's central premises in the book, that for many in the novel American life would go on, much as it had before the Nazi's took over. It seems to me in the freakout over these posters (and the subway seats, my God! the seats!) there seems to be some recognition of the appropriateness of the imagery given the political zeitgeist of the time -- that was immediately, not only rejected, but which must be removed for its crass offense.