Culture Shock 01.29.15: Amazon confronts 'The Man in the High Castle'

The camera pulls back to reveal a theater marquee advertising "The Punch Party" starring Rock Hudson and June Allyson. It could be one of those romantic comedies in which Hudson so often appeared in the 1960s, often with Doris Day. But it isn't.

This movie is playing only in Nazi-occupied America.

Welcome to the world of "The Man in the High Castle," based on Philip K. Dick's 1962 Hugo Award-winning science fiction novel of the same name, set in an America that lost World War II.

From that shot of the marquee on, "The Man in the High Castle" plays with our expectations. Nothing is entirely as it seems. There's the small irony, for instance, that one of the actors still able to work under America's Nazi regime is a closeted gay man. His movies are no threat.

"The Man in the High Castle" is part of Amazon.com's latest slate of pilots, and of the retailer-turned-studio's hour-long drama prospects, it's the one most deserving of a full-season order.

Few artists teeter between genius and madness in quite the literal way PKD did.

Dick's struggle with mental illness translated into stories about people who are never quite sure what is real or what is fantasy. A man could come to find out the world he thought he inhabited was all a dream. Or he could learn that what he thought were paranoid delusions about a vast conspiracy controlling everything were real.

A lowly resident of the science fiction ghetto during his lifetime, Dick has, since his death in 1982, been welcomed into America's literary pantheon. Through his novels and short stories, and through osmosis, Dick has become the SF writer with probably the greatest influence on popular culture. He certainly is one of the most frequently adapted, for better or worse. The movies "Blade Runner," "Total Recall" and "Minority Report" all spring from his sometimes fevered imagination.

At the helm of "The Man in the High Castle" is executive producer Frank Spotnitz ("The X-Files"), who also wrote the teleplay. The setting is roughly the same as in Dick's novel: an America where World War II dragged on past 1945 and Germany developed the atom bomb first, allowing the Nazis to vaporize Washington, D.C., and successfully invade the continental U.S. The story picks up in 1962, with the United States divided into two regions: Nazi-controlled territory east of the Rockies and Japanese-occupied territory along the West Coast, with an impoverished neutral zone in between.

The pilot opens in New York, where Joe Blake (Luke Kleintank), trying to live up to the example of his war veteran father, joins up with a resistance cell. No sooner does he receive his mission — to transport a secret cargo to resistance contacts in the neutral zone — than the secret police strike. Joe is on the run from the outset.

On the West Coast, Juliana Crain (Alexa Davalos) becomes involved with the resistance inadvertently when her sister, who is on the run from Japanese authorities, hands her a package containing movie reels labeled "The Grasshopper Lies Heavy." The film, made by a mysterious figure known as the Man in the High Castle, depicts a world were the Allies defeated the Nazis and Imperial Japan. It's a typical PKD conceit: Inside a work of alternate history, history itself becomes fiction.

So, film canisters in hand, Juliana takes up her sister's assignment and heads toward the neutral zone and an eventual meeting with Joe, which is where the pilot leaves off. But the episode is at its most  compelling when concerned with the deteriorating relations between Japan and Germany. The only thing worse than occupation is becoming the battleground for rival occupiers, which significantly raises the story's already high stakes.

Spotnitz squeezes a lot of potential plot threads into just an hour, while cinematographer James Hawkinson (NBC's "Hannibal," aka the best-looking show on television) gives everything an appropriately cinematic gloss, despite some obvious budget constraints.

"The Man in the High Castle" looks like it could be one the better PKD adaptations. The best of all worlds is where it makes Amazon's cut.

Looking back at the first year of shocking culture

After writing this column for one year, it’s time to look back and see where some of the past year’s stories stand.

Dec. 7, 2006: I wrote about the newfound respect some science fiction writers, Philip K. Dick in particular, are receiving from traditional literary circles. That trend continued in 2007, when Doris Lessing won the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Lessing, 88, is the oldest person ever to win the award. Her long career includes two notable transitions. She went from communist to anti-communist and from “serious” fiction to science fiction.

The latter move upset some critics, among them Harold Bloom, who said, “Although Ms. Lessing at the beginning of her writing career had a few admirable qualities, I find her work for the past 15 years quite unreadable ... fourth-rate science fiction.”

But Lessing is unapologetic. “What (critics) didn't realize was that in science fiction is some of the best social fiction of our time,” she said in an interview.

Good for her.

Jan. 4, 2007: I wrote about the new comic strip “Lio” by Mark Tatulli. Since then, “Lio” has increased its following. It now appears in about 275 newspapers worldwide, including The Daily. And that was enough to get Hollywood’s attention.

A live-action film based on the strip is in development.

Jan. 11: Time magazine named “You” its Person of the Year in recognition of ordinary people flooding the Internet with blogs and videos.

The flood continues, and it may be making its biggest impact in politics, where citizens are bypassing the “old media” to spread the word about their preferred presidential candidates. You get a sense of how revolutionary that is when a “second-tier” candidate like Ron Paul raises more than $4 million in one day when his online supporters stage a fundraising drive.

Feb. 1: I continue to receive e-mail about my column on self-proclaimed psychic Sylvia Brown, who still hasn’t demonstrated anything that looks like real psychic ability. Perhaps that is why she has moved on to write, with the help of “her spirit guide Francine,” an absurd book titled “Secret Societies ... and How They Affect Our Lives Today.”

March 15: Marvel Comics killed off one of its most recognizable heroes, Captain America. He is still dead, but someone else is set to don an updated version of Cap’s red, white and blue costume. I still say the original Cap will return — eventually.

July 12: A cryptic marketing campaign for an upcoming sci-fi/horror film by producer J.J. Abrams (“Alias”) had fans scouring the Internet for clues. As it turned out, the Web sites www.ethanhaaswasright.com and ethanhaaswaswrong.blogspot.com, which many thought were promoting the then-untitled movie, were for an unrelated role-playing game.

At any rate, the film now has a name, “Cloverfield,” and it opens in theaters Jan. 18.

July 19: “Harry Potter” fans were eagerly awaiting the final book in the saga while trying to avoid spoilers that had leaked online.

By now, everyone who cares knows who lives and who dies. Also, Dumbledore is gay, but we didn’t learn that until months later.

Sept. 6: I wrote about a study published in Nature magazine, which found that the online encyclopedia Wikipedia is almost as accurate as Encyclopaedia Britannica. A spokesman for Britannica then e-mailed me a rebuttal, which included links to stories critical of Nature’s findings.

“Dozens of the so-called inaccuracies they attributed to us were nothing of the kind; they were the result of reviewers expressing opinions that differed from ours about what should be included in an encyclopedia article. In these cases Britannica’s coverage was actually sound,” Britannica responded.

After reading up on the controversy, I’m siding with Britannica, although I still think Wikipedia is an amazingly successful experiment.

Culture Shock 12.07.06: Science fiction's outsiders find new respectability

There are snooty critics who see it symptomatic of civilization's decline. But the American literary canon is finally expanding to encompass some of our most influential, yet neglected, writers.

The Associated Press reported last week that the Library of America will release in 2007 a volume devoted to science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick. Although there is no shortage of Dick's stories in print, this is significant news because the Library of America is the closest thing the U.S. has to an official literary gatekeeper. If the L of A publishes your work, you are a Significant Author. To be part of the Library of America is to be one with Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Hawthorne and Melville.

"Philip K. Dick: Four Novels of the 1960s" is scheduled for publication in June. It will include the novels "The Man in the High Castle," "The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch," "Ubik" and "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" The last of those was made into the 1982 Harrison Ford movie "Blade Runner."

Jonathan Lethem is editing the volume. Lethem, author of "Motherless Brooklyn" and "The Fortress of Solitude," is considered a "literary" author, although he actually has written quite a bit of genre fiction, including the futuristic "Gun, with Occasional Music." But although Lethem sometimes writes science fiction, his books aren't marketed as science fiction. He isn't confined to the ghetto as was Dick, who died in 1982.

And he's happy to do his part to assist Dick's escape. In an interview with the blog The Elegant Variation, Lethem said, "I'm helping preside over the utter and irreversible canonization of one of my (formerly outsider) heroes ..."

But Dick's ascendance to the literati firmament wouldn't mean much if it were merely an isolated incident. It isn't.

Last year, the Library of America elevated an even more unfairly maligned and neglected figure of genre fiction: H.P. Lovecraft. And it was the positive response to "Lovecraft: Tales" that helped spawn the Dick collection, according Max Rudin, Library of America publisher, in an interview with the AP.

Lovecraft is America's most important horror writer since Edgar Allan Poe, although, like Poe, he seems to have earned greater respect in France, for whatever reason.

The works of science fiction/fantasy writers Ray Bradbury and Ursula K. Le Guin could be the subject of future L of A volumes, Rudin said.

Genre writers are at last getting their due, just three years after the National Book Foundation controversially gave Stephen King its Distinguished Contribution to American Letters Award and sent the snobs into apoplectic fits.

"But giving an award like this to a guy like me suggests that in the future things don't have to be the way they've always been. Bridges can be built between the so-called popular fiction and the so-called literary fiction," King said in his acceptance speech.

It's a two-way street. When Philip Roth, an undeniable member of the Literary Establishment, delves into science fiction with an alternate history novel like "The Plot Against America," it becomes far harder for critics to ignore those who've plowed the fields of SF for decades. Then the critics might learn that Roth's plot is such a cliche in SF circles that even most hacks wouldn't touch it without giving it some new twist.

If mainstream critics are forced to read unapologetic science fiction, horror and fantasy, there's no telling who will be admitted to the canon of respectable literature next. I suggest Harlan Ellison.