Where
Defiance ends and The Man in The High Castle begins in
2015, there is a thematic congruence, one superficial, the other overly dramaturgical.
Both series suggest American values have been tested and raise questions in
relation to our global role in the aftermath of successful blows on our soil.
The “races” of Defiance address pluralistic tensions. The nuclear device in
High Castle which incinerates the White House in the Smith family flashback
resonates with the same sobering shock as watching the Twin Towers implode on
9/11, not that it need be translated in that fashion, since the series’
creators are faithful to the spirit of Dick’s unsparing depreciation of
American sensibilities, however heightened the realism for the sake of Prime’s competitiveness
with Netflix, this too something of a retail fiction. Streaming is streaming, whatever
we put in the pipeline. I have not gone into High Castle at great length because
I sequenced it rapidly after the start of my still ongoing personal crisis, and
there is a great deal of material to peel. Whatever viewers feel about Berlin
as the superpower du jour, the cinematic quality of SO1 & 2 seems well done
to me, and one hopes the set personnel received worthwhile compensation. Amazon
proved itself rather shrewd as opposed to SyFy, since revamping Kennedyesque authoritarian
alternatives is easier than bringing otherworldliness to St. Louis and beyond.
The outer framework of the Defiance plot falls well within the traditions of
the genre, and isn’t anything we have not seen before, particularly in print. Megalomania
pits itself against the upright and the just. Asimov may be able to get five
Foundation novels out of that, but cable television can’t expect its audience
to join all those threads so seamlessly. High Castle’s writers have more
dramatic tensions and complexity, and Julia Crain manages to play both sides
against the middle, just as we aren’t altogether certain about Joe Black’s
moral compass, especially given the revelation that he was a Leidermoif [sic]
newborn.
The
most fluid episodes, those of the Trade Minister’s visions of history as we
know it, are more tenuous, though they expose what the citizens of today are meant
to appreciate: how fortunate we are to live in a constitutional republic where
the descendants of bootleggers were de facto royals who kept us out of war with
the Soviets. Dick wasn’t quite so highbrow, and his aims nearly juxtapose those
of Ridley Scott and his team. Everything Dick did was an attack on our pretensions, not a tribute to our
national innocence.
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