The release of The Man in the High Castle, a streaming film series produced by Amazon and based very loosely on Philip K. Dick’s 1962 novel of the same name, is an occasion for us to examine the myths of empire — that is, the narratives that are woven around actual historical events, which are rarely accurate, and which are designe to buttress the prevailing political order.
We can do this by examining, first, the differences between Dick’s version,
as presented in the original novel, and the Amazon film version, which deviates
considerably from Dick’s vision. The novel, like the film version, is an alternate
history — a “what if” story — that portrays a world in which the Axis Powers
won World War II. In the novel, as in the film, Franklin Delano Roosevelt is
assassinated, and subsequent US Presidents John Nance Garner (FDR’s
anti-New Deal Vice President) and “isolationist” Sen. John
W. Bricker allow the Nazis and the Japanese to achieve military superiority,
which ends in their joint assault on the US and the division of the US into
occupied territories, with the East Coast controlled by the Nazis and the West
Coast occupied by Japan. The same scenario unfolds in the film, although without
references to either Garner or Bricker
The key difference is in the plot device that moves the novel — and the film
— forward: the existence of a subversive text that is banned in both spheres
of occupied America, entitled The Grasshopper Lies Heavy. In the film,
this isn’t a text but a movie, made by the mysterious Man in the High Castle
and distributed by the Resistance, an underground movement seeking to liberate
America from both the Japanese and the Nazis. What it consists of is left deliberately
vague, but what it purportedly depicts is a world in which the alternate history
premise is reversed: the US wins the war, and its value to the Resistance is
that it shows a world worth fighting for, one in which American power is restored
and its enemies vanquished.
In Dick’s novel, however, The Grasshopper Lies Heavy is a novel, one
in which Roosevelt isn’t assassinated but instead turns into a constitutionalist
who doesn’t run for four terms but instead limits his reign to two. He also
strengthens America’s defenses and the Axis never even sets foot on US territory.