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I'm definitely on "Team Morally Uncomfortable," because the actual resistance plot is outrageously dull and the most fascinating characters are aligned with the Axis powers. Particularly OGF Smith and Inspector Kido (and Tagomi, though he seems pretty unambiguously good.) The show's main flaw, in my mind, is assuming we actually give that much of a gently caress about this bullshit love triangle with Frank, Juliana, and her Nazi boyfriend. Frank's not so bad on his own (the scene where his sister's boss reads a Hebrew prayer is stunning), but as soon as Juliana and Joe get in there, everything comes to a screeching goddamn halt. Joe is garbage, and Juliana is a selfish child. gently caress them both. This show is best, I think, when it forces characters who actually have power to think on the systems they're part of. We already know the Nazis were evil; showing us "good guys" who share American liberal values isn't new or interesting. But a hardliner like Smith coping with his sick son, or a stickler like Kido struggling to sort duty from the greater good with the real assassin, is fascinating to watch. That one Japanese guy is 100% a dimensional traveler from a-bomb Nagasaki, though. I hope the "mystery of the film reels" doesn't become some Lost-style clusterfuck, because complicated lore feels like gilding the lily when the show's premise is already a horrifying alterverse where genocidally insane supremacists have taken over the world. Xealot fucked around with this message at 10:58 on Nov 30, 2015 |
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Nov 30, 2015 10:56
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Collateral posted:...and Trade Minister Tagomi, who resembles a tortoise. I can only see Shang Tsung. Like, I'm glad he settled down and got a stable Ministry job. A nice office, good benefits...Shao Kahn would never offer him so much.
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Nov 30, 2015 21:43
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Platystemon posted:Season 2 should start with the love triangle put out-of-action. Joe Blake died on the way back to his home planet. The notion of a Nazi civil war is kind of neat, based on the events of the finale. I can only assume Hitler loyalists and those defecting to Heydrich's cause are both fairly substantial factions. That can't have been fully resolved by OGF Smith overtaking one guy at the end of the episode.
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Dec 1, 2015 23:28
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30.5 Days posted:...this still makes High Castle the second best show made by amazon out of about a dozen greenlights and several dozen pilots. Yeah, what I've heard from people who work in media development is that Amazon really struggled with how to develop their original content at first, in a way Netflix did not. Netflix took the prestige drama tact of affording auteur showrunners a fair degree of freedom (House of Cards, Orange is the New Black, etc.), where Amazon didn't. Amazon was apparently somewhat notorious for shopping their pilots to death with excessive notes, and the result wasn't particularly good content. Both companies relied on analytics about viewership to make decisions, but Netflix did it more confidently (they knew the intersection of, say, people who watch political intrigue content and people who like Kevin Spacey movies, and knew HoC was a reasonable investment on the premise alone. Amazon funded a sort of online pilot season before committing series orders.) After Netflix original content blew up, I'm told Amazon became a little more like them...Transparent is a decidedly auteur project by Jill Soloway; Man in the High Castle afforded Frank Spotnitz way more control, probably because it was EP'ed by Ridley Scott.
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Dec 2, 2015 22:25
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Mike the TV posted:In this fictitious universe, "being a literal Nazi" is not really worse for the average person than "being a literal FBI agent" in our world. The Reich is the legitimate super power. Which is also the most interesting facet of the show, and what they should probably have actually focused on (vs. "the resistance," as if resisting the Nazis isn't one of the most familiar premises for a WW2 narrative ever.) This is an incredibly subversive show when it DOESN'T go out of its way to remind us how evil the Nazis are. The "normalcy" of OGF Smith's lifestyle - the fact his family is straight out of Mad Men or that his loyalty is treated as a virtue - is damning because it makes the case that his relationship to state power is no different from our own. Remove the swastikas, and the military chauvinism of V-A Day is indistinguishable from the 4th of July, etc. etc. At its best, Man in the High Castle's argument is humanist, not patriotic. In Tagomi's vision of Allied San Francisco, we see an American flag and also the Cuban Missile Crisis. If the Greater Nazi Reich is a dystopia, so is our world, because it's built on the same hostilities, the same drive for supremacy, and the same potential for apocalyptic violence. The resistance plot interferes with this, by boringly suggesting that if only the Nazis lost, everything would be fixed.
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Dec 9, 2015 20:27
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etalian posted:I was pleased to see Rufus Sewell getting cast as a villain again Kind of a villain. I suspect you're supposed to see the warhawk splinter Nazi faction as *more* villain. Which kind of makes him a de facto hero, along with Old Man Hitler. Which is the most hosed up and hilarious part of the show, by far.
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Jan 4, 2016 12:05
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JetsGuy posted:Hey remember that girlfriend (wife?) and kid Joe has in NYC? No? I don't blame you because it happens like once. I thought she was just some shutz he staffeled, but I'm not even sure the kid is Joe's. They explained nothing about what was going on there. But I'm fine with that, because I wouldn't care if they did.
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Jan 5, 2016 22:50
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Tortolia posted:Watched the whole series over the last week. I will agree the young leads/characters were all infuriating to some degree, but the older characters (especially Smith, Kido and Tagomi) were all really interesting. The world building and how the show demonstrated that via often super subtle showing, not telling was fantastic. It's so funny how universal this reaction is. Literally every person I've spoken to about this show, online or in real life, has said this. I hope they get the message and re-proportion the runtime to be about their good characters.
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Jan 15, 2016 20:12
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kaesarsosei posted:The circumstances around how a real regular American looking guy called John Smith can become Obergruppenfuhrer are much more interesting than a bog standard resistance-fighter show. I'd much rather see a show from the establishments perspective treating the resistance as the bad guys and with Tagomi being something of a middle ground. I agree 100%. The audience doesn't need some surrogate character to constantly remind us the Nazis are bad. We know they are bad. The novelty of this show is providing a human perspective on normal people living in this dystopic society. If anything, the higher-order agenda of the show should be to point out how our own society is dystopic, which the Cuban Missile Crisis aspect of the S1 finale obliquely suggests. That nationalism and propaganda are no less true of our reality than it is of theirs, and that the same chauvinism behind the Germany/Japan cold war that's central to the main plot also fueled our own standoff with the USSR. I hope they actually substantiate the implication that the guy in Tagomi's office who's covered in burns is actually from our own timeline; that he survived the bombing of Nagasaki and transported across realities. Because that really sells this point. We may not have run concentration camps or raped Nanking, but we dropped two apocalypse bombs onto civilian populations in large cities and that's the stuff of nightmares.
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Jul 18, 2016 20:45
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Plucky Brit posted:Really? I do not want to watch a show which equivocates the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings with the holocaust. I especially don't want one which equivocates allied actions in WWII and afterwards with the extermination of all black people in Africa. I think you're missing my point. I'm not saying it's "equally bad." I'm saying that I want the show to undermine the sense that "this world is a dystopia" vs. "our world is not." I'm saying that war is horrifying, and that just because the Nazis lost in actual history doesn't mean that military-industrial horrors didn't happen. That there is no version of history that doesn't look dystopic from a certain perspective. The United States essentially exterminated Native American populations 150 years ago. To the Lakota, the Nazis won.
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Jul 19, 2016 20:51
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monster on a stick posted:I am not Lakota but I am part Native American, have visited a concentration camp, and I don't think any sane person would compare the American-Native American Wars to the Holocaust. Many, many sane people have referred to the treatment of Native Americans over the past few centuries (by the United States and the British colonial apparatus preceding it) as genocide. The US government didn't construct literal death camps, but it did systematize violence against Native Americans on an individual and community level for generations. The entire premise of Manifest Destiny relied on white supremacy and the non-personhood of Native Americans. At various points in American history, stores would offer rewards for Native American scalps as an incentive to find and murder them. Military massacres of civilian communities occurred well into the 19th century. I don't know what else to call something like that. Again, though, I'm not saying America is literally the same as Nazi Germany. I'm saying that echoes of the same sanctioned, accepted horrors are also a part of our own history. Our own historical narrative paints us as being on the right side because we're the victors and we wrote it that way. Because of the themes of alternate history and what "the best of all possible worlds" might look like on this show, I think it'd be cool if the show confronted that idea in a more nuanced and self-aware way than to say, "oh! In this timeline, the Nazis lost and everything is as it should be."
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Jul 20, 2016 04:14
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Plucky Brit posted:That is a direct equivocation between the Holocaust and the US treatment of American Indians. Your crass comparison is made worse by the fact that the show is set in an alternate 1960s, where the Nazis have apparently exterminated most of the USA's Jewish population in the past decade or so. I'm talking about historical narrative. "The Nazis won" in the sense that the racist warmongers who sought absolute conquest over an ethnic enemy won. Resistance movements to stop that tide failed, and this invading aggressor spread its influence to the sea. We are living in the aftermath of these events, where Manhattan is actually the center of White American wealth, and Mt. Rushmore has our leaders faces carved into it, and Native American cultures and histories have been largely erased. What you find so crass is a difference in the extent and focus of supremacist violence. The Nazis are the superlative example of racist, militant nationalism, and of course they deserve to be. But they're not some idiosyncratic aberration with no parallels in history. It's not that America is the real monster...it's that there are monsters everywhere. You're right, though: this is probably not something this show could artfully explore.
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Jul 20, 2016 22:00
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ThisIsJohnWayne posted:Trailer didn't show Joe at all! I'm psyched! That's my attitude. "Joe drowned in the Amazon; don't worry about it."
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Jul 29, 2016 07:42
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I don't know, my reading of those characters was pretty neutral. It's hardly an unfamiliar narrative for wealthy, privileged people to be interested in some mythologized Other as a curiosity. I'm sure this Japanese couple was fascinated by American culture in a genuine academic sense, and that they enjoyed the "authenticity" of a native authority on the topic, but also they clearly had no intention of challenging a social hierarchy that benefits them. They're not great, but they're not terrible. "Eat Pray Love" is basically the same idea in real life. A bored, wealthy white woman goes on a poverty tour of The East to cherry-pick digestible nuggets of philosophy. She's not doing anything to address horrendous poverty in India or anything, but she's also not making GBS threads on their beliefs. If Instagram existed in alt-history 1960, I'm sure this couple would take tons of composed photos of this American house guest and no-sell it as a reflection of their enlightened interest in different cultures and perspectives.
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Dec 3, 2016 03:10
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Guys, this show is so loving good now. I actually like all the main characters now, even Joe who was able to become remotely interesting. Tagomi remains the best, though. And I'm glad [2x09] Kido didn't die in the explosion. I like having him around.
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Dec 18, 2016 23:24
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Thom12255 posted:I'm loving the Battlestar Galactica reunion I was going to say. Everyone's a frakking cylon.
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Dec 19, 2016 19:55
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Blazing Ownager posted:Alternate World War 2 outcomes? Now that's an interesting setting. Now I have to check this out. Be warned: as is the consensus here, Season 1 is not that great and may shake you, but the current season is vastly improved. Mike the TV posted:I completely agree that our universe is objectively 100% better. But my point was that we were (and in many ways continue to be) also one button press away from total annihilation and then it wouldn't even be a competition. I pissed off some people in the S1 thread by going into this argument, but I agree. And I appreciate that this show is interested in this line of thought...obviously, the Nazis are a superlative type of evil as white imperial militants go, but "evil" is subjective and all things are on a spectrum. The reveal that [2x10] the hydrogen bomb is even more apocalyptically hosed up than the "Heisenberg device" speaks to this nicely. Because sure, the U.S. is a multicultural republic that doesn't genocide ethnic undesirables, but the U.S. and U.S.S.R. are/were absolutely warmongers, and nationalist militancy most definitely pushes us towards the apocalypse in horrifying ways in any conceivable reality. If this show was content to say nothing more than, "hoo boy, dodged a bullet beating those Nazis, didn't we?" it would really suck. It's at its strongest when it asks us to consider our own relationships to nationalism, or our own complacency with systems built on oppression, violence, or chauvinism.
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Dec 19, 2016 21:57
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Intel&Sebastian posted:Well that sucks. A narrative thread that obvious really shouldn't be left untouched and I'm starting to think Amazon and whoever is making this show is getting irresponsible and exploitative with the subject matter. Or this show is interested in flawed characters whose motivations are complex? If this show runs for years and at no point do they push John Smith closer to the Resistance because of what happens with Thomas, then I'd agree they missed something important. But I'm not going to decry the show for presenting a character whose self-defined ethos is at odds with his actual behavior. Cognitive dissonance is a thing IRL, so I don't see why it's bad writing for a fictional character to be something other than a logic-robot with perfect instant clarity. And more to the point: the show *is* commenting on his hypocrisy, just not through dialogue. [2x10] In the last episode, Smith does a ton of illegal poo poo: murdering a surveillance tech, but also illegally conspiring with Kido, presenting a film reel he knows may be false to the Party, and extrajudicially interrogating/executing Heydrich to out Heusmann, but he's rewarded with a personal commendation from Himmler. Meanwhile, his son is an *actual* True Believer, to the point that he reports himself to the government. Ironically, spurred to this action because he didn't want to shame his hero father. Xealot fucked around with this message at 22:51 on Dec 19, 2016 |
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Dec 19, 2016 22:49
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Intel&Sebastian posted:But they don't really play it as a rejection of Nazism, or show him rejecting it in any other major way. I don't imagine the last two episodes will satisfy you on these points, but there are most definitely cracks in his veneer. The note his character is left on, as I saw it, is completely hollow. He's celebrated as a hero of the Reich despite committing subterfuge to get there. And despite all the ethical compromises he made to keep his son alive, it's ultimately his son's belief in the Reich that gets him killed. If that isn't a recipe for Smith to become intensely disillusioned with the Party and his place in it, I don't know what is. Also, they reveal he was a U.S. serviceman during WW2, and was outside D.C. when the Nazis nuked it. There's a lot to unpack with this character, and I'm still really interested in seeing what's there. Xealot fucked around with this message at 23:21 on Dec 19, 2016 |
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Dec 19, 2016 23:17
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Heaven Spacey posted:But the United States wasn't ... performing science experiments on living human test subjects, etc. etc. etc. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_syphilis_experiment Don't get me wrong, I agree with you. But as a matter of extent rather than some fundamental difference in morality. The US never went to the extremes that Germany did, but you can't discount our own history of racist policy. Shades of grey, not black and white. Of course, if there's one thing this election cycle has taught us, it's that America's "flirtation" with white nationalism is not trivial, either.
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Dec 20, 2016 18:39
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Charles Get-Out posted:Right, Hitler wanted state worship, but a lot of his writing involved wrapping Norse symbolism and mythological entities together with Christian mythology and the fiction of the Aryan race. It rings false for me that Hitler is still alive and has pursued an eradication of Christian religion from German territories; seems more likely he would have used it as a tool to wrap Aryan exceptionalism in "divine right" cloth. I think you're totally right about that. Ironically, this is pretty much what the Soviet Union did. "Christmas" as a religious observance was officially not sanctioned, but Santa and Christmas trees and other essentially pagan aspects of the holiday were collapsed into New Year's Day. So, kids got presents and people dressed up as Santa, but instead of Nativity scenes and mangers and such, the Soviet version involved secular state motifs: Red Stars topping the tree, ornaments depicting rockets and cosmonauts, etc. You'd definitely think that the "Greater Reich" in this show would pull the same poo poo. Christmas trees, but it's for the New Year or the Winter Solstice or something. Gilded swastikas and edelweiss-looking flowers and poo poo on the tree.
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Dec 20, 2016 20:24
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Ersatz posted:Given all of that, I have a hard time believing that a typical viewer is going to watch the scenes in the Reich and think, "hey, it's not so bad." I'm on this side of it. The intense cleanliness of New York and Berlin actively creeps me out. People being super passive and gentile contributes to my unease, because they'll intersperse it with these moments of horror...the Nazi pledge of allegiance, the falling ash from the pilot, and what-not. If they depicted constant atrocity, *that* would feel exploitive to me, but the sort of retro-futurist false utopia stuff is what unnerves me. Because you have enough context to know insanely horrific things are happening constantly. "This was a retirement home built by the Jews. That was a poor investment." Though, I'm sure a lot of you are right that tons of white supremacists could see the same things and be really jazzed about the whole situation.
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Dec 20, 2016 21:54
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Intel&Sebastian posted:I'm not even convinced they'd give the whole thing a bad review. I could watch this show from their point of view and say "Yeah well it's better than what a lot of people live in right now, and I approve of a lot of the bad guys' ideas. What's the big deal?". I suspect that's true, but I think I'm losing the thread of the argument. Pretty much anyone could view a piece of media through a warped lens and get what they want out of it. I recall seeing a review from some Stormfront neo-nazi "news" site years back for the first Harry Potter movie, where they lauded it for its "honest" racial dynamics because of the goblin-Jew bankers. Ironically, they finished the review by saying something like, "I hope the next installment isn't Harry Potter and the Talisman of Tolerance." Which Chamber of Secrets kind of was. But if you're just really dick-hard over Nazi poo poo, confirmation bias can favorably sway your opinion on all kinds of things, I'm sure. Anything that tries to depict Nazis in a humanized light (I mean, not as Indiana Jones cartoons) is especially ripe for that kind of "re-interpretation." But nothing the showrunners could do would reverse that without making the show kind of lovely in the process, so I'm good with them ignoring that viewer entirely.
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Dec 20, 2016 23:38
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Intel&Sebastian posted:That's an irresponsible attitude to me, for reasons stated above. The nation doesn't begin and end at rally attending neonazi and highminded, thoughtful tv viewer with a historical reference of why Nazi's are of course, not good. I'm not saying this, either. I guess I'm confused as to what your remedy is for this. Be less subtle about the ways the genocidal fascists appear evil, but the show has already shown a mother and her children gassed to death at the Nazi's behest, and Smith's son voluntarily euthanized because he has muscular dystrophy. It's already a world in which Jews, blacks, Slavs, etc. have been almost entirely genocided and Washington has been nuked into oblivion. What else could they show that makes it more explicit that the Nazis are evil if not more mass graves or executions, which we have also seen? If a viewer isn't bothered by these things (or in fact supports them), what could the show realistically do to dissuade them from that feeling? The thing I find most interesting about this show is how characters who benefit from the status quo come to reject the system, and I'm comfortable with that being a slow burn. Again, I can't imagine this show continuing on with Smith remaining totally loyal to the Party. His disillusionment with it, I expect, will *be* his character arc throughout the show's run. Piling on reasons for the viewer to dislike the Nazis seems less important to me than the show providing motivated reasons for the characters to feel that way. Let's see what happens in the next season, when Smith learns that the State murdered his son because of Thomas' own loyalty to it and its beliefs.
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Dec 21, 2016 00:50
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Intel&Sebastian posted:Ive got PM's if you want to talk about it, but I'll leave yall alone. It's cool. Unlike the Greater Nazi Reich, your dissenting opinion is welcome.
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Dec 21, 2016 20:23
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ufarn posted:Rorschach and Walter White come to mind. Tony Soprano, Don Draper, etc. Definitely, "morally complex" to outright villainous is what anything you'd call a Prestige Drama has done for over a decade. "Child-murdering meth cook" isn't much better than Nazi, in my assessment. If I felt like these shows were making an honest case for these guys' virtue, I'd be uncomfortable with it. But they don't generally do that. Though I suppose they do occasionally ask for empathy, which is a tension I find interesting.
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Dec 25, 2016 01:28
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I forreal want to know what's going on elsewhere in the world. There's got to be some underground remnant of Soviet or Chinese resistance. Too bad we probably won't have any context for that.
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Dec 27, 2016 02:00
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Open Source Idiom posted:That you can be otherwise reasonable, but still a fascist isn't a defense of fascism. It's a criticism of people who think that they can get away with what they're doing because they have sympathetic motivations. It's a criticism of how easily American white picket fence values can gel with Nazism. This. I've been trying to sort out what bothers me about that argument, "it's irresponsible to show sympathetic Nazis," and that's what it is. I don't think it's that valuable to show Nazis as totally alien, inhuman monsters. It's valuable to show that they were human, and still did the things they did. I can bet the vast majority of Trump supporters aren't Richard Spencer alt-right neo-Nazis. I'm sure many are the same people that jack it over Band of Brothers or Saving Private Ryan. But they don't see the irony of normalizing super racist policy, because "Nazism" has become this mythic extreme of human evil that they refuse to recognize in real terms. By showing someone like Smith as an accessible and even sympathetic person, viewers are asked to consider his political reality and how they might navigate it in his shoes. In that way, the show's doing something no other WW2/Nazi narrative is doing, which is making the viewer politically uncomfortable. Maybe that's a good thing.
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Jan 5, 2017 08:21
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LinkesAuge posted:Eugenics would of course work (in the long run), we have been doing it to our crops and animals for thousands of years. The problem with eugenics aren't the "results", it's the ethics behind it and how you'd get to those results. The Nazis are doing it based on cosmetic ethnic traits, though. That wouldn't work in the long run, because they'd be creating a genetically insular population because they thought blue eyes looked nice. If they think conditions like muscular dystrophy are a problem now, imagine bolstering an even smaller subset of the population for several generations. Recessive gene disorders like whoa.
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Jan 10, 2017 23:41
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Delthalaz posted:Sure, of course we could breed blonde haired blue eyed people through eugenics. I'm troubled more by the fact that they're beautiful people. After 1 or 2 generations, I'm sure they would be. It's why children of actors and models are often insanely beautiful. It's when you get into Hapsburg territory, several generations deep, that poo poo starts to get weird.
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Jan 12, 2017 04:50
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I also assumed Ed's deal was lung damage that make him unfit somehow, but his interest in Frank could for sure be more than incidentally homoerotic. Isn't the logic behind Ed's lungs a whole "useless eater" thing? His lung damage makes him less effective at his job or a social burden or something? But he seems totally fine at his job, and it's not like he'd pass on "severe mustard gas damage" genetically. I guess my defect is trying to find logic in the policies of racist maniacs. But for real: I assume the Nazis in this universe killed off amputees or paraplegics who were injured during the war? It's not like a one-legged vet couldn't work most jobs or gently caress his wife, but I guess there are appearances to keep up.
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Feb 22, 2017 01:11
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McSpanky posted:Yeah all those white liberal Nazis with a heart of gold are so played out, like No, I think I get their point. The idea that "real, productive" change comes from reform and compromise rather than outrage or revolution. Basically, the Metropolis ending. I don't know that I'd call it banal or cliched, but definitely disingenuous in this context. "Electing better leaders" is not really a solution when we're talking about a literally genocidal nightmare government. The most liberal position is still one that sanctions an essentially apocalyptic status quo.
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Mar 16, 2017 13:30
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Phayray posted:Also, if they find out Japan doesn't actually possess the technology, I'd imagine they'd want to move to strike IMMEDIATELY before they can assemble their first nuke. If they found out it's fake, you'd think the bigger question would become, "how did they come across film of the hugest nuke they've ever seen exploding in the Pacific?" It's the mid-60's, they didn't CG it. I imagine that concrete proof of a permeable infinite multiverse would be kind of the biggest deal ever.
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Sep 3, 2017 22:57
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