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It hasn't gone full PKD until someone's reaching for a can of Ubik.
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Nov 24, 2015 08:22
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I think it'd be really tough to call out everything Nazi as horrible in a universe where doing so will literally get you killed. At some point everything is normalized, and the show taking time to step back and remind us that Nazis are terrible at every opportunity would kind of ruin the slow horror of the rest of it. Like, from the Vox review: quote:When season two hits the same note, it blithely suggests some Nazis are worse than others. ... yeah? When every single person still alive is a Nazi or pretending to be so they don't get offed themselves, some of them will for drat sure be better than others. I know that is an uncomfortable thought, but not every member of the Nazi party was in fact a monster. Most were regular rear end people that were lied to or did what they thought they had to do to survive. I like that this show tries to portray how insidious it is by not standing on the rooftops with a 'hey all these people are really lovely am I right???' every episode. It's a drat sensitive subject and I can also see how in the current political climate we might want more of the really obvious moralizing, but I don't really think the showrunners could have anticipated the election results when they were filming this.
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Dec 20, 2016 19:58
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I guess I don't agree that it was done blithely, then. We're reminded pretty constantly that things are atrocious under the surface -- the Passover dream sequence gave me the cold sweats. Everyone lives in constant fear and pain regardless of social standing except the rich kids back in Berlin. I do feel like Joe folded a little easy but with his 'words didn't do anything' bit towards I figured it was leading to him shooting his father before he could launch the nukes but it never came to that.
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Dec 20, 2016 20:27
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Ersatz posted:I doubt it because the show is explicitly anti-fascist. I can definitely see why it might not be explicit enough, I just think doing so really blatantly would make the show as a whole worse. Maybe a visit to another mass grave? More empty buildings in New York, like really obvious ghost towns? More stories about horrors on the east coast to drive home that this whole world is built on mountains of bodies? It's hard when everyone who would call this stuff out is in the ground already, and doing something like having a whole section where they visit a ghetto would feel pretty forced IMO. I like that the Nazis have a focus on bits of own history in school that we sidestep around -- they ask about Indian exterminations in their citizenship exam, and they call out how many slaves founding fathers own as a homework question. Whether or not this is because they're trying to cast Americans as monsters or just equivalents to their own recent history I dunno, but it was a nice detail. The moral relativism might not sit well but I would loving hope it doesn't. I totally get the argument that someone might watch this show and see a reality they adore and that it makes the showrunners culpable in some real grossness, but quote:Somehow I doubt the modern American Nazi fan is going to pass up a multimillion dollar loving recreation of their ultimate wet dream because they're going to be reminded that people think Nazi's are the bad guys for the 1 billionth time in their lives. Yeah -- nothing is going to change those people's opinion anyway. I'm more interested in the politics of the world they've created and the moral compromises people find themselves living with every day than a story where we learn that Nazis are bad. I also didn't like Smith calling back the Savannah strike. Let him be a monster that only looks the other way for his own family. Him pushing back on Savannah felt like a forced sort of 'oh maybe he's trying to be a good guy now' that wasn't really earned. If he had done it to the German officer's face that's one thing, but telling a subordinate to nix it from a phone in the basement was too mild.
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Dec 20, 2016 22:46
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I was more referencing this point:quote:Yeah obviously, but that's not really an excuse to be dismissive of the rest of the problems I have that stem out of the imagery, and it's use, and how it writes checks the writing doesn't cash or how it's irresponsible to go HAM on Nazi visuals with nowhere near as much attention to WHY we look back on the people who had this oh so wonderful taste for aesthetics with scorn. It should be more unnerving, it should inspire revulsion when you take it in it's entirety. You probably shouldn't make a TV show that makes living in Nazi America look like a really cool wonderful thing and then make "oh yeah and Nazi's were bad" something of an afterthought compared to how long you spend letting people wonder "Hmmmmm doesn't look that bad as long as I do this, and I'm not this". I completely disagree that they 'they were bad' part was an afterthought, but even with that said if we take this to be true quote:People are jacking off to it. Nazi's are watching MITHC and loving it. They don't care. They why does it matter how much time they spend on Nazis are bad? No amount would be enough to dissuade a lot of the people who are eating this up anyway. I thought it was unnerving as gently caress and it inspired plenty of revulsion in me personally so is it just a question of degrees? Is it impossible to do this sort of thing with subtlety, or is it just irresponsible to do so?
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Dec 20, 2016 23:17
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