TV Review by Michael Isenberg.
Imagine a movie—a sort of messed up Red Dawn—about an underground resistance cell taking on a Soviet occupation of the US. Except instead of pretty Brat Packers dressed in Eddie Bauer chic, these alleged freedom fighters are Nazis. Actual Nazis who read Mein Kampf in their free time, are armed by the Third Reich (which someone survived into the Cold War era in this alternate reality), and are inspired to survive their considerable hardships by their vision of the day when, after the Soviets are defeated, they can set up their white, fascist utopia.
If such a movie ever were made, the studio would be boycotted, pickets would spring up outside any theater showing it, and everyone associated with it would be ostracized, never to work in Hollywood again—and rightly so.
It’s not my intent for Nerds who Read to be a political blog. I have other platforms for that. Here I try to focus on the literary merits of books, movies, and TV in nerd genres like science fiction. But every once in a while, I’ll come across a work that crosses the line and needs to be called out for its politics. Which I think is the case with MITHC 4.
Two subjects which I'm not going to cover in any detail in this post are the racial aspect of Season 4 and whether or not the sort of communism I'm talking about is "real" communism. These topics are just too rich to do justice to here. The short version is 1) While I could understand how a historically oppressed people might be mistakenly attracted to communism, communism is an equal-opportunity evil--it's evil regardless of the race of the communists, and 2) Yes, the Soviet Union and Maoist China were real communism.
Based on the 1962 book by Philip K. Dick, which I reviewed on Nerds who Read last year, The Man in the High Castle is alternate history that explores the question: what if the Axis won World War II? It depicts a United States which is divided between a Nazi-collaborator regime in the East and a Japanese-occupied West.
Season 3 was exceptionally well-balanced politically, with elements that both Left and Right could identify with. Season 3 also exhausted the last of the Philip K. Dick source material—the original novel and two chapters of an unfinished sequel. So the writers of the TV series were on their own for the first time in Season 4, and I was looking forward to see what they would come up with. Sadly, the answer was a lot of leftist drivel. Cliché talking points are scattered throughout. For example, there’s trash talk about the American Flag. “This flag ain’t never done s--t for us.” We are also treated to Lib-splaining about how Franklin Roosevelt “completely rebuilt the economy. Ended the Depression.” (For another point of view, see Jim Powells’ FDR’s Folly: How Roosevelt and His New Deal Prolonged the Great Depression. Here’s a review from the Foundation for Economic Education).
These talking points are mostly throwaway lines. The viewer could easily ignore them and get on with the business of enjoying the story. But the glorification of communism, in the form of a plotline about the "Black Communist Rebellion" resistance group, is harder to overlook.
Communism was every bit as evil as Nazism, both of them among the bloodiest ideologies ever to stain the surface of the earth. The countries that attempted it ended up suffering under totalitarian regimes, where personal interests were frowned upon and service to the State—or as they called it, “the proletariat”—was the only interest allowed. Free expression was brutally suppressed. Starving, impoverished citizens lived in fear of being denounced to the government by their neighbors, or even their own children. The terrifying knock on the door in the middle of the night was the overture to a trip to secret police headquarters. There detainees might face the torture chamber, or perhaps be shipped off to a gulag, where they could work themselves to death as slaves, if they didn’t die from cold or starvation first. Or perhaps Big Brother would just skip that step and send the detainee straight to the firing squad.
Living under communism was a horror. But don't take my word for it. Ayn Rand saw the first shots of the Russian Revolution from her bedroom window, and lived in communist Russia until 1926. She once tried to explain to skeptical members of a House committee what it was like:
We were a bunch of ragged, starved, dirty, miserable people who had only two thoughts in our mind. That was our complete terror—afraid to look at one another, afraid to say anything for fear of who is listening and would report us-and where to get the next meal. You have no idea what it means to live in a country where nobody has any concern except food, where all the conversation is about food because everybody is so hungry that that is all they can think about and that is all they can afford to do. They have no idea of politics. They have no idea of any pleasant romances or love—nothing but food and fear… Look, it is very hard to explain. It is almost impossible to convey to a free people what it is like to live in a totalitarian dictatorship. I can tell you a lot of details. I can never completely convince you, because you are free. It is in a way good that you can't even conceive of what it is like. Certainly they have friends and mothers-in-law. They try to live a human life, but you understand it is totally inhuman. Try to imagine what it is like if you are in constant terror from morning till night and at night you are waiting for the doorbell to ring, where you are afraid of anything and everybody, living in a country where human life is nothing, less than nothing, and you know it. You don't know who or when is going to do what to you because you may have friends who spy on you, where there is no law and any rights of any kind.
Given that human life was nothing, and there were no rights of any kind, it's not surprising that the number of dead was staggering. Estimates vary and are prone to controversy, but the low end is 42 million people. A hundred million is more typical, with one estimate as high as a 160 million. For comparison, Nazi Germany is estimated to have killed 17 million people in the Holocaust. And this is the ideology that Amazon chose to glorify.
Granted, a movie or TV show can glorify something that is evil, and nevertheless give us an engaging, well-crafted story. A good example is Joker. Despite the denials of its defenders, Joker really did glorify nihilism and violence. Nevertheless, it was fascinating to watch a sick man’s descent into murderous insanity, and I’m sure we’ll be hearing more about the movie as we head into award season. In contrast, the writers of The Man in the High Castle Season 4 didn’t even give us good storytelling.
Characters arcs painstakingly constructed over previous seasons were just ignored, especially those of Obergruppenführer John Smith and antiquities dealer Robert Childan. Promising plotlines were never developed. The pacing was awful—yawn-worthy almost all the way through. Then, in the last episode, there is a rush to set up the big final military confrontation between the Nazis and the Communists, a confrontation which (spoiler alert) is called off at the last minute, thanks to an ex machina decision by a minor character, and it made no sense. I just didn’t believe a person in his position would make that decision. This was followed by a final scene which, though it seemed mysteriously cool on the surface, really made no sense either and left many unanswered questions.
Do yourself a favor and give MITHC Season 4 a miss. Spend the time instead reading one of the many first-rate books that warn of the true nature of communism, written by people who actually lived under its yoke. In addition to Ayn Rand, whose heartbreaking We the Living and inspiring Anthem deal with the subject, two other authors comes to mind: Yevgheniy Zamyatin (We) and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and The Gulag Archipelago). Maybe I’ll review one or more of these at some point. But not for a little while. Because I really don’t want Nerds who Read to be a political blog.
| Michael Isenberg drinks bourbon and writes novels. His novel Full Asylum depicts life under a Big Government dystopia. But since Zamyatin, Rand, and Solzhenitsyn already told the grim version of that story, Isenberg’s book is a comedy. It is available on Amazon.com. |
