The Wisdom of Science Fiction in the Age of Trump
The Man in the High Castle should’ve had it made. Sure, its launch in the fall of 2015 may have been slightly overshadowed by Netflix’s hit show Jessica Jones, but High Castle did well enough to become Amazon Prime Instant Video’s most-streamed original program in its first four weeks. It was renewed for a second season just a month after its debut, and, by the time season two launched in December, it had been handed the greatest news hook any show about American fascism could ask for: the election of Donald Trump.
In any event, the final product contains neither tips nor encouragement for would-be resistors, nor does it engage with the mentality behind collaboration and acceptance of fascist rule. The bad guys in Amazon’s series — functionaries for the Axis governments in New York and San Francisco — are bad, but not because they’ve been steeped in oppressive ideologies: They’re just reflexively bad. The show engages only on the surface with anti-disability violence: One Resistance leader has a child with Down syndrome, and the chief New York Nazi Obergruppenführer, John Smith (Rufus Sewell), has a disabled child slated for execution — regardless, the show fails to depict how Nazi eugenics manifested and killed en masse. (It does not touch on the Nazi anti-Semitism, or Japanese or American racism undergirding World War II-era societies either.) Season two casually rehabilitates a Japanese police official who gassed, without compunction, a Jewish woman and two children to death early in season one — now he’s just a good, if tortured, man holding back the chaos.