Bins comes in from his morning walk, to find me sitting on my bed and staring into space. “What’s the matter?” he wants to know. “Have we run out of tea?” I shrug. “No,” I say, “and I really don’t appreciate the way you reduce everything to some kind of trivial problem involving food or drink when the world is at the brink of nuclear war.”
He looks astonished. “Wooaah!” he says. “For a Frenchman, there is nothing more important than food and drink! ESPECIALLY at the brink of nuclear war!” When I still refuse to smile he asks me what the problem is. So I tell him: “I’ve been watching a really grim TV serial called The Man in the High Castle...”
Set in the early 1960s, it’s a darkly realistic exploration of an alternative reality, in which the Allied Forces lose World War II. The victorious Nazis and Japanese occupy the continental US, maintaining an uneasy alliance. The Germans are on the East Coast, the Japanese on the West. Hitler is still alive and ruling from Berlin. Amongst the central characters is an attractive dark-haired young woman called Juliana. She becomes involved in a resistance movement connected to a series of mysterious contraband celluloid films (no DVDs!), belonging to the eponymous The Man in the High Castle. The films seem to show a different ending to the war but no one can understand what they mean, or how they were made.
Bins hears me out but continues to look perplexed. “I don’t understand. Why is it colouring your mood with atomic war?” he wants to know. “It’s just a fiction. We know that Hitler died. Germany lost the war. The US dropped the bomb on Japan — which was terrible, but still, it happened. And the war came to an end. So why are you so glum?” I ask why he’s being so dense. “Don’t you see? Even though it’s set in a fictional past, it could all be happening right now! The leaders in power today are all just as mad and cruel as Hitler — and this time, everyone has nuclear bombs! And there is no Resistance Movement. And there are no contraband films showing us an alternative future!”
Initially I disliked the series. It seemed to wallow in the past, when right and wrong were easier to tell apart and a happy-ever-after could be hoped for. But it becomes gradually more complex. “It’s got interesting subplots and sympathetic characters amongst the Nazis and the Japanese,” I say. “The story-line is sophisticated, it’s full of suspense and the threatened disaster feels shockingly modern.” That’s what makes it hard to watch. It’s too close to reality.
“What happens in the end?” Bins asks. I tell him I don’t know, because I’ve still got five episodes to watch. He leaves the room and comes back with a bowl of chips. “So turn it on,” he says, settling down next to me. “At least we can both be glum together.”
Manjula Padmanabhan, author and artist, writes of her life in the fictional town of Elsewhere, US, in this weekly column