Man in the High Castle - Amazon

Just finished the show. A little slow. Kept hoping for crazy Zeppelin battles, but its just a cerebral show. The shows get stronger toward the end. I will be watching season 2.

 

Yes, true, there certainly were a few flat spots where the narrative felt like it was spinning its wheels. That would be the only mild criticism I would make, but it's nothing that tighter editing and pacing can't fix in the future.

 

I can't think of any plot holes just things that might not have been explained yet.

 

Not really. I suspect that while this will have differences, this is designed somewhat like Blade Runner so that they compliment each other.

 

That may very well be the case, however, I still don't want to have any fore-knowledge no matter how tangential. I also didn't read Do Sheep etc before seeing Blade Runner (or since, really). My days of reading books are behind me (I used to read voraciously up to my late 20s, but find I don't have the time nor the patience for it now, as there are too many other distractions).

 

Plot holes was probably the wrong term. Contrivances I guess. People always running into people just when they need to. Tons of that. And as a writer it drives me crazy.

 

In the novel there are no "alternate reality films," there's a novel, "The Grasshopper Lies Heavy" which is the mirror image reality.

I've read all Dick's work, and most multiple times. So much better imo than any television show or movie ever has been.

 

As have I but I would disagree with you about this point for some of the adaptions. Dick's novels as written would be very difficult to adapt as written and would probably not work on the screen. For example, I doubt that Man would work as Dick wrote it and I find that, often times, the screenwriters take the themes of Dick's work and develop them so that they are reflections of his work (which is ironic given how oftentimes Dick would deal in alternate realities in his work) taking the themes and characters in parallel directions that explore them.

I'm not going to argue that more than two or three do this effectively but those thwt do, are very effective. Dick would often develop these somewhat sprawling narratives that would work in a two hour film ( Blade Runner for example) and in some they developed his future and ideas in some surprising directions that I proved on the original work (Minority report). Total Recall, while enjoyable had to expand on Dick's story and while an effective action film, I found the most interesting psrt was the psrt that deal with Dick's themes and, in some respects, there wasn't enough material for a feature film there, there are only so many directions you can develop a story.

A Scanner a Darkly was largely faithful to the themes. The rest, while interesting in one way or another, were badly flawed.

I think Man has expanded on Dick's themes in an Intelligent way that parallels the book and improves on some elements (the newsreel,idea is brilliant I think as the idea of a novel would not work in a film as well and might be confusing for some viewers).

Film is a much more populist medium and, as such, as to sometimes pander to its sudience. I don't think that Man has done that having taken elements from Dick's books and developed them in its own unique way.

I can't remember the director who said this but he noted that the best thing to do when adapting a novel is to take note of the most importsnt elements to THEIR narrative and then throw the book away. If you are chained down by the very thing you develop into a film, you will more than likely drown. The only way to swim free to your conclusion and keep your audience involved is to let s narrwtive develop in its own ways.

I say this and in no means want to offend you but if you've read the book multiple times, you are wedded to Dick's work and there's no chance the narrative can develop on its own. It's like constantly comparing your kids--you will,always find one of them wanting until,you accept them for who each of them is. If you compare one to the kid you consider the shining star, you will miss enjoying the time with that other child. It isn't fair to the other kids just as it isn't fair to adaptations. You must give each a chance to succeed in their own.

 

I can understand that. With the kids, I had a period where I stopped reading novels (and I read Dick's work while in my teens and 20's). I found Thad during those years,nonfiction worked better than fiction (or short stories) because you didn't have a larger narrative that you could find yourself distracted from.

 

I thought that the narrative was deliberate in its pacing and, like Breaking Bad, it focused largely on the characters and their entanglements. I have the feeling that season two will build on this and, now that we have all of these situations established, we will see a story that moves a bit more quickly and in some unexpected directions. I respect Spotniz--he was one of the best writers on The X-Files-- and the work he has done since then has, largely, been exceptional.

 

Wayne, I wasn't necessarily meaning that the books were better than film or tv work adapted from them--I understand the needs of different media-- but that reading the books was so much MORE for me than ANY tv show or film has been. Books themselves are more influential to me and my mind and thinking than tv or films have been and Dick's books have been way up there in shaping my mind and thoughts.

My life is full of distractions, but I make time for books. . . a habit I have had since I was four and I'm not giving up! I just wish there were more Dick to read! And more Chandler, more Miller, more. . . I have many favorite authors, though Dick has really been perhaps the most influential in many ways since I first bought "The Zap Gun" at age thirteen at Gianopolis' Book Store in Addis Ababa.

 

Lonson, I get what you're saying, and it's what I alluded to above when I said that no one had yet adapted one of Dick's books "faithfully." They seem to take one of his central ideas and discard the rest. Let's face it, Dick's best stories are often, to put it simply, very weird in tone, a quality that doesn't exactly translate to mainstream programming. It may well be that those of us who discovered his work at a young age formed neural pathways based on our experiences reading those stories and books, so naturally we will never have experiences like that again. Having said that, I'd like to believe that the right director could retain the surreal, unsettling tone of Dick's work while remaining true to his ideas. Challenging cinema is still being produced. It's not too much to hope for.

 

As far as Dick adaptations go, I think that the mainstream (mostly posthumously published) novels offer the best chance of a successful transfer to film or television. These books were almost prescient in many of their themes and details, I love them!

 

I would agree with that, but for me I can't judge the film transposed for book aspect until I watch a lot more to see how it is really to be used in lieu of the written and published word.
So far I have the rest after ep 2 on the launch pad but haven't gone further yet, the way I see it so far is that the film thing seems silly (to me) because for one thing this proposes a high production cost to disseminate ideas and concepts vs a book, and this is set at a time when literature was still very much a strong staple of culture. This idea has to then revolve around people seeing it in groups as in a cinema or whatever -the only strong point this idea could have is that it is proven to be actual footage taken from an (our) alternate reality. Like a lot of you here I have read most of his books more than once and yet my memory isn't what it used to be and I have been busy, but it occurs to me that the film idea can really only be compelling if it is utilized as an actual artifact from an alternate reality.
So pardon my fuzzyness if that use of the idea seems obvious, when I first saw whats her name loading film reels of Grasshopper and watching them, all I could think of was that it sure was a clunky idea because the 'author' would have to produce the film, develop the film etc.
I'm still not really sold on the idea when I think about how some people perceive the moon landing footage...
IMO anything and everything can be made into a film/video story these days, the talent is there as well as the technology. Shows like The Knick or Boardwalk Empire prove quite well that a story can be extremely compelling without being much beyond the industrial revolution in time.
I guess I'm thinking here about the film vs book thing because in my mind the story screams to have that printed word aspect intact -but then I recall that the over riding concern here is to collect fees and extend the viewing time.
Any book or story could be done verbatim if that is the real goal -that is my opinion anyway as a viewer of what is being done these days, I would not agree with the one director's formula you quote as that is probably how a lot of junk gets made -to disregard the soul or core of what made a story popular to begin with thinking you can just gut some basic concept elements out and create a new beast is certainly possible, but a good adaptation has to rely on the creator actually understanding the source, very much like what Ridley did with Blade Runner.
There really aren't any rules in the long run -most great artists just figure out how to break them, I think ironically that most of Dick's writing took place at a time when some sweet rule breaking was going on in cinema.
Some of Dick's work simply cries out to be what it is and if the right screenwriter reads that work and visualizes the story as it unfolds, then he or she will know how to build it into a visual story, it can and should happen but maybe never will.

 

I will relate a somewhat common sentiment I have read on the interwebs while reading various ep reviews, etc, and you guys with direct experience of Dick's work might like to weigh in.

It's been said that Dick was a good ideas man and that he excelled in the short story format, but that he wasn't so good will long, extended narratives (long novels) and that when he attempted those that he soon exhausted the brilliant idea and the narrative tended to fizzle out by the end.

If there's a kernel of truth in this, it might explain why it's easier to take on-board his central idea/premise, but to build a different narrative around it for film and tv?

Do you think that there's any truth in that?

 

In the series it's newsreel films that show the alternate reality, something that I think works a lot better for a visual adaptation. The film cans say "The Grasshopper Lies Heavy".

 

Cool. I'll have to watch this one way or another.

 

That's not how I see his work really. I enjoy the NOVELS more than the SHORT STORIES by a wide margin. It's just that the stories do have these concentrated ideas that are clever and novel and powerful. But the novels have these stronger, fleshier characters that seem so much more real to me than those in the stories, and the repeating themes of Dick's work breathe and pulse in the novels in ways they don't get to in the stories.

It's convenience and convention that cause the stories to be used for films imo. In some of the instances the work is dumbed down for cinema, or that's how I see them.

 

His endings were usually weak, I think it is a valid observation, but there is a more meat than fat ratio to his novels in general that usually tips the scale. He wrote to live and eat just like any of us do what we do, his up most desire was to get out of the sci fi slum and write legitimate literary fiction (that's more the way he would have put it), and he wanted to be taken more seriously in that way. He did write some 'straight fiction' later on but just couldn't get published without the sci fi trappings, although some or at least 'Confessions Of A Crap Artist' did get published.
His ideas were typically in a league of their own, but when you read his works you do find that they are merely trappings for the human struggle as he saw it through his eyes, in general he made you feel the experiences of the characters in a superb and highly regarded fashion that only the better writers in general achieve, probably at the expense of accepted mechanical format for novel writing.
But yeah most of his real mind shredder stuff would kind of fizzle at the end instead of crescendo -probably because he was spent at that point.

 

I think it depends on the novel. Except for Eye in the Sky and Time Out of Joint, his 50s novels are pretty forgettable. He took a break for a while, helped his wife in her jewelry business, and when he started writing again he did so as a man possessed. He wrote something like 20 books and 24 short stories between 1962 (when he published High Castle) and 1970, so with that volume of output, you can expect some uneven work. From that period, I would say the best long works are:

The Man in the High Castle
Martian Time Slip
Dr Bloodmoney
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Ubik

and the novella "Faith of Our Fathers." I have a soft spot for Galactic Pot Healer, so I would include that one too. Aside from High Castle, which is pretty polished, all of these may reflect the haste of their composition to some degree or another, but I believe they're largely successful from beginning to end and effectively flesh out the ideas Dick is exploring. And they're the foundation of his reputation as a writer, most still pretty mindblowing even now.

I would also note that he completed seven novels between 1970 to 1982, when he died, and all of those are worth reading.

I read an article once that pointed out how the majority of the adaptations of Dick's works were from his short stories, suggesting that his best novels were perhaps too complex to bring to the screen effectively, with their ideas intact.

 

I don't think any of the numerous film versions of Dick's works have been done particularly well.
I've read most of his work through the 1970's; His later works published in the 1980's are very obtuse. My favorite novels are UBIK, The Simulacra, and Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said.

 

A decent show, even though it didn't completely live up to its premise. I was impressed with the production design and casting choices.
On the downside the pacing was too slow and felt stretched out. Lots of questions asked but few if any answered. Reminds me of Fringe in some respects.

 

Except by the end Fringe HAD answered Rhe bulk of the questions posed.i think that Spotniz realizes questions without answers will frustrated viewers..as I menrioned, I think,thst Spotniz front loaded the bulk of his questions.

 

An excellent summary.

Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said is great, one of my faves and an obvious one ripe for a quality treatment into film or the like. IMO the only thing that really creates the hurdle is matching a director capable of great visual style with a writer who can pair up the story structure properly to take advantage of that.
I realize David Lynch has his own flaws with film construction as far as linear story telling is concerned, but he is right on the money visually for Dick's vision of reality. Lynch and Fredrick Elmes created a unique and surreal alternate reality just by pointing cameras and pairing the sound carefully, either Flow or Stigmata would be powerful if those two could commit to a script version.
I've always thought that Dune probably ruined the possibility of anything like this from happening, but I spot parallels to Dick's ideas in a LOT of Lynch's work and can't help but wonder why not -I look at what Kubrick did with The Sentinal by Arthur C. Clarke (2001 Space Odyssey) and can't help but see Stigmata on that scale with Lynch.
Steven Soderbergh would be a good choice for Flow, ... I don't think he has cracked sci fi yet...
Oh well.

 

Wernher von Braun gets them to Mars and beyond ...??