“The few seconds that these images appear in the context of The Man in the High Castle reveal something of the affective power of alternate history. The genre offers us a chance to recognize our historical lexicon spoken in strange accents, just unfamiliar enough to achieve a certain distance but sufficiently close to yield to the frisson of comprehension.”
“The characters in the resistance are against their oppression, which means that for much of the series we see white characters lamenting the power of darker Asians, but they never specify what they actually hope to achieve.”
“In this respect, The Man in the High Castle translates onto the screen what might be the most potent political sentiment of our contemporary moment. The resistance movement of the television series captures, unwittingly, a generalized mood among many working-class and middle-class American whites that the time has come for them to throw off the shackles of a multicultural, politically-correct elite.”
“What the series has captured, in other words, is a moment in which claims to victimhood pervade our politics, motivated by emotions that cannot be easily contained or managed. It has required more than 40 years to bring Dick’s novel to the screen, and perhaps that is because a majority of Americans are ready now to participate in a perverse fantasy of suffering. Only a nation that celebrates its triumphalism so openly could offer these dark pleasures of defeat.”