Thanks for the Sunrise @stswithin - Tumblr Blog

#the man in the high castle #Juliana Crain #The Lariat truck

Copper Gulch Mine

#The Man in the High Castle #1X3 The Illustrated Woman #Joe and Juliana #Juliana Crain #Joe Blake

As a literary device, the Mary Sue character is a female of overexaggerated bravery, wit and competence—in this case aikido skills and an 'unnatural' mind—but is a flat creation who, with her lack of character arcs or fatal flaws, plays the males of the story (here, Frank, Joe, Tagomi, Smith) against each other. At first glimpse, Juliana is introduced as a Mary Sue character, out-aikidoing everyone at the dojo, speaking better Japanese than anyone around her, and showing an exaggerated sensitivity to the various levels of San Francisco she navigates. However, Juliana Crain is anything but a one-dimensional stock character. She is, thankfully, no superhero, and she subverts her assets in believably flawed ways, using aikido as a panic-reflex that gets a man killed, and harboring an over-analytic mind that nevertheless has a Joe Blake-sized blind spot.

All this disguises a true hero, on a hero's quest. She is humble, belittled and underestimated, and not properly shod for hiking, but she is persistent. 'Haven't you had enough?' Joe asks her, but of course she hasn’t. She is a Campbellian knight of monomyth, searching for the truth, the Man in the High Castle, the Lackawanna portal of suburban boredom. ‘You ever think how different life could be if you could change just one thing?' she says. She questions reality, hallucinates, talks to spirits, and kills the man she loves the most. Her wound is her sister, her fatal flaw is Joe. She lives on cigarettes, tepid bourbon, and the fire inside. She would give her life to fix the world.

The holy grails and Hitchcockian MacGuffins of her quest—the 8mm films—are truths too powerful to handle, truths worth dying for. When Juliana switches film canisters, the film becomes Popeye's magic can of spinach, mundane but life-restoring.

#The Man in the High Castle #Sensô Kôi #Juliana Crain

Juliana and her guys.

#Frank Frink #Juliana Crain #Joe Blake #1X9 Kindness #Rupert Evans #Alexa Davalos #Luke Kleintank

Bloshom of snow

In Japanese culture, the white chrysanthemum (kiku) is a funereal flower. Chrysanthemums feature a Fibonacci spiral, like the notion of inevitability revealed in the I Ching. Deep importance is ascribed to the reflection surrounding death and mourning; the spirits of the dead protect the living, as Juliana's sister, alive or dead, sustains and motivates her throughout this story.

Buddhist monks brought the chrysanthemum to Japan in 400 AD, and a soft Buddhism overlays the darkness of Shintoism that Trade Minister Tagomi practices.

#The Man in the High Castle #Truth #Juliana Crain #Nobusuke Tagomi #There's an edelweiss tangent here too

“Those who are enlightened never stop forging themselves.” Morihei Ueshiba, Aikido founder

#The Man in the High Castle #tmithc #Juliana Crain

Joe and Juliana in the Ovaltine Café from José Chung’s ‘From Outer Space’. (The X-Files)

#The Man in the High Castle #Joe and Juliana #If I start listing x-files locations #in tmithc #we'll be here all day #but I couldn't resist this one #the x-files

The Tao is that which first lets in the light, then the dark.

#The Man in the High Castle #3X6 #History Ends #Juliana Crain

Juliana writing a letter in a phone booth.

The phone booths in this series are wonderful - the moment of privacy and escape from the elements and noises outside. We lost something as a culture when we abandoned the walk-in phone booth (where the heck is Superman supposed to get changed?) The sense that communication is private and only between two people (and the Cold War sense that it is not.) The hair dresser phone booths in the Neutral Zone are fun, too, and the Nazi video phones, like the ones in ‘Blade Runner’.

Hotel Empress

#The Man in the High Castle #Juliana Crain #Love Hotel

The novel of The Man in the High Castle is written with energy and conviction, but feels like a high-rolling first draft, packed with cliché phrasing. Philip K. Dick does not understand women, but thank goodness, Frank Spotnitz does. He says, 'When I have created characters in recent series...I have tried to imagine people who will touch me in some way and teach me something.' And thus he reinvented Juliana.

I know in my bones that Frank Spotnitz defended Mulder and Scully in the face of some disastrous series choices. He did his best with a bad situation. He intuited the audience, and he understood the necessary authorial integrity that keeps a character's motives and choices true. Frank did a wonderful dialogue job with the TMITHC pilot and 'Sunrise', and this one, ‘The Tiger’s Cave’.

'Truth is as terrible as death.’

‘ — but harder to find.'

'You have an unnatural mind. Are you aware of that?’

This must have been a fun script to play.

Thank you, Frank Spotnitz.

#The Man in the High Castle #Frank Spotnitz #Thank you Alexa Davalos #The Tiger's Cave

Juliana and her alternate-universe books, which, wonderfully, include Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and The I Ching, two texts integral to P.D.K.’s novel.

#The Man in the High Castle #Hexagram 64 #Juliana Crain

‘Reality, by itself, becomes a story by Philip K. Dick’ —Philip K. Dick

#Philip K. Dick #he's not wrong

'This girl is a dathnon. A little chthonic spirit that ... roams tirelessly over the face of the earth.' —Hawthorne Abendsen

— Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle

#philip k. dick #The Man in the High Castle #Juliana Crain #Juliana Frink

‘Juliana said, ‘'Oracle, why did you write The Grasshopper Lies Heavy? What are we supposed to learn?” ‘

— Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle

#The Man in the High Castle #philip k. dick #Juliana Crain #Juliana Frink

'It furthers one

To undertake something'

- The I Ching

#The Man in the High Castle #Revelations #Joe and Juliana

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