The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
Arts
Wednesday, December 4, 2019 — 5

The world that the final season of “The Man in
the High Castle” is being released into is a very
different
place
than when first
commissioned
by
Amazon
Prime
Studios
back
in
2015.
Now, in 2019,
the
show
has
lost
some
of
its early praise
and is no longer
Amazon’s
most-watched
original series.
Most
simply
put, the series
is
based
on
Philip K. Dick’s
1962 novel by
the same name,
set in a parallel
universe where
the Axis powers
have won World
War II. Western
North America
is a part of the
Japanese Pacific
States while the
Germans rule the East Coast, both separated by a
neutral zone in the Rocky Mountains.
Complexly, this show is as much about the Axis
powers winning as it is about
the Allies. For in this dark, Axis-
ruled world, there is an American
resistance that suspect the Allies
won the war. These characters
come into contact with newsreels
and home movies belonging to a
figure known as “The Man in the
High Castle” that show Germany
and Japan losing the war. How
could this be possible? In this
story about alternate history,
there
lies
another
alternate
history where the Allies did in
fact defeat the Axis powers. Every
film has been brought over to the
show’s primary world by people
who are able to travel between
them. Much of the third and
fourth seasons explored a portal
that the Nazis built so they could
travel to alternate universes, with
the ambitious goal of taking over
the entire multiverse.

On the surface, how could this depiction of
alternate history not get attention? The appeal
was always the science fiction of it, which was
also a constant source of criticism. The up-and-
down reception over the remaining three seasons
culminated in a final scene that was over four
years in the making, and it kind of felt like the
creative figures behind the series didn’t quite
know the purpose of the story they were telling.
Concluding a show is difficult. Concluding a
show that plays with the idea that there are an
infinite number of parallel realities is an even
more difficult one. In this final episode, the
Japanese have abandoned North America, the
East Coast is being run by a guy who wants the
Nazis gone and high-ranking Nazi official, John
Smith (Rufus Sewell, “Victoria”) is dead. These
were all necessary to tie up loose ends. The show
could have ended there. However, inexplicably,
there was one more scene that takes us to the
Nazi multi-verse portal. The American resistance
has taken the facility where the portal is located
from the Nazis and the portal fires up itself. Once
it stabilizes, people start strolling through into
the room, not acknowledging the people who are
already present in the room. This was clearly
meant to be a “moving” scene in which people
were coming from literally everywhere but there
was absolutely no setup for this turn of events,
making it meaningless. It feels like a victory, but
what that victory was is unclear. The final scene
poses many more questions than it answers. As
the show progressed, the show became less about
the characters and more about the theory of the
multi-verse. Regardless of how the series ending
is perceived, the show will always be remembered
for establishing Amazon as a premiere streaming
service.

‘Man’ is confusing, but giving
a show its due ending is hard

TV REVIEW

JUSTIN POLLACK
Daily Arts Writer

GRAYWOLF PRESS / YOUTUBE

Four years ago, when I thought about the
town of Ann Arbor, I mostly thought about
the University of Michigan. I really didn’t
think much of the place besides the fact
that it housed this massive school and all of
its students. As someone that came from a
different state, I didn’t even know how close
Ann Arbor was to Detroit, or how the two
cities interacted. Since moving here a few
years ago, however, I’ve started to get the
lay of the land and realize that Ann Arbor is
more than just an address for students.
I started to do some more research and
found out that artists like Iggy Pop and Bob
Seger used to call this
place home while it served
as a countercultural meca
in the ’60s. Institutions
like The Ark and the
Ann Arbor Folk Festival
cultivated a growing folk
scene that attracted names
like Bob Dylan and Joni
Mitchell to the town, all
while a growing punk
scene
thrived
amongst
college students. However,
as time went by another
genre of music started
growing in Ann Arbor’s
underground music scene,
right next to its birthplace:
techno.
When I think of music
from Detroit, I usually
think of Motown soul
music. And while this
genre is most certainly
what the city is predominantly known for,
Detroit has one of the most well-known
techno scenes in the world, and Ann Arbor is
like Detroit’s younger sibling when it comes
to the genre. Having just started to explore
the style over the past few years, I had heard
of some of the bigger names from Detroit like
Robert Hood and Mike Huckaby, but I never
really understood where Ann Arbor fit into
the mix. That is, until this past week when I
watched a documentary called Impulse Ann
Arbor, produced by the Michigan Electronic
Music Collective’s co-president, Jordan
Stanton. The documentary talks about the
unique story of Ann Arbor’s underground
electronic music scene through interviews
from both students and prominent artists
alike.
I was captivated by how passionate each
person was about this music, and how
important it was to this city. How had I not
known about all of this? Ann Arbor had
played an important role in this genre, that

much was clear. I had been to parties and
events put on by MEMCO, but I was ignorant
to
how
significant
organizations
like
MEMCO and WCBN FM were in growing
this genre. But it makes sense. Being so
close to this monster of culture and music, it
would have been impossible for Ann Arbor to
ignore techno. People would travel for miles
to Ann Arbor to see huge names like Jeff
Mills frequently DJ the Nectarine Ballroom,
known today as Necto. Programs like Crush
Collision on WCBN have broadcasted
upcoming and established techno artists
to hundreds of radios around the area. The
more I learned about the genre, the more I
realized that the culture it fostered was just
as DIY as most basement shows that I would
usually associate with the term, if not more
so.
Along with the fact that
most of these events are run
by the artists and fans, free
from a corporate influence
(which is what I consider
modern DIY to be), I think
techno embodies the more
traditional spirit of DIY
from the ’70s and ’80s
through its commitment
to
social
justice
and
providing a safe space
for everyone, especially
in the Detroit and Ann
Arbor
communities.
In
the
documentary,
Brendan Gillen, legendary
DJ and founder of the
label
Interdimensional
Transmissions, describes
the music as “a purely
intellectual black music
form that was a catharsis
for people under great opresion.” MEMCO
throws an annual Black History Month
event where a portion of the proceeds go to
a different Black-owned non-profits, as well
as hosting a variety of events that feature
female, POC and queer DJs, attempting to
avoid the all-too-common lineup consiting
of strictly straight white men and create an
inclusive, welcoming environment.
As my last semester here as an undergrad
approaches, I feel like I’ve sort of missed
an opportunity with MEMCO and the
scene it fosters. I love the idea of DIY, and
I love the way in which Ann Arbor’s techno
community embodies it. It really does focus
on the community itself instead of the
individual. The more and more I learn about
this town, the more I realize how special it
is. I really liked a quote from Gillen later on
in the documentary that continues to grow
more truthful the more I think about it: “In
Ann Arbor, it can’t be about you or it’s going
to fail.”

What do you tech-know?

DIY COLUMN

RYAN COX
Daily Arts Writer

“The Empathy Exams”
The usual premise of an essay collection isn’t simply the
reproduction of a collection of magazine articles: There’s a reason
why all of this is in the same place. One expects from a good essayist
that a pattern will start to emerge, affiliations and positions slowly
revealed via the author’s readings of literature, culture, society,
politics. One writer who is particularly good at this — one whose
essay collections feel like a single, slightly inscrutable object is being
examined from many different angles — is Leslie Jamison. Her
themes have remained rather consistent since 2014’s “The Empathy
Exams,” and her new collection “Make It Scream, Make It Burn” is
a continued fleshing out of Jamison’s longtime interests.
The title essay of “The Empathy Exams” begins with a firsthand
account of Jamison’s experience as a medical actor, someone who
gets paid to act out symptoms for medical students to “diagnose.”
The medical students are graded, among other things, on their
ability to “voice empathy” for their patients. This experience — as
well as Jamison’s experiences with other medical practitioners and
a romantic relationship — provides a field for Jamison to ask some
questions about empathy in general. What is empathy, exactly? Is it
always good? She recounts the attempts of the medical students to
“empathize” with her that end up just coming across as patronizing
— “‘I am sorry to hear that you are experiencing an excruciating
pain in your abdomen,’ one says. ‘It must be uncomfortable.’” Such
botched attempts at compassion end up insulting the person they
are directed at more than a simply impersonal statement might
have, and elsewhere in the essay Jamison recalls a doctor’s calm
impartiality as comforting. “Instead of identifying with my panic
— inhabiting my horror at the prospect of a pacemaker — he was

helping me understand that even this, the barnacle of a false heart,
would be okay.” In the final account, Jamison sees empathy as an
ethical stance that requires work. “Empathy isn’t just listening, it’s
asking the questions whose answers need to be listened to. Empathy
requires inquiry as much as imagination. Empathy requires
knowing you know nothing.”
This could be read as a statement about writing, too. The various
techniques of representation through writing are, like empathy,
dependent on understanding the subject, prone to projections and
distortions. It’s possible only through careful attention, and the
stakes are high. It makes sense, then, that “The Empathy Exams” is
as much a record of Jamison’s own doubt about her ability to truly
understand her subjects as much as it is a book about mysterious
diseases, ultramarathon running and travels in Central and
South America. Passages of straightforward documentary prose
sometimes dovetail into self-doubt, which then becomes a reflexive
resentment about the insufficiency of this same doubt, often in the
space of a paragraph or two. She is unusually clear-headed with her
own thought process, tortuous though it can be.
The most striking essay in “The Empathy Exams” is “Devil’s Bait,”
a dispatch from a conference on Morgellons disease. This “condition”
emerged in the early aughts, has vague, variable symptoms and is
not recognized by medical science — but the 12,000 or so people who
claim to have it insist that their suffering is real. Jamison, in talking
to sufferers of this disease, is faced with a problem: How does one
go about expressing compassion for someone while simultaneously
disbelieving in the cause of their suffering? Does compassion, in this
case, actually make suffering worse? “When does empathy actually
reinforce the pain it wants to console? Does giving people a space to
talk about their disease — probe it, gaze at it, share it — help them
move through it, or simply deepen its hold?”
She ends the essay without a solution, in a state of dejection. “I
wanted to be a different kind of listener than the kind these patients
had known … But wanting to be different doesn’t make you so. Paul
told me his crazy-ass symptoms and I didn’t believe him. Or at least,
I didn’t believe him the way he wanted to be believed.” She finally
questions what, exactly, she is accomplishing by writing the essay:
“I was typical. In writing this essay, how am I doing something he
wouldn’t understand as betrayal?” She’s unable to see what she’s
doing as anything other than a failure of empathy — or a limit case
of it, which also becomes the limit case of the form of the essay. You
can never create writing that is really true to someone’s feelings
in cases like this — Jamison offers instead her own conflicted
thought process. This is writing that, instead of making claims to
objectivity, lets readers into the problems underneath the surface of
the essayist’s craft.
“Make It Scream”
The title essay of “Make It Scream” is, on the surface, concerned
with many of the same things that Jamison was working out in “The
Empathy Exams.” The essay is a long exegesis of James Agee’s 1941
book “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men” that doubles as a critical
examination of journalistic veracity. It helps that Agee’s book is not
at all a conventional work of narrative journalism — Agee, tasked
by Fortune to write an article about sharecroppers in Depression-

era Alabama, ended up writing, instead, a 400-page book that
documents “everything Agee felt and thought and questioned as
he tried to tell the story of these Alabama families.” The work is
deeply reflexive in a way that presaged the New Journalism. Agee
ruminates about his own inability to tell the story effectively in a
way that nearly undermines his own authority, and that’s not even
counting the bizarre and categorically inappropriate statements
he makes — like wanting to have sex with the daughter of one of
the families he’s supposed to
report on. Jamison’s interest in
the book is in Agee’s honesty
about his own limitations as a
reporter — she writes that “part of
the claustrophobia of Praise is its
suggestion that every strategy of
representation is somehow flawed
or wrong” and that he was “ looking
for “a language for skepticism.”
The clincher is not Jamison’s
valorization of Agee’s anxious
style, but that she finds in his
writing “a sincerity that lay on
the far side of self-interrogation.”
Sincerity
becomes
possible
through
interrogation
—
it’s
a logical continuation of the
argument she posed in the title
essay of “The Empathy Exams,”
of
carefully
applied
attention
and emotional intelligence. This
applies to her subjects, too. In an essay about contemporary belief
in reincarnation, she writes “The more compelling question for
me had never been, is reincarnation real? It had always been, What
vision of the self does reincarnation ask us to believe in? I found
something appealing about the vision of selfhood it suggested:
porous and unoriginal.” This is the embrace of projection as its
own kind of truth — something that indicates a feeling instead of
indexing a fact. In another essay, “52 Blue,” Jamison writes about a
famously lonely whale that has inspired an odd culture of devotees.
After cataloguing the various tributes people have paid — an album
or two, a tattoo, thousands of online posts — Jamison broadens her
scope: “52 Blue suggests not just one single whale as metaphor for
loneliness, but metaphor itself as salve for loneliness … Loneliness
seeks out metaphors not just for definition but for the companionship
of resonance, the promise of kinship in comparison.” Her topic
gracefully slides away from the messy specificity of projection to
the generalities of longing. It’s an incredibly sympathetic move. You
could say Jamison’s topic has moved from suffering to longing, or is
simply following the mandate she set out in 2014: “empathy requires
knowing you know nothing.”

Restlessness and reason in the work of Leslie Jamison

BOOK REVIEW

EMILY YANG
Daily Arts Writer

Make It
Scream,
Make It
Burn

Leslie Jamison

Little, Brown and
Company

Sept. 24, 2019

The Man
in the High
Castle

Season 4 Finale

Amazon Prime
Video

Streaming Now

AMAZON PRIME VIDEO

Read more at
MichiganDaily.com

Detroit has
one of the most
well-known
techno scenes
in the world,
and Ann Arbor
is like Detroit’s
younger sibling
when it comes
to the genre.