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.