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.

