REFLECTING THE TIMES
Atwood series dark, topical
In The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood creates a disturbing, dysfunctional world run as a strict patriarchy. Rigidly stratified by class and function, this society has rich, powerful men as Commanders, with their Wives (lesser men are workers or servants, some are soldiers, called Guardians). Serving women are Marthas and child-bearing women are Handmaids.
Keeping the Handmaids in line are instructor Aunts, meting out guilt, condescension and corporal punishment. Everywhere secretly there are spying Eyes watching, ready to enforce and punish.
Atwood’s story — first a novel, then a 1990 feature film, even a 2000 opera — is now a 10-part episodic series for TV, created by the American subscription video on demand service Hulu and airing in Canada on Bravo and later CraveTV. Like the novel, and in even richer detail than the feature film would allow, this TV series is resonant, chilling and darkly cautionary. In an undefined but almost familiar nearfuture, religious zealots have overthrown the U.S. government and established the Republic of Gilead, a quasi-biblical martial theocracy somewhere in the northeastern New England states and warring with holdouts in other parts of the country. Oranges in the grocery store are a sign the fighting in Florida goes well.
We’re told pollution, sexual disease and assumed divine intervention have combined to render most women barren. “So God whipped up a special plague,” Aunt Lydia instructs her charges. “The plague of infertility.” (Of course a patriarchy would blame only the women.)
The fertile few Handmaids are kept as breeding stock. The reference is to an Old Testament story in Genesis, where Jacob’s wife, Rachel, unable to conceive, “gives” him her handmaid to bear him a child instead. As one might expect, Gilead mines the usual jumble of Judeo-Christian Old and New Testament stories and strictures to justify its actions.
Atwood wrote her novel — Orwell would smile — in 1984 and it was published in 1985. This was the United States of Ronald Reagan, where televangelist Jerry Falwell’s self-proclaimed “Moral Majority” had the president’s ear and the Meese Commission was doing its best to root out what it considered the evil of pornography. Women’s and minority rights, hard-won in the ’70s, seemed to be slipping back under small-c and large-C conservative oppression.
In that sense, Atwood’s futuristic novel was very much a product of its own time, the writer as seer warning us of possible impending doom.
Sadly fitting that it should be made newly relevant and newly prophetic once again today, in the divided states of that genital-grabbing U.S. president, Donald Trump. Jerry Falwell Jr. is a Trump supporter and everywhere conservatives and evangelicals are still proclaiming the sort of “family values” Gilead would welcome. Those who haven’t learned from history can watch it repeated here.
Created by showrunner Bruce Miller with Atwood’s input — watch for her in the briefest of cameos in the first episode — this new TV adaptation builds on its well-written foundation with strong acting and striking visuals. Status is colour-coded: Men wear black, Wives wear turquoise. Marthas dress in dull brown, Aunts in olive drab, Handmaids in scarlet robes with white wimple-like wings.
The music, by Adam Taylor, can evoke tension or seeming calm, but also makes careful use of silence and tends to be sardonically playful over the credits. The use of Onward, Christian Soldiers over the ritual impregnation scene is a subtle, perfectly ironic jab.
At the centre is Mad Men’s Elisabeth Moss as the Handmaid Offred (literally “of Fred,” her Commander, since she is a mere possession). Her performance is solid but understated, mixing confusion, fear and resolve without histrionics, as she narrates her tale, combining flashbacks with current events. Others — Joseph Fiennes as the Commander, Yvonne Strahovski as his Wife, Samira Wiley as Moira, Ann Dowd as the dour Aunt Lydia — play their parts admirably.
Like other great dystopian stories, The Handmaid’s Tale works best partly because it’s not so far from the truth of our own world. The mirror it holds up may distort, but still reflects the problems we may see (or ignore) around us.
“Now I am awake to their world,” Offred says. “I was asleep before. That’s how we let it happen.”
Atwood’s novel was very much a product of its own time, the writer as seer warning us of possible impending doom.