| TV Review
An unmissable adaptation of a Margaret Atwood novel seems even more relevant today.
The Handmaid’s Tale should come with an urgent new viewer discretion warning: do not watch before bedtime; it will mess with your dreams. This superb, gruelling adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s 1985 dystopian novel imagines a world of Old Testament amputations, stonings and eye-pluckings.
Women must submit to colourcoded Gloriavale-style dress rules. Female genital mutilation is performed in the name of “redemption”. Bodies hang on a wall as a warning of the price of being a dissenter or a “gender traitor”. Beneath the orderly surface of the theocratic Republic of Gilead, formerly the USA, seethes the sort of mess that is always made by those who believe it is their duty to clean up society.
I didn’t read the novel when it came out. Then the story seemed highly hypothetical.
In 2017, it’s too close for comfortable viewing. The references to “cleaning up” the country echo disturbingly the Trumpian vow to “drain the swamp”. Gilead runs on fake news. “When they blamed terrorists and suspended the Constitution, we didn’t wake up then either. They said it would be temporary,” says Offred. Of Fred: formerly June, she is now named for the commander with whom she must have chillingly ritualised sex each month. She’s a handmaid (long, shapeless red dress and a bonnet on top of her bonnet) forced to bear children for the privileged women of marriages made barren by unnamed catastrophes. It’s a marginally better fate than being sent to the colonies for a short life spent clearing nuclear waste.
Atwood has said The Handmaid’s Tale was inspired, in part, by the repression of women in Iran under the ayatollahs and by American Puritanism. She was living in West Berlin when she wrote it and it’s permeated with the perverse logic of the concentration camp: the euphemisms, the public executions, the forcing of victims to participate in their own destruction. Now the story is inspiring activism. In Ohio this month, women dressed as handmaids as part of a protest against a bill proposing restrictions on abortion.
In Gilead, the handmaids must speak in virtuesignalling ritualised pieties: “Blessed be the fruit”; “Under His eye”. In their indoctrination sessions, a politically incorrect response by a trainee is dealt by way of a cattle prod. Aunt Lydia (an even scarier than usual Ann Dowd) tells her charges, “This may not seem ordinary to you right now, but after a time it will. This will become ordinary.”
The feminism of The Handmaid’s Tale is of the unflinching sort. Women, for a variety of reasons – fear, power, survival – can be the enemy, too. The wife of Offred’s commander, Serena Joy, a former televangelist who wrote books on family values, is an increasingly monstrous figure. She tries to get close to her errant husband via a game of Scrabble. But in Gilead, for women, reading is forbidden.
“You know the law,” says Fred.
“Yes I do,” says Serena Joy. “I helped write it.”
As Offred, Mad Men’s Elisabeth
Moss is a revelation. She’s still as a stone, as emotions from hope, panic, cool-headed calculation, defiance and stark terror flicker across her face. For a handmaid, apart from suicide, which is popular in Gilead, the words “Welcome to Ontario” represent the only hope of escape from a life of slavery. The message: we’re all only one crazy authoritarian theocracy away from being refugees.
In the end, the most painful scenes aren’t the hangings and the amputations. They are the flashbacks to June’s life before Gilead, when people, even women, were free to write, read, play with their children, tell each other the truth.
Just when things get too impossibly bleak, people do what some people always do in such situations: organise, fight back, say no, if only in their heads. “We’re handmaids, bitches,” thinks Offred. “They should never have given us uniforms if they didn’t want us to be an army.” Unmissable.
Offred is now named for the commander with whom she must have chillingly ritualised sex.