What the new series of The Handmaid’s Tale has in store
As ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ returns, Jane Mulkerrins goes on set in Toronto to discuss the drama’s extraordinary impact
When the television adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale hit our screens in May last year, based on Margaret Atwood’s novel and starring Elisabeth Moss as the sexually subjugated, rebellious heroine Offred in the dystopian republic of Gilead, it had all the ingredients of a niche critical success: a beautifully made, high brow literary treat in the same vein as, say, Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty or Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall. In the 12 months since, however, the show, produced by American television company Hulu and broadcast on Channel 4 here, has become something rather different, not only winning eight Emmys and two Golden Globes but morphing into an all-conquering cultural phenomenon.
“Offred’s story really connected with audiences because she comes across as a survivor,” says Bruce Miller, the show’s writer, when I meet him on set in Toronto ahead of the second series, which launched in America this week and will daringly move beyond Atwood’s book to create its own narrative. “People might not be very happy with the times they are living in, but they look at Offred and think: if she can survive, maybe I can, too.”
Atwood wrote her novel in 1984 but, in the way it imagines a world in which women are forced into reproductive servitude by a patriarchal autocracy, represented by the Commander and his wife Serena Joy, it has become a story of today. The red robes and white winged caps worn by the handmaids have become the de facto uniform for the new feminist protest movement that has emerged in the wake of #Metoo and the current legislative assault on women’s rights in America. Women wore them in courthouses in Texas to protest against proposed anti-abortion bills and at the second annual Women’s March, at cities across the world, in January. That same month at the Golden Globes in Los Angeles – where Moss would win Best Actress for Offred – a group called the Hollywood Handmaids, dressed in red, held a silent protest demanding an end to sexual misconduct and inequality in the entertainment industry. The Handmaid’s Tale is no longer just a novel or a television show: it’s become a symbol of the suppression of feminine freedoms, and a rallying point for the new resistance.
More curiously, it’s also spawned its own accessories, many recycling buzzy phrases from the novel, which have become digital memes: Moss herself also has a necklace bearing the mantra “Nolite te Bastardes Carborundorum” (a faux Latin phrase that roughly means Don’t Let the Bastards Grind You Down), while scores of women in America have reportedly had the same line tattooed upon their bodies. T-shirts are available online bearing the slogans “Praise be” – a common platitude used by the handmaids – and “I’m sorry, Aunt Lydia,” referring to the moment when a handmaid refuses to stone a fellow woman to death. Most bizarrely, the sleepwear company Lunya recently launched a red silk lingerie set named “Offred”, after Moss’s protagonist. Offred is a sexual slave.
Given what has happened over the past year, I ask Miller to what extent he was keen to make the new series explicitly reflect the new 21st century feminist battlegrounds.
“As the world changes, of course you want the story you are telling to change,” he says. “But [in writing the new series] I tried to let the audience figure out how it fits in their life and where you put it in a political context. A lot of the discussions about gender that are happening all over the world, but especially in the US, including the #Metoo movement, are becoming increasingly polarised. The more you try to make an argument on the show, the less interesting it gets. Of course you feel sorry for Offred, but if you don’t feel sorry for the Commander and Serena Joy, the show becomes boring, because then it’s just about evil people.”
Atwood has been a consultant on the new series and has given her blessing to every script. “After reading episode one of this season – which was obviously the most important one, since it takes place right after the book ends – she said: ‘I never would have thought that’s what would have happened’,” says Moss, who is also a co-producer on the new series and who I speak to between takes. “That’s the greatest thing you could possibly hear. If we can shock Margaret Atwood, that’s amazing.”
Season one ended with a pregnant Offred being bundled off in a van, the destination unknown. The producers are remaining tight lipped about the new plot, but that confirm pregnancy will figure prominently. “The world [of the show] is revealed through Offred and she will carry us through it,” says Miller. “It’s our hope for her salvation, that she will survive and her child will survive, that we are connected to.”
The producers have significantly expanded the geography of Gilead this season to include the Colonies, the toxic waste dumps where “Unwomen” are exiled. ‘When you imagine the Colonies, you start with the question: what’s the environmental disaster they’re trying to clean up?’ says Warren Littlefield, executive producer. “For these scenes we looked at places such as Fukushima [for inspiration]. At first the Colonies are magnificent to look at. They’re beautiful, they’re seductive, much like the rest of Gilead, and then the closer you get, you realise just really how horrific an environment it is and what they do to the women who are labouring there.”
This season will also elucidate how the authoritarian theocracy of Gilead came to be born from a ravaged America – a moment Atwood only refers to briefly in the novel. “Using flashbacks, we flesh out the moment when a population in Boston realises the terror that is arriving, a march is fired upon, and there’s a mass exodus at Logan Airport,” says Littlefield. It’s a crucial moment – the point at which a democracy becomes something more sinister.
“People ask me what is the biggest similarity between Gilead and the real world,” says Moss. “And for me, it is getting used to something being normal that shouldn’t be – like the idea of teachers in America being armed in schools.’
The brutalities meted out in The Handmaid’s Tale are all the harder to dismiss since none of them are fiction. Atwood deliberately didn’t feature anything in the original novel that “had not already happened in what James Joyce called the ‘nightmare’ of history”, a rule which Miller has adhered to for series two. “Otherwise it just turns into pornography,” he says. One early gruesome scene in this season’s opening episode, for example, involves a mass public execution that makes one think immediately of the atrocities committed by the Taliban. “Not only the Taliban but places such as Rwanda and Sarajevo,” says Miller. ‘We consulted a lot with the UN on that scene, as we do on many things.”
As we wander around the set, Miller tells me he also looked to the recent history of Germany – not least since Atwood began writing the novel in a then still divided Berlin. He consulted a “speculative economist – someone who imagines what the economy of a place would look like” to flesh out the power structure of Gilead, and also drew on Nazi models of power and organisation. “[Nazi] commanders were given these enormous houses,” he says – a detail reflected by the ruling Party in Gilead. “They were given the whole neighbourhood – they simply took the properties.” Similarly, the art that adorns the houses of the Commanders are all copies of pictures from Boston museums. “The idea is that they looted them and put them in their houses, like the Nazis did.”
“We feel the weight on our shoulders,” Miller continues. “In the United States right now it feels very pre-gilead, more so than ever before. We wish we weren’t as relevant as we are, but we’re a part of the conversation now. So bring it on.”