‘The Handmaid’s Tale’
Hulu streams the first three episodes Wednesday, April 26.
All her money has been transferred to her husband’s account. She cannot work or access any of her belongings. Soon enough women can’t own property. They aren’t even allowed to read.
Demonstrations turn violent. Eventually the transformation is complete. Gay people, along with priests and scholars and anyone else the government believes to be a threat to the theocracy, are publicly hanged.
Offred, like other handmaids, wears only crimson smocklike dresses and a white winglike hat, and must submit monthly to state-imposed rape by her commander, her head resting between the legs of the commander’s wife in an attempt to make it seem as if the wife has a role in the proceedings. During rare births, the wives sit behind the handmaiden during delivery and simulate the agony of delivery.
There are other classes of women. Infertile women cook and clean as domestic servants. Handmaids who cannot give birth to healthy babies are doomed to a short-term assignment in the “colonies,” cleaning up wastelands (shortterm because the work kills you).
Women don’t spend time alone. Publicly they communicate only in rote religious statements: “Under his eye,” “blessed be the fruit,” “praise be.” Privately they share more, and luckily Offred — her real name is June — retains a feisty attitude in her voiceovers. She has lost everything but hope.
Alexis Bledel shows far more range than she ever did on “Gilmore Girls” as Ofglen, who Offred thinks of as a “pious little (expletive).” Joseph Fiennes is good as the commander, who may be up to something. So is Ann Dowd as Aunt Lydia, who breaks, er, trains the handmaids until they’re the servile baby vessels society means for them to be.
But it’s Moss who carries the show, and she is fantastic. It’s not just the duality of the role, playing June in flashbacks and Offred in the present. It’s the duality of her feelings as a handmaid, her obedience contrasting with her remaining, if dormant, independence. We see it in a glance, an offhand remark. It’s all she has to hang on to.
It’s easy to go looking for parallels to the current political and social divide in every movie, show and song that comes along. Critics sometimes seek to find them even when they aren’t there.
No one has to hunt for them here. They exist, front and center. And again, the scary part isn’t the ideas. It’s their adoption, and how they become accepted. In “The Handmaid’s Tale,” and maybe elsewhere, the unthinkable becomes routine. But despite the adoption of insanity, the new normal isn’t normal, and as June still knows, it’s horrifying to think otherwise.