Trump-era Handmaid’s Tale presages totalitarian future
Truth will come out: O’Reilly
LOS ANGELES, April 25, (Agencies): Decades after the release of “The Handmaid’s Tale,” Margaret Atwood’s dystopian sci-fi fable and foundational feminist text arrives on television — with critics noting its enduring resonance in Donald Trump’s America.
The first three episodes are released by streaming platform Hulu on Wednesday, with excitement piqued among the landmark novel’s fans by a marketing campaign featuring appearances in public across America of the story’s iconic scarlet-clad “handmaids.”
Published in 1985, Atwood’s bestseller is required reading in many schools and often mentioned in the same breath as George Orwell’s “1984,” Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” and other dystopian works of speculative fiction.
Over the years it has spawned a movie, a graphic novel, an opera and a ballet.
The TV series stars Golden Globe-winner Elisabeth Moss (“Mad Men”) in a near-future in which New England has been dismantled in a theocratic coup and replaced with Gilead, a tyrannical regime where men mete out brutal punishments and rape is mandated by the state.
Moss plays Offred, one of the few remaining fertile women who work as “handmaids,” forced into sexual servitude in a desperate attempt to repopulate the climate-ravaged world.
American critics have remarked how Atwood’s nightmarish vision has never felt more relevant in an age of religiously-inspired massacres, campus sex attacks and a proposed assault on reproductive health care that has driven women to march in the thousands.
“In April 2016, when Hulu first announced its plans to adapt the book into a television show, a Hillary Clinton presidency seemed forthcoming, and the novel’s setting, in a near future misogynist theocracy, seemed to be at a nice, safe, strictly metaphorical distance,” wrote Slate magazine TV critic Willa Paskin.
“Then Donald Trump was elected president. That nice, safe distance closed up in a hurry.”
While Trump is not seen as particularly religious, Paskin suggests that “The Handmaid’s Tale” is a logical conclusion of the uglier realities of Trump’s America — not least what she describes as the “gaping pit of contempt for women” revealed by last year’s US election.
Sales of the novel have surged since November’s vote, according to US media, and it is currently third on Amazon’s fiction bestseller list. Both “1984” and “Brave New World” have seen similar boosts.
“I hate to say the story is newly relevant, as if it weren’t for three decades,” said James Poniewozik of the New York Times.
“But face it: when you have a president who talks about women as if they were squeeze toys, who implied a tough female journalist was on her period, whose administration gathered a room full of male politicians to discuss women’s health coverage — well, the viral marketing takes care of itself.”
Not resting on its laurels, Hulu has been building buzz by sending women dressed in the iconic handmaid’s uniform of crimson dress and white bonnet to public events from San Diego Comic-Con and South by Southwest in Austin to the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books.
Five days after being fired from his toprated Fox News Channel perch, Bill O’Reilly used a podcast to express his dismay and vowed that “the truth will come out.”
“I am sad that I’m not on television anymore,” he said in an episode Monday of his personal website’s “No Spin News” podcast, available only to subscribers after this week’s free window. “I was very surprised how it all turned out.” O’Reilly, who exited Fox News amid sexual harassment allegations that he has denied, said he couldn’t add much more “because there’s much stuff going on right now.”
“But I can tell you that I’m very confident the truth will come out and when it does, I don’t know if you’re going to be surprised, but I think you’re going to be shaken, as I am,” said O’Reilly, who was Fox’s most popular and most lucrative personality.
He declined to expand on that point, he said, “because I just don’t want to influence the flow of the information. I don’t want the media to take what I say and misconstrue it.”
But his listeners have a right to know exactly what happened, and “we are working in that direction,” O’Reilly said.
O’Reilly’s remarks were the first since his exit on Wednesday, which took place while he was away on his vacation.
“Flip or Flop” stars Tarek and Christina El Moussa have signed on for another full season of their hit HGTV show.
The announcement of the hosts’ — and former couple — return to the home improvement series comes amid a highly-publicized divorce that followed a domestic altercation last spring. When the duo announced their separation after seven years of marriage this past December, the future of the HGTV series was unclear and reports surfaced that the seventh season would be shortened.
HGTV has ordered a whopping 20 episodes for the seventh season — more episodes than any season in the past of the home improvement show. Season 7 is slated to debut in December 2017. According to HGTV’s website, their cameras for Season 7 “captured the ups and downs of Tarek and Christina’s house flipping business as well as their family life. While the couple has separated, each one has turned the page to a new life that includes a continued commitment to running their house flipping business together and delivering fresh episodes of ‘Flip or Flop.’”