The Handmaid's Tale

 

In one of the last conversations I had with the late Gareth Davies, he assigned me a task, watch a TV series and then come onto the Mind Set Podcast and help him review it. The series was The Handmaid's Tale on Amazon. Seeing as Gareth's previous tip had turned out to be a winner, Utopia, see: https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2020/12/utopia-two-cancelled.html, I was keen to follow it up. The Handmaid's Tale is based on a famous book of that name by Margaret Atwood and premiered in 2017. I watched the first episode of the programme and then reported back on the Mind Set Podcast: https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2021/06/the-mind-set-podcast-programme-454.html. The series begins with a young woman with the strange name of "Offred" fleeing for her life from mean looking policemen with guns and fierce dogs. She has to abandon her husband and daughter in her rout. Her husband is killed and her daughter kidnapped by the police. She is captured and taken to a facility called the "Red Centre" where she is trained to be a "handmaid" by a horrible old lady known as "Aunt Lydia". The term comes from the bible story in Genesis 29:29 in which Rachel, the wife of Jacob, can bear no children so a fertile woman is brought into their relationship simply for that purpose. Offred has become a prisoner of Gilead. This is an imaginary country in a dystopian futuristic North America that has been established in the midst of a brutal civil war which is being fought against what is left of the USA and Canada. She is installed in a rich family and has to go through a grotesque ritual where the husband has sexual intercourse with her in a very meaningless dispassionate way while his wife sits on the bed with them. Yes, very weird! The problem is that an environmental disaster from some kind of pollution has made most women barren and so handmaids are in common use among Gilead's ruling class. Gilead is a very male chauvinistic society and is a Christian theocracy based on an extreme form of American Puritanism. Homosexuals, doctors who terminate pregnancies and religious apostates are publicly executed. Everybody wears colour-coordinated uniforms like in Brave New World and the handmaids wear a red cape with a peculiar white bonnet that resembles a lampshade. I've noticed that real feminists have started wearing this outfit at protests. Women are not permitted to handle money and so when Offred goes grocery shopping she has to pay with special coupons. At the end of the episode it is revealed that Offred's real name is June.
 
As you'll hear in the above Mind Set episode, I took a very dim view of episode one of The Handmaid's Tale, especially when I researched the origins of the story. I do not criticize the production design, acting or script. These are all very well done. The budget is obviously quite big. My concern is purely conceptual. The Handmaid's Tale has a deeply sinister theme, that white straight men are evil. As if that theme is particularly original or controversial these days. In the first episode there are literally no good white men at all. Every single one is an antagonist; even June's husband is black and her daughter mixed race. There is only one bad non-white male depicted, a policeman; and even he is just an extra, out of focus in the background. Margaret Atwood's book was a bestseller and won numerous awards, including the Arthur C Clarke, which is strange because it is not science fiction. It has gained a cult following and Atwood has been showered with praise. Words used to describe her work regularly include: "brave!", "edgy!" and "daring!" Absolutely not. Attacking white Christian men in this day and age is the safest, most mainstream, most hackneyed act in all fiction. Including such themes in the right way guarantees the success of the most amateurish and lazy writer, as with Get Out, see: https://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.com/2017/04/get-out-film-review.html. I don't consider Margaret Atwood quite as much of an opportunist as some of her successors, possibly like Naomi Alderman, see: https://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.com/2017/08/buying-milos-book-2-power.html. I think Atwood put a lot of thought and consideration into her work; however she is clearly heavily influenced by radical feminism. Leaving aside the story's racism, sexism and anti-Christian propaganda; I do find the setting's depictions of surveillance, mental tyranny and police brutality neatly achieved. The story is similar to 1984. At the end of the Mind Set programme I was reluctant to watch any more of the series, but Gareth persuaded me to stick with it, at least for a few more episodes. If I agree I will only do so as a tribute to my departed friend and co-host.
See here for background: http://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2021/08/political-correctness-portal.html.
And: https://hpanwo-radio.blogspot.com/2021/09/programme-432-podcast-gareth-davies-in.html.