I was actually shocked myself reading this article bc I realized that other than the general context of “Jesus, you’re bitchy, do you have your period?”, it’s not truly discussed, much less shown. Sure, mountains of violence in any given show are acceptable, but a tiny spot of blood on underpants? Too far, mister, too far.
Since the closing is similar to the book’s, I’m assuming (and hoping) that there will be no second season. The show did an amazing job of expanding the world without losing the core of the book. Some of the new scenes I couldn’t watch, but others made me cry. Maybe I’ll have better words later, but man… this show.
I’m of two minds: I really like shorter series that don’t try to go on and on but instead tell the story and then close up shop, but I also think that the timing of this is perfect for Hulu to work with Atwood to flesh out what happens next in a fictional world that is starting to look more and more like the trajectory we are actually on.
Oh. Wow. I had a British roommate one summer in Colorado and she had the perfect phrase for any situation that defied words: “Well. Right then. There you are.” For some insane reason, that phrase was all that kept running through my mind.
This adaptation is is everything art should be: Imperfect, but beautiful, true, but brutal. I clearly admire Atwood’s work, but Elizabeth Moss and company exceeded all possible expectations. It was at once the slow reverberation of a deep bass note and the shrill sound of a piccolo.
We tend toward the hyperbole when discussing recent TV shows, and mostly, I agree. We are indeed in a new age of exquisite TV. For me, however, this show transcends almost all else in its merciless honesty of a world gone mad, a world that seems too close for comfort at the moment.
This isn’t an easy show to watch, but I think it’s some of the most important TV of our lifetimes.
I agree – I selfishly want more, but if it ends now, that’s okay too.
When Moira was handed the medical card and the prescription card, I cried.
It’s how a large percentage of people from the U.S. would feel RIGHT NOW if they were to actually become refugees in Canada, despite the difference in level of civilization being not quite that extreme…yet.
Just finished the show and found this thread. Breathtaking. I want to say it’s the most truthful fictional show since The Wire.
Elisabeth Moss has a real knack for finding interesting and thought-provoking roles, doesn’t she? I’d watch anything she thinks is worthy of her time, and I’m stoked there’s another season of Top of the Lake on the way.
So you’re in on the conversations between Bruce and Margaret about where the show goes now that it has passed the source material?
Bruce and I have talked about [it]. We know the book well and there’s so much stuff that we haven’t done from it. There are so many lines from the book we haven’t said in the voiceover and so many things we haven’t explored, like The Colonies and things like that. That’s something we actually feel very excited about because there’s so much more to mine from the book. There’s also a sense that it’s so great to have the author to speak to. I’m sure Bruce is doing this, but you can run things by her to see if they make sense. She has been so incredibly supportive and she is even more enthusiastic about taking it in new directions and trying new things. It’s exciting for her as well, I’d imagine.
I confess I’d never heard of Margaret Atwood before but if she’s on board for another season then so am I.
Outside a global collapse in fertility (per the show, a city in Mexico the size of Boston with zero live births in 6 years), plus the implied climate change affecting crops and yields leading to mass starvation worldwide… does not seem likely to me. Those are two very big things.
It is true that people would seriously lose their shit if new humans stopped being born. That is pretty much the darkest possible end of the world scenario. Dark does not really do it justice, it’s more like peering into a vantablack abyss that light can’t escape from.
And yet, so much of what is in the book/show is already happening here. It’s almost like certain types of people only need an excuse to start acting out their oppressive fantasies. Any trigger is good enough to start the process, if you want it badly enough.
You don’t think climate change is real, or that it’s serious?
Also, even though worldwide sterility seems ridiculous to you, and me, sitting here in comfort, it’s not outside the realm of possibility.
Besides, I never meant to say that literally everything in The Handmaid’s Tale is happening as we speak. As @anon67050589 pointed out, a lot of it is happening, from a social justice perspective, and it won’t take extreme conditions to bring us all the way there. There are people looking for any excuse to take us all the way there. I think a large scale terrorist attack, like Oklahoma City to maybe 9/11, will be more than enough.
And then you see all the attempts to reduce access to birth control, and abortion, and it’s not too much of a stretch to me to see some men deciding that maybe they should just go back to controlling the entire woman because it’s so much work to control just the womb.
Atwood didn’t make this shit up. It’s already happening to women around the world.
“When it first came out it was viewed as being far-fetched,” the 77-year old said of her novel that was originally published in 1985. “However, when I wrote it I was making sure I wasn’t putting anything into it that human beings had not already done somewhere at some time.”
That’s what I love about speculative fiction. It repackages what happens in real life as something futuristic and fantastical, and then when we notice this stuff happening all around us, we take notice because we remember what happened in the book. The book looks prescient when it’s really just observant.
This also removes bias because we’re starting fresh with a new society and culture, rather than allowing our baggage to influence what we think of the characters.
Ironically, stories that don’t dress up politics and current events like that get dismissed out of hand. “That’s never happened to anyone I know.” “Yeah, but that only happens in Darkest Africa.” “They must have done something to deserve it.” etc.
I do, but climate change alone is not enough. The peculiar end of world hysteria of no more babies being born would also be required for this level of madness to engage. There is no bleaker end of the world scenario than a global crash in fertility. People would lose. their. shit.
This is absolutely central to Handmaid’s Tale. Fertility is the specific doomsday scenario, the literal end of the world that everyone can see coming (again, no births in a city the size of Boston in 6 years). And that’s fundamentally about women in a way that climate change is not.
When there is data showing it begin to happen, perhaps. We have plenty of data on climate change. Can you cite any such data for a huge drop in global fertility?
Without that specific doomsday scenario playing out – the radical social change shown in the show, including the massacre of congress and the formation of the new nation Gilead in the place of the United States, isn’t likely.
This is what speculative fiction does. It takes elements of now, and posits “what would happen if…” The “if” in the scenario IS the global collapse in fertility.
The subjugation of women isn’t new. Environmental degradation isn’t new. Fascism isn’t new. Theocracies aren’t new. Homophobia isn’t new. Atwood took all these and asked “what if.”
It looks to me like you’re discounting the story’s meaning because of it’s genre. And that doesn’t really make sense. (And if you want to discuss genre, then doing it here would be off-topic anyway)
There is no such thing, but there are probably catastrophic events that could trigger something like that. Some kind of viral pandemic, for example, or chemical warfare.
That’s beside the point though, because the whole point of speculative fiction is that it’s speculative. It poses a “what-if” scenario and then sets up a story in the middle of a scenario. These stories almost always reflect issues that are relevant to our own society, but because the context is so different, we don’t let our internal biases affect our reading. It isn’t an academic treatise on how such a scenario would come into being. Those tend to be quite boring, and still rather speculative.
It wouldn’t have to be that specific scenario. Yeah yeah, I know, you’re going to ask me to prove that, but the burden of proof is on you to show that only one scenario would result in this outcome, especially since history has shown that many scenarios could (and did) trigger this.
Are you not aware of the many people in the US who think that they have the constitutional right to forcibly overthrow the government? For example:
New nations form all the time, and governments get overthrown, and theocracies form, and underprivileged groups such as women and gay people get horrifically systematically oppressed. Just look at history, including very recent history. The US should stop seeing itself as exceptional when it’s part of the same planet every other nation is.
