If you wish to perceive the affect of The Handmaid’s Tale, the TV collection tailored from Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel set within the totalitarian Republic of Gilead, look no additional than eBay, the place you may decide up a handmaid outfit comprising a pink cloak and starched white bonnet for round £30. Additionally obtainable are the dowdy brown clothes worn by Gilead’s aunts, who prepare and dispense beatings to the handmaids, and the teal cloak worn by Serena Pleasure, the commander’s spouse whom viewers will know as the girl who holds down Elisabeth Moss’s handmaid, June, so she may be raped.
For some time after the collection launched in 2017, these pink handmaid robes had been worldwide symbols of feminine defiance, exhibiting up in marches in help of girls’s reproductive rights in Eire, Argentina and Trump’s America. Atwood’s imagined world, which arrived on screens because the #MeToo motion was demanding an finish to male harassment and abuse, was swiftly absorbed into the lexicon of feminine oppression, shorthand for what occurs when societal and institutional misogyny goes unchecked.
However since then, The Handmaid’s Story has morphed from an allegory of the fragility of feminine freedom right into a blood-soaked horror present. Little surprise it has additionally change into a staple of Halloween cosplay, the blood-red robes now equal to the Ghostface masks from the Scream franchise – preferrred for scaring the neighbours.
Subsequent month, the sixth and ultimate season of The Handmaid’s Story arrives on British screens (it’s already up and working within the US). When the collection started, it was largely devoted to the supply materials, which Atwood referred to as “speculative fiction”, which means it offered a “what-if” model of actuality. It launched us to the workings of Gilead, a spiritual patriarchy established after an environmental disaster, the place fertile girls are enslaved as breeding chattels, ritually raped by their masters, and compelled handy over their infants to their rapists’ barren wives. It was chilling, not least as a result of, in an age of rising authoritarianism and the rolling again of girls’s rights, it felt all too believable.
In a really perfect world, The Handmaid’s Story would have ended on the shut of that first season, when, as occurs within the novel, June was bundled right into a van after refusing to stone one other handmaid to dying – whether or not to be executed or rescued, we weren’t positive. However by this level, Atwood, an govt producer on the present, had begun writing The Testaments, a sequel to The Handmaid’s Story, which picks up the story 15 years after the primary ebook. This allowed showrunner Bruce Millar to maintain going with the TV model and do no matter he noticed match with June and Gilead, as long as occasions ultimately lined up with Atwood’s sequel. (Naturally, The Testaments is already being developed for TV.)
And so got here a second season, which left the novel behind and doubled down on the brutality. After the beatings and stonings of collection one, we noticed handmaids sure, gagged, having their tongues minimize out, or positioned on a scaffold in a mock execution. We noticed a pregnant June zapped with a cattle prod, shackled and force-fed. Within the Colonies, land of the “unwomen” (learn: previous, infertile, spent), haunted figures cleaned up radioactive waste, tumours sprouting like mushrooms from their faces.
In eight years on our screens, June has gone from being an atypical girl reacting to horrifying circumstances to an motion determine ceaselessly being thrown into but extra excessive conditions so that she would possibly combat her manner out. It has been within the present’s pursuits to maintain her on a brief leash, and to maintain her and people she loves in mortal peril, therefore her common catapulting again to Gilead. In succumbing to the calls for of bingeworthy leisure, the collection has not solely swallowed its fury and diminished June to a mere action-movie trope: it has overlooked its elementary feminist message, and thrown logic out of the window, too.
In season 4, June lastly escaped Gilead and was reunited together with her husband, Luke, in Canada. An excellent place to finish issues, you would possibly assume. However at this level she was restyled as an avenging angel, bent on punishing her tormentors and rescuing her eldest daughter, Hannah, who was being raised by a commander and his spouse. So quite a few have been the failed efforts to retrieve the little lady, you absolutely count on the Canadian authorities to inform June: “Sorry we didn’t get your daughter again, however we have to make one other season.”
Not one of the collection’ issues – the exhausted plotlines, the torture porn, the as soon as efficient however now repetitive close-ups of Moss’s mutinous face – would matter if this had been a bog-standard thriller moderately than an adaptation of a 40-year-old literary masterpiece and very important piece of social commentary. On the finish of the fifth season, we noticed June once more separated from Luke and fleeing Toronto, the place anti-immigrant and pro-Gilead protests threatened her security. The trailer for the sixth season makes it clear she’s going to quickly be again in Gilead, and as soon as extra wearing her pink handmaid robes. For her sake, and that of Atwood’s best creation, the earlier she burns the place to the bottom the higher.
The sixth season of ‘The Handmaid’s Story’ is on Prime Video from 3 Could
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