Handmaid's Tale 2.09

[beer_good_foamy]

OK, that was a hell of a satisfying episode, but is it just me...?

Season 2 so far has done a lot more right than I'd expected after the clunkiness of the non-book scenes at the end of s1. It's told a story that, even if I get the critique that it's misery porn,

And "Smart Power" is a hell of an episode in many ways, paying off a lot of the shit our characters have gone through or put others through. We finally get (somewhat convenient, but still) clash between the Gilead storyline and the characters marooned in Canada, the Chekhov's Gun of the letters is finally fired, Mrs Waterford is forced to see exactly what sort of prison she's built for herself, Moira and Luke finally get to unleash some emotions and shut down any notions of a deal between a democracy and a murderous dictatorship, and June finds out about them and even manages to almost sway Aunt Lydia. Especially considering real-life events of the last week, it's almost creepily well-timed. And the end of the episode, the triumph of the ex-pats (nice shout-out to The Deer Hunter there) and June's one-episode-left determination is very cathartic.

And yet.

Is it just that I've gotten really hyper-sensitive to any form of nationalism as my country prepares to elect a fascist government, or does the idea implied in this episode that the real US government would never ever accept any form of disenfranchisement of women, that there's a real America The Beautiful where nobody would stand for this, that once The Truth is out the people will inevitably rise up, doesn't that sort of... undermine the whole point of the story, that this isn't something alien but an extreme representation of something that's always been right there under the surface, that's ingrained both in society, personal relationships and even your own psyche? It felt satisfying, but for once in this series, it felt almost like utopia, a rose-tinted version of the world. Like the Gilead leadership and the world they wish for isn't the worst of us*, but a different them.

* Yes, I'm not American, then again neither is Atwood, and the story definitely resonates outside US borders.

Maybe I'm overreacting. And I mean, it was kinda beautiful.

Comments

[elisi]

Having just re-read this article, your criticism seems timely, and also probably mostly unconscious on part of the creators:

The First White President
The foundation of Donald Trump’s presidency is the negation of Barack Obama’s legacy.

[beer_good_foamy]

Good article. (And way too uncomfortably close to how the debate is currently going over here.) Which also touches on how very conveniently post-racial The Handmaid's Tale the series is, compared to the novel.

[elisi]

Possibly stupid question, but I'm not watching The Handmaid's Tale, so in what way is it post-racial? Like, is racism not a thing?

[beer_good_foamy]

The extent to which racism is a thing in the TV series (as opposed to the novel, where it's very much a thing, having sprung out of the US Christian right) is hard to say. On the one hand, all or most of the leaders of the Shiny New Patriarchy seem to be white. On the other, they seem to have no issue whatsoever with having non-white people in other positions in society, or with raising children of any and all backgrounds. You could make a case that it's completely colourblind, or you could make the case that it's the ol' liberal Get Out kind of racism. But given the very real goings-on in society that they're riffing on, and the fact that the book had them literally committing genocide against African Americans and Jews, it's just a striking thing to tone down or leave out.