The Handmaid's Tale

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Lost Highway
Joined: Thu Aug 29, 2013 7:41 am
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The Handmaid's Tale

#1 Post by Lost Highway » Wed Dec 06, 2017 5:02 am

Curious to see that there is no thread for this, considering its acclaim. For the most part I found this gripping and well done, though I could have done without the pop song montages, more appropriate for a teen show.

Maybe the most interesting aspects were how current America changes into Gillead in flashbacks.

I haven’t read the novel, but from a Wikipedia synopsis this appears to be fairly faithful. Only one thing jars. I get that there was criticism of the novel that it writes out African Americans by apparently having them relocated to the Midwest. The TV series takes a color blind approach, casting central roles with black actors and then it never addresses race. I found it hard to believe that a patriarchal, ultra-conservative society who enslaves fertile women and publicly executes gay people and Catholics, would not also be racist.

MongooseCmr
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Re: The Handmaid‘s Tale

#2 Post by MongooseCmr » Wed Dec 06, 2017 11:11 am

Lost Highway wrote:I found it hard to believe ... a patriarchal, ultra-conservative society who enslaves fertile women and publicly executes gay people and Catholics
Agreed.

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mfunk9786
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Re: The Handmaid's Tale

#3 Post by mfunk9786 » Wed Dec 06, 2017 11:45 am

The show does a bit too much of trying to have it both ways for my taste. The showrunners want to make it more divisive along gender lines than class ones, attempting to make us feel empathetic toward Yvonne Strahovski's character in a way that feels disingenuous, and almost certainly in an effort to make sure not to alienate some of the target audience for the show (upper class women who have more in common with this character than they'd care to think about). That rang a bit false, as did some of the cutesy music cues at the end of episodes that have a bit too much cheeky fun with a very grim concept that would be well served by being treated maybe 10% more seriously than it is.

And yes, the glaring, terrible flaw with the show is what's mentioned above - a completely unrealistic sort of whitewashing of the concept of racism - absolutely feels like something that was conceptualized pre-Trump administration. We see now that the way that Atwood handled this in the book is far more realistic, and I would not have minded orienting the show as bifurcated between stories going on in the northeast US and the midwest US in order to achieve more diversity in casting and storytelling. There's surely a rich mine that could have been tapped there that is just made intellectually soggy by the decision to completely ignore any racial unrest that the far right is very much in the business of stoking.

Beyond all that, it's well acted, well executed, and enjoyable. Will be interested to see what happens in Season 2 since
SpoilerShow
From what I understand, we're pretty much at the end of the book (minus the postscript set years in the future)

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Lost Highway
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Re: The Handmaid‘s Tale

#4 Post by Lost Highway » Wed Dec 06, 2017 11:52 am

MongooseCmr wrote:
Lost Highway wrote:I found it hard to believe ... a patriarchal, ultra-conservative society who enslaves fertile women and publicly executes gay people and Catholics
Agreed.
Mike Pence’s wet dream, actually.

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colinr0380
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Re: The Handmaid's Tale

#5 Post by colinr0380 » Wed Dec 06, 2017 6:59 pm

I must admit that I have been most familiar with the 1990 film version starring Natasha Richardson (and of course Stuart Gordon's ultraviolent Verhoeven-esque 1992 film Fortress is kind of the male-centric version of the same kind of story!), so it was interesting to see how a more necessarily contained story there (down to having to create a Blade Runner-style 'happy ending' for closure) compares to the relatively more faithful TV series.
mfunk9786 wrote:Will be interested to see what happens in Season 2 since
SpoilerShow
From what I understand, we're pretty much at the end of the book (minus the postscript set years in the future)
SpoilerShow
There was an recent episode of The Business featuring an interview with Margaret Atwood and Bruce Miller that suggested in line with the coda the idea that Offred's story was just one 'generation' of this society in its prime, and that there might be room for further stories from beyond that specific character detailing the evolution of the dystopian society.
Last edited by colinr0380 on Wed Dec 13, 2017 4:34 am, edited 1 time in total.

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Lost Highway
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Re: The Handmaid's Tale

#6 Post by Lost Highway » Wed Dec 13, 2017 4:26 am

Looks like they’ve listened to what I think is the main problem with the series:

http://www.digitalspy.com/tv/the-handma ... e-problem/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

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domino harvey
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Re: The Handmaid's Tale

#7 Post by domino harvey » Thu May 28, 2020 3:13 pm


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Mr Sausage
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The Handmaid's Tale

#8 Post by Mr Sausage » Thu May 28, 2020 4:40 pm

domino harvey wrote:Zizek on the book and series
One of the commenters summed up my disagreement with Zizek’s argument:
“youtube commenter” wrote:I actually have a nuanced disagreement with Zizek about the “nostalgia for present” he thinks a Handmaid’s Tale represents. It is more akin to tragedy porn, where the pleasure of reading/viewing the story is not about making someone feel better about the present, but to validate their feelings that the present is bad and tragic. People who love and defend the story don’t say “I’m glad I don’t live in that reality.” They instead insist that it IS somehow representative of the present reality.

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domino harvey
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Re: The Handmaid's Tale

#9 Post by domino harvey » Thu May 28, 2020 4:54 pm

That’s more where I fall based on what I’ve seen, but I thought it was an interesting argument. I was dating a woman who was in love with the series and so I started watching it and frankly, when we broke up, I was relieved that I could stop watching it! The series is so relentlessly negative and full of fear mongering that helps no one, especially those who have already experienced oppression in its actual forms. This country really is not like this and will never be like this because too many good people will not allow it to happen. Getting worked up over its alleged eventuality seems legit harmful to me

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therewillbeblus
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Re: The Handmaid's Tale

#10 Post by therewillbeblus » Thu May 28, 2020 4:57 pm

And that sums up why I've never taken the plunge, though I tell the aggressively persuasive people in my life that it's 'cause I need to read the book first

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Mr Sausage
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The Handmaid's Tale

#11 Post by Mr Sausage » Thu May 28, 2020 5:03 pm

I get that, tho’ I suspect for fans the series and books reflect more an emotional reality than any literal belief in the world represented there.

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Murdoch
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Re: The Handmaid's Tale

#12 Post by Murdoch » Fri May 29, 2020 5:19 pm

I enjoyed the book well enough, but agree it felt overly cynical in its attempt at an Orwellian dystopia. I can stretch my imagination pretty far and have grown cynical toward the U.S. in my adult years, but the degree of public lynchings and thought suppression that take place while a quiet complacency takes over the populace felt not only unrealistic but willfully blind to the protests and public outcry that are characteristic of nearly any nation where the people are given basic civil rights. If anything, this Trumpian era has proven that protest is alive and well even when there's merely the belief that civil liberties are at stake.

I can see the story as being less prophetic than it is symbolic, but for me the clunkiness of the novel undercut it. I can't help but roll my eyes at Atwood's cribbing of pieces of African-American history for her purposes while focusing on largely white characters ("the Underground Femaleroad" being the most egregious example).

But I haven't seen much of the series, and I've heard it does correct some of Atwood's appropriation.

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