1×10 “Night”
–This was one of the best episodes of the season, IMO. I cried through several scenes, not gonna lie.
–When June saw Hannah and was all but clawing her way out of the car followed by her spewing vitriol at Serena Joy was incredibly powerful. Elisabeth Moss deserves all sorts of awards for her work this year.
–Equally powerful, June and the other Handmaids refusing to stone Jeanine.
–“You’re on my list.” “List of family?” “Yeah, of course.” I think the Moira scenes did a great job of showing how even open countries can treat refugees poorly, a different kind of poorly. Like they aren’t people who have crossed through war and almost literal hell to come out of the other side. It’s just give some food, give some water, some clothes, a few bucks, a few things to get you started and then out the door into this brave new world you go. It’s a different kind of dehumanization, I suppose.
–So the maximum punishment for a man who sinner is amputation but for a woman it’s getting stoned to death by her peers? Yeah, praise be to Gilead.
–“You’re the worse shopping partner ever.” “Shut up.” You shut up.”
–I’m interested to see where the show goes from here but I’m also incredibly hesitant. This is where the book ends, apart from the epilogue that I keep talking about. June escapes or at least is taken away and we lose her from there. All that’s left are her voice recordings but we have no idea if she found Luke, Hannah, or even if she managed to evade recapture forever. In other words, S2 and beyond (if there’s a beyond S2) is going to be totally uncharted territory and that makes me nervous.
I just don’t get Serena at all. Here she wrote books. She even wrote some of these laws. But now she can’t read or be involved and is upset about it, so why? Why is so so angry at June when this is a situation of her own creation
Well, I don’t get Serena Joy either but it’s the same way I don’t get women that she’s modeled after–like Ann Coutler or Tomi Lahren. They actively voice a regression in culture, not just conservatism but regression, but the only way they are able to do that is by working within the progressive system that allows them voice in the first place. This situation is of her own creation but I think we have to think in human terms here….Serena is a woman who is coming to understand that the world she advocated for doesn’t work. It’s a bad world. It’s bad for her, her marriage, her fellow women, everyone except her husband and if the Putnam’s are the other side of the coin here, it’s not like it’s all sunshine and daises for the husbands either. I think that sort of awakening, that the world you believed in, fought for, advocated for, murdered for, and gave up your identity and agency for is ultimately not working and bad would devastate anyone and make them act the way Serena is. She can be a conservatively religious, uphold a very strict interpretation of the Bible and God’s law, believe in the sacrality of marriage, of a woman’s place as wife and mother, and still be troubled by instances of wrongness in her world. She’s a foil for June. If June rebels and fights back against the wrongness of this world, Serena digs in her heels, turns a blind eye and trys to remake the world once again until it suits her. She does this by trying to mold everyone around her, curtail their behavior until it pleases her (hence taking June to see Hannah and laying into Fred with hard truths like the baby not being his)
’It seem like they did grow up in the cult.
But it’s not a cult, not in the way you seem to use that word. This wasn’t 100 guys in the woods who stock piled weapons and then managed to overthrow the USA. This isn’t Waco or Jonestown. This isn’t a small select group; these people were legion. Cult is a loaded term because of the connotations that come with it, mainly the things like Waco and Jonestown with one charismatic leader and a small group of followers who isolate themselves from the world. We have a hard time, then, imagining a multitude of believers who work and live along side us as a “cult” because that word has come to mean one thing and only one thing.
But that’s not what happened with Serena and Fred. They lived in the world, they were part of the world. Fred is military, Serena was a public figure. They owned a big house, they wanted children, they were not subject to one leader who made demands of them or forced them to do anything. I think you have to stop thinking of them in terms of cult. It’s not a cult….it’s the religious right.
They are everywhere. They exist in the real world in that silent majority. People who see the way the world is headed–toward progressive reform with regards to women, LGBT+, PoC, refugees, non-Christians–and they think it’s wrong. That it’s not God’s way and that their way of life is better and, moreover, is what God would want. We instances of this almost every day on the news–radical conservatives and people who push for regressive reforms who use violence and threats as part of their rhetoric but still go home to suburbia and work a 9-5.
We keep talking a lot about the reality of this world and whether or not it could actually exist here in the US. Do I think that I’ll wake up tomorrow and be carted off to a Red Center? No certainly not. But do I think that the ground work for something like that–100, 200 years down the road–is being laid down? Yes. From rolling back healthcare so that millions lose their coverage, to the healthcare reforms to make rape a preexisting condition, to the constant attempt to defund Planned Parenthood ensuring that millions of women lose access to premium health services including against gynecological diseases, to the multitude of environmental concerns like rolling back regulations against toxic dumping all in the name of profit and business, lead in the water (Flint, Michigan), pulling out of the Paris Climate Accord, to cultural happenings like the constant stream of sexual harassment in the workforce, the casual misogyny of interrupting a woman when she’s speaking (Senator Kimala Harris, Elizabeth Warren “nevertheless she persisted”) or making jokes at her expense (even as she lectures you about such things *cough Uber and Arianna Huffington cough*), refusing to destroy racist or misogynistic symbols because “history” and “our traditions” (the Confederate flag).
I suppose you could make the argument that the show shouldn’t have set themselves in modern times, like being in 2017. That it should have warped us into the future a bit (something Atwood’s novel does casting it into the near future).