The Handmaid's Tale

[RumplesGirl]

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).

[hjbau]

Serena is not religious. She is not a true believer in the cult. I have no idea what her motivation is besides she wants a child, but her character is inconsistent. I could understand her using a public face for an agenda, but they also have weird scenes where she is playing at being a cult believer when she is just with her husband, even before they took over. That doesn’t make sense. Then they had the scene where she told her husband to stop when he was quoting scripture at her because she knows they are faking, but the scenes before they took over they were just faking too? Why? Why would she do that back then? It just makes no sense that this would be the way they would go about doing this if they are all just faking. The true believers of the cult make sense and the commander who has a lot of power from what he is doing makes sense, but her character does not make sense because of the way she acts in private.

I didn’t say anything about what i thought a cult was or wasn’t and i don’t think that it is that. There are mainstream cults in the US now. They are not this. I don’t think a cult is a hundred guys in woods with guns. I don’t think that this is remotely the religious right and the show may be suggesting that, but that is so far out there that i just can’t take that part of the show seriously. It is down right silly to me. I just think that what this cult is could never exist in the America that is now and therefore feels so fake as to make their world building completely unrealistic to the extreme or really it just means their world building is nonexistent. The problem is that they didn’t explain what is going on in their world that a cult like this could exist. It just does and i just have to accept that as part of the show. There is no world building except after the cult took over.

I don’t want to talk about politics, but yeah people have been saying a lot of nonsense lately in the politics, but no one is taking away all that stuff. That just feels really fake to me. Sure there are crazy people out there, but they aren’t the majority and the world will move forward. People who voted for Trump, voted for Obama. There are other things going on here. I am at the point where i think, let’s all just wait twenty years and see where we are at sort of place. Sure, go out there and protest, write your congresspersons, vote, do all that stuff. People can believe what they want and it is going to be okay.

I totally get though how if you feel that way about the state of the world, that you might feel that this is realistic. I don’t feel that way and feel like this is so out there as to be nonsensical. Impossible now, impossible in 200 years. There could be an end to America, but it wouldn’t be this end.

I think the idea in the real world that people seem to think that others aren’t allowed to think differently then them and try and pass laws about how they think is a much bigger problem then what those people i disagree with are saying. That is just me.

[hjbau]

I thought the Moira scenes in Canada were so good because here she is so used to not being able to do whatever she wants that it seems like she thinks these people are going to try and make her do stuff. Instead they ask her if she wants food, if she wants a shower, if she has family to call, and she isn’t used to having choices at all and now she does. She reminded me of someone who had been in prison and was used to being told want to do by the guards now being let go with a bag of stuff. I thought that scene was really well done.

The handmaids are the best part and their reactions to the situation have been the best part of the show. June was amazing in this episode. Janine was amazing in the last one. That is why i hope they show us more of those characters next season.

[Bar Farer]

Is anyone going to watch Alias Grace?
Is the story as good as The Handmaid’s Tale?

"All your questions are pointless"

[RumplesGirl]

Is anyone going to watch Alias Grace

I haven’t read it, but I’d like to watch it!

"He was a lot of things to me" "The only conclusion was love"

[RumplesGirl]

Is anyone going to watch Alias Grace? Is the story as good as The Handmaid’s Tale?

Quote

Dredging this back up, a month later…

I just finished the 6part miniseries “Alias Grace” on Netflix and *my god* was it good. I was enraptured for all six episodes and thought it was even better than the Handmaid’s Tale (a feat I didn’t think could happen given how much I loved the first season of tHT). I think tHT could actually benefit from Alias Grace’s shortened mini series season (I am terribly nervous about tHT having a second season given that they covered Atwood’s entire novella in the first…)

100% recommended!

"He was a lot of things to me" "The only conclusion was love"

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