In my 2017 review of “The Handmaid’s Tale,” I referenced the 1985 book’s chronicle of society’s collapse. Eight years later, as the show’s sixth and final season gets underway, Margaret Atwood’s guesswork has proven eerily accurate.
Buoying “The Handmaid’s Tale” in its first season, other than Elisabeth Moss’ wrenching performance as June, was the misguided idea that the show’s dystopia could never happen here, regardless of how bad things looked at the outset of Donald Trump’s first four-year term.
What comes next, according to Atwood’s vision, is a totalitarian society led by mediocre white men who believe themselves to be enacting God’s will.
Then again, the show premiered a year before his administration began separating the children of asylum seekers from their parents at the border. It also came to us five years before Roe v. Wade would be overturned, a ruling that brought red-robed cosplaying protesters out in force. In citing Atwood’s accuracy, however, I’m referring to that.
Atwood also wrote about Congress being slaughtered and martial law being declared, neither of which has happened – although January 6, 2021, brought us precariously close to that first one. However, months into Trump’s second term, we’ve watched his administration ignore constitutional laws without facing any real consequences. Congress has proven to be a weak deterrent, as have self-censoring mainstream news organizations.
The government is meddling in gender markers on passports and other identifying documents. What comes next, according to Atwood’s vision, is a totalitarian society led by mediocre white men who believe themselves to be enacting God’s will. Their wives benefit from their power and visit cruelties on those forced to serve them, but they willingly trade their agency for those perks. These women intentionally resign themselves to a permanent state of ignorance.
Meanwhile, Gilead’s governing forces correlate everyone else’s worth to their fertility, utility and willingness to submit to their rule. To those men, as one commander’s wife blithely puts it in the sixth season, virility is power. Resistance to their whims, even in speech, gets critics carted off to the Colonies to be worked to death if they didn’t immediately catch a bullet.
In summary, we haven’t entirely crossed over to Gilead. It’s doubtful that those floor-length red robes and white-winged bonnets will ever become a thing, especially since the highest “liberation day” tariffs have been slapped on some of the world’s biggest textile producers.
Still, we are certainly barreling in the direction of a Christo-fascist, racist autocracy – which leads me to wonder what we’d get out of being reminded of that during our downtime.
Plenty of people must be watching “The Handmaid’s Tale” or it wouldn’t have made it to six seasons. I would feign shock or dismay at its popularity if I didn’t already know that we are a nation of self-serving masochists.
But we are also a nation of white lady worshippers, and in the show, Moss’ June has become a symbol. Regardless of Canada’s safety and awesomeness (seriously, have you tasted Old Dutch brand All-Dressed potato chips? Life-changing!), she keeps pulling us, her husband Luke (O-T Fagbenle) and best friend Moira (Samira Wiley) into her drama.
Yeah, sure, her first-born Hannah remains in Gilead, giving her a reason to keep going back and endangering her side piece Nick (Max Minghella), who fathered her toddler Nichole, and Commander Joseph Lawrence (Bradley Whitford), one of the rare self-hating architects of Gilead. But Hannah doesn’t even recognize her mother anymore; also, the woman was recently run down by a car and is now fleeing on a West Coast-bound train.
June. Girl. Aren’t you tired? Because we are.
Elisabeth Moss in “The Handmaid’s Tale” (Disney/Steve Wilkie)The continued existence of “The Handmaid’s Tale” can be explained if not entirely justified by its performances, especially Whitford’s, who excels at conveying dry-witted exhaustion, and Yvonne Strahovski’s dead-on portrayal of Serena Joy Waterford, June’s oppressive former mistress. New additions Josh Charles and Timothy Simons are also flawlessly cast in roles that, like Serena, are similar to repugnant figures who have been normalized, whether famous or simply common.
In another reality/fiction crossover, many noticed that Ivanka Trump’s inauguration outfit resembled Serena Joy’s tailored teal gowns. Fitting, since both women prop up repressive regimes from which they’d like to distance themselves when the public calls for heads to roll.
The continued existence of “The Handmaid’s Tale” can be explained if not entirely justified by its performances.
But where June embodies the soul-trying self-regard of crusading white feminists, Serena is the avatar of those women who weighed their interests and perceived comfort against the safety of non-white, queer and economically disadvantaged fellow citizens, and voted for a 34-count convicted felon who is now destroying their retirement accounts.
Strahovski excels at playing white woman privilege to the hilt, and never as much as when she finds herself back on top, ready to evangelize for women’s oppression yet again.
Serena wrote foundational texts that made life unbearable for millions, secure in knowing she would be among the few standing atop a mountain of corpses as high as Everest. Now that hasn’t worked out so well for her, Serena, the woman who forced June to be raped by her now-dead and abusive husband, wants to be June’s ally.
Believing that requires great strain, too. When we meet up with these two, June can barely stand being in Serena’s presence and is juggling a toddler while contending with a shattered arm. She had to leave her husband behind after he surrendered to Canadian authorities; the homicidal Gilead sympathizer from whom Luke defended June died of his wounds.
To Serena, physical distance from the place that caused their problems is all they need to start fresh. “Tomorrow, we can start to forget,” she whispers with a smile to June, the Pauline who can’t stop running back to peril.
I’ve already written about the enraging white feminism driving “The Handmaid’s Tale” along with June’s increasingly silly and unrealistic “there and back again” missions. The sixth season doesn’t cast aside either of these original sins; series creator Bruce Miller and his staff are too far down the road to pull off such a turn. This time, however, peppered throughout the script are small acknowledgments of how insufferable June can be.
This is also true of Serena Joy and the wives who rule the roost in New Bethlehem, Commander Lawrence’s progressive (for Gilead) gated community experiment located in what appears to be the theocracy’s version of the Hamptons. But we already knew that.
June, though, finally gets a well-deserved earful from Luke and Moira, the Black folks propping her up like democracy itself. Hearing and watching them spell out how much her savior complex has depleted their patience in a few key scenes almost makes up for the tens of prior episodes flavored by their deference to her unstoppable will.
Additionally, the writers indict the perversions committed in the name of Christianity, whether in Gilead or these United States, in ways that have particular resonance in these concluding episodes.
On the train, when the endlessly devout Serena attributes every stroke of luck to “God’s grace,” another survivor who has endured horrors more excruciating than mere shame (OK, Serena’s amputated pinky wasn’t exactly a paper cut, but still) sets her straight. “God is just an excuse for men to use two things: c**ks and guns.” Don’t we know it.
Ann Dowd in The Handmaid’s Tale (Disney/Steve Wilkie)A subsequent episode makes that explicit when two characters argue over who suffered more based on how often they were raped as Gilead’s subjects, only to be interrupted by a guy who, yes, tries to rape them.
As horrible as this is to witness, the situation also grimly verges on parody. The unnatural narrative mechanics leading to and resulting from that moment and others are a more significant crime. You may lose count of the number of times you ask yourself why June and everyone else are doing what they’re doing again and expecting a different result. Watching the definition of madness in action can be maddening.
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The three-installment kickoff to the “Handmaid’s” 10-episode finale run debuts one week after Hulu picked up its sequel, “The Testaments.” That announcement fell on April 1, so a person should be forgiven for checking to make sure Hulu wasn’t punking us. But no, the news is real.
That means some powerful Disney man in a high tower gazed down at the smallfolk from their sky-level suite and decided that what we need are further adventures from our favorite depressing dystopia.
Watching the definition of madness in action can be maddening.
Goody for Moss, who is an executive producer, along with Atwood, who penned the novel serving as the spinoff’s basis, and cast carryover Ann Dowd. She’s set to reprise Aunt Lydia for the series, which picks up years after the events of the original series and follows Agnes, otherwise known as June Osborne’s daughter Hannah (played by “Presumed Innocent” star Chase Infiniti), as she navigates her life in Gilead.
If this news hadn’t already headlined an assortment of trade reports, this may count as a spoiler since Hannah is the purported reason that June keeps skipping across the border between Canada and the hell she barely escaped.
Then again, maybe not. About a year ago, “We won’t go back” became a battle cry, and look how that turned out. We shouldn’t be shocked that a kid raised in a regressive society somehow managed to remain there, whether by choice or one of her mother’s recurrent wrong turns and close calls.
Besides, backsliding is easier than making progress, especially if it means some of us get to remain comfortable while the rest of the world turns to ash. You can watch “The Handmaid’s Tale” pull into its terminal point and say to yourself, “This is fine,” knowing it isn’t, or you can look away towards virtually any other show and take a needed break from a world that is speedily tumbling Under His Eye.
The sixth and final season of “The Handmaid’s Tale” premieres with three episodes Tuesday, April 8 on Hulu.
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