Depending on who your friends are, you might have seen a fair few posts crowding your feed in the last few days, along the lines of “Handmaid’s Tale… Oof.”
One of last year’s biggest TV successes just came roaring back – and by roaring, I mean pumping full-blast dystopian grimness straight into your face like a fire hose.
So why are we doing this to ourselves?
In the very first few minutes of the second season, we watch dozens of enslaved women face the prospect of their own imminent execution, pissing themselves and whimpering helplessly through leather muzzles. We watch families being shredded through a slow, deliberate thicket of bigoted bureaucratic cruelties, and a queer (white) man who’s been lynched, and the aftermath of massacres, and satisfaction and joy on the faces of people doing incredibly evil things.
What we see in The Handmaid’s Tale are not scenes of dystopian fantasy. They are the lived experience of plenty of women and families in the world right now and in living memory: people living under the rule of fundamentalists with guns, parents being torn away from their children in public places.
And everyone with a uterus, regardless what other privileges they have, knows they’re potentially at the mercy of a society where reproductive rights go to hell in such a spectacular way.
How good is reading the news every day in 2018?
Some people seem to be watching as much as a duty as for entertainment – like the men who want to better understand the ever-present hum of worry that your body will suddenly no longer be your own to control, and what that might look like overlaid on the fabric of their current realities.
Some are women who seem to just want to actively remind themselves not to get comfortable.
But also, there’s a perverse satisfaction in seeing the show draw a clear line between the relatively minor shifts to the status quo in the flashbacks and the nightmarish religious-fundamentalist dystopia where even white, educated, middle-class cis women aren’t safe from persecution.
Women are told so often that we’re making a big noise about nothing – we have not been believed when we report abuse or harassment, been shouted down with manipulated statistics when we point out pay gaps, and met with shrugs or mockery when we say something makes us uncomfortable. Women of colour, poor women, and queer and gender-diverse folks, of course, are listened to even less. (While it’s not great about casting or representing POCs, the show is careful to illustrate how the queer and POC characters it does have are instantly more on their guard in the flashbacks than the white, straight main character, June, is.)
And so there’s something satisfying about having a hit TV show that illustrates pointedly exactly how f**ked up the subjugation of women is; that shows, in beautifully rendered extremes, that oppression is just a question of degrees. How wide is the gap between being judged for not taking your husband’s name, and being given a man’s name instead of your own? Between being forced to get pregnant, and being forced to stay that way once you are?
It’s like the show is pointing to creeping restrictions on abortion, on Mike Pence saying he refuses to be alone with women, on the hoops women have to jump through to just be safe – and saying, “See? Do you see, now?”
Recommended viewing suggestion.
All that said: if the show wasn’t good, it’d just be traumatic feminist misery porn for middle-class white ladies. Women – most women, anyway – do not need to be convinced with thinly veiled allegories about religious politicians, or told endless stories about women and queer people suffering under patriarchy. There’s a metric tonne of that in the news, and our lives, every damn day.
But the viciousness is so beautifully, precisely calibrated that it resonates with everyone. The cinematography is gorgeous. Elisabeth Moss’ performance – often in scenes where she’s experiencing unbelievable levels of terror or emotional and physical pain and yet cannot scream – is one of the most detailed and compelling on any screen right now.
It’s a spy thriller, a domestic drama, and, as June wanders through the shell of an old newspaper office, as compelling a look at the end of a civilisation as The Walking Dead. It’s often devastating, but you can’t look away – and if you’re going to sit through death and misery, this is a lot more useful than Game Of Thrones, and probably still less miserable.