First three episodes are available (officially on Hulu). I watched the first one and while it's slow moving, it's horrifying. Horrifyingly well done, horrifyingly timely and horrifying in general. I mean, OK. All the critics falling over each other saying this fits Trumpism well are kinda exaggerating - after all, the novel was written in the 80s and a reaction to Reagan. We know Reagan didn't introduce totalitarism after all and Trump won't either. But it's IMHO a glimpse into the a world where the likes of the Tea Party have absolute control. This is what those people are dreaming of. Kudos to the makers there. Squareness partnered with absolute oppression is woven into the show's DNA from the very first shot forward. They are working with extreme opposites, like the setting in a quaint European style small town - only with hanged bodies dangling from pretty much everywhere. It's almost ironic. And continues with the characters. While the titular Handmaid does not buy the bullshit and longs for her child and her old, cool life, she's quite OK to take part in a bloody execution. She also really doesn't seem to mind chatting away with the other girls while execution victims are rotting away nearby. Well worth watching. But don't prepare to be in a good mood afterwards. As for me, goddammit I have had the book for going on 25 years but never got around to reading it.
Fun fact: Elizabeth Moss is a Scientologist. So you have a woman who is in a repressive cult, in a series about a country ran by a repressive cult.
Unbelievable that anyone in their right mind would think that President Reagan was some kind of "proto totalitarian".
Not Reagan at all, not even Trump by his own designs (in the religious aspect) but it's not the figurehead it's the fifth column they empower, and Trump has enabled them much more than Reagan did. Agree with the OP on all points regarding the program
OTOH, HIV/AIDS became a thing because Reagan chose to stick his head up his ass because gays were icky and who cared if they died, amirite? So.....no.
They didn't even know what AIDS was until well into Reagan's presidency. Nor all of its transmission methods until well into his second term. Blaming Reagan for the advance of a venereal disease is beyond stupid. And President Reagan and his wife Nancy had homosexuals stay as guests in the White House so I'm not sure where you got the idea he thought "gays were icky" and "who cared if they died".
Yea, that's it pretty much, isn't it. Types like Trump, Strache, Wilders or LePen fertilize the ground for extremism even if it's not really intentional. Well OK it is in the case of LePen. This one can't be played down to populist. Our own Strache probably neither. What happens when those people get their way can be watched in Turkey right now. Thunderous applause and all. In Poland and Hungary, proto-Turkeys are in the making. Those democracies are young and unstable enough to allow 'strong men' to undermine their institutions. However, I do think mature western democracies are strong enough to survive this breed of politician. Trump got some mighty fine lessons already. I can see Gilead in Turkey. But I cannot see it in the US or Western Europe unless they suffer a civilization ending type of disaster. Thinking about it, climate change has potential there...
I read the novel when it was first released. Haven’t seen any of the visual versions (the current series is a remake of the 1990 film). It’s an allegory, a cautionary tale, if you will, that reminds us that such things were not unheard of in our history (q.v. droit de seigneur in medieval Europe, and the “rights” of slave masters as late as 1865). All of this has happened before – granted, on a smaller-than-national scale – but still.
Not that unbelievable, people like to believe, and the further left have a history of thinking the right are always going to be totalitarian (usually whilst chanting Soviet leaders names at marches, we had one on London over the weekend ) You get the reverse too, just look at how many fools though Obama was going to turn the US into some kind of Islamic Republic. Ideologues of every stripe and affiliation demonise their opposites, it's how they get to justify the means that usually contradict their morals.
I used to work in the Health Dept. in those days. We got all the stats from CDC, before anyone else. People died because no one knew what HIV was until 1985. AIDS had a good head start. Then, a lot of gay men ( it wasn't so much in the lesbian population) thought, that if they changed their religion, they could avoid AIDS, but they were already infected. Odd stat. Around 1995, the disease had shifted from gay men and drug addicts to adolescent GIRLS. If girls were promiscuous, it wasn't with adolescent boys.
I remember the nationwide freek out when it was discovered that HIV was transmittable by heterosexual sex. They started the thing of "you're not just sleeping with one person but with everyone that person has slept with the last seven years" and so forth. Ignoring the fact that a man having sex with an HIV positive woman who is asymptomatic has only a 1 in 300 chance of contracting the virus.
This is the first show that has actually captured my attention since queen of the south. Holy shit I cannot stop watching. I think there's only a couple episodes left on Hulu before I run out. You ever watch so much of something like this that when you're done you feel kinda disconnected from real life? Yep.
Binging this with the wife. So far, it seems like the strongest argument for the 2nd Amendment I've ever seen put to television. As an aside, I think M. Atwood has some really lurid sexual fantasies, or hang-ups. Take your pick. This shit is fucking WARPED.
what within the fiction of the shows leads you to believe their was no active Second Amendment in force?
Yeah, it’s supposed to be modern America, plus a few years for everything to play out the way it did. The problem wasn’t that people didn’t have guns, but that the other side had the military and police on their side. You can have your fantasy of defending yourself from a tyrannical government, but the government has drones and all kinds of scary shit and one person against an army isn’t going to last long. There is some mentions of some states managing to fight back and there were some militias fighting them, but they’re getting picked off and they aren’t afraid to use nukes on civilians.
I've not seen the show but in the novel the Sons of Jacob suspend the constitution after gaining power, power which was gained through the massive support of the fundamentalist right who are exactly the demographic most likely to support the 2nd. The book is politically ambiguous in many regards but at least insofar as religion is concerned it works as a critique of theocracy as a form of government and offers a very realistic view of how fundamentalist lobbying could readily translate into exactly such a state, Gilead was based on observation of real world examples and how women's rights do in fact become curtailed (mens too by virtue of being coerced into the machinery of oppression - bear in mind most of the executions and corporal punishments we see are actually of men who dissent or subvert the Republic's control). The ritual rapes are in fact based on the real subjugation of women in many societies and the dress code for the handmaids is a cross between the commonplace dress of puritanical christians and the depersonalising nature of the hijab. It isn't about a sexual fetish, Margaret Atwood uses sexual dynamics and control as metaphors throughout a lot of her books to explore wider issues about society, religion, capitalism, control and individuality. "The Heart Goes Last" is another such example where she examines the power of conformity and deconstructs ideas of monogamy, choice and the values freedom and fidelity where society breaks down and the norms and conventions of society are redefined. Crucially, however, in THT this situation doesn't initially come from a tyrannical government forcibly taking people's rights, it comes from grassroots support for religious fundamentalism working it's way up the system enabled by a perceived threat, suggesting strongly that far from being a check or balance the 2nd might well have contributed to the situation. The Commander is shown to have been a highly influential member of the SoJ, influenced heavily by his wife who was a televangelist advocating for a return to traditional values. Her popularity among the public is ironically suggested to have been crucial to his status and by extension her own subsequent subjugation by the movement she helped spawn, a cause for her resentment and bitterness which is targeted at Offred.
Here is, perhaps, my biggest problem with the premise of this show: In part, Gilead is based on the need for children. Apparently in this world, birth and fertility rates have dropped so low that there is a clear and present danger to the species itself, and to individual nation-states. So you have a group of women who are viable/fertile. In any sane world where you wanted them to birth children (and lots of them), they would be placed on the highest pedestal. Pampered, well cared for, babied. They would be allowed to choose their mates or perhaps be artificially inseminated. Instead, they are tagged like cattle, harshly indoctrinated, beaten, electrocuted, made to act as executioners, terrorized, and routinely raped. In a world where miscarriages, stillbirth, and infant mortality are sky-high, the never-ending physical and mental abuse in these women's' lives seems to be designed to literally drive them either crazy or to suicide (or both), actively work at NOT being impregnated, and cause miscarriages early and often. Maybe the ladies can speak to it, but another thing I find hard to believe is the notion that the average woman would idly stand by (or participate) as her husband raped another woman at least once a month. Even in the sterile, ritualized manner it happens in Gilead, it seems to me that the wives would want to cut their husbands' nuts off in pretty short order. The whole thing just seems nutty to me. That said, we are really enjoying the show. Every time June offers up some little measure of resistance, I'm practically cheering out loud.
And yet, historically, this is how it's always worked in such societies. You can even see hints of it in today's evangelical movement, where they praise women and babies, but actively work to ensure that they don't have access to the kinds of things which would ensure a healthy life for them: access to prenatal care, birth control, proper food, nutrition, education, and healthcare after the child's born. You might as well ask why the slaves in some southern state's didn't revolt and kill their masters in the parts of the Confederacy where blacks outnumbered whites. Or why parents kept sending their kids to Catholic school, even they knew that their child would be molested by the priests. Any individual woman (or slave, for that matter) who killed her husband (or master) could expect the rest of society to kill them in as brutal and horrible manner as possible. The society also structures itself so that those oppressed lack the necessary knowledge needed to organize a mass uprising. (It's the main reason why they're kept illiterate.) That's the point. It is nutty, but societies still do it all over the world. Even in the US (just look at the Fundamentalist Mormon groups out there).
You've just essentially made the case for feminism, which is very much the point of the book. Nonetheless as @Tuckerfan has already observed that isn't what happens in practise. Women become a resource available to the rich and powerful, reduced to having no agency and treated as either cattle or prestige items, dehumanised in either instance. They gain value, but value as possessions not people. Incidentally the wives do want to cut their husbands nuts off, but the wry observational part is the way they displace the blame onto the handmaids, whom they blme for every minor fault, which is very much the pattern we observe in reality, the woman turn on each other for the behaviours of their men. This book really isn't a fantasy, it's very much rooted in the reality of the female experience and observable patterns of human behaviour. Gilead is really not that different from some aspects of medieval society or even modern day extremist christian or islamic societies. No, it's not at all really, considering the Sons of Jacob are very much intended to represent the 2nd amendment supporting religious fundamental right wing. They fake an attack on congress in order to stoke the very paranoia which keeps the 2nd amendment in place and use it to put themselves in a well supported position of power. Considering it was written a quarter of a century ago it's remarkably prescient given the current circumstances where far from being a check on power the 2nd is used as a political platform to justify that power.
the part that gave me the biggest issue? Geography. If Gilead ever came to America it wouldn't be in the Northeast but in the deep south Appalachia and the red-state plains. Basically all the places Trump won by 70%+
