The Handmaids Tale : Emotional Devastation on a Weekly Basis

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > TV IV > The Handmaids Tale : Emotional Devastation on a Weekly Basis

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

Le Saboteur posted:

The one thing I find totally unbelievable is how quickly they make the modern world fall in this show. Goes from like 0 to religious militia they've never heard of once locking women out of their jobs. I know why they do it because of a lack of time it's just really weird how they chose to do it.

I think the reason it feels this way is because they really haven't sold the flashbacks as being significantly different to reality. We're told that birth rates are down and infant mortality is up, but society looks exactly like modern America until suddenly it doesn't. And the characters seem to be taken as much by surprise as we are. It gives the impression that it's exactly like the real world and then suddenly there's this fundamentalist theocracy out of nowhere.

Snak posted:

Yeah, I think the realism of how the world got from the world we know to how it is isn't really important. She could have set it farther in the future if she wanted it to be more realistic, but it's better to have characters that remember what it was like "before".

The thing is though, they shouldn't remember what it was like when the world was "normal", because their normal wouldn't have been the same as ours to begin with.

Bobbin Threadbare posted:

But like I said before, the point of the book isn't to show how quickly and easily this could happen. It's to show how uncomfortably close we are to it already.

This is definitely true, but I think that's actually undermined by the setting. Using an alien world, an alternate reality, the far future, etc. as a parallel for reality works much better than saying "this could happen if just a few little things were different".

precision posted:

Also, we aren't really been shown a "totality" situation. They have total control over this small area the show takes place in, but we already know there are rebels and whatever is going on in Alaska.

That just raises more problems. If the theocracy only controls a small area and is at war with the rest of America (and presumably America's allies) then how have they not already lost? How is everyone just living their lives like they're not in the middle of a war?

whalesteak posted:

And the particicution felt like it happened too early in the story- I wasn't quite sure if they were trying to demonstrate that in this version, Ofred was attacking the dude because she feared retribution, or was venting frustration, or had internalized her role and presumed feelings as a handmaid.

That's one example of a recurring problem with this show, which is that it seems to expect the audience to already agree with it. Like, they don't explain her actions there, because there's this unspoken understanding that we all know why she's doing that.

Unrelated observation: Yvonne Strahovski looks like a cross between Lena Headey and Portia de Rossi. It keeps distracting me because, when I see her, for a second I think it's one or the other of them.

# ¿ May 3, 2017 04:35

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# ¿ Apr 18, 2024 11:22

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

Fucker cheated at Scrabble. If you challenge a word and it turns out to be in the dictionary, you lose your turn.

# ¿ May 4, 2017 16:55

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

FourLeaf posted:

The flashbacks were great but the present day plot kind of went off the rails in this ep. I appreciate that they need to expand on the book to make it into a series but this latest plot development makes no sense.

1) Gilead is so desperate for babies they need to use Handmaids in the first place

2) But their extreme religious fundamentalism forces them to conceive using a method where even if the Handmaid is fertile she's less likely to get pregnant (bizarre rape ritual once a month instead of IVF/artificial insemination, if the man is infertile she will be punished), meaning they should be even more desperate for babies than people in other, less misogynist countries

3) Despite being so desperate, they are willing to trade Handmaids away to other countries??

If anything Gilead should be even worse off than Mexico and should be trying to import Handmaids from there, not the other way around.

I'd love to view this show in a more allegorical way, but they are the ones insisting on explicitly outlining the details and contradicting themselves instead of leaving it to the imagination like the book.

Yeah, that just seemed incredibly dumb. As long as Mexico hasn't also outlawed science and medicine as Gilead seems to have, thetre's no way they could be worse off.

INH5 posted:

Though the more this show emphasizes the infertility crisis aspect of the setting, the more jarring I find it that the flashbacks show a pre-Gilead world that's pretty much indistinguishable from our own apart from the hospital scenes in episode 2. It seems like a big failure of imagination to present something like this as causing no major social changes except the one specific change of inspiring a bunch of religious nutcases to overthrow the US government.

I think they're way too invested in making it "relatable" by having it be set in a world so close to ours that it makes it totally implausible.

pigdog posted:

Actually fast-forwarding at 2X speed about half the time. The acting is good, I like Elizabeth Moss a lot, the theme of the show is fascinating, but they just. don't. have. enough. story. and therefore they pad the thing out.

I can't imagine not watching it at double speed. It's soooo loving slow.

WeAreTheRomans posted:

Huh. Well at the time we were watching I checked this with my partner (who is a heterosexual woman to my knowledge) and she agreed he was repulsive, but no accounting for taste I guess

There is definitely something weirdly off-putting about his appearance.

There Bias Two posted:

\Every shot in this show is like a painting. The symmetry, the placement of the characters, the lighting... I don't understand how someone could watch this on 2x speed instead of taking all that in. It's part of the experience.

Visuals, in general, do basically nothing for me. :shrug:

# ¿ May 21, 2017 03:32

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

WeAreTheRomans posted:

I'm not being facetious, but why not just read audiobooks?

I don't like audiobooks. I find most narrators irritating, and there's no way to skim over the boring parts as you can with a book. TV and movies are totally different because the actors add depth and detail to the characters and the visuals do contribute to the story. I don't enjoy the visuals as their own thing but I appreciate their ability to convey information. And I do like radio plays, but there's just not the quantity of them available to me that there is TV. And I want to watch the things that other people are watching so I can participate in conversation.

# ¿ May 21, 2017 06:13

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

There Bias Two posted:

What? Why would you skim over parts of a book?

I'm a very non-visual thinker. Descriptive bits are essentially meaningless to me so I skim over them.

# ¿ May 21, 2017 14:16

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

There Bias Two posted:

Out of curiosity, what do you do for a living?

At the moment, nothing. I have worked in a call centre and other miscellaneous stuff in market research but mostly I've been a student living off Centrelink. Studied computer science for a while until I realised how boring it was and that I'd basically picked it because I didn't know what I wanted to do and I'd always been "good with computers". Most recently studied writing. Planning on going back to school again to become a teacher.

I don't know why you ant to know any of that, but here you are.

# ¿ May 22, 2017 05:02

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

There Bias Two posted:

I was just wondering what a person with your apparent lack of visual thinking would excel at.

Well, that could be a completely different question. Lots of people have jobs they're not good at.

# ¿ May 22, 2017 14:16

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

Lum_ posted:

The vibe I got from that whole sequence was that free societies weren't as efficient at leveraging what few fertile women exist as Gilead's raping.

Yeah, and that makes no sense, because Gilead's methods are not efficient at all.

# ¿ May 28, 2017 14:35

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

Pac-Manioc Root posted:

Ha, I did not know that, but if the Reddit Atheist Pope will go along to get along that sorta proves my thesis.

I think in his case it's basically just a shallow justification for hating Muslims.

Ubiquitous_ posted:

I haven't felt as connected to the show in the past couple episodes with their male-centric origin stories, moreso a problem this week than last. I just don't find Nick to be a strong character or the actor to be very talented.

The big problem with Nick's background is that it didn't really illuminate anything. I still don't know if he's a true believer or just going along with it. I don't really know what his situation was like before. He seems to have had the same job since right at the beginning, except that now he's also a spy. He's just a really shallow, uninteresting character.

# ¿ Jun 2, 2017 06:56

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

jfood posted:

He's a shallow, uninteresting person. That's exactly what the flashback showed. He's not particularly motivated, but easily manipulated. He's just a life-long loser, the same type of shithead who becomes a klansmen or a brownshirt. I seriously doubt there was anything interesting or nuanced about the lives Cletus 'the knight' or Otto the gate guard at Treblinka, just your average, everyday fucksticks who are content to look at the cash and the sense of 'meaning' it gives or gave to their empty lives, not the hatemachine it spits out of.

I mean, sure, but we don't need a series of flashbacks to tell us that. It was already evident.

# ¿ Jun 2, 2017 10:29

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# ¿ Apr 18, 2024 11:22

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

Rochallor posted:

I'm not sure about widows, I don't remember anything about them in the book. It might be Gilead is still new enough that there's very few widows running around. But logic would dictate there's either some sort of retirement home type thing, or they just transition into being Marthas.

Going by the old testament, they'd probably have to marry their husband's closest male relative or something like that.

Defenestration posted:

Letters in the package make no sense except for the cheap emotional shot of listening to their words and seeing June spread them on the floor. And then she falls asleep with them all out like that? Come on, she knows she has to watch her back so hard.

That scene annoyed me. I get that she'd have that instant emotional reaction to want to see them all, but wouldn't the very next reaction be panic, like "oh poo poo I have to hide these"?

# ¿ Jun 20, 2017 09:15

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > TV IV > The Handmaids Tale : Emotional Devastation on a Weekly Basis