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precision posted:Anyone who thinks the world couldn't turn into this show virtually overnight is incredibly naive. Probably not. The biggest issue of realism/plausibility is the totality of it all. We are presented a scenario where society is almost completely restructured. In most authoritarian situations, you don't really see this, because the level of control it would require is beyond most states' abilities. What you have is situations where most people's lives don't change too much, which creates passivity. It would be more realistic if it were more post-apocalyptic, if it were implied that most people are dead and this new world arose from the remains of the old one, rather than arguing for any kind of gradual transition from one to another. Pedro De Heredia fucked around with this message at 23:38 on Apr 29, 2017 |
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Apr 29, 2017 23:33
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Probably not enough to account for the "Pol Pot Is Prez" state of things we've seen so far.
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Apr 29, 2017 23:45
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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. We are. In the first episode, there's a scene in a supermarket. Every single person shopping at the supermarket is a woman, and every single one of them is wearing either the red handmaiden outfit or the gray regular maid outfit. The supermarket shelves are fully stocked (which means this is a functioning society), and we are shown all the labels on the products. They all look the same and have no text (I imagine because women are not allowed to read, but it also suggests no consumer brands either. There's probably a good level of control over production/business. When women walk outside, the streets are largely empty, except for soldiers. It is quite explicitly showing you a world without normal people. The world shown shows no trace of the old world, only a few years into a revolution. The closest we get to being told that there's people out there that are normal is when we're told Nick is so low status that he 'hasn't been assigned a woman yet'. But that suggests a government with such total control over their state that they're even managing the relationship status of random lower class people. This level of reach is implausible. The show takes place in what looks like a reasonably sized city. Let's say it had 1 million people. There are clearly not that amount of people living there. It's not shown and it's impossible for the government of the show to control so many people so strongly. Now, you could say they died, there's way less people now. But that makes it a very different story. It's one thing to say 'we could slowly and then suddenly descent into authoritarianism' and another thing to say 'we could live in some nightmare world where 2/3rds of the population were wiped out and the rest are enslaved by randos'. Pedro De Heredia fucked around with this message at 00:11 on Apr 30, 2017 |
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Apr 30, 2017 00:06
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Cambridge doesn't seem like the most logical place for a theocratic government to have a stronghold on.
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Apr 30, 2017 00:14
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precision posted:The food in the supermarket could easily be read to have been produced elsewhere and stolen with the new authority simply printing new labels for the cans. And yeah, it's implied that most of New England just went to Canada, and I think that was even before the "cops just slaughtering protestors" scene. I don't really think that's what we are meant to read from looking at the supermarket. I also doubt that the economic math would add up if we just assumed "most of New England moved to Canada". This stuff doesn't really matter in terms of enjoyment of the show or book. I read the book way too long ago, but I remember you felt more trapped in its world, since it was more focused on the inner mind of a person living through it, and had less of the old world in it (plus, since it's not a visual medium, you are not seeing a bunch of modern buildings and remembering this is meant to be 'reality'). And obviously the important thing is the ideas. I'm just saying that, in terms of 'this could happen', it probably couldn't, because what the show and book depict (or at least what the book makes you *feel*) is very far away from most authoritarianism, which tends to be less in control.
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Apr 30, 2017 00:21
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Jack Gladney posted:I think that post means that you're being shown a single city under control of a particular regime but without a clear sense of how far its control extends beyond or of how many people live there, or how stable that control is. It's like how ISIS can run a city and if you happen to be in that city, it doesn't really matter what the bigger picture is. The story's built out of 20th-century revolutions like in Cambodia or Iran. It doesn't have to be a totalitarian state or a superpower to kill everyone with glasses or start doing fgm. I know we're being shown a single city. I'm saying that even within a single city, this level of complete control and total submission is implausible. Which isn't a flaw in the book/show, it just makes suggestions that what's shown here could happen a bit of a stretch. Iran is an example of what I'm talking about. Many (most?) people in Iran live lives that you and I could probably recognize as 'normal', even if particulars are different (both because of the country and because of the culture). But it's a country that has a bunch of people in it, who have 'normal' jobs, do 'normal' things, etc. It's easy to overestimate how much control a state can actually exert on its population in any practical sense. And in a large country like the United States, even moreso. Most authoritarian governments rely on some degree of passivity or tacit approval, and they get that passivity and approval from people who are not too affected by the new order. They buy that passivity / approval by not changing some fundamental aspects of their lives too much. In reality, what you would probably see is the change in status and loss of rights limited to the fertile women, and this new situation being passively accepted by non-fertile women (who are most of them) and men whose lives would be allowed to remain mostly the same. Pedro De Heredia fucked around with this message at 00:39 on Apr 30, 2017 |
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Apr 30, 2017 00:30
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Snak posted:But the part of society we're seeing isn't analogous to a city, even if it geographically used to be one. We're seeing the estates of the super rich, their nearby academy, and their local market. This is not a place that is near peasents. It's not an urban center. I don't think so. What you're saying, essentially, is that what they're showing you is an aberration: that this is not what things are like. But... what would the point of that be? No, the point is to show you how things are. They show you the essence of this world (that it's extremely mysoginistic and that women are under some pretty brutal control) through a character who is not special, but rather living what many characters are living. The themes and the world aren't really interesting if we're meant to assume that somewhere not too far there's a bunch of poor people living lives indistinguishable from Pre-Gilead ones. Pedro De Heredia fucked around with this message at 00:51 on Apr 30, 2017 |
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Apr 30, 2017 00:49
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