Handmaid's Tale S3 - at least it isn't Alabama

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > TV IV > Handmaid's Tale S3 - at least it isn't Alabama

Zane: Nov 14, 2007

Snow Cone Capone posted:

Also can we loving stop with the moral ambiguity for Lawrence?

there needs to be moment to moment drama within an episodic television framework. human existence in a real totalitarian society is just as crushing but a lot more banal.

# ¿ Jul 2, 2019 23:34

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# ¿ Apr 25, 2024 21:22

Zane: Nov 14, 2007

there is an inadvertently fatal circularity to the show's logic. one of gilead's great crimes is to reduce women to their reproductive function, to making children. the heroic concern of the female protagonists, meanwhile, in response to this great crime, has been.. to focus endlessly on their intimate relationships and their children to the exclusion of almost any other concern.

# ¿ Jul 4, 2019 02:19

Zane: Nov 14, 2007

Wafflecopper posted:

If I was living in a theocratic military dictatorship that executes people for infidelity I would totally shank their high command and expect to get away with it because I�m a total badass rebel, why can�t these characters be like me

something like this will deffo happen. it'll just be drawn out over a couple more seasons.

# ¿ Jul 8, 2019 09:33

Zane: Nov 14, 2007

Cheesus posted:

What were people's impressions of the first season? Had you read the book before hand?

I really liked the idea of the Handmaid's Tale world, wanted to get into the series, and so I read the book for the first time this week. I thought it was amazing from start to finish.

Then I tried to watch S1E1 and only made it through about 20 minutes.

First, Luke being African American was a hard pill to swallow given book-Gilead's racism. I misgivings when I saw some youtube videos showing Samira Wiley as Moira but seeing a mulato handmaiden at the initial Loaves and Fishes was a really tough pill to swallow.

But it was Offred/June that took me out of it. For the first 1/3 of the book, she acts brainwashed/PTSD by her experience, not daring to even think any kind of resistance thought until her first evening session with the Commander. Up until that point in the book, she established Moira and her mother as the ones likely to have those kind of thoughts and she seems never up to their level of power. Then in those first 20 minutes (and I guess more like 5 if you eliminate the flashback with the attempted escape Luke and her daughter), she's thinking Ofglen a "pious little poo poo" and in the Loaves and Fishes, thinking about firing a machinegun at one of the guardians.

Thinking that Atwood's follow up would be more of what I was expecting, The Testaments is unravelling for me there as well. A lot of the power of original book comes the vague ideas of how Gilead came to be, leaving it up to your imagination which is somewhat easy to hand off to my suspension of disbelief. I'm halfway through and Atwood's detailing of the fall and how Lydia formed the basis of how women were to be handled in Gilead tweaks my disbelief in a major way (along with the second story of "Sending baby Nicole back to Gilead might be just the thing to bring them down! " is striking me as a very Arrested Development Tobias "open marriage" moment).

yes. the original novel was always best at capturing the lived experience of totalitarian oppression: an experience of privation, repetition, trammeled thinking, bad compromises, and small victories. there was never much thought given to the broader structural plausibility of the setting -- let alone how to narrate the collective rise and fall of such a society through the lens, perhaps even the agency, of a single person. i was never much impressed by this tv adaptation. too significantly driven by the cheap conventions of commercial screenwriting from the start: where each season has to have a dramatic arc, where the waterfords have to be hot, where the stakes have to always be raised with more and more brutality and control while the protagonist simultaneously always has to survive and be moving forward, etc.

but atwood herself seems to arbitrarily alternate between two modes: serious literary fiction mode and commercial hack fiction mode. for example: oryx and crake is almost a masterpiece of dystopian science fiction. while the year of the flood, the sequel, is kind of a hacky cash in. this is fine if it works for her but it can also obviously create a mess of things.

Zane fucked around with this message at 21:01 on May 21, 2021

# ¿ May 21, 2021 18:57

Zane: Nov 14, 2007

socialsecurity posted:

Raping your black slaves is like racism 101 anyway, it is not surprising they use them as handmaids.

it gets pretty complicated. if we're talking about the antebellum south: masters had a prerogative to dominate their black slaves but also an expectation to preserve the christian respectability of their family more narrowly as well as the purity of the white race more broadly. the coherence of the racial dividing line--the security of white power and black subordination, the conceptual distinction between white civilization and black primitivism--was an explicit social imperative that whites of all classes generally took heed of. the legal status--or legitimacy--of mixed race children was therefore an extremely difficult and contentious issue. many masters took advantage of their slave women; but this was also one of the most dangerous threats to the image of responsible gentility that they cultivated. the children that issued would often be enslaved; sometimes they would be freed. it's not a dynamic that the show--inasmuch as there is aspirational historical reference to past racial oppression in the americas--is really capable of grappling with.

Zane fucked around with this message at 02:38 on May 24, 2021

# ¿ May 23, 2021 05:57

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > TV IV > Handmaid's Tale S3 - at least it isn't Alabama