The Handmaid's Tale, second season -- Feminists be gettin' paranoid

[Byker]

"The parallels between the current rapid militarization of the US and Gilead
are undeniable." Get used to it, sweetie...
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Elisabeth Moss on The Handmaid’s Tale: ‘This is happening in real life. Wake
up, people’

As the Golden Globe-winning drama returns, the creators and cast of the show
discuss the new horrors on the horizon, and how it’s become a symbol of new
resistance

by Jane Mulkerrins
7 May 2018

“We knew that we were doing something important,” says Samira Wiley,
reflecting on the feelings of the cast and creators of The Handmaid’s Tale
in the months running up to the show’s launch last spring. “We knew that we
were making something with a lot of integrity. But we definitely didn’t mean
for it to be that timely and that relevant.”

Nine months later, the television adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s seminal
dystopian novel was not only sweeping the boards at every awards ceremony –
remarkable for a new show, with such dark, brutal themes – but had rapidly
become a social phenomenon, too: a symbol of the new resistance, with the
handmaids’ uniform co-opted by protesters at US courthouses, on marches, and
in Hollywood itself.

“When we were arriving at the Golden Globes, there were a bunch of handmaids
outside,” recalls Wiley, who plays Moira, rebellious best friend of the main
protagonist Offred. The group, calling themselves the Hollywood Handmaids,
were holding a silent protest to demand an end to sexual assaults and
inequalities in the industry.

“It has been absolutely crazy,” says Wiley, shaking her head in disbelief.

Certainly, the fervor surrounding the series is unprecedented, which is all
the more exceptional considering that Atwood wrote the story in 1984. There
have been previous adaptations, too: a 1990 film written by Harold Pinter
and starring Natasha Richardson, plus an opera and a ballet. But none have
sparked the torrent of memes, slogan T-shirts bearing lines from the book,
and even, apparently, tattoos of its quotable mantras.

The phenomenal success of the series has, of course, been assisted by the
story’s prescience: it’s set in a fundamentalist theocracy where women and
minorities have been stripped of all rights, the former no longer even
allowed to read or write, and all but the top 1% forced into servitude and
ranked according to their fertility. And if, a few short months into the
Trump presidency, season one arrived into an atmosphere of bewildered
anxiety, then season two, which hits UK screens later this month, has landed
in an atmosphere of radicalized action, with the #MeToo and Time’s Up
movements demanding the end of widespread cultures of misogyny, sexual
harassment and abuse.

On a sub-zero day in Toronto, Canada, I visit the set of the show to meet
the cast and creators. Such is the secrecy surrounding the production that
all correspondence with the team regarding my visit refers to the show as
“Rocket Woman”, a security measure designed to avert overexcited fans, but
also any fundamentalist groups who might object to its themes, I am told. As
season one ended exactly as the novel did – with a pregnant Offred bundled
into a van – this second series will not be Atwood’s story, moving beyond
the content of the classic text. She is a consultant on the show, and
approves the scripts. However, “that doesn’t mean I have veto power”, the
author recently told Newsweek. “No one would ever give an author that; you’d
be really foolish to do so.” That simultaneously bestows both freedom and
pressure on the show’s writers, on top of already enormous expectations.

“The way we made the first season, which was in great ignorance, is exactly
the way we’re trying to make the second season,” says showrunner Bruce
Miller, as he shows me around the sprawling set. “We try not to think about
people out there dissecting it, but instead just think about making
something that’s cool.’

Elisabeth Moss, a producer on the show as well as its star, also points out
that the first season was not a simple facsimile of the book, either:
timelines were altered, some details were changed, while partial sentences
were extrapolated from the text to create entire scenes and stories. “We
were faithful to the idea and the tone and the messages of the book,” she
says, “but we kept characters alive that died and we did things that were
never in the book, so we’re not afraid of that.”

Nor, if the season opener is anything to go by, are the team afraid of
pushing the boundaries of bleak, brutal barbarism even further than in the
first series. It is tense, harrowing and bloody; the very opposite of an
easy watch. In a timely echo of 2018, one theme explored is that of
solidarity. “One of the saddest things about season one for me was Serena
[the Commander’s wife, for whom Offred is meant to be bearing a child] not
having any solidarity with Offred, or with any of the handmaids,” says Moss.
“In season two, we start to think about the fact that if these women
actually banded together, they could overthrow Gilead. That’s a very
powerful idea.”

Miller admits that, while the writers did not seek to weave threads from
current news events – such as the #MeToo movement – into the story, it is
impossible not to be influenced by the political and social context in which
The Handmaid’s Tale is made and consumed. “I try to let the audience figure
out the relationship between the show and the real world, and how it’s
interpreted and where it’s put in a political context,” he says. “But one of
the things the writing staff brought this year was that – because of the
more polarized discussions happening all over the world, but especially in
the US, including the #MeToo movement – you’re starting to hear people
verbalize things you didn’t think people thought any more.”

This season will also see an expansion of the world that Atwood created: the
Colonies, the toxic waste dumps to which “Unwomen” are exiled; and Little
America, in Canada, where refugees from Gilead are living. “There’s also a
scene that addresses journalism in Gilead,” says Moss. “It’s really intense.
But it needs to be addressed. Because, what would have happened to
journalists?” she asks, rhetorically.

In Gilead, environmental factors have caused the birth rate to plunge to
near zero and the few fertile women are installed as forced breeders for the
barren wives of the Commanders of the Faithful. The ages of Serena Joy
(Yvonne Strahovski), along with that of her husband, Commander Fred
Waterford (Joseph Fiennes), were a major detail altered for the adaptation;
both are significantly younger on screen than in the book. “[Offred] and I
being the same age adds an extra layer of jealousy and a devastation,” says
Strahovski. “Here’s a woman who is my age, who can do the things that I want
to do – ie have children – but I can’t.”

For Fiennes, whose character has sex with Offred every month, against her
will, in a bid to get her pregnant, the burden of playing a rapist – albeit
one committing an act sanctioned by the ruling order – does not sit easily.
“I am repulsed by it,” he says, simply. “I am very affected by some of the
things we have to do, this season in particular, I have found some of it
very difficult.”

Much of the most egregious brutality of season one was meted out by – or, at
least, on the orders of – Aunt Lydia, the enforcer of the handmaids’
compliance, played by Ann Dowd. “I think she thought, ‘This is not going to
be tough, not at all. I’m going to get these girls in order,’” reflects
Dowd. “I think the difference for her, for season two, is that she’s far
more challenged than she anticipated she would be. I don’t mean to say that
she is subversive – she’s all in [with the regime], still – but she realizes
it’s not such a straight shot, and all these young women are not all the
same.”

In seeking to build an authentic world beyond that outlined in the book,
Miller and his team drew – as Atwood did in her original story – on history,
creating a meticulously detailed mythology for Gilead. This explains why the
outwardly pious Commanders of the Faith have based themselves in Cambridge,
Massachusetts, north of Boston, rather than Washington DC. “It’s not the
traditional seat of power, but in America it’s the seat of intellectual
power, and Boston has such a huge place in our Puritan history,” Miller
explains. He says he has an unusual advantage in being able to question
Atwood directly about her own inspirations. “Usually when you adapt a
classic, the author is long gone,” says Miller. “But not only is Margaret
very much around, she also has a spectacular memory about what she was
thinking when she wrote The Handmaid’s Tale.”

One criticism leveled at the first season was the show’s depiction of race.
While Miller deliberately created a multiracial world (unlike in the
original book, in which minorities had been exiled), the show did not deal
with, or mention, racism. Among other critical voices, New York magazine
described this as the show’s “greatest failing”. How those criticisms have
been taken on board in the storylines for season two remains to be seen, but
some cast members say that such issues are influencing their performances.

“I watched a lot of movies on slavery, just to see how characters moved,”
says Amanda Brugel, the mixed-race actor who plays Rita, one of Gilead’s
low-ranking domestic servants, whose story will be more prominent this
season. “I especially watched the women who were slaves, versus a character
in our show like Serena Joy, who’s lived a life of freedom. I very much lean
on past experiences in which I felt like I have actually been a different
class, and a slave, in situations just because of my colour,” she says.

Moss and I speak again, a few weeks after my visit to the set, on the day of
the March for Our Lives, held across US cities and organized by the
surviving students of the Parkland school shootings. Donald Trump has
suggested, as a solution to the growing tide of similar tragedies, arming
teachers in schools. “When I heard that, I got chills,” says Moss. “Because
I’m on set with a man pretending to hold a machine gun, in a situation that
he just shouldn’t have one in.”

The parallels between the current rapid militarization of the US and Gilead
are undeniable.

“In the book, Margaret calls it the new normal,” Moss continues. “It’s a
line that Aunt Lydia says – this will all be normal to you one day. That’s
scary to me.” She has no tolerance, however, for people who find the show
itself frightening. “I hate hearing that someone couldn’t watch it because
it was too scary,” she says. “Not because I care about whether or not they
watch my TV show; I don’t give a shit. But I’m like, ‘Really? You don’t have
the balls to watch a TV show? This is happening in your real life. Wake up,
people. Wake up.’”

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2018/may/05/elisabeth-moss-handmaids-tale-this-is-happening-in-real-life-wake-up-people