The Misogynist Future of Hulu's The Handmaid's Tale Feels Terrifyingly Within Reach
In the first couple episodes of Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale, there are two aerial shots depicting the handmaids, dressed in vibrant scarlet, flocking together in an animalistic swarm. The first is when they murder an accused rapist at the behest of their totalitarian government. The second is when one of their own has her baby pulled from her arms immediately after giving birth, only this time, the handmaids move in to comfort her. Though depicting opposite ends of the spectrum of human behavior (on one side brutality and on the other compassion), the scenes are bonded by violence because that’s what drives a handmaid’s life in this brutal 10-episode adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s 1985 dystopian novel.
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The concept of The Handmaid’s Tale is wildly disturbing, but hardly unfathomable as we enter an era of increasingly draconian abortion law and a far-right leaning federal government that—during the brief time that the Trump administration has been in office—has shown little regard for the constitution and human rights in general. In the world of The Handmaid’s Tale, and the world we live in, it takes very little time for a governing body to strip you of your freedom, especially when you already belong to a discriminated class like women, people of color, and non-Christians.
In this new world order of Gilead, women are divided into four roles, all of them suppressive to varying degrees. There are the wives, privileged but barren women who are married to powerful men, the Marthas who make up the kitchen and house servants, the fertile handmaids, and the Aunts, government lackeys who train the handmaids through cruel and often violent means. (Atwood has a brief cameo as an Aunt in “Offred,” the first episode of the series.) The women who fall outside these categories—because they are too old, too poor, too rebellious, etc.—are dubbed “unwomen” and are sent to the colonies where, rumor has it, their lives are short and spent laboring in nuclear waste fields. Abortion doctors, practicing Jews, and gay people are executed, their bodies put on public display to warn Gilead’s civilians against resistance.
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Still, Offred is the center of the story and Moss plays her with the appropriate balance of fear, resentment, sadness, and simmering rage. Bledel, for whom I had low expectations, pulls out an unexpected dry sense of humor and—in one of the series’ most horrifying and heartbreaking sequences—palpable sense of grief and terror. Orange Is the New Black’s Samira Wiley—playing Offred’s college best friend Moira—is predictably engaging, capturing a character who is dangerously boisterous and rebellious. It’s a good thing Hulu decided to diversify a previously all-white story (in Atwood’s novel, Gilead, as a white supremacist society, killed or exiled all people of color, calling them “Children of Ham”)—not just because the last thing we need is another overwhelmingly white TV show, but also because we’re now graced with the solid performances of Wiley and Fagbenle.
Read More: http://themuse.jezebel.com/the-misogynist-future-of-hulus-the-handmaids-tale-feels-1794188254
Makes me ill just reading this. Fact is, it could happen here in the not so distant future.
RESIST PERSIST
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Had a profound affect on me. No plans to watch it. Scarry as hell
Not sure how to do it on TV. Depends on how much it costs I would love to watch.
Kudos to Reed Morano. 
Thanks bsis.
