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This is also not a review that argues The Handmaid’s Tale is a sucky series that could only take place in the Islamic world, so just leave the Trump administration alone, you whiny feminists! Real oppression is when you can’t legally drive a car! If you want to read those reviews, click on the hyperlinks associated with them.
If you want my political opinion of the series, its closest approximation is found in this article, written in The Atlantic, because The Atlantic will always deliver something that makes me smile, nod, and wish I could have written it myself. Maybe one day some important person at The Atlantic will stumble upon my humble movie reviews and contact me with a job offer that pays the big bucks to write for them. Until then, faithful readers, I’ll continue as a Bystander.
What I want to focus on is The Handmaid’s Tale as a piece of art and its story-telling techniques. Atwood’s novel, stylistically, is unique in many ways—I’d argue most of those ways can be traced to how the narrative unfolds, builds tension, and at the same time, revels in ambiguity.
The ten-episode series, released weekly over the last couple of months, messes with the chronology of the novel, which initially, shouldn’t be too troubling to audiences who have read it. Offred, the narrator, relates her story with liberal use of flashbacks to the “time before,” freely mixing up memories of her childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood to make sense of her present position as a handmaid for the newly-formed theocracy of Gilead. Smells, images, and sounds will trigger Offred’s memories, which serve as allusions to the events of the 1980s and the so-called Moral Majority that threatened the social progress of the United States. Interestingly, Atwood wrote The Handmaid’s Tale in Germany, just a few years before the iron curtain fell, and by her own account, had totalitarianism on the brain when she crafted her story—not uncommon for dystopian fiction.
Readers are transported from the present time to the “time before” by references to artifacts of a womanhood stamped out under the boot of the Gileadean regime: nail varnish, short skirts, high school dances, sex for pleasure, hand lotion—any tokens of female liberation and individuality you can think of show up in elegiac fashion in the novel, specific to its time and place. The result is a highly-individualized narrative, driven by the subjectivity of its speaker, who, it appears, seems to be telling herself her story until the novel’s epilogue, which is when readers learn Offred’s story was recorded on a series of tapes and discovered in the future. Offred’s cerebral, singular voice invites readers to consider their own lives in relation to the events referred to in the book and either confirms or denies their own subjectivity of experience, especially if those audience members are women.
Hulu’s adaptation preserves the subjective voice of Offred, but opens up that perspective to include extraneous interpretations of what Gilead would look like through the eyes of other characters, including Serena Joy, Ofglen, and Offred’s husband from the “time before,” Luke. With those additional perspectives comes additional storylines and subplots. As a result, they lose some of the ambiguous clout Offred casts upon them. (Though, to be fair, the original Serena Joy is supposed to be a caricature of Phyllis Schlafly, so some of her ambiguity is already dissolved when audiences see the connections to between the two women in the book). Hulu is able to make Ofglen, Serena Joy, and Luke more complex than Atwood originally does, fine, but the human perspective brought by Offred gets mixed up in the added layers of omniscience the series superimposes on the original story. At the end of the day, you might ask, why does this matter? What does it do to the narrative?
It makes it too long. There. I said it.
Oh, and they’ve renewed it for a second season, possibly more—because apparently 311 pages of a novel needs 20+ hours of on-screen portrayal with lots of pregnant pauses, intense close-ups, beautifully-arranged tableaus, and added backstories and plotlines. The artistry of the series is off the charts, no doubt.
Maybe I’m getting too old to invest hours’ worth of my attention to a screen (ha!), but I couldn’t help but fidget around episode 6 and think to myself, Let’s get on with it…we’re doing the same thing in every episode and at the same time, nothing is happening! And the chronology is all out of order! This response isn’t unique to The Handmaid’s Tale, I should also add. I had the same problems with Netflix’s 13 Reasons Why, another series based on a novel with a highly subjective narrator, whose singular perspective showcases his emotional growth—literally, overnight—as he comes to terms with a girl’s suicide. Netflix added additional plotlines, characters, and perspectives outside of Clay’s, and the result was a sluggish storyline drawn out in the throes of teen drama over two weeks, rather than 12 or so hours as originally presented in the book.
Do you know why Baz Luhrman’s adaptation of The Great Gatsby was so good? It’s because he stuck to the spirit and story of the novel, added an extra narrative layer for Nick Carraway telling his story from a sanitarium. Luhrman didn’t decide to cram 45 extra minutes with a detour to Tom Buchanan’s perspective just to make him more interesting as an antagonist. He also used Fitzgerald’s fantastic prose for most of the script. By contrast, Atwood’s original writing in the series, sadly, is relegated to a few of her memorable one-liners from the book, while the remaining 90% is screenwriter interpretation of already-fine prose.
Hulu’s interpretation of The Handmaid’s Tale includes material not in the novel, which is standard protocol for Hollywood when it gets its clutches on a piece of art. It isn’t always a disaster. But what made this particularly disappointing was the fact that they didn’t need to add anything—Atwood’s writing is already there, intact, and her book is already compelling. And it’s ok to cover it all in one season and then move on with our lives, better for having watched it! Offred’s first-person, subjective position as author of her own story is an artifact in and of itself, especially in light of the epilogue. Female voice and experience are what make the events of The Handmaid’s Tale meaningful; neglecting this important rhetorical trope at the end of the series undermines the significance of female perspective in Hulu’s adaptation of Atwood’s work in the first place, and makes for a somewhat tedious viewing experience for audiences who just want something true to the book, precise, and that maintains the same rhetorical clout of ambiguity that Atwood infuses in the world of Gilead.
To make a long criticism short: it’s ok to leave questions as questions. Hulu doesn’t need to try to answer every single ambiguous moment with clear-cut, spoon-fed answers that not only deviate from the source material, but obfuscate the singular first-person perspective that makes The Handmaid’s Tale compelling in the first place.
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