The early reviews for The Handmaid’s Tale – which Americans have been able to screen in its entirety since Wednesday while Canadians are forced to wait for episodes to be doled out weekly on Bravo TV beginning Sunday (nope, not bitter at all) – have been almost synonymous in praising one specific aspect of the the Hulu miniseries adapted from Margaret Atwood’s novel: its timeliness.
As in most large-scale disputes, two vocal minorities are viewing the present political climate in the United States in two very differing ways. One section of people believe that a course correction is presently underway; that we have strayed from specific values that had previously led us to achieve greatness, and that the only way to return to that period of accomplishment is to embrace those ethics once again. The other perspective suggests that we have halted the social progress of our recent history and begun hurtling ourselves toward a future hellscape; that we are moving backwards closer to ignorance and bias rather than improved equality.
It’s into this environment that The Handmaid’s Tale – a piece of dystopian speculative fiction that envisions a world in which a totalitarian theocracy has overthrown the United States government and, among other things, removed women’s rights – enters. Consider that it was only a few weeks ago that U.S. Vice President Mike Pence cast a rare tie-breaking vote in the Senate to let states deny federal grants to Planned Parenthood, and you don’t have to strain yourself too much to understand where critics are making the connection.
Of course, the miniseries went into development long before Donald Trump was voted into the office of the presidency. And furthermore, the source material was written by Atwood in the early 1980s in response to the Reagan administration threatening the social gains that women had made in the previous two decades. And so, while it’s impossible to doubt the content of The Handmaid’s Tale to be as relevant as ever, its timeliness to the specific social struggles of 2017 wasn’t necessarily intentional.
That doesn’t make the miniseries any less of a work of art, but it does raise interesting questions about how we consume and create art in times of repression – supposed or otherwise. I’m thinking of two specific phenomenons that occurred in the weeks immediately following Trump’s election: 1) Sales of Atwood’s novel and George Orwell’s 1984 went through the roof; and 2) Artists with an opportunity – Lady Gaga performing in the Super Bowl Halftime Show and George Saunders with his first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo – were roundly criticized for not using their respective platforms to take an overt stance against a Trump administration.
Related
- What to do when dystopian futures become the dystopian present
- Why 1984 is a 2017 must-read: Those who forget dystopian fiction are doomed to repeat it
Our impulse to look to art for solace or meaning when our understanding of right and wrong is being threatened is well-proven. However, it seems that the most effective form of this art isn’t something that tackles the subject explicitly, but rather indirectly through allegory, metaphor or extrapolation. This creates a more lasting work; one for which meaning can be inferred not only by an audience at the time of its creation, but future readers and viewers as well.
It also makes me wonder about the punk rock of the 1970’s. Were the artists at the time attempting to actually distill their dissatisfaction with the mainstream through music; or was their art an almost involuntary response? Maybe that’s the difference between the songs that have lasted from that time period, and those that have faded away.
If so, does that make The Handmaid’s Tale the “God Save The Queen” of first literary works and now television miniseries?
No comments:
Post a Comment