The Handmaid's Tale film/essay discussion

Cinematically, The Handmaid’s Tale for me was very unsuccessful. The film itself feels much more and too obviously trying to illustrate ideas and falls flat in attempting to create a believable dystopian world; THX-1138, 1984, and Fight Club all succeeded in doing this very well. Even though both 1984 and The Handmaid’s Tale were made in roughly the same era, 1984 doesn’t have any sense of being an “80’s” or cheesy 90’s film, whereas The Handmaid’s Tale unfortunately carried for me a sense of redundant drabness all the way through, which took away from any of the ideas or significance it tried to portray, e.g. extrapolating on the possibilities of domination by ultra-ring-wing evangelical Christian fundamentalism, women being more or less sex slaves, etc. The film was obviously very detailed and tried to re-create scenarios from within the novel, but never crosses the line into a convincing or interesting depiction of this scenario. It often feels too obvious what is happening is being staged, whereas in the films mentioned above this sense was not there, at least for me.

In the essay “Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale: Critical Reception”, there is an interesting point about “the novel’s deeper interest in the process of narrative itself, a process repeatedly fascinating to Offred”. Since her husband was killed right in front of her, and she was taken away from her child who was left on a cold mountain, then sent into a life of virtual sex slavery, constant vigilance, and dehumanization, Offred probably did have the need to tell herself stories in an attempt to stay sane, though apparently she knew they were only fictions she created herself. This theoretical depth is absent in the film.

It is interesting to think of the film as an extrapolation of the potential of Christian fundamentalists taking control of the United States, where there is no sex except for procreation, where conformity and mind control are enforced through creepy Puritan entreaty to emotion rather than intelligence, e.g. as in the scene where the handmaid’s surround and kill a man who was a political rebel and not a rapist, then the girl walks calmly away saying “have a good day”, with blood on her face. It’s a good example of a kind of dystopia where intelligence has been subverted to the point where medieval ritual with wild appeals to emotion is reinstated, combined hideously with a sleek modern technological environment. Atwood, in a similar way to Fight Club, might have touched and extrapolated on potentials already present that could lead to American fascism, which might be why as stated in the essay that The Handmaid’s Tale “deserves an honored space on the small shelf of cautionary tales that have entered modern folklore”, and account for its popularity.

The film might not have been as well done as the others, and the score too falls flat with none of the emotional depth or suggestiveness of 1984, especially considering Offred’s predicament of totally losing her life and her previous identity, but the ideas are still useful in thinking about where the present could go with the current dominance of ultra-right-wing puritan Christian fundamentalism in U.S. politics today.