The multi-award-winning production of 5 Emmy Awards is based on the famous novel by Canadian Margaret Atwood. It tells the story of a future America turned into a theocratic nightmare. Great script, great performances, and, above all, great talent to amplify on the screen the echo of a country and a world that today arouses uncertainty.
It is not about World War II, although its plot is linked to a nuclear disaster that leaves a large part of the population sterile. And even though both Maria Elena Walsh and Margaret Atwood were born in the 1930s and surely both knew the tram (one in Ramos Mejia, perhaps the other in her native Ottawa), The Handmaid's Tale (The Handmaid's Tale) It is not a melancholic song or an autumnal and unforgivable poetry. And yet, the most singular adaptation of Atwood's novel is also, like María Elena's tango, a silent dialogue, a search between women and friends, a bunch of letters that the hunted hide from the hunters. In that coming and going between a normal past and a nightmarish future, in which one castrates and r-pes in the name of God, and where the family is an imposed patronage, hope can be a memory, a faithless rebellion, a carnal friend.
The Handmaid's Tale won 5 Emmy Awards a few days ago, including no less than Best Series, Best Actress, and Best Screenplay. And the smile of the actress Elizabeth Moss was replicated in all the world's media. The first publicist woman in Mad Men, the last fertile American in The Handmaid's Tale, Moss is a brilliant creature of just 35 years old, the daughter of a jazz music manager father and a harmonica player mother who played with B.B. King. "It's Jack Lemmon, it's Ernest Borgnine in Marty… you want her to succeed. She's very ambitious, but the last thing she would do is step on someone to get to the top," Mathew Weiner, creator of Mad Men, said of her character. the unforgettable Peggy. The one who shouldn't dig too much into the green cloth of the slogans to receive the message of machismo and her shoveling to three bands (Sterling, Cooper) in a men's game in which women barely had a place.
The Handmaid's Tale was created by Bruce Miller and is based on the 1985 novel by Margaret Atwood. The series, a total critical success that has Moss and Atwood themselves as producers, narrates a dystopian era in which, after a civil war and a nuclear crisis that sterilizes a large part of the population, the United States. A theocratic government emerges victorious. A militarized society where there are also new social classes. Or, rather, as old as those of the Ancien Regime before the Enlightenment. The successful oligarchy hunts potentially fertile women: they are the maids. These are called according to the surname of the families that submit them: the interchangeable and abstract Offred, Ofwarren, and Ofdaniel (from Fred, from Warren, from Daniel). The new power changes words and things.
The entire tale is told by the tiny voice of June Osborne/Offred (Elizabeth Moss). In the first chapter, June flees with her husband and her little daughter trying to reach the border of the long-awaited and free Canada. The USA is already a solid and dictatorial fog and the asthmatic flight of a mother and her daughter recalls the pure horror of The Road (based on Cormac McCarthy's novel) in which a father and his son flee from cannibals, between a desolate sky and the groaning of dead trees. But in The Handmaid's Tale, there is no escape or revenge as there is in "Patron", the story by Abelardo Castillo in which the r-ped mother can leave the newborn in front of the helpless man and flee. Here the whole society is the enemy and the series terrifies because it moves within the best science fiction. And the key to this, as Elvio Gandolfo maintains in his recent The Book of Reloaded Genres -and quoting Robert Heinlein-, resides in the fact that, unlike the fantastic genre, it does not deny reality but rather draws on its framework. Horror: Ogres and witches don't exist, but monstrous men and enslaved women make for a disturbing "could happen."
The series displays a sharp and contemporary intelligence that reveals much more than it tells: in this triumph of an ultra-reactionary government, a dystopia is told in which even consumption, like communism -but one built from the start guilt and self-censorship - is sinful. Thus, an aesthetic nihilism unfolds that could be read as Stalinist as extreme right. Brands and labels are prohibited and stores are simply called "Meat" or "Honey and Milk". Disturbing general plans of supermarkets narrated from an amazing art direction give a tone of Soviet and totalitarian lightness where visually the distinction does not exist because there are no marketing contrasts to reach any "target". The maids always wear a red tunic and a white cap. The wives, those childless matrons, Penelopes who embroider the loom of their own confinement while the macho weaves and manages the war, wear a greenish-blue martial dress with an Eva Braun collar. Hard to guess who covets whom in this civil and domestic war between the same S-.
Even so, its endless political subtexts do not lose an iota of oxygen to the perfect aerodynamics of the narrative. Because, despite the commonplaces with which certain liberalism could interpret the series, The Handmaid's Tale (even in the height of Trump) is not essentially a criticism of the United States, but a diatribe against irrational fanaticism. And in today's geopolitics, the power of synecdoche is updated in the face of examples such as the Islamic State. Because there they are, hanging between the walls that accompany the walks of the maids, the bodies of lesbians, intellectuals, and all those who oppose the word of God.
The other sharp and chilling parallel in the story is with the Germany of the rise of Nazism. If it is still difficult to gloss over that gradualness that overwhelmed European folkloric anti-Semitism to the Shoah, in The Handmaid's Tale, paraphrasing Lennon, the woman is the Jew of the world. Pastor Martin Niemoller's finished and worn phrase makes sense for the first time in many decades: we witness in flashbacks and scene by scene the construction of a total subjugation of women. First, those who wear loose clothing are looked down upon; then they throw out, as if it were something isolated, two girls from a bar by "accusing" them of being lesbians; then they fire the women from their jobs and confiscate their wages. When they finally enslave an entire genre, it's already too late. At the end (but at the beginning of hell) will come their re-education as "maids". The electric prod, the mutilation, the clitoral ablation, by "Aunt Lidia" (the extraordinary Ann Dowd, also the winner of an Emmy for best supporting actress). Her outfit is a cross from the "Star Wars" saga, with a pilgrim fresh from the Mayflower and Kapo from the concentration camp. Her eyes collapsed from so much searching for God in the heavens, lower, open, and smile when she smells the fear of the newcomers, whom she subjects to a system of social denunciation and physical and psychological torture.
And there is even more. In the subversive feminism of this dystopia, The Handmaid's Tale confronts as many feminisms as women, regardless of their theoretical frameworks. In this way, as rarely in audiovisual history (an exception would be Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs), the series is encouraged by a female libido and eros that can show an r-pe accompanied by pleasure, in the perverse scene in which the commander caresses Offred's clitoris (something forbidden in ritual r-pe of masters) while abusing her. Or the absence of guilt, of sin, in June/Offred's indecision between her husband, dead or alive, and the janitor and chauffeur of the house, the young, succulent, and noir Nick. As in Hiroshima mon amour, as in the extraordinary The Black book, The Handmaid's Tale understands that, in times of war, the true cowardice was always to look to the side and then blame, shave and spit on women and accuse them of what everyone we always try to do -in bellicose times or times of love and peace.
There was another version of The Handmaid's Tale in 1990, for the big screen. It features Natasha Richardson in the role of Offred and was directed by Volker Schlondorff, the same as The Tin Drum, the classic about the boy who refuses to grow up during the rise of the Third Reich. But the definitive version and the times of its fiction are definitely these, ours. The same as series Once Upon a Time, which is 5 seasons crack down on everything Bruno Bettelheim theorized about fairy tales to give us an adult, adulterous, and single mother Snow White. The times of the new "Wonder Woman" and even of the "Antiprincesas" children's collection, which includes everyone from Clarice Lispector to Violeta Parra.
As Gabriela Massuh says in the biography? Autobiography mirrored in the portrayed? by María Elena Walsh, I was born to be brief, the series, with its horror on its back, can also "mix picaresque, poetry, anger, harshness, and infinite tenderness". The picaresque gore makes us burst with joy when a woman steals a car and runs over mean men, making their brains splash on the asphalt. Nina Simone's epic gospel poetry in the last chapter, singing "Feeling Good": "It's a new dawn, it's a new day, it's a lifetime for me, yeah!" And the infinite tenderness of the character of Moira, the rebellious and hermit, June's close friend, her heart sister, who upon arriving in a promised land (but without a subjugating God) finds a man who calls her "family".
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