The Handmaid’s Tale Is a Riveting, Relevant, and Political Drama, So Why Won’t the Creators Say So?

Indie Wire ^ | April 22, 2017 | Chris O'Falt

[EdnaMode]

Last night, Hulu’s adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival. A frightening and incredibly gripping piece of visual storytelling from cinematographer-turned-director Reed Morano, it stands as a remarkable piece of art that speaks to atrocities committed against women around the world and throughout history.

While writer and executive producer Bruce Miller began developing the 33-year-old novel before the rise of Donald Trump, the story of women who have been stripped of all agency to exist solely as breeding vessels for the patriarchy seems all too prescient in a 2017 when immigrants are being separated from their children, facts are “alternative,” and women are losing access to healthcare at the hands of a president who’s admitted sexual assault on audiotape.

[EdnaMode]

This article is ridiculous. Nearly every actress on the show has been saying how "relevant" this series is in every single interview I've come across. At least one actress on the show who had been previously apolitical has been doing it. Maybe some of them actually aren't comfortable being political and had only been doing so in their social media and interviews to avoid being blacklisted.

[Ciaphas Cain]

I read the novel a long time ago. Even as a high school kid I thought it was crap.

[Da Coyote]

Really?

It is difficult to imagine how a writer this dense manages to eat and excrete.

[nopardons]

This book was written as an anti-Christian, anti-America under anything but a faaaaaaaar lefty president and government.

This is the SECOND time that it was filmed. I doubt that it's any better than the first stab at it, which wasn't all that good.....unless one is a lefty lunatic and extremely stupid to boot.

I read the book, when it came out and it wasn't a bad read, IF you can managed to divorce oneself from political polemics, which run throughout it.

[montag813]

I was forced to read this tripe by a feminist college professor. It sure IS relevant...TO ISLAM! Not to Donald Trump, Republicans or the “Christian Right.” This is NON-FICTION as far as the Islamic world treats women.

[nickcarraway]

How can Handmaid's Tale be considered against the feminist agenda? It describes a terrifying patriarchal dystopia. But the fact is, the world we live in is a far less scary world for women that we are living in, so, isn't it saying women today have it relatively good?

What's more, it seems very critical of kinds of reproductive technology that Planned Parenthood and the left are in favor of now.

Plus, if you really think about it, it's anti-daycare and proxy motherhood.

[nickcarraway]

Women are getting married later and having far fewer children. How is this like The Handmaid's Tale?

[Secret Agent Man]

The 90s movie was well-acted, but the story was sophomotic and crap. Acting cant save a poor story.

[ransomnote]

They are also choosing to bear children without a father (single but decide to be moms), freeze their eggs for later use or choosing not to have children at all.

[Yardstick]

The story is informative in that it shows you how ridiculously paranoid leftists are about Christians.

[Bratch]

Fantasy

Reality

[Diana in Wisconsin]

I’ve been reading Margaret Atwood since I was a teenager. Her writing is amazing. I love her stories. And they are just that: STORIES.

If anything you read ‘sways’ you to think in some way differently than how you were raised or what you’ve come to believe due to personal experiences in life, you are a weak person who has no moral compass!

I likened, ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ to any other ‘cautionary’ tale of the time - ‘Farenheight 451’ ‘1984’ ‘Animal Farm’ ‘Atlas Shrugged’ ‘Catch 22’ etc. I’ve read everything. Ask me to name something I HAVEN’T read; I’ll have no answer for you, LOL!

Socialists and The Enemy Media. They destroy anything they touch with their fecking, ‘analysis’ of EVERYTHING, but they NEVER look into their own hearts of darkness.

[Diana in Wisconsin]

Ping to #12.

[nopardons]

SPOT ON !

[A_perfect_lady]

It sounds like she basically took the story of a slave woman from the Islamic world and just changed the location and the religion. Hey Presto, instant money.

[nickcarraway]

My favorite is her poem:

You Fit Into Me

You fit into me
like a hook into an eye

a fish hook
an open eye

[Diana in Wisconsin]

Love Sometimes Hurts! ;)

[Secret Agent Man]

I mean, put it this way. I know what they were TRYING to do. They didn’t achieve it. It’s like a freshman lit semester writing project that tye person thinks is an A but it comes back a C.

[2ndDivisionVet]

But they still haven’t made a film out of The Wheel of Time.

[nickcarraway]

Okay, did you read these two:

We by Yevgeny Zamyatin. This was finished in 1921, so very early on in the Soviet experiment. If you read 1984, you have to read this, by someone who really experienced it. It inspired: Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, Ayn Rand's Anthem, George Orwell's 1884, Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano. and Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed (1974, among others.

The Iron Heel by Jack London. Even though he mixes up some thing, this 1908 novel seems to predict World War I Stalin, and Hitler.