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I found myself sitting through the first episode of Hulu's The Handmaid's Tale on Sunday afternoon, and in an unexpected confluence of the stars, the following Wednesday I stumbled on a Yale Courses lecture on YouTube about Queer Theory and Gender Performativity which reminded me of my affection for the theories of one Judith Butler. It's an interesting bit of timing that one thing happened and then the other, but definitely fitting as my thoughts upon listening to the lecture immediately had me circling how ideas of gender and sex have been appropriated and re-written in The Handmaid's Tale, and how survival in this universe requires unflagging commitment to performing an identity that has absolutely nothing to do with the individual and everything to do with a prescribed archetype created for the benefit of the top 1% of the population. In other words, it's like real life!
Elizabeth Moss is gold in the performance and the running interior monologue throughout the episode beautifully depicts the duality of June as Offred (reality vs function), offering entre into the world and creating immediate empathy or the character. It also provided quite a bit of backstory quickly and efficiently, highlighted Offred's peril, and ratcheted up the tension while maintaining the calm, orderly yet sinister veneer that Gilead is working so hard to maintain. Without that I never would have made it through the hour and trust me when I say that there were moments when I was ready to call it a day. My commitment to watching THMT flagged considerably at times and I was convinced that I wasn't going to be able to watch this series, except that a wealth of friends advised me that it's worth watching. The advice, offered consistently by everyone: don't try and binge it.
I won't. I figured that out within the first 15 minutes. Not that binge-ing was much of an option. I'm not good at bingeing TV unless I'm installing twists or braids and I'm not going to be doing anything else for the next eight to 72 hours.
This first episode of THMT, Offred is a set-up. It introduces characters to a degree, but mostly it introduces you to roles. Here are some characters and here are the parts that they play. They have lines to recite (Martha and Offred in the kitchen, Ofglen and Offred at the market) and stage direction to follow (the Ceremony, the salvaging), and although there is some suggestion that this is willing and organic participation (Janine, Aunt Lydia who tells a room of newly enslaved women at the Red Center: “This may not seem ordinary to you right now, but after a time it will. This will become ordinary.”), there is plenty of work being done throughout the episode to undermine the party line rhetoric of a cohesive and cooperative community. It's in all of the sideways glances, Rita's (Kitchen!Martha) sullen demeanor, Serena Joy's hostility, all the plastic platitudes and empty smiles. Everyone is angry and everyone is afraid: “They do that really well,” Ofglen tells Offred. “Make us distrust each other.”
And yet they play the game. To stay alive, for whatever reasons they may have: for Offred that reason is Hannah, her stolen daughter.
As it ties into Judith Butler's theory's of performative and performed gender, I thought about how Offred comments on identity and the erasure of unique selfhood in favor of broad categorical performances of femininity as a type based upon compartmentalized biological functions interpreted from the Bible: the fertile handmaids in red, the domestic Martha's in green, the lawful, but infertile wives in blue. Performance of an individual identity as it is depicted in the flashback scenes where the ladies where bikinis and tube tops and drink beer out of red cups, is reduced and rewritten into these deeply formalized and ceremonial performances. And with the exception of Offred's one complete (and completely deserving) freak out moment, they continue round the clock in public and private.
Offred was a crazy hour of TV. It made me rage-y. My friend M commented, “It's so good! It's not like that the whole time.” To which I replied: “Not what? A total rage-making festival of misogynistic fuckery?!” She was talking about the brainwashing and the indoctrination stuff. I wanted to punch someone. And then go take down the patriarchy. Admittedly, it doesn't take much for me to want to punch someone and take down the patriarchy, but watching THMT made the compulsion feel especially urgent and necessary.
So, I'm going to queue up The Handmaid's Tale and struggle through season one. It's probably going to take me awhile. I am interested in seeing how June leaks out around the edges of the splintered Offred mask. I'm interested to see how all the women exist and survive and resist within the cage that has been forced upon them. I'm not interested in the government sanctioned and institutionalized rape or the brainwashing and female on female violence that is undoubtedly at work (we saw some of what that looked like in the Red Center). This show is SO uncomfortable, but in a lot of very real ways it is necessary and timely and it's something that has to be seen and witnessed. The orderliness of the world that Offred has found herself in suggests a level of complicity that is frightening and which bring to mind the kinds of arguments and dismissals made by people who were willing to vote for Donald Trump despite the corrupt, racist, misogynistic rhetoric that was a hallmark of his campaign. People turning a blind eye to the kind of person that he is and the reality of all the threats and promises that he made.
Although the timeframe within THMT universe seems alarmingly truncated, it also reminds me that Nazi Germany and the Third Reich flared hot and bright within a twelve year period. True Facts. So, this is always a possibility. The current administration's willingness and determination to strip American citizens of their rights (women's reproductive rights, as well as civil rights and protections for immigrants and LGBTQ) is an alarming promise for what the future could look like. If we let those kinds of things go, allow them to happen because maybe they don't affect us personally, then where does it stop? What performance are we willing to participate in? Which identity do we want to assume: Rebel, Conformist, Survivor? Personally, I don't want to be a June and I damn well don't want to be an Offred. I don't want to wear any of the masks that I have seen so far. I am deeply invested in the performance of the identity that I have now, an identity that, as a single, childless, un-married hetero woman, is already in tension with the society that I live in. Hopefully, there's a third option. I would kind of bet on it. Until we get to meet her, what I have learned, among many things, is that the world burns. We all know it does. All we need is a match and the right conditions.
Elizabeth Moss is gold in the performance and the running interior monologue throughout the episode beautifully depicts the duality of June as Offred (reality vs function), offering entre into the world and creating immediate empathy or the character. It also provided quite a bit of backstory quickly and efficiently, highlighted Offred's peril, and ratcheted up the tension while maintaining the calm, orderly yet sinister veneer that Gilead is working so hard to maintain. Without that I never would have made it through the hour and trust me when I say that there were moments when I was ready to call it a day. My commitment to watching THMT flagged considerably at times and I was convinced that I wasn't going to be able to watch this series, except that a wealth of friends advised me that it's worth watching. The advice, offered consistently by everyone: don't try and binge it.
I won't. I figured that out within the first 15 minutes. Not that binge-ing was much of an option. I'm not good at bingeing TV unless I'm installing twists or braids and I'm not going to be doing anything else for the next eight to 72 hours.
This first episode of THMT, Offred is a set-up. It introduces characters to a degree, but mostly it introduces you to roles. Here are some characters and here are the parts that they play. They have lines to recite (Martha and Offred in the kitchen, Ofglen and Offred at the market) and stage direction to follow (the Ceremony, the salvaging), and although there is some suggestion that this is willing and organic participation (Janine, Aunt Lydia who tells a room of newly enslaved women at the Red Center: “This may not seem ordinary to you right now, but after a time it will. This will become ordinary.”), there is plenty of work being done throughout the episode to undermine the party line rhetoric of a cohesive and cooperative community. It's in all of the sideways glances, Rita's (Kitchen!Martha) sullen demeanor, Serena Joy's hostility, all the plastic platitudes and empty smiles. Everyone is angry and everyone is afraid: “They do that really well,” Ofglen tells Offred. “Make us distrust each other.”
And yet they play the game. To stay alive, for whatever reasons they may have: for Offred that reason is Hannah, her stolen daughter.
As it ties into Judith Butler's theory's of performative and performed gender, I thought about how Offred comments on identity and the erasure of unique selfhood in favor of broad categorical performances of femininity as a type based upon compartmentalized biological functions interpreted from the Bible: the fertile handmaids in red, the domestic Martha's in green, the lawful, but infertile wives in blue. Performance of an individual identity as it is depicted in the flashback scenes where the ladies where bikinis and tube tops and drink beer out of red cups, is reduced and rewritten into these deeply formalized and ceremonial performances. And with the exception of Offred's one complete (and completely deserving) freak out moment, they continue round the clock in public and private.
Offred was a crazy hour of TV. It made me rage-y. My friend M commented, “It's so good! It's not like that the whole time.” To which I replied: “Not what? A total rage-making festival of misogynistic fuckery?!” She was talking about the brainwashing and the indoctrination stuff. I wanted to punch someone. And then go take down the patriarchy. Admittedly, it doesn't take much for me to want to punch someone and take down the patriarchy, but watching THMT made the compulsion feel especially urgent and necessary.
So, I'm going to queue up The Handmaid's Tale and struggle through season one. It's probably going to take me awhile. I am interested in seeing how June leaks out around the edges of the splintered Offred mask. I'm interested to see how all the women exist and survive and resist within the cage that has been forced upon them. I'm not interested in the government sanctioned and institutionalized rape or the brainwashing and female on female violence that is undoubtedly at work (we saw some of what that looked like in the Red Center). This show is SO uncomfortable, but in a lot of very real ways it is necessary and timely and it's something that has to be seen and witnessed. The orderliness of the world that Offred has found herself in suggests a level of complicity that is frightening and which bring to mind the kinds of arguments and dismissals made by people who were willing to vote for Donald Trump despite the corrupt, racist, misogynistic rhetoric that was a hallmark of his campaign. People turning a blind eye to the kind of person that he is and the reality of all the threats and promises that he made.
Although the timeframe within THMT universe seems alarmingly truncated, it also reminds me that Nazi Germany and the Third Reich flared hot and bright within a twelve year period. True Facts. So, this is always a possibility. The current administration's willingness and determination to strip American citizens of their rights (women's reproductive rights, as well as civil rights and protections for immigrants and LGBTQ) is an alarming promise for what the future could look like. If we let those kinds of things go, allow them to happen because maybe they don't affect us personally, then where does it stop? What performance are we willing to participate in? Which identity do we want to assume: Rebel, Conformist, Survivor? Personally, I don't want to be a June and I damn well don't want to be an Offred. I don't want to wear any of the masks that I have seen so far. I am deeply invested in the performance of the identity that I have now, an identity that, as a single, childless, un-married hetero woman, is already in tension with the society that I live in. Hopefully, there's a third option. I would kind of bet on it. Until we get to meet her, what I have learned, among many things, is that the world burns. We all know it does. All we need is a match and the right conditions.
