Saturday, August 26, 2017
Bleak, squalid and sordid
MARGARET ATWOOD – HAROLD PINTER – FAYE DUNAWAY – THE HANDMAID4S TALE – 1990
I will only consider here the 1990 film with Faye Dunaway, not the novel beyond, nor of course the recent adaptation as a TV series that is not available on the DVD market.
We are in the United States of America after it became the Republic of Gilead. I will not enter the Biblical meaning of this word that can be used to designate some regions of the old Biblical Israel and three characters in the Old Testament, among them the father of Jephthah, that crazy general who swore to have the first person coming to him after the battle if it is a victory sacrificed to God. He thus has to put his daughter to death.
But that gives you the flavor of the story. In this Republic of Gilead, men are absolutely dominant and they have reinstalled or reinstated the standard total submission of women to go against the total dissolution of society before due to sexual promiscuity, abortion, family planning, contraception, artificial insemination, gender orientation, etc. Women have to go back to their main and only function in that male-dominated society: to give birth to babies conceived in the normal natural good old intercourse between a man and a woman. And that’s where the story becomes bizarre or even squalid.
Women are, like for men in Brave New World, divided into clearly defined groups that have to dress in a particular color. Grey is for the plain servants. Then, red is for the handmaids, those whose sole function is to procreate babies with the master of the household they are attached to. White is for some kind of religious characters who participate in various rites. Maroon is for the women who are controlling the handmaids, assigning them wherever they are needed, and of course punishing them when “necessary.” Blue is for the ladies of the various households whose babies are produced by the handmaids attached to them and their husbands. All men are in black. There is a last category of women: those who cannot be integrated into any category, particularly as handmaids and are the “girls” of some parties for the masculine elite. In other words, they are the escorts or working girls of the elite men of the society.
The disease that is the cause of this situation is purely surreal, causing the sterility of most women and those who are not sterile are used as reproductive human chattel. The film though seems to hint that the man, Fred, Kate, the handmaid the story is centered on, should provide with a child, is sterile, and his sterile wife, Serena, suggests Kate should use the services of her husband’s chauffeur, Nick. All that is of course sordid. During that time Fred, the Commander, is systematically hunting down the resistance with the clear objective of exterminating them. Today we call that genocide. Apart from Blacks and gays, the concept of resisting people is rather vague and we can wonder how this elite can live if there is no proletariat, even lumpen-proletariat to work for them.
Fred falls in love with Kate, but that brings no pregnancy. Nick, on the other hand, falls in love with her too and she with him and that brings a pregnancy as if without equally shared love there is no pregnancy possible. When Serena learned that Fred had taken Kate to one of the elite’s parties and that she had worn her own black clothing instead of her red dress, she becomes furious and wants a vengeance. On the other hand, Nick and Kate want to escape Gilead with their future baby.
That’s the dramatic knot in the thread of that story, a Gordian knot actually and it will have to be cut, but how and for what future?
The fact that this old novel and this here old film have been remembered for a TV series has, of course, to do with the election of the present President of the USA. The rise of bigotry and populism in the USA today is seen as dangerous. Just the same way The Man in the High Castle, an old novel stating the same type of dystopia centered on men essentially has been brought back to life by Amazon Prime, this Handmaid’s Tale, centered as it is on women, had to be brought back to life too. The present period in our globalized world is bringing up the question of refusing change and even dreaming of a full U-turn and going back to what the world was in the past, the Old Testament in this case, A victory of Japan and Germany in 1945 in The Man in the High Castle. The pessimist are going to say that will lead to the Third World War. The optimist will say that God or man’s rational wisdom will prevail and the Singularity of Intelligent Machines will bring humanity eternal life and absolute peace with no work what so ever to do. The dream of a permanent siesta or farniente. Though it may very well be a Matrix that leads to eternal slavery and war.
Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU
# posted by Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU @ 2:06 PM 
