All stories matter
The Times writes up the making of a tv serial based on The Handmaid’s Tale.
Before the series even debuts on Wednesday, April 26, references to “The Handmaid’s Tale” — shorthand for repressive patriarchy — seem ubiquitous. A photo of a group of male Republicans at the White House debating maternity services with nary a woman in sight earned the social media hashtag #Gilead. Last month, women in Handmaids’ red dresses and bonnets sat side-by-side in the Texas State Capitol to protest anti-abortion measures under consideration.
In short the dystopian premise is horrifyingly more plausible than it was a year ago.
It was still the Obama era when Hulu pursued the property two years ago, as part of a strategy to broaden its identity from a glorified video recorder to a producer of original programming. The showrunner Bruce Miller threw his hat in the ring when Ilene Chaiken, who had been developing the adaptation at MGM, departed for “Empire.” A veteran writer-producer on shows including “E.R.” and “Eureka,” Mr. Miller had been obsessed with the novel since reading it as an undergraduate at Brown, even having his agent continually check to see if the film or TV rights were available.
“Offred spoke to me,” Mr. Miller said. “She’s in this nightmarish situation but she keeps her funny cynicism and sarcasm. She finds really interesting ways to pull levers of power and express herself.”
But Mr. Miller wasn’t a shoo-in for showrunner because producers were looking for a woman, he recalled. “The Handmaid’s Tale” has been a seminal rite-of-passage novel for many young women for over three decades; a feminist sacred text.
“It’s sacred to me, too,” Mr. Miller said. “But I don’t feel like it’s a male or female story; it’s a survival story.”
Uhhhhhhhh…well that’s why the producers should have gone on looking for a woman until they found one. Here’s the thing: it is a “female” story. So much so. It’s about what life is like for actual women right now in some parts of the planet, like Saudi Arabia for instance. It’s not about what life is like for people in general in a theocracy, it’s about how theocracy grinds women into the dirt. It is a female story.
However.
“I was incredibly, and am still incredibly mindful, of the fact that I’m a boy,” Mr. Miller said. “You always try to find people who support your deficits.”
To that end, when Mr. Miller finished writing the first two episodes, he sent them to Ms. Atwood; she approved. He made sure his writing staff was almost entirely female, and hired women to direct all but two of the 10 episodes.
I hope they’re all clear that it’s a patriarchal theocracy, not that other kind of theocracy. (That’s a joke, because all theocracies are patriarchal. That’s the point of them. The first thing Islamists do when they take over is shove all the women into hijab or worse.)
Gilead is not technically a futuristic society, but a backward (or sideways) glance. Ms. Atwood is something of a scholar of Puritanism, and she said every horrific episode in the story happened somewhere in history already, whether stonings or enslavement, reproductive restrictions or forbidding women to read.
“The theory being that if human beings have done it once they can do it again,” said Ms. Atwood, who recently received the National Book Critics Circle lifetime achievement award, and at 77, seems more current than ever.
Yeah those second-wavers, man.
I’m glad to hear he at least understood that the voices need to be women’s voices, and got Atwood’s input as well. That’s about as respectful as most men in Hollywood seem to be capable of. It’s not a huge bar, save for the number of blokes who would’ve tripped over it horribly. I’m looking forward to watching the series.
Yes, but I think he is trying to avoid the idea that it is a story for women exclusively, that it does not have themes that should resonate for the other humans.
Oh thank you for explaining that. I never would have figured it out otherwise.
In return, I’ll explain something to you. Nearly all of popular culture centers on men; nearly all movies star five men and maybe one woman; nearly never does anyone worry that that might look as if it’s a story for men exclusively. But when a story does in fact center on women – oh oh oh, then we have to rush to reassure everyone that it’s not “a story for women exclusively.”
Pleasure.
I realise that most stories are more centred on men and that ‘women’s’ stories can get ghettoised, but I think that is a good reason to get out there and try to make sure half the audience doesn’t run away, which is what I think he is doing. If men as well as women watch this, it will be good for everyone. No point in ignoring the reality because we don’t like it, better to change it. I think the insistence on the ‘women’s’ aspect of the new Ghostbusters probably damaged its impact, because a lot of men thought they were not being invited to the party. Bridesmaids, on the other hand, didn’t sell itself as a women’s film (just a film about women), and didn’t suffer in the same way.
Yes, and Schindler’s List should have been marketed as about genocide against all people, and Hidden Figures should have been marketed as about all NASA scientists, und so weiter.
But the reality remains, The Handmaid’s Tale is not “a story of survival under a cruel regime.” It’s a story of a theocratic patriarchal regime that enslaves women. The former is false advertising and an insult.
I think Schindler’s List was advertised as a film about a crime against humanity and the resistance to it, and not a special interest film for Jews. And that makes sense, the horror of what happened should reach all of us, even if we are not Jewish, and I don’t see any harm in making that point, and I see no insult to Jews in it.
Same goes for Handmaid’s Tale I think. It is about the horror faced by women specifically (although men suffer under that state as well, of course) , but the message about the horror should resonate with all humans. I think that is what he was driving at.
Fucking hell. A movie about the Holocaust is not “a special interest film for Jews.” The phrase “crime against humanity” generally does refer to crimes against particular sets of people, especially genocide, and the whole point is that attempts to eliminate sets of people are crimes against humanity.
And no men don’t “suffer under that state as well, of course” – it is the women who are enslaved. The women, not the men. That’s what the book is about: theocratic oppression of the female half of humanity.