10 times The Handmaid’s Tale got way too real

Rebekah Valentine

The Handmaid’s Tale — “Faithful” — Episode 105 — Serena Joy makes Offred a surprising proposition. Offred remembers the unconventional beginnings of her relationship with her husband. Offred (Elisabeth Moss), shown. (Photo by: George Kraychyk/Hulu)

In the current climate of political dumpster fires, sexism, and constant worry about what will have happened in the news overnight, The Handmaid’s Tale feels sharply real at times.

Even if The Handmaid’s Tale‘s writers, production staff, and Margeret Atwood herself could not have anticipated the current presidency, the scariest thing about The Handmaid’s Tale as it wraps up its fifth episode isn’t any of the events that actually transpire in the show; at least, not on their own. Rather, it’s the constant reminders and realizations as to just how close we might be to something like the Republic of Gilead, and the flashbacks showing the process of how things got that way in the first place. It hits painfully close to home, time and time again.

Sure, women walking around with blinders on doesn’t exactly scream 20xx immediately, but that particular vision isn’t meant to. What The Handmaid’s Tale in Hulu series form does so much better than the book (by virtue of the medium, with all respect to Atwood) is show, via setting, props, and simple interactions, how “normal” the society was until very, very recently. June, Emily, Luke, and even Waterford, Serena Joy, and all of them were once people walking the streets beside one another, unknowing. How did everything go so wrong, so fast?

I don’t have the answers, but here are ten particular moments when The Handmaid’s Tale just got way too real for me:

The Handmaid’s Tale — “Faithful” Episode 105 — Serena Joy makes Offred a surprising proposition. Offred remembers the unconventional beginnings of her relationship with her husband. Ofglen (Alexis Bledel), shown. (Photo by: George Kraychyk/Hulu)

Grocery store scenes

Seems harmless enough, right? But as I said above, the props and set dressing often frighten the audience even as unrelated conversations occur in the foreground. Pause, sometime, at one of those grocery store scenes. Not the close-ups of the same-ish canned foods with only one brand, but rather, look at the whole picture. The way the shelves are stocked and organized. The way people mill about through the aisles. It all screams of normalcy, even as the people in the aisles are wearing giant sack-like robes.

For some reason, when I read the book, I pictured something more like a counter where you would have to request certain items and be given them by a dark-looking person guarded by a rifleman. I didn’t expect a normal, reappropriated grocery store to suddenly be filled with a nightmare. It’s a simple image, but a powerful one.

The Handmaid’s Tale — “Nolite Te Bastardes Carborundorum” Episode 104 — Punished by Serena Joy, Offred begins to unravel and reflects on her time with Moira at the Red Center. A complication during the Ceremony threatens Offred’s survival with the Commander and Serena Joy. Offred (Elisabeth Moss), shown. (Photo by: George Kraychyk/Hulu)

Moira and June at the cafe

In episode 3, “Birth,” a flashback shows Moira and June visiting a cafe after a run just before everything goes to total hell. It’s the first sign that everything has completely turned, but it’s a subtle enough one that it doesn’t quite set off alarm bells just yet.

There’s a man behind the counter who is impossibly rude and derogatory toward the two women for seemingly no reason as June’s card fails. The two assume that the guy is just a jerk, and leave. But the moment is so normal. We’ve all had embarrassing encounters where our card suddenly didn’t work for one reason or another, and we’ve all had god-awful service, if maybe not quite to that degree of verbal abuse.

The cafe scene perfectly illustrates the “gradually heating bathtub” June speaks of. Nothing changes instantaneously. Until you’ve made so many concessions that, suddenly, it just has, and there’s not much that can be done about it.

THE HANDMAID’S TALE — “Offred” – Episode 101 – Offred, one the few fertile women known as Handmaids in the oppressive Republic of Gilead, struggles to survive as a reproductive surrogate for a powerful Commander and his resentful wife. Offered (Elisabeth Moss), shown. (Photo by: Take Five/Hulu)

Shots of the house

That house is so normal and it bothers me. You just expect dystopias to look … awful, you know? Torn apart, burning, rusted metal and piles of weapons. And those do exist in some scenes. But the house that the Commander and Serena Joy live in is one that any well-off couple might live in, even now.

The well-pruned garden out front, the elegant lacy curtains…I got upset during Episode 5 last night because the light switches looked just like switches I remember a well-off friend of mine having in her kitchen in high school, a dark copper color against a gentle green painted wall.

Literally, anyone could live there, not just a horrible military man and his acquiescing, conniving wife and their miserable staff. Where do all the furnishings come from? Do people still make those somewhere, or will everything gradually start to fade as Gilead languishes until no one in power can get anything nice that they want anymore, and everyone has to make do with brokenness and decay?

June’s boss gives in

During a flashback in episode 3, June’s boss fires her (and all of the other women working with her). Granted, it’s at gunpoint, essentially, but it shows how fragile society all is. Put a gun to the head of my boss, and no matter how much he likes me, I don’t expect him to trade his life for my job.

Put a gun to the head of enough bosses, and women (or whatever group you want to oppress) don’t have jobs anymore. You can imagine the two had a good relationship before. She was a writer, and the climate she lived in suggests that he (and those in the office) were likely open-minded, politically engaged people. If you rewatch the episode, you can pick up on that just from the office environment itself — it’s open, without cubicles.

But we are so easily undone at the threat of losing everything we have, and if anyone can amass enough of a force with a common cause, that threat becomes a very real one.

Moira and June’s escape

One more set dressing mention, then I promise I’m done. Remember what I said earlier, about nothing looking like a dystopia? You do get one more look at that as Moira and June attempt to escape the Red Center in episode 4. However, like most of Handmaid’s Tale, it’s never what you expect.

Instead of seeing an already-destroyed world remade in the image of those controlling it, you see the process of destruction. They are tearing down street signs, demolishing buildings the two characters used to spend time in, and wiping away any trace of real society that once existed. They two can follow the remnants as they remember, but it’s nearly not enough for Moira and certainly not enough to save June.

Nothing disappears overnight. The ease with which we see Gilead dismantling life as they, and we, know it is a sharp reminder of how the things we rely on can so easily be taken away from us.

The protests

You never see exactly what led to the creation of the Republic of Gilead in The Handmaid’s Tale. You get the idea that there was war, and political turmoil overseas. Probably nuclear issues, given the “colonies,” and there are hints in the book.

But the way everything unfolds in the show, you never quite know just what was being protested, or just what everyone was so upset about. You never grasp how the reins of power were handed off from normal, civilized adults to religious nutjobs intent on bringing society under an Old Testament style of order. But the protests you see nonetheless look frighteningly like ones we have now.

I’m sure part of this is due to them visually taking cues from real life events, but there’s more to it than that. The threat of violence, the groups you can see represented in the crowd protesting, and the panic when everything goes south. It’s scary in the show, but scarier because it’s all happened before. We’ve seen this type of outbreak at protests, but the blame is spun constantly to those protesting, so we never point the finger at the atrocities being protested in the first place.

Handmaid training

I’m treading lightly here, because I don’t want to be misunderstood, but I was raised in a faith tradition where sexuality was treated in a manner just close enough to Gilead that I can see echoes in June’s “education” at the Red Center in flashbacks throughout the episodes.

The way in which fertility and sexuality were treated as these sacred things around which relationships were defined, the implicit shame on the victim for being sexually assaulted, and the importance placed on producing children above all else are all very familiar themes I’ve heard before.

This is by no means an attempt to condemn religiosity, but rather to point out that the same harmful attitudes that are staples of Gileadian life already exist in our society, propagated by humans who want power and control whether or not they accurately represent the teachings of their faith.

It’s a fine, fine line to tread and a place where extremism easily finds a home if the base beliefs do not demonstrate a respect for human dignity and free will.

The magazine quiz

The magazine Waterford gives June in Episode 5 is in good shape. Still shiny, put together. It’s not old. It’s only a few years old, at best. Things can just change that quickly, it seems. I’ve seen magazine quizzes like that; even read them in waiting rooms or in the bathroom.

They’re silly, I know, and I don’t especially enjoy them. I’m not sure June did either. Heck, I’ve even been on the side of condemning those types of magazines for how they portrayed women as objects, or photoshopped skinny models to be idolized in all the wrong ways. That seems to be the argument Waterford is going for here when he dismisses women’s former freedoms and calls their lives improved now, sort of.

How quickly our own arguments turn, distended, against us. He instead turns it too far the other way, by totally removing the objectification for a new objectification. Removing one form of sexism replaces it with another, even more horrifying form. No one wanted their problems to be “solved” by a bunch of self-righteous, bigoted men with guns.

The Handmaid’s Tale — “Late” Episode 103 — Offred visits Janine’s baby with Serena Joy and remembers the early days of the revolution before Gilead. Ofglen faces a difficult challenge. Ofglen (Alexis Bledel), shown. (Photo by: George Kraychyk/Hulu)

“They can’t do that” “They just did”

How often have I found myself saying those words over the last few months? “They can’t do that.” “There’s no way.” “It won’t happen, not here.” Well, they can, and there is, and it did. Over and over, whatever “it” is, however seemingly illegal or ridiculous or obviously morally wrong, happens again and again.

I don’t want to sound like an end times doom-sayer on the sidewalk. But I’ll admit that current events make it difficult to distinguish how bad things really could get. As of now, we’re all still leading mostly normal lives, the same ones we lived before the election. And we may get through this one way or another and continue right on doing just that. But never before has there been such day to day concern about potential war, nuclear weapons, corruption in the government, rampant racism and sexism, economic concerns, rights-trampling, I-could-go-on as there is now.

And lines like this alongside every other item in this slideshow remind me that we’re always only a few “they can’t do that”s away from something awful if good people with power don’t fight back. Because heaven knows June, like us, didn’t have the power to meaningfully fight back.

The Handmaid’s Tale — “Birth Day” — Episode 102 — Offred and her fellow Handmaids assist with the delivery of Janine’s baby, prompting Offred to recall her own daughter’s birth. Offred draws closer to Ofglen while dreading a secret meeting with the Commander. Offred (Elisabeth Moss) and Commander Waterford (Joseph Fiennes), shown. (Photo by: George Kraychyk/Hulu)

Numbness

I’m a bit nervous about saying this last one, because it may be just me, and may make me sound callous or jaded or worse. But when I watch shows, I usually want to cheer for the main characters and celebrate their triumphs. I want them to succeed. And I do want June to succeed in escaping this awful world. The trouble is, I’m not sure she can. There are no high points or happy moments in The Handmaid’s Tale whatsoever. Everything is either bad, worse, or holy-hell-awful. Which leads to me, subconsciously, celebrating the times when it’s only just bad.

I catch myself, at times, feeling relief when people show her “kindness,” even if it’s just disguised sexism or condescension. I feel relief when punishment for “crimes” is only some physical violence, rather than death or mutilation. I breathe easier when Serena Joy or Waterford lets something go that she might otherwise be arrested for. And all of that is horrifying, because all of this is horrifying.

Next: The Handmaid’s Tale episode 5 recap: Faithful

That numbness to actual depravity just because “things could be worse” is one of the hallmarks of the recent election, if in a different sense than in Handmaid’s Tale. When so much is so bad, it’s easy to just block it all out and only react when it’s really bad, celebrating when it’s only a little bad because it could so easily be worse. For me, that’s the most painfully real thing about watching The Handmaid’s Tale; it’s a feeling that’s making me take better stock of how I react to reality.

Rebekah Valentine