#and are reenacting the handmaid’s tale

[gauwaine]

sometimes you have to read a book that is incredibly dumb and mediocre

[humunbean]

Handmaid’s Tale 4x07 “Home”

***spoiler alert*** PTSD etc 

So June clearly has PTSD. She’s having flashbacks which are depicted as very visual. In reality, they tend not to be that way. Usually something will trigger your memory, but not visually. Your body, it's physiological response is what the remembering is. You relive how you felt. 

June raped Luke. Classic trauma reenactment. She did what was done to her to gain control over her trauma. I don’t know how their relationship can be truly repaired now. It’s a classic pattern, the victim becoming the perpetrator. It wasn’t the first time, she was aggressive with Nick before although he seemed into it. Luke wasn’t. 

June is broken and angry and she wants revenge more than she wants to heal. I don’t think she will ever heal when Hannah is in Gilead. 

I love the role reversal between Serena and June. June is going to do everything in her power to make Serena feel how she felt. 

I think June is going to her everyone she loves in her quest for revenge. 

[simplecontentfinds]

i'm not at all trying to be rude, i'm just wondering what you would want the handmaid's tale cc for? it's a really good book (haven't seen the show yet but heard good things), but it's not something i would want to reenact, it being a dystopia and all. again, i'm just curious! :)

i enjoy the books, the show and the movie! i like to have it for novelty’s sake. i have so much steven universe themed cc that i never use for any sort of play through, it’s just nice to know that i have it. peep that i said i wanted “handmaid’s tale inspired cc.” this could be something as simple as like? the shows posters but remade into simlish like how some of the broadway and movie posters have been. or both of the books either as actual like reading material for the sims or as deco books. there’s tons of tiny cute things on etsy that i would like to have for my sims, even if it’s stupid and something no one else will notice. 

i suppose that there is also the sense of having a world based on that, for those who would like to. setting that all up seems like too much work to me but it may be something others like to do. and i wouldn’t put it past anyone! there was someone who made a whole cotton plantation in the sims 3 for their historical world and that whole thread about it was very Yikes, y’know? so, i guess it’s just there to share and have available to people who would like it. 

of course, all we have right now is the bonnet/the wings. which that is less of decoration’s sake and more actual cas stuff. but to be able to have something to share is nice. i’m more looking for stuff like the posters remade but to look like sims and in simlish or the books but in simlish or something like that. i like to decorate rooms more than anything else. i’m also like a freak and so every time geekfest or whatever comes to town in the sims, i like to go and send my sims or make the npc sims, dress up as actual like? characters and stuff. like cosplay stuff. it makes me laugh and makes me reflect back on my own time at conventions.

[aalt-ctrl-del]

on a side note, its cool to think if your little boy wants to support girls/women with cancer, then the parents very well might end up in jail or at the least under strict investigation with the state, and maybe slip under a watch for the duration you have that kid. Because who knows what the fuck is goin on in texas.

It makes me think of how that one lad who was mercilessly harassed and bullied for growing his hair out to donate to someone who lost there’s due to the chemo treatment (Wholesome Florida Boy).

Classic florida.

how bizarre is that? To live in a state with big brother watching your every move, cause you might have a kid that wears pink or let his hair grow out a little long? Or you have a daughter, and she wants to wear pants for BOYS, so mom and dad have to explain she has to wear a skirt of abbot might wheel up to their front porch with a swatt team and a caseworker, so they can give the mother and father a whole psyche evaluation, and also a childs therapist for the brutally mistreated child.

That sounds a lot like some dystopia military state we read about in Fahrenheit 451. Texas also has a ban on books (book bans because Handmaids Tales reenactment in progress) betehdouble-U

The most atrocious thing is that texans and abbot believe everyone should be like their military, authoritarian run state. More or less, the south states should have say what religion we worship, how kids should dress, what books we read, what defines man-woman-person-camera-tv. 

I am not making this up. That’s texas, that is the south states. They believe wholeheartedly the whole manifest destiny, of course. And its the most bizarre thing, because states like texas keep frothing at the mouth about freedoms and living without fear.

While the people in those states aren’t really free or living without fear, if one wrong move has the government glaring down on you. And I’m trying to figure out their malfunction, but it all boils down to these people kind of eat and breathe fox news and don’t really care about anything but the delusions they built.

[newstechreviews]

Consciousness is, at best, a mixed blessing. Sure, it’s what defines humanity—what allows us to make choices, feel emotions, form societies, create art, understand the world around us. But it also opens us up to authoritarianism, inequality, war, genocide, systematic destruction of the environment. It’s what makes us dream of utopia and—because any perfect society would still require drudge work no self-actualized individual would be satisfied doing—what keeps that idyll out of reach.

The futuristic World State of Aldous Huxley’s classic novel Brave New World, which is coming to TV via NBC Universal’s new streaming service Peacock after years in development limbo, believes it has solved that paradox. Here, each person is genetically engineered to be an ideal member of a certain caste: Alphas are the beautiful, brilliant ruling class. Epsilons are the simpleminded manual laborers. The rest fall somewhere in between. Each rank performs a crucial function, has its material needs met and is conditioned to prefer their lot in life over any other. Family and monogamy are illegal. Pregnancy is obsolete. And to control for the X-factor of brain chemistry, there’s soma, a drug whose mood-altering powers (depending on the dosage) resemble Xanax or Ecstasy. The World State has, in effect, hacked consciousness to eliminate dissatisfaction.

Showrunner David Wiener (Homecoming) keeps the foundation of Huxley’s world intact, and populates it with mostly the same characters. Entangled in a sexual relationship that has become exclusive, Beta-Plus hatchery worker Lenina Crowne (Jessica Brown Findlay of Downton Abbey) is sent to Alpha-Plus counselor Bernard Marx (Game of Thrones’ Harry Lloyd) for a scolding. After an initial encounter in which he humiliates her with a holographic replay of her monogamous trysts (Brave New World has as much weird sex as anything on premium cable), they form a bond based on mutual stirrings of discontent.

Far from the grand, rose-tinted vistas of Lenina and Bernard’s home city New London, a young man named John (Solo star Alden Ehrenreich) lives with his mother (Demi Moore, nice to see but underutilized) in a wasteland populated by so-called Savages, where religion, poverty and family persist. In the novel, this place is a sort of American reservation. Peacock’s version combines it with a theme park where World State tourists come to learn how lucky they are. Inhabitants play redneck caricatures of themselves in reenactments of, in one case, Black Friday at a big-box store. But a faction of militant Savages is rising up against this minstrelsy. Brave New World meets Westworld—until the story abruptly shifts back to New London.

Steve Schofield/PeacockAlden Ehrenreich and Lara Peake in ‘Brave New World’

The series looks gorgeous, and expensive, even if its sci-fi brutalist aesthetic is a bit generic. The performances are solid, too; Ehrenreich, in particular, imbues his character with brooding charm. Episodes are fast-paced and pulpy. Yet something is missing from the show’s core. Television thrives on rich characters, but, in large part because it’s set in a realm devoid of eccentricity, I struggled to get invested in this bunch. The rare burst of anger or passion does not a complete person make.

This wasn’t such a problem for Huxley because his Brave New World is a philosophical novel, where characters serve primarily as vehicles for criticism of ideas that captivated the cultural conversation when it was published, in 1932—from the efficiency gospel of Henry Ford to Soviet Communism. What’s strange is how tame what the author called a “negative utopia” sounds today. While a few aspects resonate as hauntingly prescient (the prevalence of psychiatric drugs, technology that enables constant connection at the cost of privacy), it’s a sad quirk of 2020 that it’s become harder to argue against a society free of indigence, violence, cults of personality and, poignantly, disease. The show barely tries to make such a case, muddling its message by making New London kind of a fun place to be and failing to explore in any depth the horrors of a culture that manufactures mundane contentment so effectively as to provide neither inspiration nor need for art.

As chilling as he found the World State to be, Huxley (whose racist characterizations Peacock avoids by implying a Handmaid’s Tale-style post-racial future while casting mostly white leads) didn’t romanticize the Savages, either. In a foreword written after World War II, he described both societies as manifestations of insanity and expressed regret that he hadn’t achieved “philosophical completeness” by fleshing out an alternate, sane society where citizens work to discern the true purpose of human life. He would revisit this idea in his 1962 novel Island. Considering how inert Brave New World feels as serialized TV—and how desperately our culture thirsts for genuine utopian thinking—I wish we’d gotten that show instead.

[ha-yeah-nothankyou]

The Act (A HULU Original) series review

During this self-quarantine, I decided that I was going to (finally) watch The Handmaid’s Tale because now is a better time than any to watch three full seasons of approximately 15 episodes each, with every episode spanning a full hour of moral horror.

Great way to pass the time.

I was half way through the very last available episode, right at the biggest climax the story presented so far, when the ad break started. I watched two different commercial about car companies and what they have to say about the end of the world. Then, the third ad was squeezed in at the end. This one was for a HULU Original called The Act, and when I heard the name Gypsy Blanchard uttered by a kind middle-aged woman I knew that this show was going to take priority over the fate of June Osborne.

You see, I find myself very familiar with the story of Gypsy Rose Blanchard. In an uncomfortable way, even.

In the middle of an episode not made for easy-peasy switching about, I quickly typed in “Act” in the HULU search and immediately started watching. I almost couldn’t care less about Offred/Ofjoseph.

The show opens to a cluttered but otherwise empty house, camera at the end of the hallway pointing straight at the locked front door. Someone is frantically knocking. But the knocking is drowned out by an audio track played over top. It is a 911 call, the real 911 call placed on that very day. Not a reenactment of it.

Dee Dee isn’t answering the door. Her car is still in the drive way, but the neighbors haven’t seen her in a few days. Someone posted a worrisome message on her Facebook page, and she isn’t answering the door.

Now, this was very smart of the writers. They opened to the climax of the story with no explanations, then skipped backward almost 6 years to the day. Each episode featured a piece of information uncovered at the crime scene the night Dee Dee’s body was found and then went back in time to show its true significance.

Gypsy Rose Blanchard lived with her mother, who actually had several alias’ so we’ll just call her Dee Dee, in a simple home built by Habitat For Humanity for the Blanchards after they lost their previous home to Hurricane Katrina. The Blanchards took priority, of course, because poor Gypsy was very very sick. She had epilepsy, leukemia, muscular dystrophy and so much more.

In reality, Gypsy was healthy as could be, minus what was imposed on her by her mother to make her seem sick. But Gypsy didn’t know this. She was raised to believe that she needed a wheelchair and that she was allergic to sugar all to appeal to Dee Dee’s ego.

You see, Claudine (Dee Dee) Blanchard was never officially diagnosed, but it is speculated, as evidence reported, that she had meunchausen syndrome by proxy. Meunchausen syndrome is when an individual feigns or induces injury or illness in order to seek attention. Meunchausen by proxy is when a caregiver feigns or induces injury or illness on the person receiving their ”care” in order to seek the attention, sympathy and pity of spectators.

Now that I’ve established the beginning of the story, stating some facts and explaining some terms, I think it’s time for what I think of The Act.

It is, in fact, a dramatized reenactment based on a true story. There are characters and pieces of information that are new, altered, or all-together missing. For example, we see interactions between Dee Dee and her own mother that happened in secret. Both of them were dead long before the show was written, and therefore no one would know what had happened between them really. All the witnesses are dead.

Two can keep a secret if one of them is dead. But if they are both dead, that secret is even safer.

Watching this show brought up an emotion I haven’t felt in a very long time. I don’t know what to call it or what to even compare it to, but it’s there lurking in the darker corners of my memory. 

In order for you to understand how I feel about The Act, you need to know a personal story of mine. I’ll make it short, as it is important and undetailed anyway.

From the age of eleven to approximately fourteen, I was introduced to the internet at the peak of popularity for Creepypasta. If you don’t know what that is, congratulations may you live a healthy life. Also, why are you on here if you don’t? But those of us in the know...

I, personally, got into a questionable crowd, consisting of two people and sometimes three. We were a tight group and stayed in touch for a couple years, I actually still talk to one of them occasionally. But the foundation of our relationship was a bed of knives, shrouded in baggie hoodies. I have no concept of time regarding these years of my life and some of the years following, so I can’t give you a straightforward timeline.

I was obsessed with a friend of mine, I only knew her as Jade. She depicted herself as a mysterious figure with auburn hair, a black hoodie, and a dark blue mask to cover her face with two black gaping holes where her eyes should be. To some of you, this sounds familiar. Yes, she said it was her OC. Yes, the OC’s name started with “Eyeless.” You know the drill.

And to compliment her, I depicted myself as a seductive red-haired teen with a dark secret: that she is actually a serial killer! Dun dun dun!

We role-played as these characters and created fictional situations where we would carve up victims, and occasionally each other, for the sheer pleasure of it. We fantasized about how we would kill people, who we would kill first, and how we would dispose of evidence.

At one point, I planned to kill my parents. I was so deep in this second reality I had built that, today, I don’t have any first hand memories outside of it. I remember our fantasies, but I don’t remember what was happening in my house. I don’t know what show my parents were watching then or what movie we bought as soon as it was available in stores. I don’t have a splinter of memory pertaining to events happening in the world around me.

That emotion I mentioned? It exists there, right there in that jumbled mess of images I wish I’d never seen and stories I wish I’d never made.

This HULU Original? The Act? Somehow, this show managed to drudge up an emotion that doesn’t exist in reality as I perceive it today. This show is so well done; the acting is on point, the casting is uncanny, and the story so well written that seeing it remolded my reality. With the medications I now take, so that I don’t return to the place where that emotion resides, I shouldn’t have been able to feel it. This series is powerful in a way that makes me regret recommending it to my mother before I finished it.

Now, HULU isn’t very specific about its trigger warnings, as I learned from watching The Handmaid’s Tale, so if you are sensitive (like me, oops) you should research the story beforehand. Learn the story-line of the real case and then make your decision.

Here is a very undetailed but informative article on the case of Gypsy Rose Blanchard.

[waterloggedtomorrow]

Anyway, when people were first talking about the handmaid’s tale as a tv show I had a very negative reaction just to, like, the premise of watching live actors reenact that story, which I felt at the time was a pretty odd reaction? But in retrospect, there are definitely a bunch of stories I feel that way about. Like. I mean, Game of Thrones I never watched just because the actors looked so different from how I had pictured them, but. I think Lord of the Flies? There are a bunch of stories that I just? In my head they are not Live People? They’re sort of drawings? Or abstractions of people? I dunno what that means.

[the-four-humors]

do you ever wonder if kinksters read 1984 and come away with entirely the wrong message and start trying to call doms ‘big brother’ instead of, like, ‘daddy’ or w/e

[mchenryjd]

2017 in Review

Necessarily incomplete, mostly for my personal record. I will probably regret this.

MOVIES

10.  mother!

Got to a screening late, had to sit in the third show, could barely tell what was happening and spent most of the movie staring at J. Law’s flared nostrils. An ideal viewing experience.

9.     Personal Shopper

Nothing captures the purposeful emptiness of spending time online like Kristen Stewart texting a ghost.

8.     Get Out

I kept telling my dad this movie was funny to get him to see it, not realizing he didn’t already know it was a horror movie. Afterwards, he texted me, “that was not a comedy!” Feels like that’s enough a metaphor. Daniel Kaluuya for best actor.

7.     Star Wars: The Last Jedi

A Star Wars movie about loving Star Wars movies, which means loving the epic, silly struggle between good and epic, loving the spiral staircase that is John Williams’s force theme, loving it when character always do the coolest possible thing followed by the next coolest possible thing, loving dumb furry creatures and sarcastic slimy ones, loving it when characters kiss when you want them to kiss, loving the hundred-million-dollar sandbox of it all. After the constricted dance steps of The Force Awakens and Rogue One, give me this bleeding freestyle any day.

6.     Phantom Thread

Finally, proof that everyone in a serious relationship has lost it.

5.     Call Me By Your Name

I refuse to believe that being stuck in rural Italy would be anything other than deadly boring and if my father insisted on turning everything into a lecture on classical art, I would run away. Also, there’s a contrast between the book (vague on the details of place and time, vividly specific on matters of sex) and the film (more contextually specific, sexier, but less horny than the original). Also, who am I kidding, I was moved and unsettled by the force of the thing. *Michael Stuhlbarg voice* Pray you get a chance to fall in love like this.

4.     Dunkirk

Having your tense, churning, clanking, thrumming, score transform into Elgar right when the beautiful, imperiled young heroes are reading a stirring speech (and Tom Hardy is heroically sacrificing himself in what looks like the middle of a Turner painting) is a level of craft so deft if feels like cheating, but it works.

3.     BPM

A film about a community in danger that acts as both a memorial to and rallying cry for that community. Uncompromising, accommodating, queer in the best way, BPM makes you want to cry and go dancing at the same time.

2.     Columbus

The kind of movie that makes you want to get in a car and keep driving until you find something beautiful, it has stuck and expanded in my memory ever since I saw it over the summer. Like the architecture that looms large in the setting, the plot can feel uncomfortably schematic – John Cho wants to leave and gets  stuck, Haley Lu Richardson is stuck and gets to leave. The question is how people live within, and blur the edges of, those confines. John Cho has a winning, curdled decency; Haley Lu Richardson gives the hardest kind of performance, in that she often seems unaware of her character’s own wants. I’d watch her quietly assemble dinner for hours on end.

1.     Lady Bird  

A movie that feels less plotted and more prefigured – every fight between Lady Bird has happened before, every high school landmark lumbers by with inevitability, every boy disappoints in the way you expect. What redeems all this? Paying attention, which is also love, in this movie’s pseudo-religious sense. Between Lady Bird and Marion, between Lady Bird and Julie, between Lady Bird and Sacramento. Watch people closely, as Greta Gerwig does, and they reveal glimmers of themselves (I know so little, and yet everything, about Stephen McKinley Henderson’s drama teacher from a few moments that feel perfect, in the sense of contained, past-tense completeness). It’ll all so ordinary. Fall in love with it.

Honorable mentions: Regina Hall’s speech about friendship in Girls Trip, Sally Hawkins tracing a droplet with her finger in The Shape of Water, Meryl Streep on the phone in The Post, Cara Delevingne in Valerian, Rihanna in Valerian, the part where the ghost jumped off the building in A Ghost Story, the fact that Power Rangers was surprisingly good, the soldier who gasps as Diana whips out her hair in the trenches in Wonder Woman, Ansel Elgort’s jacket in Baby Driver, whenever anyone tried to explain anything in Alien: Covenant, Elisabeth Moss in The Square, Anh Seo-hyun feeding Okja in Okja, Lois Smith being in movies, the kids eating ice cream in The Florida Project, the Game of Thrones joke in Logan Lucky, Vella Lovell in The Big Sick, and finally, most preciously, the moment in Home Again where Reese Witherspoon kissed Michael Sheen and someone in my theater shouted “she’s not feeling it!”

TELEVISION

10.  The Good Doctor

Listen, he’s a good doctor.

9.     Riverdale

They’re hot. They’re angsty. They do drugs that look like Pixy-Stix. They never seem to do homework. They love to hook-up in weird locations. They have terrible taste in karaoke songs. They love hair dye, and a well-defined eyebrow. They have really hot parents. They’re TV teens! I love it.

8.     Insecure

This is just to say that I am far too invested in Molly’s happiness as a person. I would also like to view a full season of Due North.

7.     American Vandal

From Alex Trimboli to Christa Carlyle, the best names on TV are on this show. Also the best reenactments, and somehow the most incisive take on what fuels, and results from TV’s true-crime obsession. Jimmy Tatro mumbling!

6.     Crazy Ex-Girlfriend

More shows should take the opportunity to explode in their third seasons, rocket forward at full speed, diagnose their main characters, and give Josh Groban wonderful, unexplainable cameos.

5.     Alias Grace

A show that conjured a performance for the ages out of Sarah Gadon and somehow made Zachary Levi palatable as a dramatic actor, this miracle of collaboration between Mary Harron and Sarah Polley is all the better for being binged. Down it in an afternoon, think of Grace under her black veil, daring you to disbelieve her, for years to come.

4.     Twin Peaks: The Return

A show that drove nostalgia into itself like a knife to the chest. Totally absurd. The best revival/exorcism yet on TV.

3.     Please Like Me

“Sorry about your life.” “I’m sorry about your life.” In a time when things tend to peter out, what a final season, in which everything goes to shit and then some. Maybe TV’s most prickly comedy, Please Like Me’s heart is of the “stumble along and keep going” sort and never does it test itself as much as it did with this bleak, pastel final statement.

2.     The Leftovers

Do you believe Nora Durst’s story? Sometimes I do. Sometimes I think it sounds ridiculous. Sometimes I relax in the comfortable, academic premise that it only matters that Kevin does. It’s a haunting idea, though, this image of world even emptier than The Leftovers’s own, where it’s possible to wander for untold time in darkness. Carrie Coon’s description of it is a kind of journey to the underworld – we’re there with her, maybe, and then we make it back, maybe. The trick of The Leftovers is the wound’s never fully healed.

1.     Halt and Catch Fire

The world changes. People sorta don’t.

Honorable mentions: the twist in The Good Place, the Taylor Swift demon character in Neo Yokio, Claire Foy on The Crown, Vanessa Kirby on The Crown, the stand-up in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Cristin Milioti in Black Mirror, the televised Academy Awards ceremony, the weeks when Netflix didn’t release new TV shows I had to watch, Girls’s “American Bitch,” the fact that Adam Driver is both in Girls and Star Wars, Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys performances on The Americans (and life in Brooklyn), the moments in Game of Thrones that were good enough to make me stop thinking about what people would write about Game of Thrones, season 2 of The Magicians’s resistance to any sort of plot logic, Jane the Virgin’s narrator, Nicole Kidman at therapy on Big Little Lies, Reese Witherspoon’s production of Avenue Q in Big Little Lies, Alexis Bledel holding things in The Handmaid’s Tale, Maggie Gyllenhaal directing porn in The Deuce, Alison Brie’s terrible Russian accent in Glow, Maya Rudolph in Big Mouth, Cush Jumbo miming oral sex with a pen in court in The Good Fight, the calming experience of watching new episodes of Superstore and Great News on Fridays, Eden Sher in The Middle, the fake books they make up for Younger, and Rihanna livestreaming herself watching Bates Motel.

THEATER

10.  Indecent

History, identity, community all mangled together in something that’s both excavation and revivification. I’m so mad I didn’t get to see it with my mom.

9.     Mary Jane

A nightmare that goes from bad to worse, which Carrie Coon performed with the endurance of a saint.

8.     SpongeBob SquarePants

Highlights: The tap number, the Fiddler on the Roof joke, the many uses of pool noodles, David Zinn’s design in general, the arms, the volcano setpiece, the fact that somehow I kept laughing for two-and-a-half hours at something SpongeBob SquarePants. Tina Landau, you’re a hero.

7.     Hello, Dolly!

I had a wonderful viewing experience like this, in that I sat alone on an aisle next to an older gay man who turned to me right when the curtain came down on the first act and said, “man, we love Bette.” (Shout out to any and all gags involving the whale.)

6.     Groundhog Day

Proof you can dig deeper into the material you’re adapting and still find more. Sometimes, the funniest gags come out of old-fashioned repetition. Andy Karl has the Rolex-like ability to make it all speed by without revealing any of the ticks, and then wallop you in the second act.  

5.     The Glass Menagerie

A lot of unconventional ideas piled onto each other that go so far into strange territory that they loop back around to being immediate. Maybe distant to some, but enough to unsettle me. I can still smell the onstage rain.

4.     The Wolves

A sign of a good play is probably that you remain invested in the characters long after you see it, and I’m going to spend so much time worrying about all the girls on the soccer team in The Wolves for the rest of my life.

3.     The Band’s Visit

Katrina Lenk has a gorgeous voice. Tony Shalhoub is restrained to the point that he could move his baton with nanometer accuracy. The songs are transporting. But most of all, The Band’s Visit manages to capture loneliness better than nearly any musical I’ve seen. Everyone, audience included, experiences something together, and then it all, slowly, both lingers and drifts apart.

2.     A Doll’s House, Part 2

What, you think I wasn’t going to include a play with a Laurie Metcalf performance? ADHP2 is perhaps clever to a fault in its set-up, but in the right hands, it turns into something both funny and moving – a story about what it takes to become a complete person, in or outside the influence of other people. Nora’s monologue about living in silence near the end is the full of the kind of simple statements that are so hard to act, and so brilliant when done just right.

1.     The Antipodes

Both an extended meditation on what it means to run out of stories and a brutal subtweet of Los Angeles, The Antipodes is my kind of play, in that it’s mostly people talking, Josh Charles is involved and very disgruntled, and everyone eats a lot of take out.

Honorable mentions: the music in Sunday in the Park With George, the pies in Sweeney Todd, the ensemble of Come From Away, seeing Dave Malloy in The Great Comet of 1812, Alex Newell’s “Mama Will Provide” in Once on This Island, Cate Blanchet having fun in The Present, Imelda Staunton in the NTLive Follies, Michael Urie in Torch Song, Patti LuPone’s accent(s) in War Paint, Ashley Park in KPOP, and Gleb.

[remembermewhentruthbecomesalone]

The Handmaid’s Tale: Episode 2

So. Today after a very long wait, I watch The Handmaid’s Tale Episode 2 with a little bit of prodding from my good friend. Things are starting to make slightly more sense in the Handmaid’s universe, but at the same time, so many questions await. So. Without Further Ado, Let’s dive right into episode 2, shall we?

WARNING: THERE ARE SPOILERS. I AM WARNING YOU NOW.

Previously, on the Handmaid’s Tale, we became introduced to the main character, Offred. The Handmaid’s Tale consists of the world that is entirely ruled by a form of the Christian religion (I’m not quite sure which branch), which rules as the government. women are enslaved to do one thing and one thing only: reproduce. 

Now, with episode two, some things are starting to be a little more clear. Priests are hung because they are from a different branch, and also churches from other branches (I'm assuming) are demolishing. Offred makes a new “friend”, the handmaid that she goes shopping with. You also delve deep into how the handmaid’s give birth. One of the handmaids, the one that lost her eye, who is pregnant in episode one (perhaps almost to term is what she looks like in episode one) is now giving birth. Oddly enough, the wives of the “governors” I think is what they call them, reenact the birth with the wife of the governor that the one-eyed handmaid (I totally forgot her name) is pregnant with. Okay, so basically, the handmaids are surrogates for the governor’s wives, except their own eggs are being used, because the wives have none. However, I guess to make it seem as though they are having sex with their wives, the wife sits at the head of the bed while the handmaiden sits in the middle. In the same way, they want to make it seem like the wife itself is having, or giving birth rather than the handmaid. They are seen as lesser and I guess non-existent (?) even though they are recognized? Anyway, other things that are going on. At the end of episode one, Offred’s “friend” (sorry I forgot her name too), tells her that there is an “Eye” in her house. Now, the “eyes” are basically spies from the government to make sure nothing freaky is going on. Most of the spies end up being the drive, according to the “friend”, which could explain the odd tension between the driver and Offred. The driver seems to be really into Offred though, and there seems to be some sexual tension along with the tension of other things. After all, he is so low class that he wasn’t even provided with a woman. But who knows? Alos, Offred’s “friend” works for some kind of resistance. Well, maybe not works for but has joined it, and asks Offred to join her. Offred is rather scared of this especially since the governor asked her to come to his chambers alone. When she told her “friend” about this, she snooped around to see if there was any reason as to why the governor may have asked her to come to his chambers alone. Handmaids are not allowed to be with governor’s alone. Also, to be noted, no women are allowed to read or have any kind of higher education. So, when Offred does enter the chambers, it is a rather scary fact to be surrounded by so many books. and you won’t believe what he asked her to do. The governor, her “master” calls her, alone to his chambers without any sort of warning, so obviously automatically your going to be expecting something bad right? No. He asks her to play a fricking game of scrabble with him. Seriously? I thought was absolutely ridiculous. Also, at the end of the episode, Offred’s “friend” gets taken and is replaced by someone else. 

Some of the questions I had previously were answered:  Are the young girls sent to school to learn? Do they grow up to become Handmaid’s as well? The young girls that you see in the first episode are the handmaid’s children. Are they learning? I have no idea.  Is this occurring all over the world or just in a specific part? So it turns out that the “epidemic” of not being able to produce children is worldwide, however, the idea of women being enslaved to reproduce is only in the United States (har har). 

These are questions that still have no been answer: When they speak about “rebels” who are they talking about? What happens to the child after it is born? What happens to the children that were previously born? They talked about a place where you had to muck toxic waste and that the toxins would cause your skin to melt. What is the toxic place and why are their toxic wastes?

More Questions: Why would a governor ask to play scrabble with a handmaid? Who is the eye? What is the resistance? Where was Offred’s “friend” taken? What happens to the handmaid’s after the child is no longer old enough to breastfeed? Where do they take the girls that have “disobeyed”? 

Perhaps I’ll find the answers as I continue watching but who knows? 

[shiyalt]

I’m scared ya’ll in ‘Murica are getting to reenact the Handmaid’s Tale. Resist.