1x01 Offred

Is The Handmaid's Tale a fiction of the past or a reality? Its Hulu adaptation is neither. It's a comforting fiction that we tell ourselves: a ghost from the past we still believe are still haunting us, when the ghost has become nothing but a wrinkling specter, its position taken over by another restless, invisible spirit poltergeisting our home.

The Handmaid's Tale imagines an oppressive religious America where women are treated like cattle for breeding the children of wealthy elites - where the wives are infertile and in need of third parties. Infertility is on steep rise and as such a select few fertile women are captured by the state and forced to continue the line of the most affluent.

This fiction of oppressive religious America seems like a myth that is not going to die soon - a myth perpetuated in America's first half of 20th century and still alive and kicking. Religion is all but dead in America indeed, but there has never been a time where it takes its most crude, vulgar secularization than today. The rise of right-wing extremism is not waged under the banner of Christianity, but under the banner of scientism, with Shapiro, Hitchens, and YouTubers like Sargon as its prophets. This is something Americans seem unable to admit: science prevails and wins over religious fundamentalism, but only in its pseudo-scientific form, with nothing but science in its name. In a sense, its zeitgeist is a disenchanted form of Christianity, but under the pretense of secular knowledge.

Whereas women of The Handmaid's Tale suffers from infertility, the reality of our society today happens because of poor working conditions. More Americans suffer from low birthrate due to stress and illness caused by heavy burden of work - yet giving birth remains a wish dreamed by many would be mothers. Like a liberal American myth, this issue seems to be glossed over in The Handmaid's Tale, focusing instead on women, though shown of varieties different colors, who seem to lack of any social classes. They all seem to be equally middle class, robbed of their individuality to be cattle of affluent aristocrats. First half of this episode seems to show this as a shocking revelation to the audience, but I find that this is nothing too new when you are already familiar with lives of lower income people, especially of marginalized ethnicities and in Global South - though of course in less vulgar ways.

That said, this episode is pretty decent pilot that conveys the world the writers intend it to be. The narrative structure is effective: a back and forth scenes of the life of Offred, before and after The Red Center - a form of disciplinary institution. The whole episode seems tense and bleak, with repertoire of greetings acting almost like mantras, said by subjugated people to each other in the hopes the saying will guarantee their safety from the all seeing eye. And when the particicution happens in the episode's second half, it acts almost like a carnival-esque moment, where emotions are unleashed without control, without proper object. Offred, crying when she beats the man, unleashes her frustation not on the man himself, but on her situation that disciplines her in such ways. In making a society where everyone is a spy to another, this episode does a great job. Regardless, the premise seems to be lacking, but it's still an enjoyable pilot episode when I turn a blind eye to its failings.