Book Review: "The Handmaid's Tale"

Margaret Atwood didn’t make up anything in this book. All of the things that take place in the Republic of Gilead have happened at some point in history (which now includes 1985, the year the book was published). She also arrived at the society depicted in the book by taking certain attitudes, both feminist & conservative, prevalent at the time, and taking them to extreme conclusions. So the place and the culture she depicts are believable. What comes across as far-fetched is the rapidity with which it occurs. In a little over a decade, America becomes so louche and licentious that the morally aggrieved have overthrown the government and set up a totalitarian theocracy totally at odds with the history of American governance. In a scant 10-15 years? I don’t really see that happening. Recently, I saw "the final cut" of Blade Runner. It takes place 11 years from now, but the world depicted looks like it should be 150-200 years from now. Things rarely change as quickly as novelists imagine. Architecturally, Manhattan in 1988 looked pretty close to how it does in 2008. Watch a film from the 90's, and you’ll see people dressed in much the same clothes you see today.

Margaret Atwood had a clear idea of what sort of shape the story would take: it is a diary. The curtain is pulled back slowly, and we only know as much as our narrator knows, and she doesn’t know much. Even the "Historical Notes" section at the end doesn’t really answer that many questions. It definitely swings the open ending in one direction, but it doesn’t really give you a lot of extra information on the society of Gilead or how it came about. We never find out that much, and that’s kind of frustrating. I blame this largely on the narrator’s passivity. Passivity is a trait that rarely endears me to protagonists (or to real people, for that matter). She says she wants to know, but then she doesn’t make that much effort to find out. There is an echo of Nineteen-Eighty-Four when, much like Winston Smith, she is broken down. "They can do what they like with me. I am abject," she says. This is in marked contrast to Ivie, the heroine of V For Vendetta. Ivie is active and engaged. It’s an interesting comparison as V For Vendetta and The Handmaid’s Tale have many similarities. Both were written in the early eighties. Both appear to take place in the late nineties. Both imagine a radical change in society coming after a perceived moral decline occurs in concert with ecological or nuclear disaster. Both feature secret police organizations called the Eyes. The biggest difference is that the government in The Handmaid’s Tale is explicitly theocratic, whereas the government of England in V For Vendetta is of the fascist and nationalist stripe. But the government of Gilead appears to have racist policies too, and the government in V For Vendetta certainly uses religion to legitimize its actions.

This book is heavy (in the figurative sense). There is no comic relief whatsoever. It is a near-total chronicle of misery, from start to finish. And it is depressing, in a way. It is depressing to think about how easy it can be for a small group of fanatics (whether they be communists, fascists or religious zealots) to take over a country. All they need is for the silent majority to look the other way, to keep quiet, to believe their promises of security & virtue and let them get away with it. That’s the easy thing to do. The hard thing to do is to stand up and voice dissent. There is always a minority that choose that path. But the bigger the majority you have looking the other way, the easier it is to deal with the dissenters and malcontents (preferably quietly).

The Python & The Postman

Sometimes, you find yourself watching a film, let’s say, The Postman, for example, and something strikes you as so ridiculous that a thought begins to form in your mind: “this is a joke.  It is not meant to be taken seriously.  The writer(s) are taking the piss.  They are in on the joke.  In The Postman, it occurs about the time we are introduced to a character named Ford Lincoln Mercury (played by Larenz Tate).

Recently, I heard a theory that the The Postman is not just bad, it is intentionally bad.  That it was a prank played on Kevin Costner.  The man who wrote it, Brian Helgeland, is a Hollywood fixture.  He’s one of those cats who will get paid $250,000 to spend a couple of weeks doctoring a script that’s already been written.  He won a Razzie for The Postman.  (In fact, The Postman swept the Golden Raspberry Awards that year, with other "wins" for worst picture, worst score, and worst director AND worst actor for Costner.)  But the same year, he won an Oscar for best adapted screenplay for L.A. Confidential, which is an awesome movie with an awesome script.  He wrote and directed the underrated A Knight's Tale.  Obviously, Brian Helgeland is very good at writing screenplays.  Thus, it simply doesn’t make sense that he would write something as bad as The Postman unless he had done it on purpose.

The Postman is Costner at his most bloated and bombastic.  The irredeemably unjustified Best Picture Oscar and Best Director he won for Dances With Wolves led him to embark on the “turgid & ponderous pseudo-epic” phase of his career.  Do you realize that he cast himself as the savior of mankind in Waterworld?  Let me repeat that just in case you missed it: the savior of mankind.  What sort of a man does that?  

As CSI: Miami has entered its sixth season, it seems that the fine technicians of the Miami-Dade Police Department are more and more finding themselves in situations so absurd that the bounds of credulity are stretching near to the breaking point.  To wit: on a recent episode, the body of a young woman was found in a cabana poolside at a posh South Beach hotel.  Her body was covered in goo.  The CSIs subsequently deduced that she was covered in goo because she had been swallowed, and thence regurgitated, by a giant python.  That’s right.  This is the point at which I said (aloud) to the television, “Come on.  This can’t be for real.  They don’t actually expect us to take this seriously.  Do they?”  But it gets better.  The snake was in the hotel because he was actually a drug mule.  Okay, sure.  Why not?  A crooked herpetologist who has a customs inspection exemption, for reptiles of course, was smuggling drugs from South America.  Inside the snakes.  When this particular snake was being exchanged at the hotel, he got out, swallowed that chick, and then the vials of narcotics inside the snake burst and the python died of a massive drug overdose.  The snake O.D.ed.  Of course.  Then he threw up the girl.  Seriously, they actually expect us to believe this?  Come on.

I must say, Horatio had a great one-liner at the beginning of the episode.  When Horatio’s Texan sidekick informed him, in his own laconic Texan way, that the young woman was “Tanya Thurman, 23, from Chicago.  Her friends say she came down here to drink some mojitos and catch some sun,” Horatio responds, right before putting his sunglasses back on, “Well it looks like [pause for dramatic effect] something caught her.”