Meanwhile, are we already inhabiting this perverted hellscape? Will it be too painful to bother watching a show when real life seems so unfathomable? It began, just as well-timed, at the Presidential launch of Trump in when we easily appropriated the red-robed rage as our own. What it takes for the author, artists, technicians, and actors to create all the systems, textures, and density of such a book and seriesβnot to mention what it takes culturally and materially to construct an actual new nation.
I love books complicated enough to require a map. Margaret Atwood concretized her vision with an intricate scaffolding of place, organizations, customs, social classes, and endless vocabulary words. The Republic of Gilead, roughly the United States, has a strict hierarchy crafted by the Sons of Jacob, atop which men, namely Commanders sit. Below them are Angels, frontline soldiers, then Guardians personal soldiers, bodyguards, servants of commanders.
Below this: Economen standard class males , and Unpeople inmates. You have Unpeople, Unwomen, and also Unbabies. This whack world order depends first on much self-policing guilt, indoctrination, instilling fear and then layers of policing from without: from the Aunts who punish women, to the Salvaging or public executions that remind everyone how close they can be to death if they misbehave.
Particicution is a certain excruciating ceremony that requires the Handmaids to launch and kill a prisoner themselves, with their bare hands, in a bloodthirsty mob. For all the spies The Eyes looking to report insurgents, there are the secret resistance members Mayday and the Underground Femaleroad, much like what some Americans did to escort and protect the escaped enslaved of a different, if equally relevant, era.
Sex is just an awful means of making babies in this frantic world where mass infertility has made conception scarce and prized. Babies are the main currency of this whole machine built to groom them for the ultimate upkeep of the male power into which it all feeds. World-building depends on the equal opposite act to happen firstβthe tearing down of what pre-existed. We know very well the Americas were already here, and populated of course.
