I’ve been rewatching handmaid’s tale
When it first began airing, in 2016, it quickly became something I watched alone in off hours while my spouse was busy because they couldn’t stand it. It felt, to them, like excessive and needless pain - like political torture porn. It’s an understandable perspective, I think, and I couldn’t put into words at the time what exactly I saw in it beyond that.
But lately, I’ve had the scene from the “before times” where the main character finds out women have been stripped of their financial rights when her credit card is suddenly declined. There’s a believable mundanity to that moment, a relatability that stuck with me. The dread of realizing your bank account is empty, money gone faster than you anticipated and you’re not sure why, not knowing in that moment if you’ve overdrawn or been scammed somehow or if your paycheck didn’t go through or… or, I guess, if the government has seized your assets and reduced you to sub-citizen status without warning. It just felt like a very imaginable extension of an already familiar feeling.
I needed to watch it again, like listening to a song stuck in your head in the hopes of it unsticking. And the scene was later in the show than I remembered, and so many other little things were hitting in a way I know they didn’t back, and now I guess I’m rewatching the whole thing.
It only took me an episode or two in to realize what it was I got from this show, though. The thing that felt worthwhile, despite the brutality and the anguish that fills it. If nothing else it’s a reminder that it is possible to survive things that may be unimaginable to you now - that people have survived these things, and will again, and that survival is worth honoring. And it’s a reminder, simultaneously, of the importance of fighting back and refusing to give up or give in. That survival and staying alive are not always synonymous. It must be a reminder I need now more than I did then, because it seems so obvious to me now… which is in and of itself unnerving in a way.
The smallest, silliest thing that immediately stood out to me was the eyebrows. 2016 feels like it just happened, I don’t think of this show as “old,” I didn’t expect it to really look noticeably different than something made a year or two ago… but it does. Everyone’s eyebrows look so thin and trim and tidy, even in the “after” times. That’s how long it’s been, how long this dread has been living in the pit of my stomach, this quiet anxiety I’ve been rationalizing and coping with just fine but can never really shake.
The thing about the credit card scene, a thing I had forgotten and maybe the very thing I felt I needed to see again, is that it comes along much later than I thought. Not just in the sense that it was a later episode, but later in the process of the insurgent fascist government’s seizure of power. It happens suddenly, yes, but in the context of a drawn out unraveling that the characters have been steadily acclimating to. It’s an abrupt change, but it’s not shocking to them - at least, not quite shocking enough. The main character doesn’t immediately pack her bags and plan an escape. There’s objection and protest along the way, sure, but not they’re not flooding the streets and rioting. It’s less than I would have imagined in 2016, far less than the uprisings of 2020, but it feels proportionate now. It’s what I would expect now. And when the main character attends a protest, and senses that it’s about to turn, and begins retreating just in time as an armed force in riot gear opens fire - that feels believable now, too. Not that it didn’t before, but in a way that feels closer now. In a way that dulls the impact of the scene itself. And when the queer university instructor finds out she’s being shelved because a student glimpsed a photo of her with her wife and their child on her phone, that feels believable too. Believable like you could tell me it was already happening, and I just hadn’t heard, and I’d believe you. And all the scenes of men in positions of power discussing the birth crisis and coolly discussing enslaving women as a solution, that too feels believable. Tangible.
I kind of rolled my eyes when I first heard there was another season coming, had no real interest in sitting through another season of agony. It already felt kind of drawn out to me, I was already kind of over it by the end of season four (if not sooner). Rewatching it hasn’t changed my feelings on virtually any of the criticism I had or heard of the show while it was previously airing, but… I’m glad I decided to revisit it. I’m not sure how enthusiastic I’ll be for another season by the time I finish this rewatch, but it makes more sense to me now.
“Women are so adaptable, my mother would say. It’s truly amazing what we can get used to. I’ve been here for two months. What have I gotten used to?”
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