The Handmaid's Tale (film)

Could the United States be converted into fundamentalist utopia -- the 'Republic of Gilead' -- and the status of women be demoted to Old Testament proportions? It seemed possible in 1985, when Margaret Atwood wrote The Handmaid's Tale, and even though the political muscle of evangelical sects has diminished a bit since then, but not the peril of an authoritarian regime. And, to a degree almost unimaginable in the 1980's, the Internet has muddied the waters of reality, creating a new sort of primordial soup, from which all kinds of new monsters may yet be slouching toward Bethlehem to be born. Religious fervor is one thing, but chaos is another.

In 1990, the novel was adapted as a film. Things looked good at the start, with Harold Pinter (later a Nobel laureate) set to write the script, and an A-list cast was lined up that included Robert Duvall as the Commander, Faye Dunaway as Serena Joy, and Natasha Richardson as Offred. The original director, Karol Reisz, had wanted thousands of extras for the crowd scenes, along with other big-budget set pieces; when the studio nixed these, he quit, and was replaced by Volker Schlondorff. Pinter, claiming he was "exhausted," begged off doing any of the script changes Schlondorff requested, giving him and author Margaret Atwood "carte blanche" in rewrites, and later trying to have his name taken off the script. Another day in Hollywood.

Given all that, it's remarkable that the film is as strong, as coherent, and as passionate as it is. Certainly, it was far ahead of its time in many ways, and despite its modest production values conveys an uncanny feeling that such a world might still, a third of a century later, be just around the corner.

The (graphical) Handmaid's Tale

The Handmaid's Tale 

first appeared in 1985, at a time when its dystopian religious-state future seemed to some to be -- potentially, at least -- just around the corner. Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority organization had emerged as a major political player, along with other evangelical leaders; many decried the rising tide of "secularism" and demanded that their God combine forces with the state. At the same moment, the expansion of mass media -- tame by today's standards, but notable at the time -- gave many the feeling that, with the vast increase in cable channels and the abolishment of the "Fairness Doctrine," the possibility of state control of the media was a real and present danger.

How naive some of these fears seem today -- not because they were groundless, but because when these things really came to pass, they were a good deal more insidious -- and darker -- than anyone back then could have imagined. It's little wonder that the novel has come back into prominence today; Atwood herself has written about the power it's had in its new (juxta)position. The current television series starring Kate Moss is certainly one sign of this renewed relevance; this graphical adaptation by Renee Nault is surely another. Nault, like Atwood, is Canadian, which certainly gives her an ideally parallel perspective on Canada's irksome southern neighbor, but she's also a generation younger, a native of the dynamic, cosmopolitan province of British Columbia. Her style is very much influenced by other arts of the "Pacific rim," drawing in particular from that of Japanese Ukiyo-e prints. In particular, the presence of red in a dark world is even more dramatic -- not only is it, of course, the color of the habits assigned to handmaids, but it's the color of blood. It's a bright, bright red, spilling onto and over the frames and margins of the page. Nault has talked about her approach, but bear in mind that, as with our other books, it's we the viewers and readers of this book in whose eyes and hands the ultimate judgement of her success rests. 

The Stepford Wives

The novelist Ira Levin can claim credit for two novels -- the other being Rosemary's Baby -- that were the basis of classic horror/sci-fi films of the '60's and '70's. With Stepford, Levin tunes in on many of the issues of the day -- urban flight to the suburbs, feminism, and the pressures of conformity -- without in any way making it an "issues" novel -- it's been called a "satirical thriller," and that probably comes as close as any other phrase to describing his subtle yet sardonic portrait of an independent woman in a suburb filled with women who don't just act robotically, but are in fact robots. built deep in the bowels of the mysterious "Men's Club."

The fascination with the idea of human automata or robots goes back to the earliest days of modern technology. In the early 1800's, Henri Maillardet built astonishing automata, including one which could write poetry and draw. This figure, amazingly, was found in a state of disrepair after having been damaged in a fire; on its being restored and wound up, it made a number of drawings, including one one under which it wrote "Ecrit par L'Automate de Maillardet" -- Written by the Automaton of Maillardet -- in a sense, it identified itself.

The quest in more modern times has been to create a robot which is as similar in its outward capabilities as a human being, and yet most of its fictional and film incarnations have been hostile rather than kind: cyborgs such as the Terminator, organic humanoids such as the Replicants in Ridley Scott's Bladerunner, or the Borg of Star Trek, whose famous taglines are "resistance is futile," and "you will be assimilated." Friendly robots have not fared so well; the best, such as Robin Williams' Bicentennial Man, have been vaguely pathetic in their never-ending quest to reach a humanity that is denied them.

Levin's genius -- and the genius of the 1974 film version, starring Katharine Ross -- to imagine robots who are nothing if not built to please -- men, that is -- but whose ultimate significance to the women they replace is a total loss of identity, followed by a death that will never be reported in the Stepford Chronicle.  They're entirely technological, but in other respects much like their organic counterparts in Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

There are a few interesting differences between the book and the film, most significantly its ending, a fade-to-black that suggests that the knife goes in a rather different place. The book also introduces a black couple new to Stepford, Ruthanne (a children's book author) and her husband, Royal. It's a feint -- sexism trumps race, and while Ruthanne is useful to the book's last pages (it's through her eyes that we see Joanna's replacement), there's a strong implication that she, too, will soon be Stepfordized.

As an aside, the novel explicitly mentions the urban legend about the Abraham Lincoln animatronic (designed by Disney engineers for the 1964 World's Fair) going 'crazy.' It didn't, but a frequently posted online video shows that it had other, equally bizarre, troubles. The adventuresome might also check out the TV sequels, Revenge of the Stepford Wives and The Stepford Children -- for even more animatronic weirdness.

BONUS: Here are some more details on the film's reception, including an article about the reaction to the film from a group of leading feminists of the day.