Hacker Cinema
The Handmaid's Tale
2017 · TV series · 6 seasons
Created by Bruce Miller
DramaScience FictionFantasyActionAdventure
Set in a dystopian future, a woman is forced to live as a concubine under a fundamentalist theocratic dictatorship.
6 positive3 negative1 mixed22 neutralfrom 32 commenters
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33 comments on Hacker News
> “Are we here in the West??” Only this one question is asked by Peter Strelzyk and Günter Wetzel when they were in the early morning of the 16th.
The "Handmaid's Tale" TV series has a great variation on that moment, which chokes me up every single time.
(spoilers in video title) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0oKZgXvpm0c
It's so strange. There is a real place on Earth which is much more brutal and oppressive than the wildest fantasy that Margaret Atwood could come up with. A place that rapes virgins before executing them to prevent them from entering heaven, a place that uses sexual violence and mutilation to control women, but if anyone mentions this place or the atrocities occurring there, then a certain element in the west gets incredibly upset and tries to divert attention away from it back to some US domestic local news interest stories. Almost like they are jealous or something.
Someone told me with a straight face once that we will one day come to see The Handmaid's Tale as a documentary and not just a novel. A statement that one can only make with a straight face if one is incredibly ignorant of the world.
I'm sure these US domestic pet peeves will exist even if some attention is given to the mass atrocities occurring in Iran. Not every local interest story in the US has to become international news. We really don't care.
Game of Thrones and Good Omens would easily fit in the 14+14 model. Even Handmaid's Tale would be fine, although the new TV series would be outside of copyright. 28 years is still a long time in human terms, timespans longer than that are mostly beneficial only for effectively immortal corporations.
Your pedantry probably requires a rewatch.
I also think "masterpiece" is a heavy term to throw around but the emotional impact of the this series and the complexity of its narrative as it catalogs a hero's journey from reluctant participant to true believer with an epic story arc can be held up next to most film and historical epics like Laurence of Arabia, Ben Hur, The Matrix, the Original Star Wars trilogy, Dune, Kingdom of Heaven, Gladiator, The Handmaid's Tale (series), The Odyssey (epic poem). His personal journey which leads to his persecution and enslavement, his role in leading a slave uprising, rescuing his friends from the aftermath of a rebel uprising, building the foundations of a rebel army, risking his life countless times and ultimately sacrificing himself to prevent his enemy from having an insurmountable edge.
The series makes the very popular "Avengers" film series look like trite dogshit and does the same for most of the "Star Wars" sequels and prequels so I don't fault people for using the term "masterpiece".
How did we have shows like The Handmaid's Tale and 50.5% of America was like yeah that sounds good let's go for that?
How did we have decades of superhero movies and then elect a bonafide fascist villain? I don’t know. The lessons we were teaching weren’t the right lessons somehow. Or they were swamped by social media nonsense and decades of underfunding education.
In the Handmaid's Tale TV show, the US has turned into a repressive religious state horrifyingly cruel to women, and people will occasionally try to cross the border into Canada to safety.
Lots of film production goes on in Toronto, I especially love how Roy Thompson Hall always shows up in anything vaguely sci-fi. Vaught headquarters in The Boys, U.N. headquarters in The Expanse, it was even in the background of a few scenes of The Handmaid's Tale.
> The point of the book is that religious fanatics can take over even in the USA
That's her point. My point are the gymnastics done to substitute Islam with Christianity. If her work was the exception, with lots of other made-into-Netflix-miniseries works warning of Sharia, I would share your opinion.
It gets even more skewed than Handmaid's Tale: The Woman King was perfectly fine depicting things that happened "far away", to "other people", "a long time ago". What the films was not fine with was accurately depicting the African kingdom of Dahomey as slavers, and the French as (belatedly) fighting against slavery. So the film simply reversed their roles [1].
For a more topical example, look at how the Apollo affair [2] made it into popular media: Israel stole plutonium from the US for their weapons program. It inspired the book Sum of All Fears, in which the plutonium was instead stolen by Palestinians. By the time it was made into a star-studded movie, the villains became Neo-Nazis.
There is always some artistic excuse to justify these politically useful alterations.
[1] https://www.historyvshollywood.com/reelfaces/woman-king/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Apollo_Affair
> You see parallels between the Salem Witch Trials and McCarthyism because the left made those comparisons repeatedly.
There were also many other purges, notably in the Soviet Union and People's Republic of China, with which parallels could be drawn. Purges that were incomparably larger and deadlier. Yet strikingly little media draw these parallels [1], essentially lying through omission. There's no better example than Handmaid's Tale, that invented a whole new sexist society to draw parallels with Christianity instead of Islam.
One must be aware that in the Plato's cave of media, those casting the shadows are not motivated solely by the pursuit of truth, nor are they a representative sample of the general population.
[1] https://reason.com/2000/06/01/hollywoods-missing-movies/
Absolutely, this fight needs to be fought on the cultural/political battlefield. It can never be just a technological arms race or solution, because technology usually favors the rich.
Culture eats strategy for breakfast, and mass culture of movies and video games is really the most effective way to teach the broader audience about these issues. Black mirror did a great job with some episoses, and also handmaid's tale has had a big impact in thinking about women's rights.
Banned by Amazon, and now from school library shelves too? And that's on top of their foundation being deplatformed by all credit cards. They really don't want us reading White Identity by Jared Taylor.
Oh, it's about Handmaid's Tale, the book about what if Sharia came to the US? With a well-publicized, well-funded TV series on major networks? Available literally everywhere except school libraries in one Virginia county?
They so like cloaking themselves as noble crusaders against censorship, but their crusades never go beyond their ideological doorstep.
I don't know if I would call it an addiction, but I feel very similar in the sense that I spend a ton of hours on the internet and tinkering with technology.
I did take a break. A long break. I joined the Army in 2021, after being laid off during the pandemic, thinking I wanted to leave technology for good. Then after I graduated from basic, I realized I was probably going to be a shitty, unfit soldier and that I missed all of the interesting technical and engineering challenges we solve as software engineers.
I'm still working on getting back into the profession (pretty much due to my own laziness the past year... I guess needed time to recalibrate after everything). But, I have spent countless hours the past year setting up homelab equipment, various servers, writing scripts and small programs to organize stuff.
Youtube isn't something I really could get addicted to, because I don't like learning from videos or watching stuff I could read in a quarter of the time. But I guess I do have a pretty bad TV addiction. I wasted tons of hours when I was depressed binge-watching shows online. It's to the point I don't even watch movies often because I prefer the intimacy I feel when I know the characters well and am deeply immersed in a series, especially something running multiple seasons. I binged all 5 seasons of the Handmaid's Tale a few weeks ago in less than a week, for example, and considered immediately rewatching them all.
As another has stated below, I guess this is to fill the void that occurs in life when we are single and childless, unemployed, or both.
I still don't think if I would call my internet usage or passion for technology "addiction". The TV/Netflix/etc. ... sure. That's fair. But I think it's fine to be obsessed with something like programming, especially if it's your profession. People who get paid to do something they love are lucky.
Maybe you can refresh my memory? The ark in raiders was a macguffin. The only overtly religious character I remember was the imam. If you mean temple of doom with the Kali cult, that's closer except for one important detail. Other movies are careful to mentally distance depictions by having cults be underground or otherwise abnormal and isolated. Think midsommar, wicker man, etc.
The narrative of apocalypto is literally the mainstream Maya priests kidnapping and torturing people to sacrifice them before the protagonist is saved by the distraction of Spaniards arriving. I would consider the same thing with Christianity swapped a bit distasteful as well, but I can't think of any movies like that. Handmaid's tale would count, but that's a deliberate critique rather than unintentional stereotyping.
This is going to be a disaster, Like GoT Season 8 level diaster. Mark my words. My reasoning:
1. The budget for the original LOTR trilogy was $281 million [1]. Obviously there's inflation but we're also talking film vs TV. Films tend to be much more expensive to produce to the point where only theatrical releases tend to make films economical;
2. The showrunners are JD Vance and Patrick McKay. If you check their IMDB profiles they have almost no credits. How on Earth did they get this job? To put this in context: films are run by directors. Producers work for the director. TV shows are run by showrunners, which are really producers. Directors work for the producers. There's good reason for this. The showrunners need to maintain consistency across the entire season while individual episode directors will manage the schedule for their own episode.
Producers are writers and you'd expect that any producer has a long list of writing credits and a premium TV showrunner will have lots of producer and writer credits.
3. No name recognition in the actors that I can see. There's nothing wrong with eelvating talented no name actors but you need to pepper in some name recognition. It builds hype and recognized actors tend to be recognized for a reason. GoT had Sean Bean and Peter Dinklage. There were also seasoned actors who just weren't well known (eg Lena Headley);
4. A lot of shows go downhill when they run out of original material. It happened to GoT in apsectacular fashion. It happened to the Handmaid's Tale (the book only covered Season 1). It takes a strong writing team to generate good original material. Being in Middle Earth is both a blessing and a curse. There is source material like the Silmarillion but that can also hamstring you in a way that greenfield writing isn't.
5. Statements made suggest the showrunners and Amazon just don't get the tone of Middle Earth, like they were trying to make GoT in Middle Earth. Not everything has to be GoT. Jackson understood LOTR. It's why his vision was so good.
6. Spinoffs are hard. The most successful spinoffs are organic. Frasier (from Cheers) and Better Caul Saul (from Breaking Bad) spring to mind. Both came from a successfully developed character that was proven to audiences and thus also had inbuilt interest. HBO is busy throwing mud at the wall to see if any GoT spinoff will stick. Even now I'm not sure HBO has any idea of how badly D&D shit the bed with GoT season 8. It undermined the interest in earlier seasons and nobody talks about GoT now. In seasons 3-5 they were actually showing episodes in theaters (even IMAX theaters). Think about that. Nobody cares about these spinoffs and D&D are a big part of why. But they're also not organic.
If you want to see what happens without strong leadership and understanding the source material, look at the Hobbit (yes Jackson was involved but he came in very late).
Amazon has committed $1 billion to this and I believe they are obligated to produce at least 5 seasons. I predict we'll see 2 or even 3 different showrunners in that time and the whole thing will likely be incoherent. Look at American Gods Season 1 to 2 or the downfall of The Walking Dead for just how much this can doom a project.
[1]: https://www.indiewire.com/2019/04/elijah-wood-lord-of-the-rings-amazon-1-billion-1202127879/
It's not just about chronic malignant threats like those countries; it's also about acute threats. Take as an example, if you were Ukrainian, you had about 2 months of runway during which there was ample evidence Russia was going to invade Ukraine and the country would likely be flattened. And yet, when Russia did invade Ukraine, there were throngs of people trying to escape. I'm not talking about people who are disabled or immobile, I'm talking about middle class people who simply thought they had more time and didn't want to disrupt their life for nothing. See also Afghans in Kabul, who thought either the Taliban wouldn't win or they'd have several more months to get their lives in order.
This is also a popular trope in fiction. In the recent Handmaid's Tale series, there are several episodes devoted to life immediately before the fall, and what you see is a lot of evidence stuff is going to hit a crisis point, and a lot of people insisting that it hasn't quite yet.
Obviously the threshold to act has to be fairly high -- and I'm not saying America is Kabul or Kyiv or Gilead -- but I think there's nothing wrong with listening to the part of your brain that says "wow, it feels like the shit is imminently going to hit the fan". Because if you wait until it actually does, you'll have significantly less capacity to act.
There are also options beyond leaving the country. Some places are physically safer and physically more isolated from threat than others. For example, in the event that there is a rapid institutional collapse in the United States, it seems likely that Hawai'i would be among the places most likely to endure a little while extra or to most easily facilitate leaving the country. Areas near unguarded border crossings on the northern border also have an appeal in that regard. I think the right degree of seriousness with which to take something like this is not so much "I should move to Hawai'i tomorrow in case there's a civil war" and more "If I can work remotely in Hawai'i or if a job opens up, I might gain some degree of personal safety/sovereignty by moving there."
Personal context: I am a non-American. I spent most of the 2010s living in the U.S., and I emigrated to another country in early 2021. The pull factor to emigrate was a job opportunity abroad that was great and that my wife agreed would be a fun way to spend a few years, but the push factor to emigrate was significant uncertainty about the institutional stability of the U.S. We were setting up our paperwork just as the Capitol Insurrection happened.
While lots of people are disappointed (to say the least) in the rendering of the books into a TV show, citing unfaithfulness to the source material and the spirit of the books, there are also a number of people who praise the representation of gender, approach to things like smoking, race relations, and other modern ideals.
I see it differently. The Fallout video games put an interesting spin on the "future" by showing that what was once considered fashionable can become distasteful due to catastrophic events. With Foundation, it would have been more interesting to show how different events lead to the current state of society. The Battlestar Galactica TV series made a point to showing how society turned decidedly against digital communications because of how vulnerable it was to AI.
Much like with A Handmaid's Tale, I wish they would have tried a little harder to bridge the gap between how we see things today, and how we could see them under different circumstances. 12,000+ years from now could be quite different from now in a lot of ways.
> One subscription for access to ALL the content is the way to beat piracy. Anything else is anti-consumer at this point.
So what do you do when an Amazon Prime membership is required to access most contemporary books?
Or when you have to get several different all-you-can-read memberships to access all the authors you like. Eg. first there was just Netflix, now there is Hulu, Disney+ and Paramount+ as well if you want to see The Handmaid's Tale, Stranger Things, Game of Thrones, Star Trek: whatever, The Expanse, Star Wars & Avengers movies (to name just a few of the most popular and culturally relevant shows and movie franchises).
Whether there is a monopoly or oligopoly doesn't make much difference to consumers, though it does make some difference to content creators.
To make a system like you describe palatable over the long term, you would have to add in structural separation (content owners can't also be distributors) and strictly limit the kind of exclusive licensing deals that are allowed (eg. require statutory licensing of some sort) so new publishers and distributors can't be prevented from entering the market.
The issue has nothing to do with creative fiction. Nobody is bothered by stories that might use real life as a basis of inspiration.
The issue is that these stories are latched onto as 'narrative basis' for some kind of populist ideal, which may frankly just be bigotry.
The story was not picked up upon because it was just 'great writing' - it created buzz because it engendered a kind of bigoted fantasy among those that wanted to buy into the potential truthiness of it all.
Like the 'Man Next Door Who Raped The White Girl' (i.e. Black man) from the 'Reader's Digest', 1952 etc.
It's an issue because people can do whatever they want under the guise of creative fiction, and then try to use it as some kind of scare mongering re: 'This could happen! This is happening!'
I'm Canadian, we had to read the Handmaid's Tale in school. Margaret Atwood is famous for saying 'all these things happened somewhere in history' - essentially she cherry picked the absolute worst bits of history and rolled them into a hyper-fascist theocracy. Which is 100% legitimate and interesting from a creative perspective ... but the TV series became a ridiculous point of reference for the fantastical ignorance of some populists who loved think of this as the interpretation of their political enemies. As a TV series it's great fun. But when it's used beyond that (or more poignantly, used by the studios to play into people's bigotry) then it's not good.
Edit: please see my above comment for reference as to how most of the media picked up on this piece as the basis for a narrative. It's not some corner case conspiracy - it was used by NPR, RollingStone, Wapo, Medium, The Guardian etc. etc..
Any fantasy movie in a futuristic setting (even one that's technically in the past, like Star Wars) would be widely considered science fiction. Granted, that is a common definition of science fiction.
But science fiction can also be something like The Twilight Zone: a genre that explores "what-if" scenarios. A genre that takes some fictional premise and attempts to explore the consequences logically. An example premise could be, how might modern society have evolved if the Greek gods were real? A sci-fi story would try to approach that question in a scientific and logical way. Star Trek often followed this pattern. Star Wars doesn't.
A weakness of defining sci-fi by a futuristic setting is that you can change the genre with only superficial changes to the story. Other major genres - comedy, horror, mystery, romance, action - are defined by the feeling or thought process they try to evoke. But take Star Wars and replace the planets with kingdoms, the Jedi with wizards, and the force with.. well, that's fine as it is.. and you can create a story with the exact same plot points but without a futuristic setting. There's no actual science in Star Wars; only a futuristic setting.
Setting doesn't feel like it should be the feature that defines a genre. You should be able to have a comedy, horror or mystery take place in a futuristic setting and a sci-fi that takes place in the present (and we often do, eg, The Handmaid's Tale).
I'll note that there aren't many movies that stick to just sci-fi; most incorporate a lot of action (like The Matrix). This is probably because filmmakers feel 2+ hours of science fiction would be boring. The movie The Martian heavily cut from the science of the book and focused on the action (while the book had little action and a lot of science). You see a strong sci-fi focus more often in literature and TV.
The classic dystopias in literature described a supposedly future time, in order to criticize the present. The classics: Clockwork Orange; Farenheit 451; Brave New World; 1984.
Now there's a new trend in this genre, where a supposedly possible future time is described in order to glorify the present, and defend it against all possible change, good or bad, because "it could become worst". Handmaid's Tale is a good example. It makes catholic religion look so good it's sad. The total absence of criticism towards a religion tied with the institutional rape of thousands of children[0], and hatred of women, for instance, is absurd. And the fact is the raping is still going on as you read this. Of course this is only a single point of failure and absurdity amongst many others. Whilst Huxley, Orwell and others were driven by passion and rebellion against injustice and misery and desire to change life, low quality scripts like the one on this TV series are clearly motivated by making money while surfing/exploiting current social media cultural "trends". Disgusting.
0: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-44209971
We are dropping Disney+ minutes after the last episode of the Maldorian finishes it's screening at our house. Unless they release something immediately thereafter. We split Netflix with my best friend and my wife and I split Amazon prime/hbo. As soon as last week tonight wraps up we're cancelling hbo too. We briefly had Hulu while the wife was binging on handmaid's tale but have since cancelled. Not keeping these services on 52 weeks a year
I can't get behind "looking down" at scifi, but the distinction between scifi and speculative fiction isn't necessarily pedantic. Speculative fiction creates a world sufficiently different from our own that we need to situate to it, which makes it similar to science fiction. But in terms of technology, everything matches what we have right now.
As long as you don't disparage a particular genre, it's an entertaining and thought provoking distinction, especially when you get right out on the line. For instance, the episode of Black Mirror "Nosedive" gets right out on that line. There isn't much technology that doesn't already exist, they've just gone a little farther with it in terms of electric cars. Then you could go in the other direction - all fiction is speculative to some extent, so when does it cross the line? I'd say it happens when you need to situate yourself to the rules of a very different world, in a broad sense, but very hard to say...
The Handmaid's Tale feels like science fiction to me, probably because it's in a vague future date. But I'm having trouble thinking of anything technology oriented that would have to exist and doesn't already.
> I think it would be hard to somewhat regularly buy books or go to a (typical English language) bookstore without seeing anything about Margaret Atwood.
The past month you cannot have entered any decently sized bookshop carrying new titles without encountering her name with The Testaments out. In my local bookshop I find the hardcover original English edition, its Dutch translation, The Handmaid's Tale in English and Dutch in editions ranging from paperback to luxury hardcover, and a bunch of her other works.
Before that, The Handmaid's Tale has been prominently displayed ever since the TV series came out.
Now: "This is ridiculous! I'm paying 10 bucks a month to Hulu for thousands of shows, movies and kids content so I can watch Handmaid's Tale with commercials."
The interpretation and application of the word varies.
Growing up in Canada in the 80s, all of Margaret Atwood's books were always considered Canadian Literature (aka CanLit).
Since the Handmaid's Tale TV series thrust her into the pop culture consciousness, I always find it interesting when someone in the American media refers to her work as science fiction.
I love the Handmaid's Tale, but it drives me bonkers that they release new episodes at the rate of one per week. Release all the episodes in one day darn it! Making me wait pisses me off and (as I'm discovering) want to complain about it online.
I'm not sure if that's what the parent meant. I'm on the same side, I'm not really watching movies anymore, there's too little depth to the world there. It's amazing how much you can make the world and characters deep and interesting in series. It's the same situation as movies vs books.
The problem is when there really only is enough interesting content for 4-5 hours and you feel like half the series is there only as a filler. Handmaid's tale is an example that comes to my mind. I like the series overall, but it's 2-3x times as long as it should be in my opinion.
The issues I have with Hulu aren't all that different from the issues I have with Netflix. Yes, content is removed without warning, but it is on Netflix too. Yes, there's a delay between a show being broadcast and it showing up on Hulu, but there's a considerably larger gap with Netflix. Neither of these applies to Hulu's own original content, same as it doesn't with Netflix.
All the streaming services, IMO, share the same flaw - they can't provide all the content I want to watch. I really wish we'd ended up in a world where I can just buy the latest episodes of Black Mirror, Handmaid's Tale and Star Trek: Discovery when they come out, rather than have to maintain separate monthly subscriptions for each, but alas. Ironically, I can buy a lot of network show content by the episode on iTunes/Google Play/whatever.
1. Fermat's Enigma: The Epic Quest to Solve the World's Greatest Mathematical Problem - I've been on a giant math books kick. I really enjoyed Simon Singh's other book, The Code Book, so this one is awesome.
2. The Code Book - If you're really into the history of cryptography, this book is for you.
3. The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck - Not a really a revelatory book by any sorts. But a fun read.
4. The Handmaid's Tale - Revisiting this since the TV series came out and I really felt like getting traumatized all over again.
Content isn't fungible. Netflix, Prime, and Hulu put together may have more content than you could ever watch (arguably, even just one of them alone does), but if it doesn't have the show or movie you want, you're boned.
I've had Netflix, Prime, and HBO for years. A couple months ago my gf and I really wanted to watch The Handmaid's Tale, which is only available on Hulu. Hulu charges $12/mo for their no-ad plan (hell if I'm going to pay for a service and still have to suffer through ads). The idea of paying $12/mo for a single show seemed a bit much to me... in the end I signed up for the free trial to watch it because I couldn't find pirated copies on Usenet.
Now Star Trek Discovery has just come out, and CBS wants me to give them $10/mo for the privilege of watching it. No thanks.
It's funny, because we've all jumped at the chance to "cut the cord" and ditch our cable subscriptions, but we've replaced it with the online version of exactly the same thing. We still don't have a la carte pricing for TV shows and movies for the most part. At this point I might be paying more per month than I used to for cable.
I never thought The Handmaid's Tale was a documentary about the actual, real future ahead of us...
Funny you should say that. Here in the UK we're three episodes into a Handmaid's Tale TV adaptation. It's surprisingly good and you're right, it's excellent TV, even if I found the book itself quite a struggle back in college.
The Hulu series is well written. The colors are amazing.
I think it's perfectly valid to see some parallels in current society with the dystopian society in The Handmaid's Tale. The US has a vice president who doesn't allow himself to have dinner with a woman he's not married to. The President and his team make statements to the media every day that would have been hard to predict in the most outlandish dystopian novels.
It's just a TV show.
I am sad that Elizabeth Moss is a Scientologist!