A Tale of Two Handmaids

I really hated Mad Men. I concede that the show looked terrific (its regular cinematographer Chris Manley, an old friend of mine from Philadelphia days, was deservedly nominated for an Emmy four times), but I found its politics totally oppressive. For a show that people loved so much for the way it “exposed the patriarchy” or some such thing, it sure seemed to spend a lot of time depicting women being humiliated, degraded, and generally abused in ever more novel ways. The series’ most vivid image for me is in the pilot: Elisabeth Moss, in the stirrups for an exam to get birth control pills, the doctor smoking as he berates her to not let herself turn into “the town pump.” The highly calculated ugliness of that tableau just seemed so impossibly smug and callous. I hated the way that the show flattered the political sensibilities of its presumed viewership, even as its creators seemed just as impressed with themselves for coming up with so many previously unimagined ways to degrade women on screen.

Initially, the newfangled television adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s seemed to be some sort of impossibly heightened version of this. Like , it is genuinely impressive from an aesthetic standpoint, being shot by a group of highly talented visual stylists (including a number of refugees from the English Canadian cinema: Kari Skogland, best known; Jeremy Podeswa, he of [1994], [1999], and [2007], as well as several episodes of everyone’s favourite prestige-TV rape-fest ; and Floria Sigismondi, the OCAD-trained music-video director who has helmed some episodes of Netflix’s as well as the 2010 rock biopic ). And, also like , a lot of that style is lavished on the many innovative ways the show finds to horrifyingly degrade women. Indeed, now the whole show revolves around the picturesque victimization of Elisabeth Moss, in her role as one of the indentured sexual slaves and human breeding stock of Gilead, the totalitarian dystopia that has replaced the former United States. Now it’s not just women being sexually harassed and objectified, but imprisoned and repeatedly raped, in addition to being electrocuted (also repeatedly), beaten, burned, mutilated, and hanged, as well as having their children stolen.