The Limited Times

Now you can see non-English news...

Successful series "The Handmaid's Tale": Suddenly the world is different

2019-11-05T17:20:00.235Z


Finally, the dystopian drama "The Handmaid's Tale" can also be seen in Germany. The series tells of a religious dictatorship that seems radically different as well as terribly close.



"Normal is always what you're used to," says one of the women who introduces the new to the new. "This may not seem normal to you at the moment, but in a while it will be. It's going to be normal."

The new, which still has to become normal, came over them like from the sky. About them, the new women who find themselves "maids" in a state called "Gilead". Just every single one of her everyday life went by: in the evening with friends on the road, annoyed in the job, silly with the husband under the woolen tent. Now, after a coup d'etat, there is an authoritarian theocracy: women are not allowed to work, their existence is reduced to whether they are fruitful or not. All freedoms and rights: gone. Suddenly everything is different than in the "time before".

It is first of all this surprise that makes the story of "The Handmaid's Tale", in English: "Report of the Maid", seem so eerie. The feeling of waking up in a world whose rules and codes have fundamentally changed is the feeling after the Brexit vote, after the coup attempt in Turkey, in which Erdogan makes journalists terrorists with a stroke of a pen, following the election of Donald Trump. And although the novel is from the year 1985.

photo gallery


10 pictures

"Handmaid" meets David Fincher: Who succeeds in the next series hit?

So it is fitting that Margaret Atwood's world bestseller now comes as a series on television - from 4 October now finally in Germany to see on EntertainTV. Grandios the first season captures the oppressive mood of the original, also thanks to the brilliant Elisabeth Moss in the lead role of the eponymous maid. The series has just been showered with Emmys (five pieces), Season 2 is in the making. It is nothing short of the socio-critical series of the hour.

Then it was too late

It was "speculative fiction" when she developed the dystopian substance, according to 77-year-old Atwood. In 2017, this fiction is no longer speculative, but rather real. The setting, a nonspecifically near future in the US, has been unmistakably updated in the series, with Tinder, ugly modern strollers, phrases like, "When we looked up from our phones at some point, it was too late."

When the women look up, they find themselves in a gender order according to the racist ideology of the strict conservatives. Men have the say in religious dictatorship, women are only prototypes, defined by their bodies, marked with colors: In jungfraumariablauen the devout, but infertile wives. In blood-red cloaks the childbearing women, the "maids", with enormous white hoods like blinders, which are assigned to the childless to mate once a month, so: rape, let. In green robes the "Marthas", the servants of the houses. And homosexuals are hanged.

"We gave them more than we took away from them," one man says of the women. One thinks of those who put silicone in their breasts just to get a hold of this "meat market". "Our society has died from too much choice," it says, and "women were not safe at the time."

It's moments like these that so accurately reflect our now. You can think of Trump's men's cabinet, which judges abortion rights, the reactionary thesis that "German women" should be defended, the AfD election slogan "New Germans, let's do it ourselves," with the incidental tone, with the existence of Midwives is decided. And how Trump consultant Kellyanne Conway invented the euphemism "alternative facts" to force normalization of the unimaginable.

The patterns are simple in Gilead, the world sorted by blue, red, green. Reading and writing is taboo for those women. Even above the butcher hangs only the image of a pig.

"Pull yourself together, fight!"

The rebellious potential of the maids shows in the series whenever the camera circles in eagle's perspective high above them: The red dots below, they act like a menstrual army. And indeed, a secret society, geared for the overthrow, is created for a time "after". "Pull yourself together", Elisabeth Moss's maid hisses to her friend Moira (Samira Wiley, Poussey from "Orange is the New Black"), "Fight!". The pink caps of the newly strengthened women's rights movement under Trump are not far away - with women disguising themselves as maids, for quiet protest.

LO SCALZO / EPA / REX / Shutterstock

Supporters of Planned Parenthood protest in front of the Capitol in June 2017

Atwood, who co-wrote the screenplays, always emphasized that she made use of this cosmos of injustice in reality: that sounds like the Lebensborn program of the Nazis as well as the stasis spit atmosphere of the GDR - she wrote in West Berlin at that time - the overthrow in Iran in 1979, the desaparecidos during the Argentine junta, slavery with their underground railroad.

How phenomenal the Canadian author's feeling is to write so timelessly about repression will become even more abundant in the coming weeks: In October she will be awarded the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. And in November, "Alias ​​Grace" will release another novel in serial form, adapted for Netflix by filmmaker Sarah Polley ("The Stories We Tell") and staged by "American Psycho" director Mary Harron.

A "report" is an eyewitness account, here of one that opposes the official truth about Gilead. So that not only the invented by men history - incidentally, also the theme of "Alias ​​Grace" - applies to this era. It is the core message of Atwood's writing: we always need the testimonies of others.

" The Handmaid's Tale - The report of the maid " , starting from 4 October with EntertainTV of Telekom Germany

Editor's note: We have corrected the caption below the photo from Washington

Source: spiegel

All life articles on 2019-11-05

You may like

News/Politics 2024-02-22T16:53:15.493Z
News/Politics 2024-02-23T08:43:29.580Z
Life/Entertain 2024-03-08T20:47:23.445Z

Trends 24h

Life/Entertain 2024-03-28T17:17:20.523Z

Latest

© Communities 2019 - Privacy

The information on this site is from external sources that are not under our control.
The inclusion of any links does not necessarily imply a recommendation or endorse the views expressed within them.