Who was going to tell Margaret Atwood in 1984, when in a room in a boarding house in East Berlin she began to write
The Handmaid's Tale
,
that the novel - considered at first a dystopia only suitable for fans of the genre - would become a revulsive of global feminism at the end of the first decade of the 21st century.
He did, of course, with a television series to match.
The very appropriate approach of the first season of the series expanded and, above all, updated, with very successful script decisions, the message, more ambiguous and less explicit, of the classic: if you take a step back, you are lost.
Time can go back one second.
And your rights too.
So be careful, don't let your guard down.
MORE INFORMATION
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Who was also going to tell Atwood that the success of that first shot would lead her to write a second part -
The Wills
, despite everything also at the height of the first, especially as regards the ambiguity of that one. -, forced by the logic of a conservative market to exploit what works while it works. Without thinking, of course, how the transformation of a cult work into a gold mine can literally end that cult work. What is happening with
The Handmaid's Tale
, the HBO series whose fourth season premieres this Thursday, is something like that. Fearful of straying from the original message, it begins to spin. When that happens, the initial terror — the alert that was intended to be transmitted — becomes habit, acceptance, fiction with directions, sometimes conflicting.
What happens in this final season of
The Handmaid's Tale
is that the Republic of Gilead (the United States of the series) is falling apart. There is a war going on. What happens that the character of Elisabeth Moss, June Osborne - also known as Offred, later Dejoseph - anticipated in one of the first chapters of the third season: “Mom, you wanted a culture of women. Well, we already have it. It is not what you said but it exists. And this is what we do. We watch over the men. We study them. We know what your worst nightmares are and, with a little practice, that's what we'll become: nightmares. " June — without whom nothing would make sense; it could be said that the series is her, a
deus ex machina
infinite - threatened to "go for them" when they were "ready."
Well, they already are.
The battle, and the constant flight, turn this new installment into a kind of
survival horror
, that is, a story of survival in a devastated place that has more to do with
The
Walking Dead
than with terrifying domestic fundamentalism.
The psychic cannibalism of the impeccable first season is here above all brute force and explicit vengeful cliché, completely removed from the avant-garde that Atwood proposed, that mysterious medieval-looking future that worked perfectly as an allegory of a present in which nothing should take for granted.
The last corkscrew regarding the —already so hackneyed completely neutralized— matter of motherhood (and her, here, tormenting sacrifice), will be starring Serena, and it is, taking into account evolution, fireworks.
Elisabeth Moss, in an instant of the fourth season of 'The Handmaid's Tale' HBO SPAIN
The writer of all this, Bruce Miller, has not lost the north. He's just trying to find a way out. And it is one that pierces, over and over again, the same wound, incidentally widening the focus to, for example, all those rescued children who would like to grow up in Gilead because they have known nothing else and do not understand the world that believes they have saved them —inciding in the perniciousness of indoctrination, but doing it on tiptoe. And it would seem that, although it seems so on the outside, because the aesthetic is so powerful that, at the glimpse of each cap, the initial terror reappears, inside,
The Handmaid's Tale
has long ceased to be what it was. It is installed, as an unforeseen success, in a forward flight that, curiously, is lagging behind.
By intensifying June's suffering, you are building a myth that should be destroyed, as contemporary genre filmmakers are destroying it. Here martyrdom has an old end. The struggle, the liberation, must pass through the sacrifice. And shouldn't he, as Rose Glass does in the movie
Saint Maud
, put an end to the idea of martyrdom itself? In the near-hand-to-hand fighting — with the enemy, all those treacherous men — that the maids embark on this season, there may be a message — everything that awaits us depends on each one of us. But the destruction of all the pernicious imaginary about the feminine that directors like Glass are carrying is far, far away, and here is the failure of, it seems, something that perhaps should not have happened to be one of the fuses that lit everything.
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