BEFORE: There is a third film in the "I Know What You Did..." franchise, in addition to the current TV series - again, I feel like everything will be a streaming TV series someday if it isn't already - but the 2nd sequel shares NO actors with the first two films, so I can't go there. Rules are rules, except when I want to grant exemptions. So I had to change tactics a bit, move over to another franchise - "The Handmaid's Tale" is also a series now, it's been killing it on...Netflix? Or is it on Amazon? The fact that I don't even know for sure shows you how little interest I have in streaming series. (It's on HULU? Really? If Amazon is like McDonald's and Netflix is like Burger King, Hulu's like the Dairy Queen of streaming...like it's great if you want ice cream, but who goes there for burgers?)
Sure, I watched "Tiger King", "Queen's Gambit" and "Norm MacDonald Has a Show" over the past year, but I've been avoiding "The Boys", "The Umbrella Academy" and most recently, whatever "Squid Game" is. They may all be fine productions, and those first two are based on comic books so they MAY be right up my alley, but I watch so many movies that I just haven't got time for any new series, unless they're revivals of "Law & Order" or "CSI". THOSE I will make time for.
Muse Watson carries over from "I Still Know What You Did Last Summer" - at least I've been assured by the IMDB that he's in this film somewhere.
THE PLOT: Under a dystopian religious tyranny, most women cannot conceive children. Those young women who can live in a form of sexual slavery to provide children for influential families.
AFTER: I know what you may be thinking - "How is this a horror movie? There are no witches, demons, vampires or zombies in it..." But it is one, isn't it? Just not the typical Halloween-y kind, but the fact that this COULD all be real someday is what makes it scary, right? I mean, what's more terrifying, a zombie that can't possibly exist saying "I'm coming for you...to eat your brains!" or a Supreme Court justice saying "I'm coming for you...to take away your reproductive rights!" You can totally team up with your friends this year to go to a costume party as the conservative justices - seriously, what's scarier than Brett Kavanagh, Neil Gorsuch, Amy Comey Barrett and Clarence Thomas in a room together? If you don't have an African-American friend available, just stick to the three Trump appointees, that's still plenty scary, and if you've got another female in your group, just add Zombie Ruth Bader-Ginsburg. Halloween solved, you just need some black robes and a couple gavels. You're welcome.
I'm really lucky that the linking this year allowed this one to be part of the mix, because I put this chain together a few months BEFORE the recent anti-abortion laws passed in Texas. Come on, we all know the new laws aren't going to stick, they're clearly unconstitutional, but still, this sort of thing is very worrisome, especially when we all know that the rich people are still going to find ways to get abortions for THEIR daughters, it's really just another way to punish the underprivileged and exert control. But the GOP seems more confused than ever - without access to abortion, won't there be MORE people below the poverty line, MORE people born to poor parents, and therefore FEWER people of privilege, who are the ones more likely to vote Republican? I'm thinking there's a contradiction in there somewhere, low-cost and available abortions for all is something that helps keep the U.S. birthrate down, might help keep the world from being overpopulated, and that means less of a strain on the planet, more resources for all, and we'll all be better off in the long run. Somehow the Republicans tend to forget that elections are all a numbers game, and fewer abortions could translate into more voting Democrats 20 years from now, and that should be something they DON'T want, right? It's kind of like how the GOP is against vaccination mandates and mask mandates, without realizing that this stance could kill off more of their Republican supporters in the long run, it's simply penny-wise and pound foolish.
But I've got to consider tonight's cautionary tale and take it at face value, the source was a novel written in 1985 by Margaret Atwood, set in Gilead, a country that used to be the United States but had "gone wrong" - the film doesn't specify exactly when or how it went wrong, which might have been helpful here. My guess is that Atwood looked around at the conservative policies of the Reagan era (Moral Majority, evangelical preachers, right-wing politicians) and just projected all that into the future to a somewhat illogical conclusion. I recorded this off of NYC's PBS station, which runs three semi-obscure movies every Saturday night (one short film, one "classic" feature and one "indie" feature) and the movie's host couldn't stop talking about how this 1990 film was poorly received at the time of release, but in the end, was just a few decades ahead of its time. I'm sort of on the fence about this, though, because it feels like Atwood and this movie got some things right, but other things wrong.
In the future of Gilead, there's been some kind of widespread disease (OK, check) possibly related to pollution or toxic waste (umm, could still happen) that rendered 90% of women infertile (nope, not yet, though the possibility of infertility was allegedly contributing to vaccine hesitancy). There are checkpoints at the U.S. borders in this future, but they're there to keep Americans from LEAVING, not to prevent immigrants from entering - so that's a 180-degree big miss, but we do have travel bans still in place, right? So let's call that one a push. The people trying to flee the U.S. are rounded up and treated as undesirables, with the fertile women among them "recruited" into the Handmaid's program. Then there's a montage of black people being similarly rounded-up, and since the rest of the movie is African-American free, is this some kind of riff on Hitler's concentration camps? Sure, we'd like to think this could never happen in America, especially since we're on a path to Caucasians becoming a minority over time (again, GOP, if this happens, and you don't approve, your anti-abortion policies are partially to blame) but the U.S. is still the country that rounded up Japanese-Americans during World War II and put them in camps. Internment camps, sure, not death camps, but it's still a human rights violation.
So then the movie explores the sexual politics of the new reality - but again, it's the social mores of the 1980's projected forward, not necessarily the social mores of today. Yes, of course, today's women should always, always be on their guard to retain and maintain their social status and the equal rights that have been fought for over time. But it's just not the same world that it was in the 1980's, women are having children later, many are more focused on career than family, and then you've got gay rights and trans rights in the mix, blended families and diversity and surrogate parents and honestly, isn't the nuclear family just a quaint remnant of the past at this point? I've been in many situations, even recently, when I realized I was probably the only straight person in the room and I felt like a total throwback. So in 1990 it was probably quite shocking to have a married couple use a younger, more fertile woman to carry a child to term, but now it's just another way to have a baby. Bringing a third person into a marital relationship was something of a jaw-dropper back then, but now we just call it a "thrupple". (Really? The English language is quite flexible and diverse, but is that honestly the BEST name we could come up with?)
But of course, there's the issue of consent. The handmaids just didn't sign up for this, and that's where the "horror" element comes into play here. The fertile women in the minority are not in the program willingly, and the program itself seems to be religious-based, Old Testament style, and also has elements of brainwashing and hive-mind mentality. Sorry, to me "religion" and "brainwashing" are nearly synonymous, but I'm not sure how you feel about it all. I was raised Catholic and my parents were very involved in the local parish, but at some point during mass when everybody stands up together, sits down together, recites the same prayer together, I started to feel like I was in a cult, so I got myself out. Your mileage may vary, of course, but I just want you to know that you've got options, you can stop going to church at any time, just saying. If God exists and is everywhere, they why do I have to go to church? Who benefits? Probably the people passing the collection plate.
Where were we? Oh, right, rape. Brainwashing, subjugation of minorities, separating parents from their children, using women as baby-makers against their will, how is this NOT a horror movie? That 10% of women who were still fertile just couldn't organize themselves into a powerful voting bloc, and a substantial number of older infertile women no doubt had some say in subverting their rights, because they still wanted children, for some reason (I don't understand the appeal of having kids either, but hey, you do you.). Believe it or not, this does seem possible, considering how many women live in red states and voted for Trump, at least the first time, so yeah, they voted conservatively and are apparently anti-abortion and are actively selling out their own gender, because they somehow believe it benefits them to do so. It's a head-scratcher for sure, but that's where we find ourselves. My guess is these are the same women protesting vaccination and mask mandates at their kids schools, which is also confusing, don't you WANT your kids' teachers vaccinated, don't you WANT your kids to be healthy and NOT catch COVID and NOT bring it home to kill you and Grandma? Oh, right, you want your personal freedoms, and congratulations, you get to keep those, but now Granny is dead.
There are signs of hope - fewer women voted for Trump the second time around, which is encouraging - I'm guessing the 2020 election split a lot of families right down the middle. Many wives voted for Biden, even if they didn't tell their husbands about it. Single women, gay women, trans women, women who were turned off by Trump's sexual history, all that gave Biden 57% of the female vote, while he only got 45% of the male vote. Trump got 53% of the male vote, so you just know that somewhere right now, GOP leaders are trying to figure out a way to allow only men to vote in 2024, right? But I'm sorry, Miss Atwood, the future is female. There simply are more female-Americans than male-Americans, and a greater percentage of them turn up and vote. While women didn't get the right to vote in American until 1920, I just read about how they started voting differently from men around 1980. The "blue wave" that put more Democrats into the House in 2018 was also called a "women's wave", and now we've got a female VP for the first time ever, and I wish Biden good health, but on the other hand, we're just one bad ticker away from a female President. I secretly really want to see the GOP lose their shit over that.
Now back to the scary stuff - 55% of white women still voted for Trump in 2020, despite his horrible record of molesting and abusing women, despite the possible loss of reproductive rights, despite the possibility of putting more conservative justices on the Supreme Court and turning the U.S. into Gilead. WTF, white women? Why throw your fellow females under the bus? Is this a race thing, a class thing, or a self-loathing thing? It's another head-scratcher to me.
Anyway, back to the movie. Maybe the Hulu series really is the best way to go, because over four seasons (and counting) they've really had the time to flesh out a lot of the ideas concerning the social politics of the future and the subjugation of the fertile women into a constantly-abused working class - which again, you'd like to THINK couldn't happen because of this thing called the Constitution, but who can say? The 1990 movie, which many people seem to have forgotten completely about, does seem a bit rushed, by comparison. There are some good plot ideas put forward here, but many of them are also very nebulous and seem not completely thought through? I could get more into detail here about what works and what doesn't work, but it scarcely matters. Like, how can the commander and his wife consider the baby to be THEIRS, when perhaps both of them are infertile, and they're neither the mother or the father of the baby? And where are the women who become infertile and say, "Oh, God, what a relief! Now I can just live my life and enjoy myself!"
The screenplay here was written by the esteemed Harold Pinter, but when the film's director asked for revisions, Pinter was simply too busy, and referred the director back to Margaret Atwood, the author of the novel. I don't even have time to discern all the differences between page and screen here, but apparently they're substantial - this film was by default written by committee, apparently, and maybe that's why it doesn't feel like it truly ends, it just sort of stops. Any time you take a 500-page novel and condense it down to a 110-minute film, that's bound to happen. As always, my rating below reflects my immediate enjoyment of the film, and is not necessarily a measure of the film's ultimate importance and/or cultural impact. But maybe the whole reason we have dystopian cautionary tales is to make sure that those futures never come to pass. So register to vote, stay informed, stay vigilant, and "Illegitimi non carborundum".
Also starring Natasha Richardson (last seen in "Maid in Manhattan"), Robert Duvall (last seen in "The Eagle Has Landed"), Faye Dunaway (last seen in "The Champ"), Elizabeth McGovern (last seen in "The Wife"), Aidan Quinn (last seen in "Desperately Seeking Susan"), Victoria Tennant, Blanche Baker, Traci Lind, Reiner Schöne, Robert D. Raiford, Bill Owen, David Dukes, Blair Nicole Struble, Zoey Wilson, Kathryn Doby, Lucia Hartpeng, Karma Ibsen Riley, Lucile McIntyre, Allison Holmes, Mirjam Bohnet.
RATING: 4 out of 10 games of Scrabble
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