The Handmaid's Tale Is Jarring Even to Those Who Read It

Dystopia can still be shocking.


The first thing to know about The Handmaid's Tale is that it does not matter one bit if you have read the book or not. That's important, because a lot of people have read the book, and a lot very recently. For those who haven't read the book, well, dystopia doesn't get much more ominous than a tale of a tyrannical theocracy stripping the rights of women to counteract the growing rate of infertility. In short: We sinned, so God is taking away our babies. For those already in the Margaret Atwood loop, the show—which debuts April 26 on Hulu—is deeply satisfying, at least as far as its first three episodes go.

Watching The Handmaid's Tale is an entirely different experience than reading it. The book was written in the '80s, which makes it dated in a technological sense. But it's also so damn meditative; just Offred's thoughts, recounting events that may or may not be true, with utter solemnity. Elisabeth Moss, however, plays her with a wry twinkle. She's reactive instead of ponderous, which is off-putting at first—she's doing The Handmaid's Tale for christ's sake, this is serious shit!—but becomes completely winning. If you were swept up in a Jesus coup and forced to breed so another woman could raise your child to propagate the human race, you probably wouldn't stop muttering "fuck." You'd call an annoying person "a pious little shit." You'd laugh like a moron when a dangerous man made himself look weak.


The Handmaid's Tale is of course jarring in the obvious sense: One ruthless scene is a single shot of Alexis Bledel's Ofglen clinging to her lover before her lover is dragged away and hung. Another is the most devastating rendition of Bob Marley's "Three Birds" you'll ever hear. The flashbacks to the coup peppered throughout the first three episodes are a bit too relatable—protests in the streets; a militarized police force; Samira Wiley's Moira being too afraid to walk to the train station without a man accompanying her. The show also blows through so many of the book's plot points in the first three episodes you aren't sure what it could hit you with in the next seven.

It's also jarring in the little things, like the mention of Uber and Tinder, or the weirdness of the handmaid's wandering the food-stocked aisles of a brightly lit grocery store. Reading the book, I imagined shopping happening at thatch huts and wooden stands. But this dystopia is ultra-modern; it's tomorrow, maybe. The juiciest bits in the show aren't remotely scintillating; they're the crumbs of detail we don't really get from Atwood's version that give a blueprint of how, exactly, this society came to be. One nugget of information is that there are only two states left of the 50—there are now only two stars on the American flag. The country's capital is now in Anchorage; you can only assume Hawaii is the other survivor. Another is that before the takeover, people were worshipping in front of hospitals where babies were being born (or stillborn, or dying).


This show, and the times, make you hungry for these facts; Offred and the other women have so little information in The Handmaid's Tale, and we, like them, feel privileged to get any detail. Information is power, no? And that information makes the show hyper-relevant, whereas the book seemed removed from time. Besides, the sexist dystopian landscape has been rehashed on social media about a thousand times since the last legislative blow to Planned Parenthood, and five million times since Donald Trump successfully set his sites on the White House. What makes The Handmaid's Tale so satisfying is that it manages, despite the canon, to be shocking.

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