A Handmaid’s Tale, a Tale untold

Imagine living in a world where religious police exist, men can have a second wife, love songs are forbidden, girls can’t sing in case men hear them, being caught with a man not from your family is a sin, wearing blue nail polish is an act of rebellion, girls can’t ride bikes, women can’t drive cars, women are meant to bear sons not daughters, women can’t appear in public unless veiled and girls can be married off at a young age to a much older man. While this sounds like it could be Margaret Atwood’s dystopian Gilead from the book and televisions series, The Handmaid’s Tale, it’s actually a description of the Saudi world of Haifaa Al Mansour’s Wadjda where many of the restrictions of Gilead are real.

The first season of The Handmaid’s Tale was claustrophobic and terrifying, and it worked because it stuck closely to Margaret Atwood’s book, published in 1985. By season 3, the series had lost the plot, literally. Sharks were jumping though gaping credibility holes in virtually every episode.

For me, the series had problems from the very beginning. Why did the handmaids have to exist in the first place? They made sense in the 1980s, but they made no sense in the 21st century. What had happened to modern reproductive technology? Why weren’t the fertile women given fertility drugs and the resulting ova fertilised artificially and then implanted in the commanders’ wives? And why were all the commanders’ wives infertile, and why did all the fertile women come from outside the Sons of Jacob movement?

Of course, without the handmaids, there would have been no story.

Other things bothered me too. The Sons of Jacob were meant to be a pro-environmental theocracy, yet there were no visible signs of renewable energy in Gilead. There were no solar panels on the roofs. The vehicles all seemed to operate on petrol too. Unless they were electric or operated on hydrogen, but this was never revealed.

The shopping expeditions to the supermarket, Loaves and Fishes, bothered me too. Quite a lot of organisation was involved in sending the handmaids to Loaves and Fishes to go shopping with their walking partners, yet the handmaids only ever bought a few items at a time, never enough to sustain a large household consisting of a commander, his wife, his handmaid, his Martha, his driver and possibly several other menials. Who was doing the rest of the shopping? Loaves and Fishes must have had a delivery service, so why send out the handmaids to Loaves and Fishes if they were only picking up a couple of oranges and a can of beans?

Once the series left the world of the book, June Osborne donned a virtually impenetrable Kevlar suit of plot armour. The laws of Gilead continually bounced off her as the scriptwriters struggled to maintain her in the centre of the story while failing to develop the storylines of other more interesting characters. The series Mad Men successfully managed to overcome this problem by weaving the main thread of Don Draper’s story through the plot arcs of myriad other characters against the backdrop of how US society changed during the 1960s. As season 3 of The Handmaid’s Tale unfolded, I kept on wondering why The Handmaid’s Tale’s scriptwriters hadn’t used Mad Men as a model of storytelling, especially as Elizabeth Moss was one of the stars of Mad Men along with being June Osborne.

The vagueness of the political structure of Gilead was also frustrating. Historically, an authoritarian state usually has a dictator, and without such a dictator, The Handmaid’s Tale lost many plotlines that would have improved it. June Osborne could have remained as the hero with her ultimate goal being to assassinate the dictator after she’d saved her daughter, Hannah.

I also kept on wondering what had happened to New York.

Perhaps the series should have been named Gilead and this would have freed the scriptwriters to give the story a bigger picture instead of frequently focusing on closes-ups of June Osborne emoting. As it was, I ended up missing a few episodes of season 3 because the reviews told me what I needed to know. In many cases the reviews turned out to be more interesting than the episodes I did watch.

While waiting for season 4 of The Handmaid’s Tale to appear on viewers’ preferred devices it might be worthwhile tracking down Wadjda to see a real-life version of Gilead that’s happening now. In many ways, I found Wadjda’s seemingly simple tale of a young girl trying to obtain a forbidden bike more compelling and uplifting than much of season 3 of The Handmaid’s Tale.