Lately I’ve been putting myself through the somewhat gruelling ordeal of watching The Handmaid’s Tale TV series. As I write this, I’ve just started on Season 5 so be aware there might be some spoilers in here…
The TV show is an extrapolated extension of the masterful dystopian novel by Canadian feminist writer Margaret Atwood. It concerns the testimony of a single ‘handmaid” - a women forced in sexual slavery in the name of serving god, as a result of catastrophic declining fertility rates in the imagined state of Gilead.
I took a four year break from watching the show after I completed Season 1. I felt too traumatised and too triggered to continue at the time. Some had accused the second season of offering up too many gratuitous depictions of violence against women. It was certainly too much to stomach for me at the time, and so I took a pause.
Fast forward multiple rounds of trauma therapy later and I finally felt able to dip back in, hearing that the later seasons took a trajectory towards a revenge narrative that might better suit my taste for what I call “justice viewing”.
In the past, I was always a fan of stories about powerful, vengeful female protagonists: Uma Thurman in Kill Bill, the Japanese horror of ‘Audition’. I even wrote a song about the joy of karma - ‘What Goes Around’, styling the earliest Anchoress releases around the concept of “revenge pop”.
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