Why remake the Handmaid’s Tale now? Gilead as ISIS

I posted this briefly and then pulled it, with the idea of expanding it into a proper article somewhere. But weirdly, a piece about how a show that (1) is over turns out to be (2) not as topical as people think was a hard sell. So here you go!

The Hulu series The Handmaid’s Tale is a curious cultural document. It is very well-produced and well-acted and makes the dystopian world feel eerily plausible — and yet the big question that was always lingering for me was, “What exactly is the point of all this?” People like to say that under Trump, we are now living in The Handmaid’s Tale. But even if that were true — which I don’t think it actually is yet, thankfully — that can’t be the motive behind making the series. After all, such decisions had to have been made long before Trump was even a serious candidate, and certainly before his shocking Electoral College technicality.

After watching the finale, I think I know what they were thinking: it’s actually about ISIS, and the political goal is to make American viewers feel sympathetic to refugees. The transposition into American conservative Christianity makes it clear that we’re dealing with a group that is very selective in reading Scripture in ways that feed their political agenda, with no real relation to tradition — making central to their practice obscure stories that even most Christians aren’t familiar with, for example, and taking clearly metaphorical or hyperbolic language (“if your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out”) to justify brutal violence. The fact that they added the trial of the Commander, resulting in the amputation of his left hand, only reinforces this connection, given that the amputations mandated in the Qur’an (and almost always avoided in traditional Islamic law) are a signature move of ISIS, apparently due to the fact that they offend Western sensibilities. The only way they could have made it clearer would be to have the guy beheaded on camera.

This helps us understand why they included black characters, which don’t make sense in Atwood’s original universe. Isn’t it a weird coincidence that both of the main POV characters who make it to Canada are precisely black? They need the refugees to be racially different from their destination, so that they can implicitly shame the American viewer for racial prejudice against people who are victims of a horrible system. We, too, should be providing refugees with a cell phone, insurance, walking-around money, etc., without even mentioning their race or forcing them to go through a heavy screening process. If you show up and you’re from Gilead, you’re taken care of — and that’s what we should be doing for victims fleeing ISIS.

I am so confident that this is the real motivation that I don’t even care if no one involved in the show admits to it. Naturally, they are going to run with the narrative that their show has in fact prompted — no one wants to say that they made a political allegory that so badly misjudged the political terrain. The shame is that the reading of the show as anti-Trump leads Americans to focus on their own victimhood, completely ignoring the people that the show (somewhat heavy-handedly) wanted us to think about.