In Which We Live To Be Struck Down By Puritans

Snowglobe

by DICK CHENEY

The Handmaid's Tale
creator Bruce Miller
Hulu

Perhaps some day we will know the true story of what happened on the inside of Elisabeth Moss' marriage to Fred Armisen. The pet names, the sex, the types of sex, the frequency of sex, who prepared breakfast for who, who answered the door, kept the dog back from the mailman. Who stroked the hair of who. Who threw out the old bread, when Fred decided Elisabeth was maybe more boring than someone he could be excited by in a long term partner, when Elisabeth felt safe to criticize Fred's late nights, the smell of tequila on his breath, whether he smelled old, who was jealous, who showed it, who stopped the game, who started it again. Who fell out of love.

It feels like we will never know the real reasons that Offred (Elisabeth Moss) married her husband in The Handmaid's Tale. We are introduced to her family before all the events of the series happen in a scene where Offred, her husband Luke (O.T. Fagbenle) and her daughter (Jordana Blake) are watching the aquatic residents of an aquarium. It is an extremely well-trodden scene; it is meant to convey pair-bonding when there is no other connection between the people involved other than shared witness. It is the kind of empty stuff The Handmaid's Tale is full of; I never expected such a serious adaptation of Margaret Atwood's novel.

The real villains of The Handmaid's Tale are either Puritan values or modern American sexism. Neither is identified openly, because doing so would mean this is a real critique. It is not. Attacking the Puritans seems a broadside woefully out of date, given that any philosophy that allows individuals to survive in the wilderness without mass death should be admired for its efficacy. The English were really a very enterprising people overall.

Modern American sexism, too, bears no real relationship to what Offred discovers in the Republic of Gilead. In Gilead, the main vessels through which Offred experiences violence and discrimination are other women. She finds sympathetic companions in the men of her household, even though they are the only ones who hold any power. Offred never experiences catcalls, she is not objectified for her sexuality. She is used in her role because not very many women are capable of carrying children to term. The survival of the species is a far better reason for subjugation than "she looks hawt."

In her previous job, Offred explains that she was an "assistant books editor." This is her desk:

What naive scrumpet would seriously believe that this lifestyle could go on indefinitely without consequence? Offred's nostalgia for her old life seems entirely misplaced. Did she truly think that people would go on buying books and allowing her lifestyle to persist indefinitely? "The future is a fucking nightmare," proclaims one advertisement for the series, a statement which appears to refer to all elements of what is to come, including the ubiquity of Apple advertisements that subsidize your viewing of The Handmaid's Tale.

It has been several decades since The Handmaid's Tale was published, and Gilead is starting to not seem so bad in some ways. Yes, forced sex with her commander (Joseph Fiennes) is a drag, but at least she has a supportive community of other women who are going through the same thing. Alexis Bledel steals the show as Ofglen, a lesbian molecular biology professor who, you guessed it, talks very much. Bledel and Moss have an on-set competition going on as to which one of their respective eyeballs can protrude more prominently into the mise-en-scene. Moss wins pretty much every time.

It is kind of sad to see an actress who usually plays such prominent feminist characters reduced to romping meekly through each scene, although I guess this is sort of the point. In one particularly boring moment, Offred plays Scrabble with her commander. They shake hands afterwards, but instead of feeling bewildered by the interaction, as we are meant to, we merely start to judge Offred for feeling upset and rebellious towards all of this. I mean, when I think of how much her attic room would cost to rent if it were an apartment in New York, I want to cry. She doesn't pay for food or utilities, either. Is there any way we can all be transported to this dystopian future?

Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to This Recording. He is the author of your current dystopian present.

In Which We Find Ourselves Calling Out For Lorelai In The Night

The Same Mistakes

by CATHERINE ENGH

In October seven long seasons of Amy Sherman-Palladino’s Gilmore Girls were made available on Netflix. This means that instead of having to wait an entire week to see another episode in which nothing essentially happens, Netflix subscribers and their friends can now watch two, even three episodes back-to-back.

For those who saw Gilmore Girls unfold on the WB thirteen years ago, the re-watch promises to be a nostalgia trip, if nothing else. The show is the same, but we’re all older, our judgments are different. I’ve found, for one, that Jess and his beat poetry are far less alluring than they once were. It’s hard to believe that he has it in him to care about anything but his car and his hair gel. Shouldn’t Rory want to smooch a nice guy like Dean?

A little background: Gilmore Girls depicts the social universe of Stars Hollow—a fictional town an hour’s drive from Hartford. We know everyone there is to know here, down to the guitar player who busks on the street corner. At the bottom of the character- hierarchy are the unnamed laborers who work in the kitchen at the local Inn.

At the top are Lorelei and Rory, a mother-daughter pair who tell each other everything because they are also BFFs. There’s an inescapable dynamic between the two: they consume a ton of coffee and food together, they drop all kinds of allusions to indie culture. They can be a bit annoying—cliquish and self-satisfied—but it’s the kind of thing you can forgive. The other characters on the show certainly do.

Alexis Bledel, the actress who played Pete’s troubled love object on Mad Men, is Rory, a high school student with big ambitions to go to Harvard, become a journalist and travel to all of the nation-states featured on posters around her room. We don’t know why Rory is so uncompromising about her goals, Harvard in particular. What we do know is that if Rory doesn’t make the same mistakes as her mother — i.e. get pregnant — then she’ll go to an Ivy League University and that, somehow, will make everything okay for everyone.

Lauren Graham, recently of NBC’s Parenthood, plays Lorelei. Gilmore Girls repackages the story of Lorelei’s fall from grace more times than it should be possible. The story is simple: Lorelei becomes pregnant as a teen and when she doesn’t want to marry Rory’s father, she leaves her conservative parents’ home and moves in at the fittingly named Independence Inn. The change turns out to be a boon: Lorelei becomes Inn manager and no longer has to suffer the oppressions of life with Richard and Emily Gilmore — parents who never really understood her or her rapid-fire jokes.

Everything is going swimmingly for the Gilmore girls until we learn, in the pilot, that Rory has gotten into Chilton, a fancy prep school. Lorelei can’t afford to replace the girls’ lumpy couch and she definitely can’t afford to pay the Chilton tuition. Richard and Emily agree to cover it on one condition: Lorelei and Rory eat dinner with them every Friday night. It shouldn’t be such a bad deal but Lorelei’s pregnancy stands like a traumatic memory that no one can incorporate — over and over again, it recurs, disrupting the tenuous relationships that everyone in the Gilmore family is trying to cultivate.

The Gilmore girls are, like Cher in Clueless, long deluded about their attraction to the important men in their lives. Lorelei represses her feelings for the town’s diner owner; Rory does the same for the local bad boy. Sherman-Palladino draws these self-deceptions out to such lengths that sometimes it feels like she just wants to keep us watching, wondering if the next episode will be the one where one of the girls finally admits to the obvious and couples with the person she is supposed to be with.

Oftentimes, the supporting characters are more fun to watch than Rory and Lorelei. Melissa McCarthy is wonderful as Sookie, the brilliant but clumsy cook at the Independence Inn. Keiko Agena reaches manic heights as Rory’s friend Lane. Living under the authority of a cartoonishly tyrannical mother, Lane’s uneasy mix of resentment and obligation drives her to make many an impulsive decision.

Liza Weil plays Rory’s friend Paris — an intensely driven student who vies with Rory for academic plaudits. Paris exudes all the A-type energy that we don’t get from Rory because we’re supposed to see her as a singular character with sympathies and inner depths. I enjoy Sookie, Lane and Paris so much that I like to think of their frenetic energy as a dissenting outcry against their relatively minor status on the show.

Sherman-Palladino conjures all kinds of drama around the issues of sex and pregnancy, an aspect of Gilmore Girls that grew very tiresome very quickly the second time around. ‘Gilmore Girls’ wants to recover the great old virtue of feminine modesty but, for the modern woman, virginity is for Harvard, not marriage. The Rory-Dean and Rory-Jess narratives function like seduction plots: the premarital sex act looms, ever present, as a potential threat to Rory’s expectations. If Rory has sex with either one of her boyfriends, it will ruin her chances of getting into Harvard. Lorelei frets about Rory’s sexuality, she rewards her for putting off the deed but never once does she bring up birth control. And she’s supposed to be a cool mom!

There’s much about Gilmore Girls that still works. The show's asymmetrical character structure speaks of a world in which few go to Yale and many are the nameless laborers who work at the local inn. The trope of the woman who doesn’t know her own feelings dramatizes what happens when the head and the heart aren’t working in synch. But the seduction plot, which tells of the social regulation of women’s bodies, is anathema in a show that’s supposed to be about two progressively minded gals living in the 21st century.

Catherine Engh is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in New York. She last wrote in these pages about her grandmother.

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