"Better Never Means Better for Everyone"
Season One, Episode Seven: “The Other Side”
“Better never means better for everyone,” the Commander concedes to Offred in an earlier episode. “it always means worse for some.” In this installment, we see numerous ways that the world has become worse for many people throughout the Northeast: “GENDER TRAITOR” is spray-painted across a window Luke, June, and Hannah run past as they are on the lam together. “FAGS DIE” is splattered on a nearby building. “God Hates Fags” appears later on.
“Better never means better for everyone.”
Luke’s rescue squad includes, in the words of the one man in the group, “an army brat, two strays, a gay, and a nun.” The one “stray” is a young, woman, too traumatized to speak. It sounds like she had been in a Red Center, but she has no words, merely panic attacks to suggest what she has been through.
“Better never means better for everyone.”
When this episode ended, I thought it an interesting additional foray into territory outside the novel. Both this exploration of Luke’s experiences post-separation from June and Hannah, and last episode’s backstory of the Waterfords, flesh out the small nuggets of information and speculation Atwood offers readers. It all seems plausible in the world the novel constructs. And, since the series is under contract for a second season, these extrapolations will need to continue. I’m glad to see the team can do it well. But, the more I’ve thought about it, the more meaningful “The Other Side” becomes. More than only fill in gaps and set the stage for what Season Two might do, the episode confronts the story’s important themes of religion, gender, oppression, resistance, and the various ways to represent them; it also highlights, even more noticeably than in earlier episodes, the unspoken issue of race.
The architects of Gilead impose their extremely narrow vision on others, and this is mirrored in the focus on limited vision and hearing that the episode forces on the audience early on. After awhile, though, our perspective—and that of the characters—expands. For, while we see how much worse the Commander and his cronies have made life for so many, we also see how much those people will do for each other to help make things better., or at least to retain their humanity.
The beginning of this story takes us back to Episode 1: the mad drive along the rural roads of Maine, the car crash, Luke sending June and Hannah into the woods. But, where the series opener, titled “Offred,” showed us the changing world from her perspective, this one lets us see it from Luke’s. This is an important shift from book to television. As a first person memoir, the novel can only show us things that Offred knows. So, when it comes to Luke, the novel’s Offred can only tell us what she imagines happened to him. She has imagined for him three different realities and tells us that she believes each of them: “Here is what I believe. I believe Luke is lying face down in a thicket, a tangle of bracken, the brown fronds from last year under the green ones just unrolled, or ground hemlock perhaps, although it’s too early for the red berries. What is left of him: his hair, the bones, the plaid wool shirt . . . I believe this. I also believe that Luke is sitting up, in a rectangle somewhere . . . “ She devotes two paragraphs to imagining him in custody, tortured for information. Then she lets us know that she also believes that he made it out. “[T]here must be a resistance, a government in exile. Someone must be out there, taking care of things. I believe in the resistance as I believe there can be no light without shadow; or rather, no shadow unless there is also light” (104-5). It is this last, this hopeful imagining of Offred, that the TV show dramatizes for us. We get to see Luke’s escape, through his eyes and perspective.
At first, we see the wooded area through which we watched June and Hannah run and try to hide, six episodes ago, through the distorted lens of Luke’s broken glasses. We learn that those shots June heard were first Luke’s gun firing at his pursuers, then him getting shot. He’s in pain, he’s distraught, and he’s viewing the world through cracked glass. The book’s Offred is not always the most reliable narrator of this world, not because she is dishonest or trying to mislead us, but because the constraints of a handmaid mean she cannot know much beyond what she experiences; all she can give us is Gilead through her limited senses and her necessarily limited perspective on the world. Likewise, Luke leads us to see one version of events for someone who was able to get away. This is one of The Handmaid’s Tale’s interesting philosophic conundrums. We are made to consider the necessarily limited perspective to which each of us has access. We need each other to widen the lens.
The world on “the other side” is once again presented as claustrophobic: in flashbacks, we see Luke and his family riding in the trunk of Mr. Whitford’s car, only able to hear sirens as they are driving; when the ambulance that carries a wounded Luke and Guardians overturns, all the men are trapped in a small space; once Luke is rescued by Zoe and her band of escapees, he is made—for good medical reason—to stay on the cramped bus even as he struggles to push his way out. None of this offers him—or us--a broad perspective on the world. And, Luke’s memories, too, are limited in their vision. Missing his wife and daughter, imagining them dead—or worse—after finding Hannah’s stuffed bunny and boot in the woods, all of his recollections are of a beatific mother and child. June is always smiling broadly at Hannah, nurturing, caring for her. He walks in on a scene in the kitchen of the Maine cabin in which the mother and daughter are making chocolate chip pancakes, and it looks as stylized as a 1950s family sitcom or a scene from “Pleasantville.” It’s “pancakes every day” as they laugh and smile. This must be an exaggerated picture; not that June wasn’t a loving mother, but the behavior is not natural under any circumstances, let alone when the adults are running with their child for their lives. The sentimentality of it is highlighted by the accompaniment of some of these memories by James Taylor singing “Sweet Baby James,” a song about a sad and lonely cowboy, who “sings out a song which is soft but it's clear/As if maybe someone could hear.”
One of his companions on the bus is a nun. There have always been people objecting to the novel—and now some to the show--based on their presumption that it is anti-Christian. Yet Atwood takes pains to show that there are numerous Christians at odds with the Gileadean regime. Some, like the Catholic priests Offred sees hanging from hooks on the wall, are murdered for refusing to go along with the new program. Others like Baptists and Quakers are shown to be actively resisting. In Offred’s fantasy of Luke escaping, she imagines that it might have been Quakers who took him in and hid him for awhile. The novel is only anti-Christian if one understands the name of “Christian” to be exclusively the province of ultra-conservative fundamentalists. This nun offers a prayer for Luke that is so different from any other prayer that we have heard on the series, most of which are uttered to “bless” the Ceremony. She wishes Luke well: “May the Lord guide your steps and bring you to your June and Hannah. He has not forgotten any of you.” One might question that last statement, but her prayer is for a family to be together, not to coerce someone away from her family into the service of making one for someone else. The concerns for “family values” are very different between these two religious perspectives. We see that the regime does not have a monopoly on religion.
While the show does an excellent job of portraying how Gilead’s misogyny can be manifest in the actions of both males and females—and that both females and males can and do resist it—it virtually ignores issues of race. I have read critiques of Atwood for taking from African-American women’s history of forced impregnation and illiteracy in slavery to create a novel about white women forced into reproductive slavery and a world without the written word. This is an important point to reflect on when reading the book. And, it is also necessary to note that not only African-American women’s experiences are what the author draws on, but also those from Nazi Germany, Cold War Eastern Europe (Atwood was in Berlin when she began writing the novel), and Iran, among others. Given these criticisms, I can understand the desire on the part of the TV show creators to present a more diverse world, and O-T Fagbenle and Samira Wiley are excellent at portraying Luke and Moira.
But, it must also be noted—and a number of other writers do point out--that the novel’s Gilead is a white supremacist project. There are no handmaids of color or from other minority communities because the “children of Ham” are re-located to areas in the center of the continent, and boatloads of Jews are sent away from North America.
In an interview with TV Line on January 7 [1], show-runner Bruce Miller said that he had in-depth discussions with Margaret Atwood about the change to a diverse Gilead. His points make some sense: in the decades since the book’s publication the evangelical movement in the U.S. has become more integrated; fertility would likely be more vital to these people than anything; and, he asked, “what’s the difference between making a TV show about racists and making a racist TV show? Why would we be covering [the story of handmaid Offred], rather than telling the story of the people of color who got sent off to Nebraska?” That’s a compelling question, but it doesn’t have to be an either/or option, and it still leads to some oddities in the show that seemed heightened in this episode.
As Susan Rensing writes for the site Nursing Clio [2]: “[I]n his efforts to cast people of color in the show, the director decided to cut out the white supremacist ideology of the Republic of Gilead. In explaining this significant change, he said simply, ‘I made the decision that fertility trumped everything.’ But of course historians know that concerns over the birthrate and population have always been about whose fertility and the fear of being overrun by “someone else’s babies,” [in the words of Rep. Steve King just this past March]. And this is where Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale misses the mark.”
And, in an excellent article for Nerds of Color [3], Shannon Gibney and Lori Askeland respond to Miller’s claim that when fertility is an issue, racism falls away and white people adopt babies from places like Ethiopia and Asian countries: “With all due respect, I wonder if Miller has heard of colonialism? That is, the process by which a country or society with more power ostensibly rapes, pillages, and reaps the natural resources (one of which is children) of a less powerful society or country, in order to gain more power and resources? Talk to transracial adoptees, and you will learn very quickly that our adoption into majority white cultures in the Global North does not necessarily or even often mean they are instantly welcoming or open to the presence of non-white bodies in their midst. The real issue is how these black, brown, and indigenous bodies are used in the service of building up these majority white societies — a key subtlety Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale never quite seems to get to.”
This fits in with my speculation that Commanders’ families would not all be thrilled with taking in mixed-racial babies to raise as their own. Given the way that right-wing extremism, racism, and homophobia so often go hand-in-hand with misogyny (as they are right now among many in the United States), I have found it odd to think that Gilead would be ripe with the bodies of “gender traitors” hanging on the wall, forced clitoridectomies on lesbians, and many signs expressing sentiments like “FAGS DIE” and “God Hates Fags,” yet have not one expression of hatred of--or even bias against--black people, Mexicans, Middle-Easterners. That stood out even more to me tonight with Luke, June, and Hannah running as a mixed-race family through a community with multiple signs of aggression against gay people, but the only problem with them trying to run was that they were attempting to get a fertile woman out of the country,
To shift to the ending: three years later—we see book Offred’s vision of a government-in-exile in Canada. Luke brings a cup of coffee to the traumatized woman from the bus—apparently Starbucks or something like it is still available in the free part of North America; that’s how we can know we’re not in Gilead anymore. That and the U.S. flag. The lens has widened. There is open air, then a long hallway lined with so many pictures of those loved ones people are still searching for. The Mexican ambassador’s aide has kept his promise. It is a female official who gives Luke his wife’s note: “I love you so much. Save Hannah.” As the episode ends, a teary Luke is looking out a wide window. The world—physically and emotionally—is expanding.
Ironically, Cigarettes After Sex’s music is playing: “Nothing’s gonna hurt you, Baby/As long as you’re with me, you’ll be just fine/Nothing’s gonna hurt you, Baby/Nothing’s gonna take you from my side.” This notion of male protection of a woman has proven to be absurd on both sides. The Commander and Aunt Lydia talk repeatedly about the benefits of protection now that the U.S. has been destroyed and the righteous have taken over. Yet, there is no protection for anyone, and this arrangement only seems “better” to a handmaid if, like the second Ofglen, she spent the time before prostituting herself for drug money and being raped in the bargain. Yet, the Luke of before couldn’t take care of his wife either—as he’d promised to do after June lost her job. The traditional narrative of gender that posits noble, superior men caring for and protecting the lesser females is bogus. The only thing shown to possibly work is groups of people banding together to help others out. And, gender isn’t the most important thing. Often those leading these efforts are women: Zoe of Luke’s rescue team, the woman who hands Luke the note. Sometimes, they are male, like the Mexican ambassador’s aide and the men who help Luke, June, and Hannah get to Maine. And, conversely, women as well as men can be the oppressors and their facilitators: the Aunts, Serena Joy, the Mexican ambassador.
If we want to make the world “better” for most, and minimize the number of those who experience is as “worse,” solidarity is key.
Notes:
[1] http://tvline.com/2017/01/07/the-handmaids-tale-hulu-series-black-moira/
[2] https://nursingclio.org/2017/04/26/a-post-racial-gilead-race-and-reproduction-in-hulus-the-handmaids-tale/
[3] https://thenerdsofcolor.org/2017/05/10/race-intersectionality-and-the-end-of-the-world-the-problem-with-the-handmaids-tale/
