It's Time For 'The Handmaid's Tale' To Finish, Torturing Women Should Not Be Entertainment
‘Life imitates art far more than art imitates life,' Oscar Wilde posited in his seminal 1891 essay The Decay of Lying, acknowledging the imbalance of symbiosis between fiction and reality. The membrane between the two is famously thin, after all. It would take almost 130 years before Wilde’s thesis would be concisely proved with the 2017 premiere of The Handmaid’s Tale, which aired the same year that the #MeToo movement once again began gaining momentum. The same year that Donald Trump was first elected as President of the United States. The show, with its signature dystopian darkness, became an almost-instant hit, and more series were swiftly written, filmed and released. Each was darker than its predecessor. The sixth — and final — season of the show will premiere on Hulu on April 8, yet with a creeping tide of authoritarianism, sweeping regression of women’s rights, and gentle thrumming of political repression already tearing the world apart at its seams, does anybody really need to watch what is a petrifying reality for many be fictionalised and billed as entertainment?
Margaret Attwood’s seminal 1985 novel that inspired the series eerily foreshadowed much of the tumult that has unfolded in the world today. The TV series, which premiered in 2017, drew inspiration from Attwood’s story but creators of the show extended the novel past its intended lifecycle to create the premise for the series; the result made for a truly gruesome watch, one that I had to turn away from after the first season and won't be turning back to when it returns. The question that whirled around my head then, and continues to now, is 'How was torturing women ever considered entertainment in the first place?'
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Let me explain — the world has felt like a dark, sad place for women of late. Our bodies, our rights and our words are up for dissection at the whim of powerful men who have felt emasculated after being caught in the cultural crosshairs that were spurred by the #MeToo movement. The real world has always been complicated and convoluted enough without having to watch those very same complications and convolutions unfurl fictionally before our very eyes. Entertainment’s purpose has, on the whole, been to do just that: entertain, yet with The Handmaid's Tale, the show's storylines plunge deeper because they remind us of what's very real for women the world over. The show, upon its premiere, was a warning of what's to come. Now, it's a clarion call for what has happened and what could — and very well might — happen imminently all around us. For those already engaged with the gender biases, regression of reproductive rights and loss of female autonomy of the world, The Handmaid's Tale is simply too close to the bone.
I'm not the only one. 'At the end of season two when June chooses not to leave the van escaping Gilead – the one we’ve sat on the edge of our seats throughout the final episode waiting for her to reach – I felt something inside me die,' says ELLE UK's Senior Fashion and Beauty E-commerce Editor, Abigail Southan. 'How could I keep being invested in a show that was more concerned with money-making renewals than the art of good plotting? When I tuned in for season three months later, I felt the show had changed irrevocably. It was high-octane and Harry Potter-like with its fantasy-inspired special effects. It had lost some of its rawness because the big budget was shining through. I didn't follow The Handmaid’s Tale again and don't have plans to.'
ELLE UK's Digital Director Rhiannon Evans agrees that season three marked the turning point for her commitment to the show, too. 'The start of series three and the first few episodes were unrelentingly grim,' she says. 'While Atwood has been vocal about the book (which season one was based on) being heavily inspired by real world things that were happening to women, when they moved past that original source material, it started to feel like a conscious decision had been made to punish June again and again unnecessarily. So I voted with my remote and switched off. From the trailers and coverage I've seen of other seasons, it does seem like the arc moved eventually, so maybe I'll go back one day. But with the real world already saturated with women being punished at the hands of men, I'm not in a rush.'
Despite its uncomfortable subject matter, the show's last series still resonated with viewers. The fifth season averaged 581 million viewers worldwide in the first week of its release in 2022, and, according to Parrot Analytics, audience demand for The Handmaid's Tale is 38.6 times the demand of the average TV series in the United States in the last 30 days alone. On the whole, audiences do clearly want to watch women lose their bodily autonomy and reproductive rights on the small screen. The real question, though, is why they need to watch a fictionalised version of it, when they can just watch it happen all around them in real time?
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