On Facebook, I watch a woman announce she’s just now starting to watch The Handmaid’s Tale. Twenty minutes into the first episode, she posts an update demanding to see an uprising against the Gilead leadership by episode two. But she’s smart enough to know that’s not going to happen. Instead she writes of Atwood’s fictional world, “It’s going to get worse, isn’t it?”
She binge-watches the entire run of the show so far—both seasons, all twenty-three episodes—in a matter of days, posting occasional updates along the way. She comments on the sadistic rituals of Gilead, suggests Aunt Lydia deserves a good beating, and wonders what, exactly, they’re going to do to Eden in that pool.
I tell her that watching her start the series fresh from the beginning is like watching someone seconds away from stepping into traffic.
I stepped into that traffic for the first time years ago, when I initially read The Handmaid’s Tale, and I kept stepping every time I reread the book or when the first season of the show came out last year. Upon the release of the second season, I waited impatiently for the latest episode every Wednesday so I could terrify myself anew with the horrors of Gilead.
As much as I admire the show (the acting, the character development, the dystopian tension), I sometimes wonder why I do this to myself. After the episode showing a flashback of how Emily was separated from her wife and son at the airport, I had stress dreams about my passport, which I’d temporarily misplaced—a loss my dream-self was convinced would be my downfall when it came time to flee. Later, the episode that aired during the height of the news surrounding families being separated at the border was so parallel to those real-world disasters that it gutted me. And yet I watched on.
Sometimes, or maybe a lot of times if I’m honest, I can’t bear to keep up with the news. I shut it out. But while I wish to close myself off from the real world, I keep letting Gilead in. I’m drawn to the darkness there. To be so compelled by this cruel, imaginary world, and to not only choose to live with it every week but to crave even more, is mystifying. All I can think is that my imagination needs this monstrous world that has become a warped mirror of our own.
Around the time my Facebook friend was binge-watching The Handmaid’s Tale, I borrowed some philosophy books from the library to research a new short story. These books focused on what is real and what is not—imaginary objects, fictional characters, all the universes we can hold in our minds. The material was technical and largely went over my head. Before long, I started to suspect the authors were overthinking everything. Of course what we imagine is real. How absurd to suggest otherwise.
Gilead is real to me. June and Moira and Emily and Serena ring true to me. The acting, the music, the sets, the props, and the costumes are all fictional dressing on a story I believe to be real. It doesn’t exist in our actual physical world, but it’s a reflection of reality all the same, of the darkness we’re capable of conjuring. Like my Facebook friend explaining how she was able to watch the entire series in under a week: by going to a dark place in her mind and powering through. I know what she means, how we compartmentalize our nightmares both real and imagined.
I read recently that Elisabeth Moss doesn’t wear makeup when shooting The Handmaid’s Tale. An interesting bit of trivia, but I found myself thinking it can’t be entirely right. I recall some scenes, for example, in which Offred appears to have shadows beneath her eyes. I know that’s not the typical makeup an actress wears for the screen, but still, it’s there—a little bit of fiction to make the darkness tangible, to bring its truth to light.