(finished THT S2E9 a few weeks ago but didn’t get to putting this out in text until now)
- throughout the 1st two seasons I was curious how they were going to play Fred—started with surface possibility of him adhering to the “bad but not in an Actually Evil Villain way,” i.e. able to be polite; it was shown to be just a façade later; I think a lot of viewers were also curious about his relationship w/Serena & how far misogyny stretched vs his previous relationship w/her pre-Gilead that seemed pretty good & respectful & fine, and how that played into the shifts that occurred during the coup, and how she maintained a presence behind the scenes in activism and planning and operations despite becoming a Wife, and to what degree Fred disagreed w/her being dismissed by the others. kind of confirmed a thought I’d had(?) to see that he was willing to be “traditionalist” w/her & assault her and not just Handmaids and not just endorsing other husbands’ assaults on their wives. lot of viewers seemed to feel really sorry for her after that, enough to move her from the “villain” category to the “pitiable/sympathetic/to be fought for” category. unsurprised that [iris’s abusive parent] had a similar reaction, and called Serena a good person after that (she always had a problem w/acknowledging Serena as Actually Abusive; cis nuclear family mothers abusing their dependents tend to find solidarity). also saw various articles going w/a similar framing of sympathy.
- but that’s the thing, isn’t it? (white, bourgeois) cis women are abused (by white, bourgeois cis men) and are victims—but they continue to choose their power over the further marginalized, over the forced laborers they own in their households, over their own liberation from their abusive patriarchs. Serena has physically assaulted as well as constantly verbally abused and controlled and psychologically tortured over the first two seasons (and after E8 she resumes). She gets a chance to leave to Hawai’i and she doesn’t—I doubt this was solely influenced by the coercive control/threat Fred exerted over her, much of her motive was that she wished to continue ruling over what she did have. We see that even more in E10 (viewed a few days ago)—she joins up w/Fred to rape June and that’s, symbolically + as the plot goes, how that contradiction that was (finally?) exposed or forced into the light in E8-9 was “resolved,” with the state of her and the house going back to as it was before: she will be close to him, plot with him, conspire together so long as it’s to abuse someone even more powerless. Serena has had much more leeway to run away throughout the entire story, and to succeed and not be caught. June tried running long before Serena started considering it when offered by the American(s).
- also it was just kind of sad to see how much better their lives were in E8 when Fred was out of the picture, and also how much less abusive Serena was to June (relatively speaking). good choice of portrayal. and a good way to understand how material conditions can lead the “good”/normal to commit atrocities, and the atrocious to behave less atrociously.
- I get why they chose for there to be a way out, going for the “inefficiency”/“working against themselves” angle (re the fertility issue, and the solution the American guy offered re their own scientists and researchers)—but it was also kind of disappointing, bc unless they were going to go full-out w/transhumanism I would’ve preferred if they just let it be. What if there wasn’t any way to resolve the small amounts of “available” fertility? What if the human race really was going to die out, and there really was no magical stroke of luck loophole found that could stop it? I would’ve liked to see the showrunners really having to contend with the fundamental value question, getting to the heart of the issue, having the guts to double down on yes we really do mean it there is no possible amount of productivity increase whatsoever that would justify coercion. (But this is a show for libfems, and for people who like happy endings and no hard dilemmas, so they have to keep it positive.)
- show makes many extremely good points and great analyses but it’s still hindered a lot by the areas where it hits a certain ceiling and doesn’t have the ability to break out of the box—mainly its erasure of racism, its erasure of transness/gender variance, and how it tiptoes around the issue of childism/child abuse (and ultimately this all feeds into its lack of endorsements of militancy, and ultimately how it falls back onto the “liberal democracy fundamentally good, just gets bad when disturbed”). obviously it’s very much not in a position to go for a family abolitionist stance, normie directors right now are all cowards, but it’s still galling to see the fundamental assumptions still endorsed, even when one of the bioparents is gay or whatever, or when the other options apart from the bereft mothers are (far worse) abusers. (a common objection would be “but they’re suffering so much from having their kids taken away so why would you hurt them even more by ok’ing kids leaving on purpose” but this is only bc the narrative still centers the adult perspective & adult struggle with patriarchal violence, not the child/youth’s, and youthlib is core and essential, not tangential or disruptive, to the overthrow of patriarchy.) (this is also linked to the show’s refusal to depict queerness more subversive than “goal of two cis adults legally married with happy kids”)
