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Each week, a few members of the Vox Culture team gather to talk about the latest episode of The servant's tale, Hulu adaptation of Margaret Atwood's novel in 1985. This week, critic Emily VanDerWerff and editor Constance Grady discuss "Night, ""Marie and Martha, "and"Be careful, "The first three episodes of the third season.
Constance Grady: The first two seasons of the Tale of the maid sometimes felt as though they were trying to answer the question of how many ways a woman can be oppressed by patriarchy, with each female figure representing another possible answer.
You can be an accomplice, like Serena Joy. You can take a sadistic pleasure in oppressing those who are less powerful than you, like Aunt Lydia. Your mental health can break, like Jeanine's. You can burn everything, like Emily. You can simply try to get out of it alive, like in June for the first season and a half or so. Or you can try to redo the system, as June does now. (As many other critics have already noted, Tale of the maid never tried to deal with intersectionality in any of his answers.)
Tale of the maid is still interested in the problem of knowing how to be a woman under patriarchy, but this season another question has arisen: How many ways is there a man who hates women?
We have already seen pious religious hatred mixed with the titillation that Fred and his fellow commanders have toward the women they oppress. It is an archetype rooted in the religious morality of the "moral majority" of the Reagan era, to which Margaret Atwood's book responded, and which is quite resilient today.
But in the third season, Commander Lawrence Bradley Whitford offers us a new variant of this theme, much more anchored in the misogyny of 2019.
Commander Lawrence gives no indication of being a particularly religious man. It does not seem to bother him that June knows how to read. He keeps copies of Darwin in his library and, while the paintings of his house are looted in the museums of Boston – as are the paintings in each commander's house – he has taken over the essentials of his art of the modernist wing. He is cosmopolitan.
Commander Lawrence is also able to respect women individually. He helps Emily to escape because he sees that she is bright, protective and affectionate towards his wife.
But he always demonstrates a constant and occasional disdain for women. He deliberately humiliates June in front of his commanding friends; he speaks of fertile children and women as "resources" to harvest; he is the mastermind behind Gilead's economic policy. And even if he justifies his actions by claiming that he is trying to save the world, it is clear that he can only do what he does if he does not think that women en masse are real people.
Commander Lawrence is essentially a Reddit guy. He was a guy who convinced himself that his intelligence made him superior to others, then isolated himself at home so that he never had to hear any evidence. And he justifies his hatred of women not by religious puritanism, but by a vague gesture of science and biology.
When Atwood speaks of America, she sometimes says that she has two self: the liberal intellectuals self of the American Revolution and the Puritan religious self of pilgrims. Part of the thesis of The servant's tale It was that at the time of the crisis, when the population was falling to dangerous levels, America would turn into a puritan, stripping the appearance of the Enlightenment as a costume.
But what is interesting for Lawrence is that his misogyny is deeply rooted in a vision of the intellectual and liberal Enlightenment world. It's a creature from the other America – and yet, it still helps build Gilead.
Does Lawrence work for you at the beginning of the third season, Emily? And what do you think of our overview of the world of Marthas?
Emily VanDerWerff: Honestly, I can say that I never realized the need for this show, Bradley Whitford playing Ben Linus of Lost. Commander Lawrence is the first character that the series has introduced without origin in books. He prompted me to say, "Okay, yes, it's really somebody you can imagine appearing in the book, but who feels more at ease with the world of the series. "
That's what's interesting about Servant For me, season three until now: I love it especially!
I have long dreaded the turning point of the series towards the revolution, for while it was probably necessary to prolong the life of the series, she also felt directly opposed to the spirit of Atwood's book. But then, the show has already prepared us a bit for this change. At this point in the series, most people on the screen and off the screen simply call Offred the month of June. In the book, she did not even have a name. So the series prepared me for this shift to the most conventional and action packed of his very first episode.
I've written a little bit about why this bend toward fire and violence works out much better for me than I thought in a recent essay, but I think at a certain level I can to understand how much the series must plunge into resistance. continue to be a TV show. I loved the degree of misery of season two that mired June and the audience, because it seemed true to the world of the series and its sources. But it is a minority opinion, to put it in a charitable way.
Now, June has a purpose and a motivation, and she knows that she will probably die to achieve it. I do not buy the whole emotional arc here! (As a childless person, anytime "but would not you? no matter what to save your children? "Is used as a character motivation, a pouting little part of me always looks like," I do not know. Your children do not seem this awesome. ") But I buy how it helped the show to focus.
That's why Commander Lawrence is such a good addition to the show. When Lost Ben Linus was a versatile answer "Ben is doing something unusual!", Response that worked for most of the third season of this difficult and disturbed series. Lost also did an amazing job in providing Ben with a story that justifies everything he did, which I really hope Servant can handle with Lawrence. But for the moment, all is well for Whitford who appears in a smiling scene enigmatically, denigrates June with a sigh aside, then helps the resistance to fight back.
The last two episodes of Season 2 – which gave us our first comprehensive overview of a map of these United States of Gilead – suggested that we would engage ourselves completely in building the world to a certain level and in an examination. in-depth of an elaborate resistance network of Marthas tracks with that. When the Marthas suddenly helped June to escape Gilead to return in the second season, it felt like he was coming out of nowhere, a twist designed to make a season finale. which finally took place on the spot. Now, with more space to explore how this could have happened, the series does a stronger job emphasizing how they could function as a resistance network.
I am then in this strange place where I buy almost all the conspiracy in these three episodes, but some of the emotional bows seem to me a little blurry. This is usually the opposite of how I feel about this show, where the plot can often give the impression "Hey, Gilead did!", But the exceptional cast sells all the emotions. Here, I buy the ground The reasons why June is not immediately executed for crimes against the state, while I'm not quite sure about buying the link she has with, let's say, Hannah's new mom or Serena Joy, in a way that would sell the underlying emotions, even if Elisabeth Moss, Amy Landecker (!) and Yvonne Strahovski make their damnedest.
But I do not care too, because as a freshly minted Emily, it gives me great joy to announce that Emily is in Canada! (I saw the first episode at a screening animated by normally harsh critics, who applauded when Emily discovered that she had managed to cross the border.) And she called his wife ! Emilys of the world, unite!
Constancy: Sometimes I can not believe how much Alexis Bledel is as good as Emily. I was watching the first episode on my couch, not in a projection room, but when she crossed the border, I had to immediately open a new browser tab to be able to inform one of my friends who had never looked at it before. 39; episode. Alexis Bledel does a fantastic job here. (My friend was happy for her.)
Emily has become such a bizarre Gothic chaos monster that it is wonderfully shocking to see her sitting in a doctor's office in a doctor's office, thinking about her cholesterol level. The way this moment is played is wonderfully banal: now that she has come out of Gilead's endless nightmare, she has returned to a world where people think long enough to worry about their cholesterol. Super weird!
Until now, I know Emily and Commander Lawrence well, but I'm with you, Emily (Emily VDW, not Alexis Bledel Emily, although I'm still with her in my soul, always), being a little unsure . on June stuff and Serena Joy. Serena's things seem to me particularly badly cooked, which, I admit, is a strange thing to say about a series of episodes in which Serena literally burned down her house.
But there is very little texture here. It's a show that traditionally excels at finding all the nuances and variations of female rabies, but in the first three episodes, Serena's rage falls … just a little flat. She wanders in stone face, and sometimes she burns shit, sometimes she wades in the ocean, and yes, I recognize that she is in shock after losing her baby / her finger / them foundations of his whole belief system. but Tale of the maid has shown people facing horrific losses earlier in a more dynamic and compelling way.
It's as if Serena was kept in the usual order at the moment, while the show told her what to do if she did not want to relentlessly hurt June. And I am very interested to know what it is! But I do not know how much pleasure I will have to wait.
Emilie: Strahovski's work as Serena was my favorite performance in the whole of television for the 2017-2018 television season, so I'm convinced that everything is happening somewhere (and that even though it's not not the case, she will find a way to make sense). And for a moment, I told myself that her relatively abrupt release of the show at the premiere of the season was a way for the actress to take a maternity leave after the birth of her child. But no, she is in the third episode again and the show really gives the impression of marking time.
That said, I think it's really interesting to see how the series has essentially completed its turn towards three protagonists. June is in every episode, and the main protagonist, but the first clarifies that the narrative of this season will be shared between her, Emily and Serena. It's really not a bad way to structure the season – I can not watch as many times Moss suffer as a close-up blur, and there are only so many ways for the series to punish her in a manner related to her. story.
I still appreciate that these three episodes take their time to plunge us back into the world of the series. Technically, The servant's tale has been missing from our lives for less than a year. Season three was only created six weeks later than Season Two. But we have the impression that this has been going on for a long time, perhaps because he has ceased to be an omnipresent presence in contests (where he has always been nominated for the second season but rarely won).
So, the first episodes are a little more difficult to prove, and I admire that they move a little faster than the typically deliberate rhythm of the series, but not this much faster. Many things happen in all three episodes, but the series always takes time for the emotions to beat. Even if I do not buy Serena's trip, man, the show is working overtime to try to get me there.
But where I think these episodes will give hope to the many viewers a little mixed in the second season is that they really feel like moving in a particular direction. You might not agree with management. You might not even understand the direction. But the series has once again taken off, which it did not have through the long and charming quagmire of season 2.
And, again, I love a long and beautiful quagmire. But eventually, you have to move on. And Tale of the maid chooses to move forward with Fire, which is good.
(Also, the song choices are still so difficult, but I love them even more now, and I do not know what to tell you, I have to be stopped.)
Constancy: The three-protagonist structure is absolutely beautiful for this show. I hope she will continue and that we continue to communicate regularly with Emily, even though she is now in Canada and that she meets his wife, Clea DuVall (Clea DuVall!). (The name of Clea DuVall's character, incidentally, is Sylvia.)
In addition to my deep and constant love for Emily, her arrival in Canada gives us another window on the underused Luke and Moira. The point of view of the series seems to be that their scenario is too stable, healthy and boring to warrant regular monitoring – though personally, I would have liked to see a subplot of Moira recover from her post stress syndrome -traumatic – but now Emily and Nichole are there to make a difference, maybe they'll all have a little more to do.
Nichole is a particularly interesting symbol for the Canadian crew because, as far as Luke and Moira know it, it's a living reminder that June is regularly raped. (Nichole, if we remember correctly, is Nick's daughter, because Fred is probably infertile, but no one else but Nick and June and Serena do not know, and Nick told Luke that June was pregnant with Fred's baby last season.) But at the same time, Nichole is a baby who is completely innocent and can not be held responsible for what is happening in Gilead. It is a delicate emotional line to walk that can potentially lead to very interesting things.
In fact, just about everything in these first episodes gives the impression that it could lead to some very interesting things. I found the finale of the second season so strange, upsetting and unsettling that my expectations for this season were low, but these first episodes propelled them up. I'm excited to be excited about The servant's tale again.
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