‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ has hit Covid-Era hard in America

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The Handmaid’s Talethe gift is a recipe. From Margaret Atwood’s 1985 book to Reagan-era conservative politics to the Hulu show horrible echoes Speaking of Donald Trump’s presidency, they speak to the generation that receives all incarnations.

Season of the year The Handmaid’s Tale, which was launched on Wednesday, has the same operation. The totalitarian theocracy of Gilead still has the appearance of an America that has been plagued by the country’s Puritan politics. June (Elisabeth Moss) serves as a substitute for any woman who has seen her hero take away her autonomy and is an avatar of the anger they already feel. All the parallels that existed between the past and modern women seeking self-determination are still there. However, in the fourth season of the show, it’s the nuances (subtle sadness, missed moments) that play hardest.

The reason for this is simple: the end of the previous season of the series was given in August 2019, approximately four months earlier Covid-19 it was created almost seven months before the US blockade closed, and it feels like a lifetime before the moment we live in now. Last season was in a world before quarantine, before social alienation, before a pandemic turned into something that masks had to fight. Clearly, it happened before our current crisis. The Handmaid’s Tale it has always felt important because it takes on systemic issues like reproductive freedom and LGBTQ + rights and gives them faces, narratives, and criminals to throw away. Like someone looking at patriarchy and saying “improve the computer”. But as this season unfolds, people are in a position to deal with it.

To be clear, living with a pandemic is nothing like living in a totalitarian society. It’s not really. The women of Gilead face torture and compassion that are far removed from everyday life in confinement. However, one of the key themes of the show has always been how sadness and trauma change people, encouraging them to do things they wouldn’t normally do. Being under constant threat — from a government or a previously unknown virus — creates anxiety and a level of fear of survival. Covid-19 times, these realities have appeared in everything from vaccination fights to confrontations horrible differences in which it is becoming the group most affected by the virus. Our social contracts were never ideal to begin with, but they have been massively disrupted in the last year. And see Handmaid’s Tale, it’s hard not to remember how quickly communities can come together or disband in the face of adversity.

This is perhaps the most rigorous testimony in people’s lives they are not June. In the first three episodes of the fourth season, which were canceled this week, when the action moves away from Gilead, she moves to Toronto, where her husband Luke (OT Fagbenle) and Moira (Samira Wiley) are best friends in an effort to rescue people. from an authoritarian southern neighbor. Luke holds out hope of being free one day in June, but wonders why he chose to stay and fight when he could have escaped. Moira and Emily (Alexis Bledel), both of whom came out of Gilead with the help of June, are fighting the guilt of the survivors. As they move forward in life they find that others cannot know and that the differences between Canada and Gilead are great. At other times, perhaps such moments did not stand out; seen now, it is difficult not to see a parallel between those who have been vaccinated with Covid-19 and perhaps never with Covid. They can move forward, but they do so knowing that not everyone is moving with them.