#--scooping out our guts essentially so that the audience can FEEL what we mean. i want my art to impact people.

[toadboatt]

I want to take out my heart

Rip it out of my chest and lay it on a table for display

See me.

Feel my emotions, hear the pumping, the thumping, the beating of my heart.

Watch me

It'll bleed out onto the table

The red dancing and painting my memories, my thoughts

Beautifully dark pictures of my life, my very essence

Exposed to the world

Painted out on the table

The floor

And the bottom of your shoe.

[ericdeggans]

The Handmaid’s Tale Brilliant Second Season Raises the Question: Is This What It Takes to Get Modern TV Audiences to Really Empathize with Slaves?

(Yup. There’s spoilers all over this review of the show’s second season.)

For me, the saddest part of watching Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale in its second season, isn’t its bleak story. Or the oddly prescient vibe that makes it seem as if this dystopia is right around the corner.

What bothers me most about watching the show these days, is the nagging suspicion that this is what it takes now to make TV audiences empathize with an oppressed people ruthlessly exploited and turned into non-humans by a brutal state.

In other words: slaves.

Handmaid’s essentially takes middle class American women and makes them lesser beings in the way slavery once dehumanized black people in the U.S. The most unfortunate are forced to serve as breeders for the ruling class, raped repeatedly in a ritual designed to lend religious authority to their violation, subjugation and impregnation.

But, as the show’s second season brilliantly revealed this year, every woman in the theocracy of Gilead is a slave in one way or another. And that point is driven home by the season finale episode which debuted on Hulu today, “The Word.”

In this episode, Yvonne Strahovsky’s Serena Waterford -- wife of the main Commander in the story, Fred Waterford -- gathers support from other commanders’ wives to pressure the government into letting their female children learn to read.

This notion – that women are forbidden to read in Gilead – is something that has existed at the margins of the show since it started, given new prominence at the end of this season (reminding viewers how dangerous it was several episodes back when Serena and Elizabeth Moss’ tortured handmaid June covertly wrote and signed documents for Fred after he was injured by a bombing).

Besides sparking one of the most impactful confrontations of the season, this stricture against women reading is a strong allegory to real-life American slavery. When slavery was legal in the U.S., it was a crime to teach slaves to read. And even after slavery officially ended, much of the unofficial subjugation of non-white people in America centered on limiting their education, segregating them in substandard schools with limited prospects.

Watching the women of The Handmaid’s Tale face similar oppression felt a little like seeing John Amos as Kunta Kinte getting his foot lopped off in Roots; it’s a horror show you feel in your guts, because the slave is someone you know and care about. They’re humanized.

That’s also why the show’s flashbacks to June’s life before religious zealots created Gilead are so affecting. As we watch her replay in her mind the moments when she left her first daughter crying at school or sparred with her own mother over past inattentiveness, we see June’s humanity and her regret at having taken so much for granted in the days before Gilead changed everything.

As each episode unfolded, I kept thinking: Is this what it takes? Is this how you get a modern audience to care about what it means when powerless people’s rights are stripped away?

In real life, a president who lost the popular vote is changing the judiciary for generations. Gilead is the nightmare vision of that scenario, where half the population is disenfranchised and shoehorned into rigid roles. And the government’s response to Serena’s efforts leaves no doubt -- regardless of your status in Gilead, as a woman, you better know your place.

(Alexis Bledel, left, as the handmaid/unwoman Emily at the colonies.)

What’s been most impressive about Handmaid’s Tale in its second season, is the way in which producers have built on the world envisioned by novelist Margaret Atwood. They gave us a visceral vision of the colonies -- a nightmarish hellscape where the most outcast women are sent to shovel hazardous waste until they die (not really clear on why Gilead needs them to do this, though. And is it weird that I also felt sorry for the “Aunts” -- the gas mask-wearing female guards who must watch over the unwomen in the colonies?)

One of the many collateral messages of Handmaids, is that such a poisonous social system also damages the oppressors. So it’s fitting that we see Serena and Fred -- once the ultimate power couple who helped build the philosophy underpinning Gilead -- ripped apart by a world which crushes her ambitions while granting him increasing power and authority.

Producers leveraged the success of Handmaids in subtle, sly ways during its second season. They have the budget (and reputation) to get an Annie Lennox hit for use in the season finale. Queen of all media Oprah Winfrey is heard in a radio broadcast as the voice of the resistance in one episode; guest stars like Marisa Tomei and Bradley Whitford surface for other brief-yet-important roles.

More than anything, the use of Kate Bush’s classic hit This Woman’s Work in the season’s first episode was a sign of Handmaid’s gathering mojo – a hit widely respected by the show’s audience, poignantly used, that also turned out to be a manifesto for everything we would see this season.

This is the season that the brutality of Gilead showed every major female character that they share a common foe. Watching Joseph Fiennes’ Fred Waterford assert himself at the end of the season finale, completely unaware of how he has united all the women in his life against him, neatly summed up the arc of the season and the lesson of the show.

I hope this season of Handmaid’s scoops up all the Emmy love possible when nominations are announced on Thursday morning. Because, as bleak as its vision can be, the mirror it holds up to our modern moment is essential, exacting and impressive.