Ever since Donald Trump was elected, we’ve been in the middle of a dystopian fiction craze. The anti-Trumpers have sought to understand (and indulge in self-satisfied frissons of terror at) the rise of the Donald by imagining that the current moment is George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four or Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here come true. In April, for example, a gaggle of independent movie-houses staged screenings of the 1984 movie version of Orwell’s masterpiece, declaring, “Orwell’s portrait of a government that manufactures their own facts, demands total obedience, and demonizes foreign enemies has never been timelier.”
Now it’s Margaret Atwood’s turn. Hulu is presenting a new streaming-TV miniseries adaptation of her novel The Handmaid’s Tale. Critics have been quick to champion the miniseries as “must watch,” not for its entertainment value but for the timely warning it provides. You see, a totalitarian theocracy like the one Atwood envisions is somehow just around the corner. The new adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale, we’re told, is “All Too Real” (Vice), “Newly Resonant” (New York Times), “required ‘resistance’ viewing” (the media blog ATTN), and has “a whole new real-world resonance” (Rolling Stone).
