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).
As The Scrapbook has pointed out with regard to Nineteen Eighty-Four, the classic cautionary political stories of the 20th century don’t match up very well with the particulars of the age of Trump. Those who say a given dystopic vision is “newly relevant” rarely inspire confidence that they’ve thought through the supposed similarities between fact and fiction. In fact, they rarely inspire confidence that they’ve read the fiction at all.
The “handmaid” of Atwood’s title lives in an America that has been taken over by fanatical religious zealots. In a murderous coup d’état, the United States has been replaced by the Republic of Gilead, a hypocritically sex-obsessed theocratic tyranny. Celebrated as a “feminist 1984” when published in the mid-eighties, Atwood’s novel was taken to be a warning of the horrors a Christian fundamentalist Moral Majority would inflict given a chance.
In other words, The Handmaid’s Tale was fright-fiction focused on what was, at the time, the left’s favorite bête noire. Now the left has a new bête noire but instead of coming up with new fright-fiction, they’re recycling the old favorites, no matter how bad the fit. And ill-fitting it is: Say what you will about Donald Trump, he is no Moral Majoritarian.
If you’re looking for fiction that is relevant to the times and Trump, The Scrapbook recommends not Orwell but Orson Welles. Watch Citizen Kane again, and just imagine that the last-minute sex scandal that felled Charles Foster Kane’s political ambitions instead (like the Access Hollywood tapes) fell short. What sort of president would Kane have made? It’s a question with “a whole new real-world resonance.”
