Parents' Guide to The Handmaid's Tale

Volker Schlondorff has taken Atwood's provocative novel and made an equally powerful and affecting movie. The script by playwright Harold Pinter subtly paints the backdrop of the social upheaval that led to the creation of the current religious dictatorship. The Commander describes the country before the dictatorship took over as "a mess," degraded and failing because too much freedom had been given to blacks, "homos" and women. An overheard pro-government TV anchorman explains that Baptist rebels are fighting in the mountains. Since Gilead leaders invoke the Bible as the country's only constitution, it's clear that this Christianity-based government also discriminates against Christians. Baptists are targeted as enemies. Both the movie and the book pose women as villains, mimicking the way the Nazis forced Jews to send other Jews to their deaths.

But men are unmistakably the architects of The Handmaid's Tale's dehumanized society. The white male supremacy practiced here is supposedly an enactment of "the will of God," with language designed to repress and recast the natural desire to throw off one's chains as punishable anti-social behavior. As in the Soviet Union, friends are encouraged to report on friends. Powerful white men, however, are exempt from scrutiny. They party with enslaved prostitutes while the government looks the other way. And Commanders are not required to be tested for infertility, yet handmaids who don't get pregnant by them face punishment. Young impressionable viewers may be prompted to wonder, "Would I have the courage to rebel if this happened today?" Since the movie begins with the words, "Once upon a time in the recent future," it's a good bet Atwood meant her story to be a warning.