Handmaid's Tale Season 2: Torture Porn

"Torture Porn" is the unofficial name for a genre of fiction designed not to scare you, but to hurt you.  You have to endure reading about or watching people undergoing horrible ordeals of pain and degradation, pain and degradation, with no moments of happiness, no humor, no hope, nothing but agony.  The person being tortured is not necessary the fictional character, but you, the viewer.

A literary example that springs to mind is "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream," by Philip Jose Farmer, in which a sentient computer takes over the world and kills all humans except for a group it keeps alive to torture.

A tv example is the second season of The Handmaid's Tale, the adaption of Margaret Atwood's novel.

In the first season, we learn about a dystopian society, Gilead, today's fascist America multiplied by a thousand, except instead of white supremacy, it's built on religious fundamentalism and patriarchy.  June (Elisabeth Moss) has been conscripted as a Handmaid, forced to have a child for a member of the ruling class whose wife is infertile.

Episode 1: The handmaids are being punished for an act of civil disobedience, refusing to stone an errant handmaid to death.  They get electric shocks.  They are burnt on a gas stove.  But June escapes, with the help of her boyfriend Nick (Max Minghella) and other members of the Resistance.  First she has to cut a microchip out of her ear.  Blood, agonized screams, burnt flesh.  Pass the popcorn.

Episode 2:   It's rather an inept Resistance. June  is brought to the deserted office of the Boston Globe and left there for two months. We spend the entire second episode there, watching June be bored.   Oh, wait -- we visit the Colonies, radioactive wastelands where "unwomen," political prisoners, recalcitrant Handmaids, and lesbians, live in concentration camps, dig up toxic waste, and die of radiation poisoning. Cough, cough.  And in flashbacks, we find out what happens to the gay people: the men are hanged, and the women, if fertile, become handmaids; otherwise it's the concentration camp.  Are we having fun yet?

Episode 3:  Finally!  June is picked up to go to a safe house,but it is compromised, so she goes home with Resistance fighter Omar (Yahna Abdul-Mahteen), a closet Muslim.  He'll take her to an airfield that night, and she'll get on a plane to Canada.  But Omar and his loving family never return from church -- they've probably been discovered and executed --  so June gets to the airfield herself  (is that a good idea?).

But just as the plane is about to take off, the Gestapo arrive and shoot the pilot and other passenger, a gay man.  He bleeds out.  Oh, and in a flashback, the handmaids are shown a film of the Colonies -- cough, cough -- and one of the Unwomen  is June's mother.  Talk about unlikely coincidences.

And June goes back to being Offred, the handmaid.   Pain, degradation, tongues cut out, fingers cut off, strangulation, vaginal bleeding, dying babies, executions of various types.  Isaac (Rohan Mead) and his girlfriend are chained together and drowned.   Even the Commander (Greg Bryk, top photo), one of the architects of the new society, is targeted.  June is covered in blood more times than I can count.   Meanwhile, at the concentration camp...cough, cough.

And I'm wondering, why am I watching this?  I have the complete Seinfeld series on DVD.

Other than the unrelenting agony, the series hasn't thought out how the society works very well.  Margaret Atwood didn't really need to, since she was writing through June, who didn't know what was going on.  But the tv series expands far beyond June to various players and parts of the society, and they are nonsensical.  For instance, in one scene, all of the Econowives (apparently regular women who haven't committed any crimes) get on a subway by themselves at 5:00 pm on a Sunday night (in a New England winter, although it's broad daylight), and get off at the last stop.  Where are they going?  We don't know.

How do the lights stay on?  How are good manufactured?  What happened to the world's economy when the Midwest turned into radioactive waste?,

To be fair, the cinematography is striking, especially the overhead shots.  And it's sort of fun seeing ruined landmarks, like the Boston Globe headquarters, deserted.

But I don't watch tv shows about the Holocaust.

See also: The Handmaid's Tale, Season 1