The Handmaid's Tale

In sixth form I studied Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Politically unaware, I was naive to her broadside against patriarchal rule. Despite this, I loved the book. I enjoyed it because on a basic level it’s an underdog story of a character struggling against a system. Like Winston Smith in 1984 and Montag in Fareneheit 451, Offred is an enemy of the state, trying to destabilise it with minor acts of revolt. At the time, I had no idea these science-fictions were rooted in fact; I perceived them to be works of imagination, unfounded in reality. Especially when it came to The Handmaid’s Tale, I just didn’t have the context. I didn’t know that creating ‘false’ enemies distracts a populace from resisting political corruption. I didn’t know that keeping people scared is a surefire way of a Government holding onto power. I didn’t know that women hadn’t achieved parity with men. As far as I was concerned, sexism ended in 1928 when all women gained the vote. I had no idea that in Saudi Arabia women couldn’t drive. I had no idea that in Northern Ireland women couldn’t get an abortion. I had no idea that women were under-represented in top jobs. When it came to the issue of feminism I was completely oblivious. For me, the book was completely hypothetical; it could never happen. The truth, of course, was in so many ways it already had.

Everything was fine after 1928.

I’m revisiting The Handmaid’s Tale this week because of Bruce Miller’s TV adaptation. Unquestionably, it’s the show of the moment. Nothing is capturing the zeitgeist more than this piece of programming. In electing a president that brags about grabbing women by the pussy, who in turns appoints a running-mate that's virulently anti-choice, the political climate in America feels horrifyingly akin to the book. In The Handmaid’s Tale a president is assassinated- middle-eastern terrorists are falsely accused -amidst the instability a far-right Christian organisation seizes control. Sound familiar? Trump too created an atmosphere of chaos by making scapegoats out of the free press and immigrants; from this he and his male cronies took power. Distraction is the friend of the illusionist; it can make a man appear magical when he’s simply a man. It can make you miss what’s going on. One minute he’s there standing in front of Trump Tower, the next he’s in front of The White House. This 1985 novel is a warning to pay attention, because nothing changes instantly. As the book's narrator says, 'in a gradually heating bathtub you’d be boiled to death before you knew it.’

"Hands up if you believe life should be about serving your own narcissistic interests." 

The adaptation of the novel begins in a different place to the source material. One of the things I’ve enjoyed in re-reading Handmaid’s is seeing how Miller has achieved the paradox of being unfaithful and faithful to the text. It’s unfaithfulness lies in its sequencing: his starting point is a woodland chase, which culminates in the kidnapping of June’s daughter. This foot-chase is thrilling and disorientating: why are officials seeking a child? Why is a family on the run? Conversely, the book begins with a description of a gymnasium with ‘Aunt Sara and Aunt Elizabeth patrolling.’ What type of society are we in? Why are adult women being infantilised and made to sleep in dorms? Who are these Aunts? It’s a benign title Aunt: warm, familial, your Nan’s friend. Why are these women on guard? The TV’s cold opening is heart-racing, whilst the book is more head-scratching: both do the job of hooking the audience into Atwood’s world.

On the run.

In terms of faithfulness, Miller may have juggled with the order, but he hasn’t dropped the ball on content. The TV version doesn’t divert from telling the story of how June became Offred, and how Offred seeks to reclaim June. Just as the book flits in and out of past and present, Miller’s version does too. Sure some details are updated: Moira and June discuss Tinder profiles; Luke meets June when he’s asked for his opinion on the profile; June works at a publisher’s as opposed to a library – however, these modifications are necessary: it makes the show current, illustrating how this could happen today.

June has become Offred because the new state of Gilead requires handmaid’s, women whose sole purpose in life is to procreate. An environmental fall-out has brought this world into being: fertility rates are low, meaning functioning wombs are in short supply. If you can’t breed, you can accept monotonous labour or take your chances with radiation out in 'the colonies.’ The regime then has poured petrol on Offred’s former life of love and literature, from these dying embers she must find the hope to keep on existing.

Sex without intimacy.. 

Each month Offred must lie back and think of Gilead. A Commander visits her bedchamber reciting the Rachel and Leah story of the maid who had a baby on her mistress’s behalf; he then proceeds to fuck her lower half – it can’t be called copulating because ‘that would imply two people and only one is involved.’ In a warped reading of religion, the clock has been turned back, women here are nothing more than a vagina and a womb; the brain they once cultivated with learning has gone to seed – lies and indoctrination have made sure of that. Yet Offred hasn’t quite relinquished control. The regime may have nationalised her body, but it hasn't yet bought out her mind. She is the heroine of our story. On the surface she's demure in her red conservative robes, yet she conceals a wolf within, one that chews up Gilead with caustic narration. 

A wolf in sheep's clothing.

With the TV show having included much of the source material already, I’m surprised to hear that the series will run and run. It stands to reason that the subsequent seasons will be fresh material, maybe exploring the Historical Notes of the book for ideas. All we can hope is when the writers do consider future story ideas, they tune in to the deep recesses of their mind and not the news for inspiration.

The Handmaid’s Tale is on Channel 4, Sunday at 9pm.    

Baby Driver

Three years ago, director Edgar Wright walked out on Ant-Man. The film, nearly ten years in production, was a true labour of love. Wright had undertaken the project because he adored the comic and its creator Stan Lee. Writing alongside Joe Cornish, Wright was finally at a stage where filming could commence. On looking at the script, however, Marvel began to balk. It’s worth remembering a few years earlier Wright’s Scott Pilgrim Vs The World failed to recoup its budget. Fearful that they too would count the cost of the director’s playfulness, production stalled; without discussion, the company proffered the script out to other screenwriters, requesting a second opinion. This understandably enraged Wright. All the other movies he had made had him as writer-director, auteur, custodian; now, he found himself sidelined and, in his mind, maligned.

The one that got away.

So what do you do when you’ve given a huge chunk of your life to something that bears no fruit? Figuratively, Wright got into his car, wound down the window, put on some loud tunes and drove; drove until he could no longer see Marvel in his rear-view mirror. Unwilling to play passenger to corporatism, Wright took hold of the steering wheel and sought, yet again, to blaze his own trail. The film he turned to was Baby Driver, an idea that had been in his head since the age of twenty-one. Then, he was living in London, a fledgling director without the means to turn his visions into reality. He remembered hearing the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion track ‘Bellbottoms’ and visualising a heist movie. Twenty years later, his imaginings have been made manifest, forming as they do the opening sequence of the film.

Baby Driver begins with Baby, a handsome young driver listening to ‘Bellbottoms.’ Enthral to the music, confined to the car, he covers the track, playing percussion with the wheel, synchronising the guitar parts to windscreen wipers.  Attached to his headphones owing to tinnitus, he is clearly in love with music. Soon after a gang of bank thieves join him. It soon becomes clear why Baby is the ‘stickman’ of the group: he may not be the front and centre hype man, bawling, ‘Put your hands up motherfuckers,’ but his behind the scenes work on foot pedals form the backbeat for their escape. Baby, you see, uses music in the same way a seeker uses mantras: by dissolving into the cadence he achieves a kind-of transcendence, becoming at one with the wheel, finding nirvana on the road, achieving deification when he brings the criminals home.

The opening scene is followed by a homage to Saturday Night Fever with our hero doing a celebratory dance to Bob & Earl’s ‘Harlem Shuffle.’ As Baby walks back with coffees for the group, he sidesteps, twists and shuffles to the tune. Quite imaginatively, song lyrics are transposed onto the screen in the form of shop fronts, posters and street art. A music shop with a hanging sax allows our hero to lean in and play along. It’s one big audacious set-piece that demonstrates Wright’s brio and ambition.

Early on in the film we learn that Baby is driving under duress. On being paid for the job, Doc (Kevin Spacey) only gives him a small piece of the pie. It isn’t until later in the movie we find out why Baby is happy to settle for less. Even though, Baby works for criminals, he doesn’t hang with them. He is a devoted son to his deaf foster father, fixing him meals and mirth. The two may be on opposite ends of the hearing chart, but when it comes to one another they’re in perfect pitch. Otherwise, Baby is something of loner, spending his free time locked away in his bedroom, sampling real-life conversations into music. That is until he meets Debora (Lily James), a waitress in a diner, who so happens to be humming along to Carla Thomas’ ‘B-A-B-Y.’ Immediately Baby is smitten. The waitress has taken his order and given him her heart. The two swap names, agreeing that when it comes to song titles one outscores the other. From there, Baby follows Debora to the launderette, where under the whirr of washing the two do the most intimate thing a couple can do: share headphones.

Come be my waitress tonight. Serve me the sky with a big slice of lemon.

Along with the romance and the car chases, there is humour to be had. For many years Edgar Wright worked in collaboration with Simon Pegg, creating the award-winning sitcom Spaced and the ‘Cornetto Trilogy’ Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz and World’s End. It’s true that this film doesn’t chase laughs in the way those did, but it easily passes Mark Kermode’s ‘six laughs test’ with a hilarious hat joke and fancy dress mix up being just two standout moments. Even though there are laughs, it’s undeniable that there aren’t as many as in his previous offerings – this is no bad thing. In his earlier works, Wright stuck to his tried and tested formula of supplanting big-budget American genre onto suburban English settings; here, the action leads the movie, letting the laughs arrive organically.

It’s clear that I really love this movie, but I would be lying if I said I loved it all. I felt that the end was a mess. Whilst the rest of the movie displays excellent clutch control, moving seamlessly through the gears of action, romance and comedy; the end felt like it was all gas – someone really could have done with putting the brakes on. There’s something to be admired about shooting a running scene like a car chase, and a car chase like a fight scene, but it felt like it had been done at the expense of the plot.

For all my reservations about the denouement, I’ve come to the conclusion that Baby Driver is one hell of a ride. After the disappointment of Ant-Man, Wright has re-written history, creating his own box-office marvel. Just like The Great American Songbook, he has found redemption on the open road. You can too, but only if you see this picture. 

It would be a sin to miss it.

The National

This week I had trouble thinking about what to write. The Girl and I have been watching The Good Wife round the clock and been doing little else. So deep is our obsession with the legal drama, I’ve taken to crying ‘objection your honour’ to the criticisms she casts against my beard and toe-nails, only to be disappointed when a judge isn’t there to call ‘sustained.’ I thought it wouldn’t be a problem though finding something to review because my friend Andy had recommended me a book that I intended to read. Last week I read one of Andy’s recommendations, Remains of the Day, which was both absorbing and utterly moving. This weekend I tried his other one, Dave Eggers' The Circle, which I didn't get on with. I like Eggers too: his A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius memoir is as funny as the title suggests. The Circle though suffers from being of a particular time. Its satire on technology would have felt prescient in 2013, but now in 2017 feels passé. The book looks at how community has been co-opted by the internet to mean faceless, vacuous interaction. It challenges the deification of data, highlighting how online users chase approval ratings in the form of re-tweets and likes. 4 years later all of this has come to pass, meaning that Eggers’ sci-fi is now non-fiction. I put the book down after 150 pages.

This woman's life now seems intertwined with mine.

So I really didn’t know what I was going to do. I’ve been enjoying The Handmaid’s Tale on Channel 4, but don’t feel I’ve seen enough to pass comment. I liked Richard Ayoade on The Crystal Maze re-boot, yet not enough to write an essay about it. I found myself in a quandary. I though about taking a week off, maybe having Stewart Lee fill in for me, like he does for David Mitchell in The Observer. Then on the TV listings I saw what I was going to write about. There on BBC 4 at 8pm were my favourite band: The National. As part of BBC’s Glastonbury coverage, they would be showing the Ohioan rockers’ performance on The Pyramid Stage.

Ayoade was great on The Crystal Maze.

 

I’ve been a fan of The National ever since my mate Jim did a compilation album for me way back in ’08. Being somewhat of a maverick when it came to mix-tapes, Jim put two tracks from the same artist – I know, it’s the kind of outlaw spirit that means he’s now training to be a school counsellor. After listening to ‘All The Wine’ and ‘Fake Empire,’ I pretty much went out and bought the whole of the band’s back catalogue. It’s not often in life where you see, hear or read something that you think was designed with you in mind. But with The National I knew that I had found my band. Listening to a lot of podcasts these days, The National along with Arctic Monkeys, are the only bands that I religiously follow. As a student I would go to gigs every week. During my twenties I bought music regularly; my CD rack standing as a symbol of defiance against a digital age. But now I don’t listen to much music. I still love how an apt song choice can elevate a scene in a movie. I still get emotional at how something so ubiquitous like a tune can be so personal to a couple at a wedding. I haven’t left music, but I feel that we’re on a break at the moment. I’m sure in years to come I’ll lay supine once more, scrutinising lyrics whilst a disc – yes, an actual physical thing – spins nearby.

I'm sure the adults of Shoreditch are late to work making these.

As it is, it’s The National and Arctic Monkeys that I look out for. Being a student of English, lyrics mean a lot to me. Matt Berninger and Alex Turner are respectively, in my mind, today’s great lyricists. (Feel free to post your favourite lyricists; I'm always on the lookout.) In five minutes both fashion the kind of character studies many novelists only dream of. The fact that they do it with a form that demands an economy of language makes them even more compelling. For all the preternatural talent of Turner, Berninger for me is the superior craftsman. Turner can do to portraiture but, unlike his peer, can't do landscape. In my favourite song of The National’s ‘The Geese of Beverly Road,’ Berninger tells a story of a pair of young lovers setting off car alarms for lols. The closing refrain of ‘Come be my waitress and serve me tonight. Serve me the sky tonight. Oh come. Serve me the sky with a big slice of lemon’ is spellbindingly beautiful. Romanticised yearning under a citrus skyline. Is there anything more evocative than that?

The reason The National were playing last night is because they’re back with a new album, Sleep Well Beast. The National have been a band on the rise for a while now: like Pulp, Blur and Elbow it took them a while to find popularity. For a few years they were in the margins on an Indie scene – that’s pretty niche. With the release of third album Alligator though, they began to generate some broadsheet buzz. To date, this is my favourite album; although for many, it’s their successor Boxer, a swooning distillation of mature songwriting. Each album since has led to incremental growth, which is why they now find themselves second to Foo Fighters on the main bill.

The Ohioans open with ‘Sea of Love,’ a cautionary tale about diving headfirst into romantic-infested waters. The protagonist of the tune is in too deep and is fading into the abyss. Meanwhile, the narrator who has destabilised the lover is left opining, ‘I see you rushing now. What did Harvard teach you?’ It appears when it comes to love it really does make fools of us all. Next is ‘Fake Empire,’ the band’s calling card. When Obama was running for Office in 2008, the song soundtracked his candidacy, being played at rallies from Seattle to Miami. It has to be one of the most gorgeous things ever put to recorded music. The piano forms a beautiful backdrop to the scene, providing a wistful vista for Berninger to paint his lyrics. Lyrics as rich as, ‘Tiptoe through our shiny city with our diamond slippers on. Do a gay ballet on ice. We’re half-awake in a Fake Empire.’ Even though the first half of these words point to elegance and finesse, the second half warn of stupefaction. It appears their city’s smile is at the expense of another country’s misery. 'Fake Empire' wasn’t so much a pro-Obama song, but an anti-Bush one, admonishing a nation that had put self-interest over world preservation. When the drums kick in, signalling the line ‘it’s hard to keep track of you falling through the sky,’ images of 9/11 and Baghdad bombing spring to mind. It’s four minutes encompasses the brilliance of a band that do both rich poeticism and pummelling ire.

After these tunes, the band play four songs from their album. The first I was familiar with, the widescreen ‘The System Only Dreams in Darkness.’ It is one where the lead guitar flickers in and out like a tele on the blink, eventually coming into colour late on with a resurgent solo. After is ‘Walk it Back,’ a synth-laden tune that has Berninger challenging his own inertia. The song is punctuated by a sample of Karl Rove, George Bush’s senior consultant: 

'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.' 

It appears that America’s Fake Empire is still a concern to a band that have been vehemently opposed to Donald Trump. ‘Guilty Party’ is another new one: a mournful dissection of a relationship in crisis. Berninger sings he knows he’s ‘no holiday,’ understanding why his love is in turmoil. Towards the end, catharsis is found when the vocals cede to guitar and brass, meditating perhaps on how limited words are. 'Day I Die' is a newbie that seems to sport a riff that's been plagiarised from an ice cream van. Never has a song about death seemed so upbeat.

Matt Berninger. (Courtesy of Getty Images)

Much of the rest of the set is old favourites like the elegiac ‘England’ and the propulsive ‘Bloodbuzz Ohio.’ At this point, Berninger’s inhibitions have gone the same way as his wine bottle... hurtling to the floor. Whereas earlier, he strikes a statuesque frame at the mic stand, by the end he’s a tourettic ball of rage. When he launches into ‘Mr November’ he paces the stage like a man that’s lost all his coordinates. There’s bellows, screams, yelps, hisses. His angel voice has been possessed by sinister forces, exorcism can only be found in shouting the devil dry. Finally, they end on another new one ‘Turtleneck’ that feels like something of a departure. The band either do mournful waltzes or splenetic charges, this though feels a little like Franz Ferdinand being sacrificed at the altar of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. (Is that the kind of description that can get me onto the NME staff team?)

In a week where I thought I would have nothing to write about, I found The National. Not just a band to save your blog, but a band to enrich your life.

The set is available here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p05596b0/glastonbury-2017-the-national