| February 04, 2019 05:35 PM
One of the least action-packed Super Bowls in decades managed to at least produce a few iconic ads: corn-free beer; “Dilly Dilly” meeting dragon from “Game of Thrones”; the return of the “Twilight Zone”; and of course, “The Handmaid’s Tale” show’s dystopian spin on President Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America” ads.
The #Resistance would have you believe that “The Handmaid’s Tale,” the televised reboot of the 1985 Margaret Atwood novel, foreshadows the impending horrors of a theocratic police state ruled by President Mike Pence. (These vociferous fears alone ought to convince Democrats to hold the breaks on impeachment fervor.)
But as the Super Bowl ad demonstrated, “The Handmaid’s Tale,” unintentionally or not, stands as a testament to Reagan-era America.
The season three teaser intersperses the Reagan script with scenes of “women’s work,” or sex slavery and domestic servitude, in the fictional former America. The ad builds to a crescendo with the final scene depicting the Washington Monument, remodeled into a cross, as the protagonist finally says, “Wake up, America. Morning’s over.”
The Left has spent a day cheering this last line as breaking the fourth wall, a real-time warning to actual Americans that Trump’s about to enslave us all in a theocratic extension of the Reagan era. Or something.
That’s right: The ’80s boom of capitalism and cocaine is supposed to have been the beginning of the end of feminism and freedom. It’s a hilarious misread of “The Handmaid’s Tale” as a whole, which is far more evocative of contemporary Iran or the antebellum South than any portion of the United States today. If anything, “The Handmaid’s Tale” continues to serve as an unintentional but powerful condemnation of bigger government.
The ad itself is obviously effective, not because it reflects reality but because it subverts it. This, of course, has been the entire trick of the show’s charade as #Resistance porn. A society so utilitarian that it breeds off of the backs of women enslaved for the sake of childbirth is far more philosophically similar to the radically leftist dream of after-birth abortion than it is to the deontology of classical liberalism.
The most obvious loophole in the notion that “The Handmaid’s Tale” is an indictment of contemporary America rather than a love letter to our fragile peace comes from that very final shot in the Super Bowl ad. Consider, just weeks ago, the March for Life rallied directly due east of the Washington Monument, and the very next day, the ostensibly pro-choice Women’s March protested less than a mile away from it. Reality itself is a testament to the fact that “The Handmaid’s Tale” is a foil, not a parallel, to our American life.
Of course, the writers of “The Handmaid’s Tale” know what they’re doing. Politically motivated clicks and views add up, and Hulu has certainly excelled at capitalizing on #Resistance fears for popular fealty. But for those of us distanced enough from the constant outrage and reaction cycle, we can at least sit back and appreciate that American life is so much more than our politics — a fact enabled by the Constitution’s curbs on government power. Whether under the Obama administration or the Trump one, “Morning in America” never really ended.
