by Richard King
I'll say one thing for the Cheeto Jesus: he's done wonders for the journalistic trade in specious literary comparisons. In the year or so since Donald Trump became the GOP's presidential nominee, I must have read hundreds of articles comparing his rise and behaviour in office to dystopias and alternative histories such as Sinclair Lewis' It Can't Happen Here, Philip Roth's The Plot Against America and Alan Moore's V for Vendetta. It's almost as if this presidency comes with its own reading list. "Okay guys, that's it for today. Next week we're going to look at Orwell, so please bring your copies of Nineteen Eighty-Four …"
I mean, it's all a bit predictable, this stuff about novels predicting Trump. It's the kind of thing a weekend editor, under orders to go "behind" the headlines, is almost duty-bound to publish. But now we are offered another novel with which to dissect the current regime, and this one seems to have set the minds and hearts of the commentariat racing. I refer of course to Margaret Atwood's dystopia The Handmaid's Tale (1985), which imagines a United States under ruthless puritanical rule, subject to a religious caste system, and officially misogynistic, homophobic and cruel. Yes, apparently Donald Trump – Trump the bumptious billionaire; Trump the carrot-coloured conman; Trump the very essence of late capitalist trash – is now to be seriously and solemnly compared to a council of puritanical commanders who enforce gender conformity through the barrel of a gun and punish deviations from it through the bowline of a rope. Seriously? Apparently.
As I probably don't need to tell 3QD readers, the occasion for this outbreak of It Can Happen Here-ism is the recent adaptation of The Handmaid's Tale for the subscription video-on-demand service Hulu. Starring the excellent Elisabeth Moss, whose stints as a Democratic president's daughter and a young, determined secretary in the world of 1960s advertising have forever endeared her to progressive viewers, this adaptation has proven hugely popular with critics and TV audiences alike, gaining scores of 100% and 93% (from critics and audience, respectively) on the review-aggregator Rotten Tomatoes. It has thirteen Emmy nominations, and has sent sales of Atwood's novel through the roof. It's even popped up in a speech by Hillary Clinton, who now has lots of time to watch TV.