The Handmaid's Tale: 6x05 Janine.
At the centre of Janine are two conversations. One compares suffering, inflicted – what it means to have been deliberately ignorant about the reality of it, which really just works as a cover-up of actual, direct responsibility for it. The other compares suffering, endured – and arrives at the realisation that victims of the regime playing one-up about it just play into the hands of the oppressors, because it takes the focus away from who is causing the pain and makes solidarity more difficult.
The first conversation happens between Aunt Lydia and Serena Joy, who are both engaged in a project of atoning for their guilt, although I’d argue that neither of them has admitted the true extent of it, and is conveniently looking at the other as less evolved. Lydia wants to save Janine after realising that she has been blind to the lies that were told to her about where her Handmaids would eventually end up, but it doesn’t feel like she is questioning the project itself, only that it wasn’t truthful about delivering the Handmaids out of their misery after they have endured their suffering. She still casts herself as a protector to her “girls” and as a victim. Serena is trying to build a different Gilead out of the example she is setting in New Bethlehem, but she, too, still believes in the project of Gilead itself, which she believes to be reformable. Serena doesn’t question the ideology behind Gilead, only the excesses it has committed against women, and she hides her responsibility for the specific suffering she has caused – to June, especially – behind her wish for a child at the time, a wish that we know is now exalted way beyond the borders of Gilead. The fertility clinic she has built in Canada, the freedom that women enjoy in New Bethlehem, are all meant to showcase was Serena originally wanted, as if any deviation from it was the fault of anyone but herself. The two meet in the middle: Aunt Lydia suggests that her Handmaids could work as attendants in new fertility clinics instead of being sent to the Colonies, or the wall, or to Jezebel’s. She doesn’t want to end the Handmaid programme, or allow “her girls” any true measure of freedom. Serena can’t admit that her dreams of a reformed Gilead are dead in the water (how truly dead they are is revealed when Joseph Lawrence overhears his fellow Commanders plotting his downfall and the end to his project of open borders through a spyhole at Jezebel’s), and that whatever freedom for women she has achieved in New Bethlehem is both short-lived and only accorded to a few privileged people such as herself. There is no true regret here, or atonement, only self-interested attempts to soothe their conscience.
The second conversation is much thornier, because it goes beyond the world the show has built and reflects, on the meta-level, on The Handmaid’s Tale itself. June and Moira, still furious at each other, are going into Jezebel’s to warn Janine about Mayday’s coming attack. They’re successful, and Janine seems prepared for what they have planned, giving them the best access point plus a door code. At the last moment, June asks Janine to come with them right now, putting the entire plan to save all of the women at risk. It’s Janine’s responsibility for the other women that keeps her there – nobody else is better equipped to ensure that as many of them get out before the attack than her. Moira is stunned that June would have put the life of her friend before those of all the other women here, and would change the plan at the last minute. They have it out: Moira accusing June of always putting herself first, using her own suffering to centre herself, without much thought about what everyone else has gone through. She asks if she has a right to her trauma as well, as someone who escaped the abuse and rape of Jezebel’s, or if only June’s pain as a Handmaid counts. They do find their way back to their love for each other, realising that this argument of measuring each other’s pain against each other means losing sight of who is inflicting the pain – but it’s also one of the core issues that this show has been struggling with, and by allowing June and Moira to make peace again, it feels like The Handmaid’s Tale is writing itself a hall pass in the process. This whole show has been based on the idea that the horrible aspect of Gilead is that these things that have historically happened to people of colour and queer people are now happening to straight, white women. June’s pain has always been more central than everyone else’s, because she’s the main character: Elisabeth Moss is the face of the show (a centrality that was initially maybe mediated when Emily was still around – and I wonder if there’s a version of the story where Alexis Bledel didn’t leave and it would have turned out differently) and June is the face of what Gilead has created, and now the face of the resistance against it. Moira has always been on the sidelines of that struggle, a supporting role in June’s deliverance and now her resistance. I wish that the show had given her more time to articulate the wish to break free from that, and followed her into that independence.
Once June and Moira come back to each other, the whole plan goes sideways. A guardian traps them in a room and attempts to rape Moira, a horrifying moment already but unbearable in light of the fact that Moira has returned to the place where she was raped and abused repeatedly. They kill the man, but his absence is quickly noted, and they are delayed by having to get rid of the body. At the gates, Luke is turned away by another guardian and almost arrested in his attempt to get June out. They end up having to rely on Commander Lawrence – a man who has just overheard the other Commanders plotting his death – to get them out in the boot of his car.
Serena, haunted by Aunt Lydia’s words about “a healthy womb must never go to waste”, walks right into a proposal by Commander Wharton that has been a long time coming: he’s built her a library as proof of his promise that he wants Gilead to change too, that he will never treat her as her former husband did. It’s very romantic, and also an impossible situation for Serena to escape: she has to believe him, because she can’t say no. We know that the bombs will soon go off, and I doubt that he will stick to his words when Gilead comes under actual threat.
Random notes:
Serena uses her wellness branding language so effortlessly – she fits neatly into a fold of the current overlap between fascism, wellness and self-improvement literature.
Lawrence is correct in saying that the other Commanders despise and disrespect Commander Bell, but he doesn’t have to taken into account that they mistrust him more, because he is already inherently suspect for not sharing in their aggressive misogyny. Lawrence wants to reform Gilead, but these men are happy with Gilead as it is.
Janine’s “You’re not a good guy. Just compared to them you are.” hits hard. It also makes me wish that Madeline Brewer, between this and her final season performance in You, had been more available this season.
Nick is in hot water as well, because one of the two guardians he shot to save Moira and Luke has survived and is waking up from his coma. He meets the mother of the man, only to make the inevitable task of getting rid of him harder. The walls are closing in.
Commander Lawrence’s “Oh hell no” was great comedic acting.
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