Future Tense: Visions Of Our Dark World

Two authors, Margaret Atwood and James McTeague, warned about the increasing strictness of laws controlling us. In "The Handmaid's Tale," Atwood shows how slight changes in laws led to the downfall of women's rights. Similarly, McTeague's "V for Vendetta" explores a dystopian world where the government controls citizens through various powers like surveillance and propaganda. These texts reflect real-world issues like restrictions on abortion rights and police abuse of power. We need to question these laws and when they go too far. What if I were to tell you guys that two authors 20 and 40 years ago warned us about the laws that control us, and how they are ever so slightly getting stricter and stricter? Hey my little visionaries, welcome back to Future Tense, visions of our dark world. It's Rory here. Today we will delve into the dystopian worlds of the Handmaid's Tale, written by Margaret Atwood and Viva Vendetta, directed by James McTeague, and discuss how the creators have fabricated speculation in their texts by the slight changes in the laws that restrict the civilians of Gilead and Northfyre, and how this has led to their dystopia. We will also question how these changes in laws and restrictions can be seen in our world today. The Handmaid's Tale focuses on the retrospective of women's rights, and the use of women's just as reproductive machines, and not as humans. Throughout the novel, Atwood uses analepsies to allow us to see the slight restrictions and changes in law that have slowly led to the downfall of women's rights. Gilead didn't just all of a sudden make the Handmaid's Handmaids. It was a carefully orchestrated event that fell over some time, a time of fear due to the skyrocketing infertility rates, and the fear of not having an America anymore. In one analepsis, we see the narrator's boss tell him he has to let go of all the women that work for him, the women including the narrator assuming, and rightfully so, they had no warning, no real reason apart from the point, but it's the law. He is mad, he doesn't want to do this, but fear is driving him to follow the laws. He says, quote on quote, it isn't me, you don't understand, please go, now. I don't want any trouble, if there's trouble, the books might be lost, things will get broken, they're outside, in my office, if you don't go now they'll come in themselves, they gave me ten minutes. The broken use of commas throughout this quote suggests that the boss is attempting to convince himself that this is right, but he knows what he is doing is morally and ethically wrong. It goes against America's whole, we are a free country. They are forcing women to not go to work and to have to be dependent on someone else, which brings me to think about how America recently had the Supreme Court turn over Rosie Wade, taking away a woman's right to an abortion. In the podcast, The Handmaid's Tale, they mention an outlaw of IBS in Alabama. Upon hearing this, I went into a full rabbit hole of research, and I found out that IBS in Alabama has stopped for a while, as there is a fear that IBS clinics will be sued. It's such a bizarre fear, but there was literally a lawsuit against a fertility clinic that had dropped an embryo and destroyed it, and it happened to fall under Alabama's Code 6539, wrongful death of a minor, by the Supreme Court, meaning that no other opposing views could change the court's ruling. Another thing this has made me think about is how we are now pinning each other against other people or facilities, like in the scene in The Handmaid's Tale, where they are holding Janine responsible for her rape. Whose fault was it, girls? Her fault! Her fault! Her fault! Her fault! Her fault! Her fault! Her fault! Her fault! The constant repetition of her fault is to engrave into Janine's mind that it wasn't the boys' fault they raped her, she led them on, she dressed too risky, and the arts are there to enforce this reminder, per se. The arts also pin the girls against each other to make them hate themselves, in other words, the Handmaid's truth quotes. The Queen Bee mentality is to ensure that all the women hate each other and don't create an uprising. They all hate each other for not making a move, but no one is going to cause an uprising because they are all too scared of the consequences from the new laws and restrictions that have been implemented. V for Mazetta undertakes this exploitation of laws in their fascist totalitarian regime, of having the government control almost everything their citizens do, so much so that there is a curfew citizens must follow if they don't want to be arrested by the fingermen. Now, you might be wondering what the fingermen are. Well, when Northfire gained control of the United Kingdom, they removed the idea of having a Prime Minister and replaced this role with the High Chancellor Sutler. Upon implementing this High Chancellor position, Northfire created an anatomical string of powers. The Finger, secret police. The Eye, surveillance. The Ear, audio surveillance. The Nose, criminal investigations. And the Mouth, propaganda for Northfire. Using this anatomical string of powers is a means of familiarity for the people of Northfire, while also being able to hide the sense of identity behind those who work for these powers, besides from the mouth proportion. The citizens don't know directly who runs these powers, only to know that they should see them. Similar to our politicians, the ones that make the laws that we need to abide by. While they are more in the public eye, and we do get to see them, do we really know them? Do we really know what their aim is? Who is to stop them from telling lies to the people of their country? The fact that we don't know who everyone is, also reminds us of the secret police. In one of the beginning scenes of the Epimandetta, our female main character Evie is seen breaking the curtain and walking outside to go somewhere. In this scene, the Fingermen's full body and metaphor is shown until Evie finds out that they are the Fingermen, representing their secret identity and the fear that everyone on the streets could be a Fingerman. In the same scene, the Fingermen also mention that, now that Evie threatened them, they were allowed to do whatever they wanted, like anything. And judging by the tone of the scene, I'm going to assume that we all know what they were going to do. This reminds me of the recent discussion of allowing police officers in Queensland to search anyone that they deem suspicious of holding a knife without a warrant. Police Commissioner Katrina Carroll is asking for more power. More. As if they don't already have enough. The searching of people without a warrant is already on trial at night around the public transport places, so I can't imagine how close they are to making this an everyday thing in Queensland. This whole ordeal is an abuse of power. Any police officer with any belief can search anyone, and I can only imagine the amount of discrimination that will succumb on this new search without a warrant. All these issues that have been raised today, from the removal of women's rights to the abuse of power, can be seen in the text for Handmaid's Tale and The Thief's Mandetta. Our society has to start questioning these laws and restrictions. When will these new laws, like the search without a warrant, be taken too far? When will women not get a say in what they want to do with their reproductive system? When will we say enough is enough? Thanks to the visionaries who are following along with this podcast, next we will begin to question similarities in the Maze Runner and those being sent off to fight in wars that are not their problem.