Handmaid's Tale: Revolutions Start With Graffiti and Food
In a society as strictly regimented as the Republic of Gilead, everyone has a role to play. Commander Waterford (Joseph Fiennes) negotiates foreign trade agreements. His wife, Serena Joy (Yvonne Strahovski), runs the household. Offred (Elisabeth Moss) is a handmaid, a womb only valuable once a month during a ritual rape known as "The Ceremony."
But even when trapped—in the beginning of the Hulu series' fourth episode, she's being held captive in her bedroom, where the vengeful Serena has kept her for 13 days straight—Offred finds ways to rebel. The Handmaid's Tale is a story of resistance, and in "Nolite Te Bastardes Carborundorum," Offred learns how to fight back: by recognizing the power she can wield when playing along. Revolutions often start quietly, and Offred's has to start within herself.
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As we learn through the flashback-driven story of Moira (Samira Wiley), playing a role is often the only way to survive. During handmaid training at the Rachel and Leah Center, she and Offred (then still June) use a shiv to take an Aunt hostage. Moira dons the Aunt's somber brown clothes and leads a submissive June out of the center. Moving through an unfamiliar Cambridge—bodies strung up on the walls of the Harvard library, street signs replaced with symbols—they get to the subway platform before being questioned by the militia. Moira makes it onto the train, thanks to her relative power, but June isn't so lucky; the lone handmaid is sent back to the center, where Aunts dole out a punishment laced with whips and Biblical righteousness.
But even with her soles are bloodied and her spirit broken, June finds solace in solidarity. Fellow handmaids walk by her cot, giving her pieces of food saved from their meals. It may not be much, but at the Center, where isolation breeds indoctrination, any community is meaningful: a slice of apple, a shared look of disbelief during a "lesson," a piece of subversive graffiti. (In a flashback, June finds Moira scratching "AUNT LYDIA SUX" into a bathroom stall. Moira knows that if her scrawled phrase gives one other trapped girl hope, it's reward enough; words hold power, especially when women are forbidden from reading.)
As a nearly comatose Offred lies on the floor of her closet, in the room where Serena has her trapped, she traces the words carved by a previous handmaid: nolite te bastardes carborandorum. Her predecessor hanged herself from a chandelier, but she gave Offred solidarity, in the phrasing of a 12-year-old boy rebelling against his Latin teacher: Don't let the bastards grind you down.
In Gilead, the bastards are insidious. The Commander, who can function sexually if he believes Offred's life is tolerable, asks her to play Scrabble with him. Serena Joy, spurned by her husband and rejected from any intellectual contribution, regains leverage by controlling Offred. A doctor, anonymous behind a white curtain, asks Offred to have sex with him on the examining table, offering it as a gift so she can avoid punishment for the sterility of the Commander. In a world where the human species has doomed itself to extinction, everyone is desperate for control.
Offred only has one bargaining chip: her own fruitful womb, a precious commodity in a barren world. She can use it as leverage to escape, but she must avoid the temptation of becoming trapped in her own mind, of losing herself in flashbacks, and focus on playing a delicate role: deferential to the Aunts, groveling to Serena Joy, coy with the Commander, subservient to all. But Offred knows her power—and now she's learning how to wield it.