The adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s novel dramatizes Offred’s claustrophobia through gorgeous tableaux of repression. Illustration by Rebekka Dunlap

When Hulu’s adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel “The Handmaid’s Tale” débuted, in April, nearly every review commented on its grotesque timeliness. It’s true that, early on, the Trumpian parallels are hard to miss. It’s a story about a government that exploits fear of Islamic terrorists to crush dissent, then blots out women’s reproductive rights. It’s about fake news, political trauma, the abnormal normalized. There’s a scene that so directly evoked the Women’s March that I had to hit Pause to collect myself.

But, for many readers of my generation, “The Handmaid’s Tale” is also a time machine back to the Reagan era, a mightily perverse period for sexual politics. Just a decade earlier, a woman could be denied a credit card without a man to co-sign, and yet, by 1985, when the novel was written, the media was declaring that feminism was over, dunzo, defunct—no longer necessary, now that women wore sneakers to jobs at law firms. At the same time, sexual danger was a national obsession, seen from two opposing angles, each claiming to protect women. On the right, there was the anti-abortion New Christian Right—led by figures like Phyllis Schlafly and the televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker—intent on restoring traditional marriage. On the left, there was the anti-porn movement—spearheaded by the feminist philosopher Catharine MacKinnon and the gonzo polemicist Andrea Dworkin—which argued that consensual sex was often an illusion and gender a cruel hierarchy. These weird sisters co-wrote laws that reframed pornography as a civil-rights issue, allowing rape victims to sue publishers. It was a peculiar era in which to be a teen-age girl, equally prudish and decadent: the era of Trump Tower and cocaine, AIDS and “Just Say No.” It also made me a free-speech absolutist, wary of any clampdown on expression. My strongest memory of reading Atwood’s book is the rude jolt of a joke between college students like me. “You’re so trendy,” the narrator, Offred, recalls teasing her friend Moira, about the subject of a term paper. “It sounds like some kind of dessert. Date Rapé.”

This was the context in which Atwood wrote “The Handmaid’s Tale,” which is set in a nightmare world called Gilead, where consensual sex is an illusion and gender a cruel hierarchy—and traditional marriage is compulsory. It’s told in the voice of a forced birth surrogate, or Handmaid, whom we know only as Offred (for “Of-Fred,” the name of the Commander who owns her); she’s stuck inside her head, desperately making dark jokes to stay sane. The plot reflects the era’s obsessions: trainers force the Handmaids to watch porn, as a lesson about how men treat women; Offred remembers throwing kink magazines into the flames with her feminist mother. Gilead, the new name for the United States, is Biblical fascism sold with faux-feminist icing. “Freedom from,” Offred’s trainer Lydia insists, is as valuable as “freedom to.” Offred thinks, bitterly and longingly, of her mother, a second-wave feminist from whom Offred had sometimes felt alienated, viewing her political struggles as ancient history. “You wanted a women’s culture,” she imagines saying. “Well, now there is one. It isn’t what you meant, but it exists.”

In Gilead, men run the state, and women are split into types. Wives, dressed in blue, oversee the home; Marthas, in green, cook and clean; Handmaids, in long red cloaks, with white bonnets that hide their faces, have intercourse once a month, in a ritualized threesome, a state-sanctioned rape. An environmental disaster has caused mass infertility, and Handmaids are the solution—the regime’s goal is to get women not merely to accept their roles but to embrace them. There are also “unwomen,” sent to clean toxic waste, and “gender traitors,” hanged. Later, we discover a wanton underworld called Jezebel’s, full of women in vintage Playboy Bunny attire, which provides a cathartic outlet for powerful men.

Atwood’s book has echoes of New England Puritanism, along with atrocities drawn from sources including Saudi Wahhabism, the Third Reich, American slavery, and the East German surveillance state. It’s constructed not as a realistic story, however, but as an eyewitness account, presented in a highly self-conscious, wordplay-drenched text, meant for an imagined reader, like Anne Frank’s diary. It’s deeply narrow, the story of a slave grieving her past—her lost child, her ex-lover—as her memories recede. The recurrent motif is Scrabble: the Commander enlists Offred in a secret game. (Women are not allowed to read.) He gives her a women’s magazine, samizdat that floods her with nostalgia. She finds a carved message in her bedroom from an earlier Handmaid, who hanged herself: “Nolite te bastardes carborundorum,” faux Latin for “Don’t let the bastards grind you down.” But, mostly, Offred observes. She hides a match in her mattress, but never lights it. Eventually, she uses sex, with the house driver, Nick, as a drug to distract her from resistance. Toward the end of the book, a black van pulls up, and she steps in, but we never find out where it takes her. In the final chapter, we get the brilliantly dark punch line: Offred’s future reader turns out to be a smug know-it-all, a future professor of Gileadean studies, who deconstructs her like a bug. Her desperate message was received, but misunderstood, because the future inevitably imagines itself superior to the past.

A TV show that replicated the book’s poetic compression, its formal strangeness, would be hard to pull off. But the Hulu adaptation doesn’t try. Instead, it is heavy-handed in the best way, dramatizing Offred’s claustrophobia through gorgeous tableaux of repression. It makes everything blunter and more explicit, almost pulpy at times; among other things, we learn Offred’s true name, June, right away. She tells us, “I intend to survive.” The first three episodes, directed by Reed Morano, sketch Gilead’s outlines. There’s the opulent mansion in which Offred (Elisabeth Moss) is fed like a prize pig, overseen by the Commander’s wife, Serena Joy (Yvonne Strahovski), a former televangelist; the wall where traitors are hanged; and the grim dorm where older women torture and tutor. Offred’s narration retains some of her wit and fury. But the emphasis is visual, making violence as beautiful as a nightmare: red dress, blue dress, white sheets, black van.

The third episode is a chilling showpiece, dramatizing Gilead’s tilt from liberal democracy into fascism, nimbly shifting from intimate scenes to grand ones, making one form of drama frame the other. There’s a graceful moment in the apartment June shares with her husband, Luke, as she, Moira, and Luke bicker in the aftermath of significant political events: the women’s money has been drained, their jobs taken away. All the characters feel like real people; their dialogue is unhurried. It’s a scene about power—Luke now has all of it—but it doesn’t grandstand. Yet this intimate moment is bracketed by deliberately operatic, even bombastic gestures. In a parallel sequence, a lesbian Handmaid named Ofglen (played, silently, by the terrific Alexis Bledel) is gagged and kidnapped by the Secret Police, forced to see her lover hanged, and then given a clitoridectomy. In the end, Ofglen stands in her white hospital room, in shock, reaching into her medical stockings for the bandage on her crotch. It’s a scene out of a Cronenberg film: abstract, grotesque. And yet the two scenes complement and intensify each other. The show doesn’t try to replicate the near-pointillist density of the book, but at its best it manages to suggest something of its allegorical weight, its recognition of the futility of trying to separate the personal from the political.