Rich Heldenfels, Pop Culture Wanderer

Spoilers included. At dinner with friends recently, the conversation turned to “The Handmaid’s Tale,” and the ending of the second season. I thought the season as a whole was powerful in the way it repeatedly emphasized the ruthlessness of the powerful – that the men in charge of Gilead were going to maintain control no matter how brutal they felt they had to be. And that control was not over some women, but all women, as we saw in the execution of a misguided teen (who had been betrayed by her own, control-minded father) and the repeated punishment of Serena. As one of our friends said, Serena thought privilege gave her a pass on society’s worst treatment of women – only she learned otherwise, and finally saw that her “daughter” would be denied even those few things Serena had carried over from the pre-repression years. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the portrayal of women, men and power – not only because of what we see from the men ruling the country (and their, w...

(Photo from Netflix) Years ago I did a phone interview with an actress who had a new series, and it was a rapid chat, her answers coming as quickly as I could ask a question. At the end I told her she'd been fast. "Do you know how many of these I've done today?" Our talk, it was clear, was not a conversation; it was a transaction, her getting publicity, me getting enough for a story my readers might like. I did a lot of transactional interviews during my career, more than I like to remember now. More often than not an interview had a specific purpose, and a fixed amount of time, and did not go much beyond either. Not always, especially when a remark took us down a different road. (I've told students more than once that, as thoroughly prepared as you are for an interview, you also have to listen to the person you're interviewing -- don't be too bound to the questions you've prepared.) Molly Shannon and I once began comparing some personal notes wh...