Under His Eye: What We Remember, and What Remembers Us
- Yasamin Dara
- 1 day ago
- 6 min read
By Yasmin Dara
Editor, Entertainment & Culture, RALLY4VETS | DVEN Dispatch
I was born in Iran. I have seen what happens when conviction calcifies into control—when a government sanctifies its violence and calls it divine order. The unraveling begins quietly. With language. With promises. With the slow redirection of fear toward those who do not conform.
When I first watched The Handmaid’s Tale, the recognition was immediate. The structures were familiar. The cadence of submission. The doctrine wrapped in scripture. The reshaping of identity through ritual, surveillance, and fear. It was not fiction. It was a mirror.
At the time, Iran stood at another crossroads. Women were rising again-lighting their hijabs on fire, chanting the names of the dead, facing down the rifles of a regime that claims to protect them. Their defiance echoed across the globe, but not always by screen. In Iran, even a television show can be an act of resistance. Access is filtered. Platforms are blocked. Bypassing the regime’s grip requires foreign currency and illicit tools. Most cannot afford them. Even fewer dare.
And still, the story found its way. Dressed in robes and silence, it told the truth that many of us had lived. Not an imagined place—but a studied one. Gilead is constructed from the raw materials of every theocracy that uses faith as a lever and obedience as currency. Its rituals are refined. Its cruelty, systematic. Its power rests not on chaos, but on the precision of order.
That is what makes it enduring.
The truth is that tyranny rarely declares itself. It cloaks itself in promises. In slogans. “Free electricity.” “Free water.” “God’s will.” And by the time people look up from their hunger, the uniforms have been issued, and freedom has been renamed disobedience.
The Handmaid’s Tale’s power lives in the precision with which it maps the machinery of control: how belief is weaponized, how order is constructed through obedience, how entire civilizations are reshaped by those who claim to be restoring virtue. Gilead is a study.
Most people will never know the full extent of what the show meant to those who could not watch it. In countries like Iran, where censorship is law and internet freedom is a luxury, many have never seen a single frame. Those who try must pay for “filter-breakers”-devices or apps to circumvent firewalls. And even then, they risk more than fines. They risk imprisonment or death. For watching a show.
But they will see it someday. Or their children will. Or their stories will meet June Osborne’s story in another form, across another border, in another language. Because truth finds a way. And when it does, they will know they were not forgotten.
Because there was Margaret Atwood-a historian of human behavior disguised as a novelist. Every law in Gilead has a precedent. Every ritual, a lineage. Her work was synthesis-gathering the fragments of regimes, religions, and recorded harms, and holding them to the light without distortion.
And there were the artists: Elisabeth Moss, Yvonne Strahovski, Ann Dowd, Bradley Whitford, and many others who carried these truths with discipline and restraint.Their performances traced the psychological architecture of control: how it is learned, how it is justified, how it is survived.
It gave us June-defiant, fractured, unrelenting. A woman who carried both fury and mercy, and never confused one for the other.
It gave us Serena Joy: poised, calculating, and deeply conflicted. From the beginning, her silence trembled with dissent. Whether driven by fear, vanity, or something unspoken, she moved through Gilead as someone bargaining with power, sometimes to preserve it, sometimes to survive it, and occasionally, to challenge it.
It gave us Aunt Lydia: cruel, and at times, shockingly maternal. So maternal that we hesitated. Her cruelty was systematic, her faith immovable—or was it? And yet, there were moments-glances, gestures, trembling silences—that suggested a struggle she could not name. Perhaps she believed the suffering was necessary. Perhaps she needed to. Or perhaps some part of her no longer did. Perhaps she never did. I guess we all need to read The Testaments now.
And it gave us Commander Lawrence.
He should have been easy to hate.
There were moments we tried. We traced the outlines of his decisions, his indifference, his cruelty-by-design. But every time we thought we had found his center, it shifted. Commander Lawrence existed to complicate our sense of justice.
A scholar of systems, one step ahead of the decay he helped design, Lawrence lived in a permanent tension between intellect and conscience. While he did not plead for forgiveness, nor posture for morality, his complex and private character was impossible to dismiss.
He placed his hand on his heart and looked at June.
The weight of a man who understood, too late, the scale of what he had shaped.
It was one of the most devastating silences ever performed on television.
The finest actors know when to let silence finish the sentence.
What Bradley Whitford did in that final moment was mastery.
If the measure of performance is what lingers, then Bradley Whitford belongs among the masters
What We Remember, and What Remembers Us
When the final credits roll on a series like The Handmaid’s Tale, what remains is the residue. The discomfort. The private questions no one hears us ask.
Would I have stayed silent?
Would I have helped?
Would I have survived?
I was too young to remember the day Iran changed. And when I ask the generation before me, they do not remember either.
Oppression does not arrive with fanfare.
In the years since, I have watched people defend their own erasure. I have watched women disappear without burial. I have watched the faithful weaponized against themselves. And I have watched the world forget.
But The Handmaid’s Tale remembered.
It understood something quietly dangerous: that control does not always come with a weapon or a threat. At least not at first. It often arrives with softness. With logic. With a hand at the small of your back.
The man who asks for your location, so he knows you are safe.
The partner who says, let me take care of it, when you know you are fully capable—and so does he.
As if you were not capable before they came.
And before you know it, without warning, you wake up one day and feel like you cannot breathe.
You find yourself asking permission to go to lunch with your best friend.
You want to take that trip with the girls—and yet the fear.
Oh yes, the fear—of revealing that you want to choose something freely, something that brings you joy.
And yes-complicity wears a smile.
Some of the worst crimes are committed by those who claim to be saving you.
Or worse, by those who make you believe they are.
The Handmaid’s Tale is the story of Chile, where under Pinochet’s regime, women were imprisoned, tortured, and raped in clandestine detention centers—acts carried out under orders, then erased from the record.
It is the story of Argentina, where during the Dirty War, pregnant women were held in secret prisons, forced to give birth in captivity, and had their newborns taken—gifted to loyal families of the regime as spoils of ideological purity.
It is the story of Bosnia, where women were held in camps and raped as part of a deliberate campaign—terror not as a byproduct of war, but as a weapon of erasure.
It is the story of Nigeria, where schoolgirls were taken by Boko Haram, torn from their classrooms, and forced into marriages with the men who captured them—told it was God’s will.
It is the story of Iran, where young women are arrested, beaten, and sometimes killed for removing a headscarf or simply for their thoughts.
It is the story of Afghanistan, where girls have been pulled out of schools, silenced in their homes, and returned to a state of legal invisibility—under a regime that claims to be protecting their virtue.
It is the story of homes where girls are not allowed to speak at dinner or ever.
Of nations where rape is sanctified through a whispered prayer before the act.
(Editor’s note: In Shi’a Islam, temporary marriage—known as sigheh or mut’ah—is sometimes cited to religiously justify sexual encounters under the guise of legitimacy. In regimes like the Islamic Republic of Iran, this doctrine has been grotesquely manipulated to sanctify what is, in truth, coercion.)
So no, not everyone could watch The Handmaid’s Tale. Not every woman had the Wi-Fi, the dollars, or the legal safety to stream it. But that does not mean it did not reach them. Because truth has its own network. And someday-through subtitles, through whispered retellings, through bootlegs passed hand to hand-it will find the young women who stood in fire. It will find the mothers who wrote down their daughters’ names so they would not be erased. And when it does, it will say:
You were seen.
There was a woman named Margaret Atwood who believed. And there was a team of filmmakers who built a world to testify. And they gave you Serena. They gave you June. They gave you Aunt Lydia and Commander Lawrence and Moira and Emily. They gave you a nation that collapsed in the name of righteousness-and people who clawed their way out in the name of love.
And if that is not legacy, I do not know what is.
