6. “All These Things into Position”: Intermedial Storytelling via Radiohead’s “Street Spirit,” the Novels of Ben Okri, and Feminist Dystopia

Contemporary storytelling seeks to exceed literary, audiovisual, and technological boundaries in order to produce intermedia communication. The rise of streaming services and the phenomenon of “serialization” have advanced the means of integration, adaptation, cross-referencing, citation, and appropriation. The rapidly expanding field of intermediality studies accordingly requires a wide range of case analyses. This chapter examines the complex interaction between the TV adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Ben Okri’s written The Famished Road trilogy by exploring the function of the TV series soundtrack. Specifically, the chapter focuses on Radiohead’s single “Street Spirit” (aka “Fade Out”) featured in the third episode of season four, entitled “The Crossing.” The soundtrack plays a fundamental role both in Atwood’s novel and in its serial adaptation, which raises questions of the story’s source medium as being more plural than immediately apparent. In this light, the TV series soundtrack functions as a tool for cross-media and cross-cultural references and permits new interpretations of the series. The outlining of these connections is followed by a discussion of how the TV series’ particular choice of Radiohead’s track connects Margaret Atwood’s feminist dystopia with Ben Okri’s postcolonial novel, while at the same time recontextualizing them as parts of the larger discourses of feminist, postcolonial, and intermediality studies.