Margaret Atwood once became so enraptured watching Captain Underpants her manuscript was almost stolen
The Handmaid's Tale author says her close attention to the movie during a flight almost resulted in a thief making off with her laptop
Aux News Margaret Atwood
Even for Margaret Atwood, whose body of dystopian work has often been referenced as a strangely prescient vision of the state of abortion rights in America, life has some real surprises in store. Case in point: her compellingly complicated relationship with the 2018 movie Captain Underpants, which she shared in a recent interview mesmerized her so intensely that a thief posing as an agent almost made off with one of her manuscripts.
As Atwood tells The Guardian, while she was in the process of writing The Handmaid’s Tale’s 2019 sequel The Testaments, someone posing as an agent on a flight almost made off with her laptop (where The Testaments manuscript was stored). Although Atwood has long been accustomed to fitting in writing time with “whatever else I’m doing,” her attention during the plane ride was commandeered by Captain Underpants, which The Guardian reports she “became absorbed in watching.” Ostensibly, the film was so mesmerizing it led Atwood to leave her open laptop on the flight after disembarking, only recovering it later with the help of the “heroes” working for the airline.
The bittersweet and somewhat serendipitous relationship between Atwood and Captain Underpants may not be illustrative of some grand truth about the human attention span, or privacy rights, or America, but it does reflect two very elemental truths about the human experience: there’s nothing like a larger project at hand to beget serious focus on a random side quest, and some movies just hit different in-flight. Invoke the “big screen experience” as you wish, but this writer proudly credits an overseas flight with finally making Inception a legible and enjoyable film after three prior watch attempts. Sometimes, quite literally strapping in for a film is key to a viewing experience so immersive that a precious manuscript becomes a little irrelevant for a second.
9 Comments
That movie fucking rocks. The gag of George having an anxiety spiral acted out with sick puppets still randomly pops in my head as a 25 year old man and I giggle like I’m 7 years old again. Glad someone as gigantic as Atwood and I can have something in common.
It is an impressive bit of movie-making, and the Netflix original series is a great example of how “toilet humor” can be done cleverly without always resorting to gross-out gags.
It’s a lot of fun for sure.
Handmaid’s Tale isn’t any attempt at prescience about the future. It’s combining things from the past, like the (then-recent) Iranian revolution, Soviet purges, slavery, polygamy, and deliberately leaving out any of the advanced technology expected from scifi. I reviewed it here:https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2022/12/31/the-handmaids-tale/
“it’s not really that original since George Orwell had already
transmuted some of the same historical material into a nominally future
regime”Edgy stuff.
In the context of the full sentence you’re quoting that from, I was comparing Handmaid’s Tale to The Dispossessed. I suppose it’s possible The Dispossessed has its analogue to 1984 making it comparatively less original than HT, and I’m just unaware of it.
So what she’s saying is that the 3-D Hypno-Ring works.
I’m a big screen fan for any movie but I also think watching a movie on the plane is one of the best ways to experience. Much better than home IMO because you are forced to engage. Not surprised MA was so engrossed with the movie.
So the original story is somewhat confusingly worded, but I’m pretty sure this headline and interpretation are inaccurate. My take of the Guardian article is a poser agent was trying to steal her manuscript. Around that same time (but in an independent incident where the poser agent was not directly involved), she got sucked into the movie and left the laptop behind on a plane. (This is me joining the ‘but here’s how this article is wrong’ first timers club.)