Keeping Score: FFC Interviews “Payback” Filmmakers Jennifer Baichwal and Margaret Atwood
It’s PAYBACK’s time
March 16, 2012 | The Massey Lectures are as much a Canadian institution as the RCMP, so it’s fitting that I spotted honorary Mountie Paul Gross in the audience of Margaret Atwood’s closing talk back in 2008. Landing at the anxious first crest of the financial crisis, Atwood’s lectures, collected and published as the best-selling Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth, were regarded as the latest in the internationally-renowned author’s string of prophesies come true. (The Handmaid’s Tale‘s dystopian vision of an American theocracy that reduces women to reproductive concubines might now be mistaken for Rick Santorum’s four-year prospectus.) Yet Atwood wastes no time in announcing that debt is not in vogue so much as hardwired into human patterns of thinking. Nor does she offer financial advice, playfully following her interest in score-keeping wherever it takes her, whether to the Victorian novel, where a parent’s balance sheet can make or break a marriage, or to how we think about the penance in penitentiaries.