“[Rand] had a habit of exaggerating her own suffering, and she often forgot to credit those whose ideas she borrowed and who helped her in more material ways. She humiliated her husband. She could be narcissistic, shrill, demanding, untidy, even unclean, and her use of amphetamines exacerbated her angry outbursts, unkempt periods, and paranoia.”
Atlas Shrugged is out. You will forgive me if I am not standing in line to see the movie. The book sucked-and even before today I had no doubt at all the movie would too.
And Roger Ebert says my suspicions have proved to be right:
I feel like my arm is all warmed up and I don’t have a game to pitch. I was primed to review “Atlas Shrugged.” I figured it might provide a parable of Ayn Rand’s philosophy that I could discuss. For me, that philosophy reduces itself to: “I’m on board; pull up the lifeline.” There are however people who take Ayn Rand even more seriously than comic-book fans take “Watchmen.” I expect to receive learned and sarcastic lectures on the pathetic failings of my review.
And now I am faced with this movie, the most anticlimactic non-event since Geraldo Rivera broke into Al Capone’s vault. I suspect only someone very familiar with Rand’s 1957 novel could understand the film at all, and I doubt they will be happy with it. For the rest of us, it involves a series of business meetings in luxurious retro leather-and-brass board rooms and offices, and restaurants and bedrooms that look borrowed from a hotel no doubt known as the Robber Baron Arms.
During these meetings, everybody drinks. More wine is poured and sipped in this film than at a convention of oenophiliacs. There are conversations in English after which I sometimes found myself asking, “What did they just say?” The dialogue seems to have been ripped throbbing with passion from the pages of Investors’ Business Daily. Much of the excitement centers on the tensile strength of steel.
The story involves Dagny Taggart (Taylor Schilling), a young woman who controls a railroad company named Taggart Transcontinental (its motto: “Ocean to Ocean”). She is a fearless and visionary entrepreneur, who is determined to use a revolutionary new steel to repair her train tracks. Vast forces seem to conspire against her.
It’s a few years in the future. America has become a state in which mediocrity is the goal, and high-achieving individuals the enemy. Laws have been passed prohibiting companies from owning other companies. Dagny’s new steel, which is produced by her sometime lover, Hank Rearden (Grant Bowler), has been legislated against because it’s better than other steels. The Union of Railroad Engineers has decided it will not operate Dagny’s trains. Just to show you how bad things have become, a government minister announces “a tax will be applied to the state of Colorado, in order to equalize our national economy.” So you see how governments and unions are the enemy of visionary entrepreneurs.
But you’re thinking, railroads? Yes, although airplanes exist in this future, trains are where it’s at. When I was 6, my Aunt Martha brought me to Chicago to attend the great Railroad Fair of 1948, at which the nation’s rail companies celebrated the wonders that were on the way. They didn’t quite foresee mass air transportation. “Atlas Shrugged” seems to buy into the fair’s glowing vision of the future of trains. Rarely, perhaps never, has television news covered the laying of new railroad track with the breathless urgency of the news channels shown in this movie.
So OK. Let’s say you know the novel, you agree with Ayn Rand, you’re an objectivist or a libertarian, and you’ve been waiting eagerly for this movie. Man, are you going to get a letdown. It’s not enough that a movie agree with you, in however an incoherent and murky fashion. It would help if it were like, you know, entertaining?
The movie is constructed of a few kinds of scenes: (1) People sipping their drinks in clubby surroundings and exchanging dialogue that sounds like corporate lingo; (2) railroads, and lots of ’em; (3) limousines driving through cities in ruin and arriving at ornate buildings; (4) city skylines; (5) the beauties of Colorado. There is also a love scene, which is shown not merely from the waist up but from the ears up. The man keeps his shirt on. This may be disappointing for libertarians, who I believe enjoy rumpy-pumpy as much as anyone.
Short for? Sucks with a capital “S”. Of course, Ebert had already documented the type of people who are her fans.
“Two novels can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other involves orcs.”
Kung Fu Monkey
I wonder why progs always write for this audience and ascribe their pathetic beliefs to the straw men they set up in their mind. I suppose the beautiful thing is that I saved money on not buying the book and not watching the movie.
and seriously, go with Joe Morgenthau and the Friday WSJ reviews.
Poverty is not a mortgage on the labor of others—misfortune is not a mortgage on achievement—failure is not a mortgage on success—suffering is not a claim check, and its relief is not the goal of existence—man is not a sacrificial animal on anyone’s altar nor for anyone’s cause—life is not one huge hospital.
Ayn Rand, The Voice of Reason [48]
There are those that believe that the government is the font of all goodness, reason, wisdom(except when they bail out the hated Wall Street or AIG et al) and THEY, not you, know best how to spend YOUR money.
Ayn believed in Objectivism, that, among many other things was a version of Realpolitik, seeing the world as it really is and making the most of it.
That one should be able to enjoy the fruits of ONE’S OWN labor and not be obligated or forced by A government to contribute to the those that can’t or WON’T work.
There was actually a time in this countrys history when the only safety net was one’s family or community but now we expect the government to do what WE should be doing for our family and friends..this is a particular mantra of the left who, according, to Pew, contribute little to charities …the thought is that they are niggardly because they view the government as a Nanny state and therefore that absloves them of personal responsibility to help others.
That Ayn is so popular on college campuses that are bastions of commie, I mean. liberal thought is a testament to her timeless idealogy, orc or not.
On one memorable occasion a small group had gathered in Lewis’s rooms and were listening to Tolkien read the last installment of The Lord of the Rings. They were sitting there puffing on pipes and sipping tea when Hugo Dyson, who had been lounging on a sofa and growing increasingly bored with the proceedings, suddenly exclaimed: “Oh, fuck! Not another elf!”
As quoted in C.S. Lewis: Creator of Narnia (2005) by Michael White, p. 152
d
I just couldn’t resist…HAHAHA
JRandom, Thanx for your comment and insight. So right on.
It’s also worth pointing out that when Ayn Rand was dying of lung cancer she went on Medicare & Social Security. Everyone’s a looter or moocher at heart, I guess.
I’ll not hear Ayn was a leech, looter and moocher. Not after all her objectiveness posturing. But then again it does explain the tea baggers preoccupation with protecting their “rights” while denying everyone else’s opportunity and access.
The nut does not fall far from the tree.
“It is obvious, in such cases, that a man receives his own money which was taken from him by force, directly and specifically, without his consent, against his own choice. Those who advocated such laws are morally guilty, since they assumed the “right” to force employers and unwilling co-workers. But the victims, who opposed such laws, have a clear right to any refund of their own money—and they would not advance the cause of freedom if they left their money, unclaimed, for the benefit of the welfare-state administration.”””””
Ayn Rand
in eight years she received 11,000 dollars TOTAL…yeah, the definition of a mooch….
Everything I own belongs to the state and the Feds and States have the right to take it away.
Nice state you got there.
Kind of a shitty Republic.
The reality is that in Rand’s novel, as in life, self-described capitalists can be the worst enemies of capitalism. But that doesn’t fit in easily with the simple pro-business narrative about Rand now being retailed.
Today, Rand is celebrated among conservatives: Rep. Paul Ryan (R., Wis.) insists that all his staffers read “Atlas Shrugged.” It wasn’t always this way. During Rand’s lifetime—she died in 1982—she was loathed by the mainstream conservative movement.
Rand was a devout atheist, which set her against the movement’s Christian bent. She got off on the wrong foot with the movement’s founder, William F. Buckley Jr., when she introduced herself to him in her thick Russian accent, saying “You are too intelligent to believe in God!” The subsequent review of “Atlas Shrugged” by Whittaker Chambers in Buckley’s “National Review” was nothing short of a smear, and it set the tone for her relationship with the movement ever since—at least until now.
Rand rankled conservatives by living her life as an exemplary feminist, even as she denied it by calling herself a “male chauvinist.” She was the breadwinner throughout her lifelong marriage. The most sharply drawn hero in “Atlas” is the extraordinarily capable female railroad executive Dagny Taggart, who is set in contrast with her boss, her incompetent brother James. She’s the woman who deserves the man’s job but doesn’t have it; he’s the man who has the job but doesn’t deserve it.
Rand was strongly pro-choice, speaking out for abortion rights even before Roe v. Wade. In late middle age, she became enamored of a much younger man and made up her mind to have an affair with him, having duly informed her husband and the younger man’s wife in advance. Conservatives don’t do things like that—or at least they say they don’t.
These weren’t the only times Rand took positions that didn’t ingratiate her to the right. She was an early opponent of the Vietnam war, once saying, “I am against the war in Vietnam and have been for years. . . . In my view we should fight fascism and communism when they come to this country.” During the ’60s she declared, “I am an enemy of racism,” and advised opponents of school busing, “If you object to sending your children to school with black children, you’ll lose for sure because right is on the other side.”
doubly glad I never read her books or watched the movie