Post Number:#15 
May 12th, 2012, 2:42 pm
Hello all,
I have seen the movie! About fifteen years ago I dabbled in Rand’s works and considered myself to be ‘somewhat’ an objectivist. I would even say that one of her noted disciples, George Smith, played a very important role in my struggles over Christianity and my eventual departure from that faith. Yet, being a religion/philosophy major in college helped me to also see the many problems in Rand’s philosophy.
So, when I heard Atlas Shrugged came out on DVD, I quickly looked it up on my Netflix-and watched away. Unlike some reviews I’ve read above, I found the movie adaptation more or less fitting the general character of the novel. I recalled when I read Atlas Shrugged just how I found the characters almost cartoonish by design. The movie employed good actors and decent directing. However, I don’t think any amount of money could have salvaged this rather grossly unrealistic host of characters from the movie wasteland. The reason the movie fell dead off the screens in the theatres is because Rand’s novel itself represents a cluelessness about human nature. People can tolerate a fairly wide range of artistic license when a novel or movie wishes to convey or demonstrate some point or message. But when the characters are so wildly unrealistic, they lose any artistic effect with the audience.
The movie, as does the novel, goes off rail when in the diner a woman asks, “Who is John Galt?” Obviously, this, and other, Randian boilerplate utterances fill up the mouths of the other ‘good’ guys and motivates the lines of the main protagonists as well. The scenes involving John Galt are probably the most farfetched. Despite the fact that such a person would appear to be an utter lunatic to real high wealthy business types, the business types themselves DO things that would never be done. When John Galt convinces Ellis Wyatt to destroy his oil business and vanish into the inhospitable Colorado Rockies, we know that Rand’s mind was on some sort of permanent vacation from reality. The movie, like the novel, displays businessmen willing to give up on their life work, leave their homes, and abandon all for some sort of commerce paradise where free-will, self-interest, and a society of business genuises perfectly and wonderfully cohere! In the movie, like the novel, one finds that only the unscrupulous business types (like Jim Taggart) would make use of government policy in order to benefit –allying themselves with the evil altruists along the way. This is all just bad! You can’t salvage something this bad!
Greg Nyquist is quite right here: “But in real life, most of the things that happen in the movie version of Atlas Shrugged (as well as the book) would not happen at all. Rand's entire world rests on a false premise: the view that evil is stupid and incompetent, whereas good is enterprising and brilliant. The deck is stacked against Rand's villains from the very beginning, the final outcome decided well in advance.”
He continues, “Yet in the real world the Jim Taggarts and the Wesley Mouches are not so incompetent and pathetic (after all, as Whitaker Chambers noted, how could such pathetic incompetence become powerful enough to be feared and loathed in the first place?), nor are the Hank Reardens and the Dagny Taggerts so pure of heart. If you examine most of the great capitalists and entrepreneurs, you'll be hard pressed to find anyone who did not attempt to curry favor with the government, whether it was for tariff protection or land subsidies or special contracts. Business people who have scruples about using government for their own advantage simply get out-competed by those lacking such scruples. The real world, in short, is a far messier, morally ambiguous place than we find it portrayed in the Atlas movie. The air of unreality, coupled with all the blatant propaganda, is likely what turned the movie-going public away from it.”
In other words, Rand’s philosophy is no more believable as a philosophy than it is as a novel or a movie. In fact, it is such poor philosophy that it sullied the fiction used to describe its message! One of the most difficult things to communicate to a libertarian, neo-conservative, or an Objectivist is that the leading enemies of capitalism are other capitalists! The bottom line in the world of business is always survival and expanding opportunities for further production and consumption at the best possible rates on hand and by whoever will lend that hand! The real life characters that fill this sort of economic role are typically not people that one would use to model a theory of applied ethics.
Thus, even the villains in the movie are unnatural Randian automatons. Nyquist brilliantly comments, “The best scenes in the movie are those involving the villians. At its most absurd, the left provides ripe targets for caricature and satire. But even here, the movie is only partially successful. Since none of these villains is more than a caricature, they can only be effective in small doses. If they were given as much screen time as the heroes, their lack of reality would become more noticeable, and their role as vehicles for propaganda would become increasingly annoying. The problem with propagandistic narratives is that they are way too condescending: they assume that their audience is too lazy or too stupid to accept a sermon without a story; but in their zeal to propagate the message, they prostitute both the story and the story's characters. Atlas Shrugged is all about the message. But even this message has problems. It's not so much wrong as it is way too simplistic. The world is not so easily divided between looters and producers. These functions are often inextricably mixed in the same person. Worse, the government is both the means by which looting is promoted and by which it is limited and regulated. Attempting to score points against Big Government and left-wing economic ideology with a simplistic narrative about looters verses producers is bound to convince no one not already on board. People tend to be skeptical of manipulative propaganda fiction; and it's difficult to believe that anyone skeptical of free enterprise will change their mind after viewing Atlas Shrugged: Part 1.”
Indeed, I was certainly not convinced. Unlike Nyquist, I am a ‘free enterprise’ skeptic and critic. My reason early on revolved around questions like ‘just how well did such pro-market capitalist economics and market ideology capture reality or worked to make a better world?’ After much reading and internal debating, I realized that just as my belief in Christianity was loosened from its chains, so, now, was my faith in market capitalism. I look around me in books, essays, further study, and even the arts to see a well-argued case for these ideas. Unfortunately, I have found ever greater reasons to further abstain. Atlas Shrugged the movie made more vivid the utter pretentions in Objectivism itself. It showed characters so wildly unrealistic and romanticized that it becomes obvious that one is not watching a well-done work of fiction. Rather, one is watching a preachy ideology of someone who sees things a bit too clearly—much like a zealous cleric who wants us to sell all that we have and come sit on top of the hill and wait for the return of the Lord! The movie, like the book, asks us to believe without giving us a world of characters we can first believe in or relate to in some way. It asks us to see the clear lines between those who create and those who destroy without ever addressing the reality that those who often create also destroy! In the end, the movie and its dogma makes too many demands that credulity isn’t just stretched thin, it has utterly disappeared. We are, therefore, asked to surrender our wits altogether or we’re condemned as unbelievers who have likely taken up shelter with the evil ‘givers.’
In the end, the movie, like the philosophy it was made to display, creates a world of false dichotomies. A world that we don’t in any way live in or can relate to. All we can do is appreciate the fact that one movie is down-hopefully not many more to go!
Eric D.
