My Struggle (and rise) as a Fascist Looter.
How I Got My Start:
I tried to take the high road and give it a chance. I really did. But then I had tried as much with Rand and The Virtue of Selfishness, but got so nauseous by the third essay, I had to put it down. And nothing I further read or heard about her tempered my disgust. Certainly not the movie biopic, the Passion of Ayn Rand, in which she has an affair with an intern after telling her husband and the intern’s girlfriend what they were going to do. That only came across as some kind of psychopathic notion of enlightened honesty and the self indulgence of a narcissistic bitch: the kind of woman that would eat her babies as a peer once pointed out. And I had assumed my sentiment to be common among the creative community. So imagine my surprise when I read that Atlas Shrugged was being made into a movie in an article that gave the misleading impression that Angelina Jolie was backing it. But then why not? God only knows what runs through that chick’s mind. One sometimes gleams a hint of the psychopathic in that icy glare: the poutty lips and that narrowing of the eyes as they zero in on the kill. Still, it seemed odd that the alleged Hollywood liberal elite would even consider it.
My curiosity took root and only intensified upon seeing a clip where Hank Reardon declares his utter indifference to the poor. For some reason, I got the impression that it would be one of those moody independent films like The Blue Rose Hotel. But in my scheme it was a sort of cyberpunk Trojan horse in which subtle critique is cleverly concealed within tribute. Plus that, there was always the possibility of being surprised. I had always been impressed when talent from the other side managed to present old school and Christian values in a way that was digestible and empathetic enough to temper my own extremes and revise my mental concepts. Such sensibilities, even if I didn’t share them, could clearly be presented in a dignified and non-sanctimonious manner as in the movie A River Runs Through It, Robert Duvall in such roles as Rambling Rose and Second Hand Lions, the work of Terrence Malick, and, hating on chairs aside, Clint Eastwood’s classicist/conservative approach to filmmaking. So when I kept coming across it on Netflix, it was only a matter of time before I would set aside my political leanings, push the play button, resolve to not tarnish my intellectual integrity with petty heckling, and give the woman, her story, and her position their day in court. But then authentic Christian/classical values are something quite different than Capitalist ones.
It was a matter of minutes before the hope dissipated and I found myself reeling in shock and astonishment at the second (if not third) rate production values. Many critics compared it to a TV mini-series. But I would equate it with the cheap B movies that are sometimes made for the ScyFy channel or shown on Fear Net. The only difference was that those films were generally innocuous enough to serve as mindless entertainment –something you stick with while rolling your eyes just to see if it ends in the way you predict. Atlas Shrugged, on the other hand, took the mean-spirited and paranoid route of conspiracy theory or holocaust denial: less the individual perspective that constitutes a work of art and more like war to anyone with a non-pathological sense of reality. I even began to suspect, perhaps out of denial, that what I was watching was not the theatrical release, but some made for TV knockoff much like the miniseries of Steven King’s The Shining, that which stuck closer to the book at the expense of the production values, creativity, and style of Kubrick’s version. Even when I recognized the clip where Reardon expresses his indifference to the poor, I wondered if it wasn’t just another version of a key moment in the book. It just seemed odd that something like it would even be released in theaters, that some marketer would not have recognized that it might have made a better debut (it basically flopped with critics and the box office) in a more appropriate medium such as TV or straight to DVD. However, the more I watched and learned about it, the harder the possibility pressed itself: that ideological forces overrode business sense and the agents behind it thought they had something more than they actually did.
But I hung on anyway because between the cheesy production, the second rate special effects, and the one dimensional portrayals amplified by the talky ideology-laden dialogue, I had no choice but to focus on the message that was more or less being shoved down my throat. And while this approach seemed a little… okay, a lot heavy-handed in Kevin Smith’s Dogma, and while I can now sympathize with the offense that Catholics must have felt in the face of that film, it gets really heavy handed and unsympathetic when you’re facing the equivalent of a master expecting the sympathy of the slave. It was becoming less about aesthetics and more about ideology, and a challenge I couldn’t refuse.
My resolve continued to slip as a heavy handed contrast emerged between the protagonists and antagonists. In one corner of this mythical confrontation was the protagonists, Hank Reardon and Dagny Taggart, the respective heads of Reardon Steel and Taggart Transcontinental (a railway company), and champions of a miracle alloy that is lighter while being stronger; and in the other: the antagonists, those petty and bumbling government bureaucrats and rich quasi-socialists suffering from liberal guilt, the “looters” who skulked about plotting against the Promethean efforts of the supposed heroes, Reardon and Taggart. And as impressed as I was supposed to be by their heroics, I only found that awe undermined by the underlying message. Where I was suppose to hear stoic resolve, I only heard whining:
“Why is everyone picking on me? Am I not the driver of progress? The job creator?”
In Rand’s world, apparently, no one understands them. The only surprise was that the antagonists didn’t have Hitleresque toothbrush mustaches they could stroke as they contemplated their schemes and future victories. They were just short of it -and actually made the connection later in the series. But I hung on anyway. Then…
In hindsight, I’m not really sure what it was that set me off. I had seen the same kind of plot device in other movies: one to several people struggle for something until they come to a moment when their persistence pays off and it all comes together. It’s a common and still effective motif in movies. But when Taggart and Reardon were riding alone on that train, to make their point about the safety of the Reardon steel used for the rails, and that triumphant music was playing in the back while the viewer was treated with a panorama of grand vistas, I felt it welling up. But when they came to that bridge gleaming in the sun, the one that Reardon had promised he could build in 3 weeks… that was it. I had to throw down. It could have been how hokey it all seemed. It could have been the forced attempt to equate the beauty of nature with the beauty of Capitalism. It could have even been, as many RandHeads would have it: jealousy. But that neglects the many times I have found the approach effective in other movies where characters have done things beyond my capabilities -sometimes to the point of choking up or, if drunk enough, tears. Or it could have been my disgust at the sheer gall of thinking I could be manipulated into seeing the errors of my ways and prostrating myself before the glory of Capitalism. I could literally imagine a true believer (a Rand Head) standing behind me and shrieking triumphantly:
“You see it? Do you see it now?”
From that point to the end of part one (the story was divided, in Lord of the Rings fashion, into three parts with the third one pending), it was a self degrading frenzy of eye rolling and heckling my computer –when I’m not sure the poor thing deserved it. Meanwhile, the movie did everything it could to encourage my behavior. For instance, there was the heavy handed explanation that Rearden provided for the demise of the 20th Century Motor Company. Apparently, it was due to everyone getting pay raises based on need rather than merit. This was later reinforced by a loyal Taggart employee who explained to Dagny that new management had run it into the ground with new ideas about treating it like one big family. The question, though, was what factory (in reality that is) was it suppose to resemble. Granted, many companies will simplify things by granting raises through across the board percentages. But a percentage means that those who have been there longer will be gaining more. And, as far as I know, the way the more ambitious bypass that is by working their way up the ladder through promotion. But, once again: what profit seeking corporation would even consider such an approach? Of course, the preposterous nature of this slippery slope only foreshadowed the Kafkaesque labyrinth of bumbling and petty bureaucrats, and their policies, that grew more absurd as it went along.
But the bigger issue was Rand’s well-known propensity towards the heroic and mythological coupled with her clear disgust for her antagonists. Her influence by Shakespeare made itself more and more apparent as it went along, which seems strange given Shakespeare’s clarity on the corruption of power. What resulted was a vacillation between a comic book approach and a classical propensity towards speechmaking. On one hand, there were lines of dialogue that sounded like something off a Lichtenstein painting such as when James Taggart, an antagonist by virtue of his wanting to serve “the public good”, advised his sister, Tagny:
“You can’t leave. It’s a violation of the directive.”
Or this line by Reardon (typical of the false dilemma the story presented) as he stomped away from an agent of the State Scientific Agency:
“One of these days, you’re going to have to decide which side your on.”
Even the repetition of the line “Who is John Galt?”, which threaded throughout the narrative and was passed about like some cultish inside joke, as well as the mystery character himself who went about collecting high achievers like a shepherd gathering his flock, took on a hokey comic book aura.
On the other hand, there were these Shakespearian dialogues that, for the too obvious purpose of effect, seemed delegated to the more heroic characters. Esai Morales, for instance, as Francisco d’Anconia, skulked about like some modern Iago, shaman-like, dispensing wisdom in resonant soliloquies on the folly of fools who do not know what they do and the unrecognized wisdom of Lassie Faire Capitalism:
“When money seizes to be the tool of men by which men deal with other men, then men become the tools of other men.”
And this might have seemed a poignant point if it wasn’t for the fact that no one I know of is trying to get rid of money and that, as anyone who is not self-employed would know, even with money men are the tools of other men. This Shakespearean element got even more vulgar in Part Two with the heroics of Hank Reardon as he stood before court accused of violating the “Fair Share Act”, that which imposed a limit on how much one company can sell to another –another act committed by petty, bumbling bureaucrats that eluded me as to what the purpose would be.
“I do not recognize this court,” he stated in bold defiance, then proceeded to indict government policies that could not, in any dimension, exist. At one point, at the mention of “the public good”, he responded, yet again, with the same smug disregard he did earlier:
“I do not recognize the good of others as justification of my existence.”
And let’s be fair here. Robert Reich makes a convincing point, in SuperCapitalism, that we cannot expect corporations to act as moral agents. They exist solely to create profit for their shareholders. It is government that must serve as check and balance to corporate power. But then, it is government, regardless of what function it serves, that Rand and the moviemakers wanted to undermine. At another point, Reardon proceeded to frame the “public good” in terms of being defined by:
“….those who would regulate and define us in our businesses and homes by stealing our liberty.”
Of course, at this point the crowd broke into the cheers of the converted. But then, who wouldn’t? Who isn’t concerned about their personal liberty? The problem was that Reardon’s point was a little hard to assimilate with the fact that, in our world (the real one), the primary agent of social control (under the encouragement of the health insurance industry) has pretty much been our employers through drug testing, smoking policies, and increasingly wellness programs. But then I wasn’t in that world, was I? I was in Rand’s world. Reardon then proceeded to describe the benefits provided by corporations, such as job creation and technological progress, while the crowd cheered and the court slammed their hammer and screamed:
“Silence! Or the court will be cleared!”
The cliché continued as the court, recognizing that they could not turn Reardon into a martyr, decided to sentence him to 10 years in prison then, in light of his achievements, suspend it. And note the irony here in that while this was a clear reference to the kind of double-speak we’ve gotten too use to out of government, in the real world, we’re equally inured to it by corporate PR and spin. This was then punctuated by the following scene in which Dagny played cheer squad and told Reardon that he had provided a voice to the people. But what people exactly? The rich? Those who are ignorant enough to believe that their personal freedom is dependent on the freedom of the rich and powerful to do as they please?
Of course, you can get away with a lot in a movie if the comedic effects work. But this depends on character-defining wit. However, when this is applied to character built around a questionable and unsympathetic ideology, what results is a lot of lame humor. To give you a sense of it, think of the kind you see on church billboards, the heavy handed attempts at cleverness that can only fall flat and roll the eyes of anyone but the true believer, but addressed to the same kind of dogmatic certainty displayed throughout this love letter to Capitalism. At one point, Dagny Taggart, faced with an employee who drones “Who is John Galt?”, responds:
“Don’t ask that question if you can’t answer it.”
And it was these kinds of references to the mock heroics and above-the-fray nature of the main characters that were suppose to seduce me throughout it all. At another point, Taggart and a scientist played by Dietrich Bader plot to research a supposed super-battery that, as we are to understand it, only the private sphere is capable of making happen. When Taggart inquired as to where the plan would be carried out, the scientist assured her, in the conspiratorial way meant to suggest a couple of lovable rascals, that he can use his state funded lab to study it and that she shouldn’t worry since they have the best night watch there is: him. What poetic justice: the state’s failures are what allow the private sphere to carry out its own more heroic efforts. But the most telling came when a CEO and political candidate snarled when his train was stopped:
“I swear, if this train doesn’t make my campaign stop in San Francisco, I’ll make it my personal priority to nationalize this railroad.”
This was then followed by the drunken wit of a fellow traveler in a British accent:
“History shows that it is the only way to make the trains run on time.”
Get it? Nazi Germany? Trains running on time? Unfortunately, for the movie, the real humor laid in what those behind it wanted me to take seriously. At one point, CEOs and government officials are filmed walking, with expressions of serious intent, to a board meeting in (can you guess?) slow motion. The only thing missing was the hard beat and crunchy guitar from Kill Bill Volume One in the club scene with Lucy Lui’s crew. But the continuous joke throughout it all was the way plot line built not through suspense, but rather through of the heavy handed manner in which Rand’s message was being relayed through the escalation of the ludicrous. This tendency peaked, appropriately, at the very end of Part One when Ellis Wyatt, before leaving with Galt, left his newly discovered natural gas field in flames and a note that said:
“I’m leaving it as I found it.”
Really? So now we know how he came into it. Apparently, he just wandered upon a burning field that no one else had noticed, put out the flames, and had his redneck self a natural gas field. And again, doesn’t there seem to be an underlying whininess about it: the feel of a child throwing a fit?
Part two, in Peter Jackson/Lord of the Rings style, was almost admirable in the way it maintained the thread of absurdity and kept it building to the most preposterous moment yet: the introduction of Directive 10-289. In a scene that was clearly meant to chill my progressive ambitions, the President (played by Ray Wise) made a televised announcement of new policies that would make no sense in a purely communist regime, much less a democratic one. And in order to direct me as to how I was supposed to feel, there was everyone in the nation, rich and poor alike, watching with dropped jaws of shock and disgust. Among the policies were total bans on firing employees or employees quitting or changing their jobs, wage freezes, all companies surrendering their patents in the form of gift certificates, and a mandate on everyone to spend the same amount of money they had the year before. Of course, in a perfect world where the government wasn’t so far up corporate ass as to actually act in the behalf of people, this might, at best, seem like a legitimate slippery slope. But how would wage freezes and bans on quitting or changing a job serve that purpose? In fact, what purpose would it serve under any circumstance? Forcing entrepreneurs to give up their hard earned patents would be a disincentive to new discovery. Even a Social Democrat and looter like me knows that. And the government has nothing on the market when it comes to forced consumption as anyone would know who, due to a lack of public transportation, has to maintain a car in order to get to work, or finds themselves in need of healthcare, or paying more for basic services such as TV which, by the way, use to be free, or generally wants to function in contemporary society. The only thing missing from the whole scene was the low, eerie hum of a synthesizer and someone shrieking at the president:
“Oh my God! It’s a white Obama!”
From that pivotal point on, the denouement proceeded with a montage style breakdown that consisted of anti-corporation protesters, having been schooled in the principle of unintended consequences, turning anti-government, and Tagny pursing her scientific ally in a plane, having lost him to Galt, crashing, and, in the final scene, finally meeting the man himself: John Galt.
However, the real money shot, for both the mentality behind the movie and for me in its lame attempt at grim irony like that of the ending to Altman’s Nashville, came with a bum sitting on a curve in the midst of the chaos, a sort of Nietzschian madman, writing on a piece of wood shaped like a gravestone:
America:
Born: 1776
Died: Yesterday.