Atlas Shrugged: Part 1. Great story, terrific movie. The professional critics not only don’t get it; we must question their motives.
“Atlas Shrugged: Part 1”
I read Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged at 17. Like so many, it changed my life. It helped me understand the idea that there are two very different ways of dealing with other people: voluntarily or coercively. The first requires a unit of exchange (in the U.S., it’s called the “dollar”); the second requires a weapon of destruction (as Mao Zedong put it, “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun”). It portrayed moral entrepreneurs, who want to make a profit (and say so) by providing value for value and goods and services that others willingly purchase; and immoral ones, who want to make a profit (but never admit it) by gaming the system and seeking government favors and handouts. The first are market entrepreneurs and the latter are political entrepreneurs (terms probably coined by Burton W. Folsom, Jr., in his extraordinary piece of revisionist history, The Myth of the Robber Barons). While no one has the right to exact values from anyone else by physical force or fraud, to the extent we expect government to solve our problems force and fraud are the realities of the world in which we live. The book helped me to comprehend the arrogance of thinking I know better how to run your life than you do and worse, preventing you from making mistakes from which you can learn, grow and become all you can become; yet such is the nature of extra-market based government regulation that goes beyond the protection of property, prevention of fraud and enforcement of contracts. Rand’s book and now the movie Part 1 (the first third or so of the book) are largely about these opposites: those who move civilization forward and those who attempt to thwart its progress, using every means at their disposal—primarily the power of the state to give them an unfair competitive advantage at the expense of others.
I also got the idea that parasitical relationships can survive only if good people tolerate it, which Rand called the “sanction of the victim.” The idea took form thirty years after I read the book, when I needed a name for my publishing company and realized I was telling codependents the same thing she, through John Galt, was telling the most productive members of society: stop playing host to parasite and, as I put it in Drunks, Drugs & Debits, uncompromisingly disenable.
Unfortunately for those of us who have waited 53 years since the book’s publication, many critics have panned the movie, even if non-professional critics at imdb.com largely rate it 8 to 10 stars (giving it a median rating of 9; for the amazing difference between the median and far lower weighted average rankings, see the breakdown; nearly 75% of the votes are 7 and greater, with almost 45% giving it 10 stars). Those who critique the movie negatively focus on (and in my view exaggerate) the technical flaws of a movie produced on a $10 million shoestring budget. Contrary to the critical attacks, the movie’s stars (Grant Bowler as Hank Reardon and Taylor Shilling as Dagny Taggart) are terrific. Several supporting cast members, especially Michael Lerner as Wesley Mouch (mimicking the likes of Congressman Barney Frank as a lobbyist and later a government bureaucrat) are superb. The music is good and scenery gorgeous. And after having read the book forty years ago, with a quick re-read of the first few hundred pages a couple of years ago, I was amazed at how deeply the characters had slipped into my soul: how I fell in love with Francisco D’Anconia (even if Jsu Garcia was one of the weaker actors) and Dagny, and seethed with contempt for the scheming James Taggart. I figured it helped tremendously that I knew the story, but found you don’t necessarily need to know the story to appreciate the movie: my wife, who’s never read the book and to whom I never told the story, gave it an 8 or 9 out of 10—and suggested we see it a second time. We did; I still had the same feelings and she told me it still earned 8 or 9 stars.
I concluded that a number of critics panning the movie are eerily reminiscent of the antagonists in Atlas Shrugged. The lies about Rand and her philosophy are worthy of James Taggart and Wesley Mouch. For example: “Rand’s philosophy can be summed up this way: to hell with the common man and hurray for the corporation.” See the distinction above between political and market entrepreneurs as to why this is a gross misinterpretation of her views. Another reviewer commented, “[Rand said,] ‘No one else has a right to limit your ideas and your pursuit of happiness, so long as you live and let live and respect others—judging them on their merits and achievements.’ What a laugh riot that is. Ken Lay, Bernie Madoff—two classic cases of success and happiness.” At whose expense? Were property rights honored, contracts enforced and fraud prevented? The one thing government is supposed to do is protect us from thugs foreign and domestic; it clearly failed in the case of both Enron (Ken Lay was CEO) and the Madoff Ponzi scheme. Another wrote, “’Me! Me! Me! Me! Me!’ and ‘Screw all you stupid peasants’,” which is yet another grotesque misreading of Rand; it’s only about “me” if I can please “you;” the only “Me!” this moron refers to is the one basking in the slime of government largesse.
If one wants to pan Atlas for anything, pan its creator: Ayn Rand. Her then close friend, journalist Isabel Paterson, told her, “Stop taking that Benzedrine, you idiot. I don’t care what excuse you have—stop it.” as early as the mid-1940s. Her pupils in a picture on the cover of the December 2009 issue of Reason Magazine are extremely dilated. She was clearly an amphetamine addict. Such addicts, as we know, have a need to wield power over others. One way is to create a following, which can evolve into a cult, which is the reason probably most if not all cult leaders are addicts of one stripe or another. She also openly cheated on her husband, Frank O’Connor, for some 30 years, as if to say, “Look at how much power I have over you” (even if, ironically, he appears to have been an alcoholic). Her personal life was obviously not the model for the heroic individuals she wrote about. One could also pan her writing, at least to a degree: she was not a great writer of dialogue and she included speeches in the book that were clearly beyond the pale in terms of length, even bombastic, as might be expected of an amphetamine addict. While the dialogue was largely repeated in the movie, the speeches were (appropriately) not. In my view, however, many are lambasting her greatest story either by misreading or purposely distorting her basic philosophy of individualism, freedom and achievement—at your own expense and within the confines of natural law (voluntary exchange absent force and fraud), not at the expense of others.