You may remember that last year, a low-budget film version of Ayn Rand's execrable screed "Atlas Shrugged" appeared in the theaters for about thirty seconds, and then dropped dead.
You may also be aware that, because they are idiots, the vanity producers decided that Part 1's early and embarrassing demise was in fact the sound of American audience calling for more - bigger budget! more screens!
This weekend, once again Rand met screen, and the inevitable happened: "Atlas Shrugged: Part II" immediately hit the skids, burst into flames, and is even now spiraling down the charts.
Come join me for a Schadenfraudefest after the two orange ampersands mating below, or - as the Randites would describe it - the straight orange line.
The first weekend estimates are in for "Atlas Shrugged: Part II." And they're screaming "bomb."
This is, incidentally, not a surprise.
Part 1 came out on April 15 of last year, and bombed just as completely. But the producers convinced themselves that the problem with their movie was that they hadn't released it on enough screens in the first week - only three hundred, leading to tea party caravans trudging for hours through the dusty desert to get to a showing.
This time around, they opened on a thousand screens. And this weekend they made pretty much the same amount of money they'd made the first weekend of Part 1. See, there's only a certain number of people in this country who think it's at all a good idea to see an Ayn Rand movie. If they have to get in the car and hajj a couple hours, no problem. If it's nearer to them, shorter hajj. But more theaters doesn't mean more people who wanted to see it.
The movie's PR is currently being helped along by a rare and delightful zero rating on the Tomatometer. The film's cameos -- people like Sean Hannity and Teller from Penn&Teller -- are not giving it a lot of boost, even though Hannity has talked up his star turn.
There is another cameo, it turns out, from Grover Nordquist. I shit thee not.
The Two Rands
To understand Ayn Rand's significance today, it helps to remember that there are really two Ayn Rands.
One was a fourth-rate writer whose ability to engineer a plot was on par with your average airport-book novelist, but who made it a practice never to use a word when she could use three hundred and forty two, and then use those same words again on the very same page and three times on the next. Better at PR than prose, she set herself up as the Grand Panjandrum of what she hoped would be an influential circle of thought - a circle that most famously included Alan Greenspan.
Rand was not a Republican. Her insistence on human freedom, for example, extended to full rights for abortion on demand. Her strident atheism led her to denounce the influence of groups like the Moral Majority. That denunciation was so absolute that she urged her minions to vote against Ronald Reagan in 1980 for daring appeal to the Religious Right.
But she had invented a kind of anti-Marxism, just as stupid and just as unrealistic, but based on the idea that any government involvement with commerce, ANY involvement, was basically Bolshevism. In the rhetoric she devised, anyone who wasn't 100% pro-Invisible-hand and 100% anti-government might as well be Leonid Brezhnev.
Which leads us to the second Ayn Rand. The GOP has instrumentalized this rhetoric of obfuscation. They take a page from Ayn Rand when they intentionally get so verbally diffuse that they can't - or rather pretend they can't - see any difference between Obamacare and socialism. Watch for the word 'collectivism', that all-purpose expression of Randish opprobrium. When you hear someone use it, you know point blank that you're being lied to.
The absolutism of the free market stance is what gets ideologues like Paul Ryan to declare that Rand is a genius. But - but - but what about the atheism? What about the abortion rights? What about the hating on Ronald Reagan? Well, none of that really matters to the GOP. All that matters is the anti-government rhetoric. All the rest is hidden, pruned away - one might even say shrugged away. "Oh, that Rand, I don't agree with her on everything" - by which they mean, "I don't agree with anything at all, except the very useful anti-government rhetoric."
Thus the Ryan two-step. When Paul Ryan was reminded that Rand had some very unconservative things to say about God, he went straight into weasel mode, trying to keep his in with the Randites without it costing him with the non-Randites.