Atlas Shrugged (Part 1, mind you), the film that libertarians and Pakistani sweatshop owners have been waiting decades for with panting tongues, opens with a crawl set against a field of stars, reading:
“Turmoil has engulfed the Galactic Republic. The taxation of trade routes to outlying star systems is in dispute. The small planet of Naboo . . .”
All right, that was The Phantom Menace, but it could have been Atlas Shrugged, which is just as turgid, banal and off-kilter as the Lucas fiasco, without the cool special effects ― they couldn’t even afford to show a Fugitive-level train wreck in a film about train wrecks.
The producer, John Aglialoro, the hectomillionaire manufacturer of fitness equipment, made Atlas Shrugged the way he makes exercise treadmills: neither goes anywhere (though director Paul Johansson, in his deeply freshman effort, does manage to give the movie the faux kinetic feel of a Ford Bronco commercial).
Let’s take a deep breath and summarize. It’s 2016 America, oil is expensive, people are poor (except the ones Rand wants us to care about), and the economy, such as it is, depends on railroads for some implausible reason dispensed with in an initial voiceover. Dagny Taggert, played by generic blonde Taylor Schilling, with a chin she borrowed from Reese Witherspoon, runs a failing railroad (because of the
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wrecks we’re never shown) along with her feckless, yet handsome brother (think Team Rocket from Pokémon), who connives with puling bureaucrats and lobbyists to thwart his competitors, rather than doing the honest thing and crushing them with anti-trust violations, as Legally Blonde and her soon to be paramour, metallurgist Hank Reardon (not to mention Rand), prefer. Reardon, played by buff Grant Bowler (apparently having worked out a lot on Aglialoro’s bench presses), has a mouth that bears a disturbing resemblance to Glen Ford’s, and a wife who is both frigid and strangely alluring in an Elvira kind of way, resulting in long nights at the office and his invention of a superior alloy he calls “Reardon Metal” (yes, he lacks neologistic imagination), which Reese’s Chin buys to rebuild her railroad and prevent (the undepicted) train wrecks, over boy-toy brother’s feeble protests, all of which generates a smear campaign by assorted malevolent bureaucrats and liberal journalists against Reardon, apparently because there really is no EPA to test and approve things like the tensile strength of metal used for train tracks (is Rand calling for better regulation, we are left to wonder?). Cut to Reese’s Chin and Ford’s Mouth stealing a prototype motor from a company that went bankrupt for not paying better workers higher wages (cognitive dissonance anybody?) so they can run their train faster and faster and more Freudian, then they hook up with oil-magnate and Meatloaf lookalike, Ellis Wyatt, to develop a Saudi-size oil field in Colorado (yes, in Colorado), who excuses himself so our Bacall and Bogey can jump into bed for some symbolic Hollywood sex (e.g., Ford’s Mouth kissing leading lady’s upper spine), lasting all of 45 seconds, which apparently is shot in real time. Meantime (now stay with me here), middle-aged management types keep disappearing after being approached by a mysterious figure, who looks suspiciously like Rorschach wandering in during lunch from The Watchmen movie set, while random people ask, Who is John Galt?, like we care. Predictably, Wyatt vanishes, but not before blowing up his unlikely giant oil field, the conflagration of which Reese rushes to observe, culminating in her screaming insanely and for no apparent reason. Fade to black, voiceover of Wyatt stating cryptically that he’s on strike. Did I mention the bracelet made of Reardon Metal? It has unrealized bondage possibilities.
The moral seems to be don't invest in advanced motors or Colorado oil fields.
This barely captures the incoherency and stiltedness of this film, which generally is less engaging than the film on a eutrophic lake. The dialog drops like tire irons from the characters' lips, with doozies such as Dagny reproaching her ex-boyfriend millionaire (of course) Mexican playboy for something or other: “You did it cold-bloodedly and with full intention.” When Dagny asks “Why aren’t there more men like Ellis,” I wanted to cry out to all who would listen: “Because the world has already reached its quota of overweight vulgarians with bad hair.” The chemistry between the post-industrial lovers has all the volatility of argon gas.
The only real talent in the film, Patrick Fischler, is wasted making cryptic comments with ambiguous intent ― if you look carefully you might see him in the background talking with his agent on a cell phone trying to get another gig on “Burn Notice.” Meanwhile, ubiquitous and silent servants, hover around the wealthy angst-ridden, yet smug, protagonists, pouring wine obsequiously and capturing Rand’s worldview better than all her endless screeds against unions, dirigisme, and food-safety regulations.
But let’s get beyond the bad script, bad acting, and bad direction, to the creamy nugget center of this cultural event: bad Randianism. Like the novel, the film’s paltry and absurd conceit involves Rand’s fantasy about the superwealthy “going on strike.” This obvious jab at unions is intended to convey just how put upon the rich are by government regulation, ungrateful welfare queens, and lazy minimum-wage workers. And so the film’s plutocrats are disappearing and igniting their oil fields: Ubermensch Galt is leading them by the hand to some undisclosed libertarian paradise (called Atlantis ― yes, the dearth of nomenclature inventiveness again), where rules are few and the rich can do what they want without the interference of government or Caesar Chavez. It sounds very much like Somalia. Such is in fact Rand’s optimistic vision of America’s future: anarchy for rich people.
Needless to say, the idea of the superwealthy giving up their wealth to seek freedom makes about as much sense as heroin addicts going cold turkey so they can finally enjoy cocaine. Rand’s crude Nietzscheanism, fueled by overpowering smugness, makes me wish the philosophy police had arrested her before she stole a pen from a blind beggar and started ratiocinating on paper. I say this having worshipfully read everything the Russian harpy ever wrote, while I was a teenager. And that’s the critical detail. Rand notoriously attracts a readership consisting mostly of bookish adolescent white males, because her ideas are in fact adolescent and bookish. They conjure up a fantasy world created for teenage boys feeling a little bit on the outs, where doing what you want when you want, regardless of the consequences to others, not only goes unpenalized, but is applauded as heroic (and it might get you in bed with Reese Witherspoon, or a simulacrum thereof). Rand, like any con artist or corporate PR firm, understood the power of appealing to people’s worse instincts and calling them noble: selfishness, vanity, greed, the allure of scapegoating, the hatred of red traffic lights. Normal people tend to grow out of this pretense, or at least learn to temper their intellectual narcissism with some sense of community, if not insight into the base manipulation of conceited ideologues like Rand. But some don’t. They grow up to be Donald Trump or Tea Party voters.
In a film like Atlas Shrugged, the effect of all this is risible, an MST3K romp. In fact, I left the theater chuckling out loud, to the scowls of the overwhelming elderly and apparently libertarian audience, mostly sitting singly (all 10 of them – the film has lost more money than Mike Tyson in Vegas, and the likelihood of parts 2 and 3 ever being made equals that of Leonard Part 7). But as a political ideology, Rand views aren’t funny, but malignant. They feed pseudo-populist conservative revanchism like the Tea Party, and produce disastrous public policy, such as the Bush Recession, brought on in part by the failure to regulate CDSs by Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, who not coincidently was a close associate of Rand and devotee of her Ferengi Capitalism. The libertarian chic of millionaire media-pundits, like John Stossel and Penn Jillette, who don't know what it means to worry about being able to pay the medical bills for their kid's broken arm, bombard the airwaves with pseudofacts and Reaganite memes about the nanny state and how deregulating the coal industry means safe cheap energy for all, helping to elect knownothing conservatives to legislate knownothing laws. From Ayn Rand to Rand Paul is a journey from ludicrous literature to politics that actually hurts people.
Apropos of Ferengis, the film did have one lone amiable detail. Somebody arranged to cast Armin Shimerman as the sinister bureaucrat Dr. Potter, whose lack of moral fiber is supposed to be shown through his refusal to answer Reardon’s stupid question about whether Reardon Metal is “good or not” (again, apparently in Galtworld, the EPA or its equivalent doesn’t have simple procedures for testing and approving goods for safety, which suggests a need for a more robust regulatory system, not more laissez-faire). Shimerman’s most famous role was the character Quark, in the Star Trek spin-off series, “Deep Space 9,” (in full prosthetic mask, making him unrecognizable) who was a Ferengi, a dwarfish alien race known for its extreme capitalist values and preoccupation with profit ϋber alles. From this the phrase “Ferengi Capitalism” was coined, meaning the type of radical unregulated market, with no consumer or worker protection, favored by conservatives, libertarians, and Chinese sweatshops. This had to be an inside joke, probably pulled off by the culturally literate assistant to an assistant, who had some sense of the movie’s absurdity, which was totally lost on the hapless director. Thank you, whoever you were, for a tiny isle of humanity in a Tethys of Randian self-satisfaction.
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