Atlas Up Ayn's Ass

Up to now I've never known much about Ayn Rand apart from a few documentaries. I've never even read Atlas Shrugged, it always seemed too ponderous to me. Tonight I watched the only film version ever made of the book, and it was only part one of a planned trilogy, one that will probably never be completed. As I had anticipated from what I know of her work, it was harsh, clumsy, with the subtlety of a train wreck, which is a pretty apt metaphor for a novel that's mostly about train wrecks.

But I was frustrated at the end to be left with a cliffhanger, so I found another documentary on Netflix about Rand focusing on the formation and ultimate consequences of the publishing of this monumental work. It explained enough to give me a pretty good idea of what her philosophy is all about.

There is an awful lot going on with her and her philosophy and the history of this country and the world. There are a lot of ideas in it I find compelling, but there's a stridency to it, an arrogance, a willingness to jump to questionable conclusions, that troubles me as much as it did reviewers who hated it when it first came out. But I'm not really prepared to delve into all that right now. 

I watched one part of the documentary dealing with her first struggles to get it made into a movie, and how those efforts ultimately collapsed, and a huge paradox leapt into my mind and I almost laughed out loud. Not too surprisingly, it goes right by in this "documentary" without any real comment.

Rand's philosophy of "Objectivism" is centered around the individual and the ultimate philosophical mandate of selfishness. The novel posits a dystopian future in which the big bad government has put a stranglehold on industry, and specifically pushed the world's most prolific "producers" and creators into a corner where they finally just give up and refuse to play, saying essentially, "ok, if you won't let me do my things MY way, then I'm just not going to do it at all!" With her typical "light-touch", Rand has her characters declare, "I'm on strike!"

Ok, so in this light, Rand endeavors to make a deal to make the movie with the Oscar-winning producer of the American classic, "The Godfather", a guy named Al Ruddy. He is not surprisingly a hard-driving motherfucker in his own right, and also not surprisingly he worships Rand and the book. He is just the kind of 800-lb gorilla to really jump into this massive, difficult project and make a go of actually getting it done.

So the negotiations are almost done, Ruddy has major stars like Clint Eastwood and Faye Dunaway all picked out for the roles. Suddenly Rand pops up and says, "Oh yeah, by the way...I must have final script approval--non-negotiable."

Ruddy just looks at her and says, "This is the greatest book of the 20th century not yet to have been made into a film, but if I do it, I'm doing it the way I think it should be done--period. Script approval is something you are never going to get, I can't make it that way, and I'll never be able to get a decent director to go along with it, so...forget it baby." (Ruddy, the guy she's chosen to make her movie, could have been a protagonist in her book. Rearden, Ruddy--essentially the same guy.)

Rand, tough Russian bitch, says, "OK, then you can forget making this movie."

Ruddy says, "With all due respect, I don't care if I have to wait until the day you drop dead to do it, I'm going to make this movie, and I'm going to do it the way I think it should be done."

She says, "Well, I'll put it in my will that you will never GET this book."

HE says, "Who do you think you're talking to? I'm a PRODUCER, if I want to, I'll just have someone else get it for me and give it to me!"

She's tough, he's tougher. As she idolizes the big winners of capitalism as the only ones who really matter, and implies that everyone else deserves to get the "heroes'" boots in their faces, she finds herself on the ground, Ruddy's boot in her face.

Ultimately, he gave up and never made the film. Rand herself is the biggest loser.

In the end she had been frustrated because no one in more than 15 years since it had been published had really "gotten" her book. Reviewers hated it, and she was denied the one thing she craved the most: general acknowledgement of the breadth, intelligence, and originality of her ideas by her peers. She complained that she could accept people hating it, but she had expected at least one person to stand up and say, "Although I hate this book, I have to admit it is a work of astonishing insight, originality and intelligence", but no one would ever say that, to her endless vexation.

In a way that's a shame, because it truly seems to be an original and ambitious attempt to establish a completely new ethical framework.  In another way it's good, because it's a dangerously misleading ideological diatribe, one that's been poisoning minds for over 50 years.

And yet here she had a fresh chance to present her ideas all over again to the world, that it is imperative that the individual be respected and that everyone be free to pursue their own ideas and self-interest above all other things without interference, in the best interest not just of people, but of society itself.

But she ruined it because she refused to let a filmmaker have that very same respect and control over his own work that she had struggled so hard to advocate on paper. She killed her own chance to get her message of the importance of individual freedom of expression across by refusing her filmmaker his own right to his individual freedom of expression!

Conclusion: She thwarted her own story about the importance of freedom of the individual by denying freedom to an individual!

She wrote the book and ultimately played the villain that she herself had conceived and it ruined her own life.

And then, she died.

Priceless!

This twist absolutely delighted me, but the documentary skated by it as if it didn't even happen. This is not really surprising, because it was more of a right-wing exaltation of her ideas and how the evidence is clear that society is on the downswing mostly because we failed to act on her warnings than any kind of objective presentation. The book itself is compellingly presented and it's tempting to seize it as a document that finally makes everything clear, excepting in fact it is not that document, it only seems like it.

It's funny, Rand escaped the Communist Revolution in Russia, and it really seems like the villains are the evil Russian collectivists. But as much as she adores and advocates American capitalism, one can't help but wonder if the defect is not so much in Russian communism, but in certain Russians themselves. Rand desperately wants to kick the jackboot of communism off the necks of the people, but she seems to want to replace it with her own jackboot of capitalism run amok.

In either case, it's a Russian bully stepping on your neck.

That said, Long Live Pussy Riot!