Atlas Shrugged Part 1 and human nature. With the threatened second version of Atlas Shrugged beginning production, I finally got around to slogging my way through the first part of this epic work in progress, which is now available as a streaming option over at Netflix. I can see quite clearly why the movie failed at the box office. It's hardly the fault of the director or the actors or production values. While obviously not a big budget effort, no amount of money or high-end production values could have salvaged this turkey. Nor would better direction or better acting make a jot of difference. The movie fails because its characters, particularly the protagonists, are grossly unrealistic; and they are unrealistic because Rand's novel demonstrates a complete cluelessness about human nature. Human beings simply don't talk or behave like they are shown talking and behaving in this movie. People can tolerate a very wide degree of fantasy and irrealism in a movie; but they can't tolerate behavior that doesn't jive with their sense of human nature. The situations may be as unrealistic as one likes; but if human beings do not behave as human beings, the movie will come off as bewildering and senseless.
Atlas Shrugged: Part 1 actually starts off somewhat promising. Using news reports compiled in clever editing, we get an exposition of a world heading toward bankruptcy and anarchy. The attempt to justify the re-emergence of railroads in 2016 as a consequence of high gas prices may be a bit over the top, but then, if the movie had been graced by realistic human beings, this would not have mattered. The first hint that the movie will quickly go off the rails comes when we hear the novel's signature line, spoken by a tramp in a diner, "Who is John Galt." This catch phrase never really convinces in the novel, and in the movie it immediately strikes a note of absurdity. This is followed by an even more preposterous scene involving a shadowy John Galt, dressed in hat and trench coat. He utters some Randian boilerplate to Midas Mulligan, after which we are told that Mulligan has subsequently disappeared without a trace.
Unrealistic situations in fiction or a movie only work if they stem from realistic motivations. The motivations in Atlas Shrugged are not realistic: they arise, not from any recognizable psychology, but merely from abstract theories. Rand imagined that human beings were made like characters in philosophical novels, i.e., that they were manifestations of their abstract premises. Real people aren't like that. They have various needs, desires, sentiments, some of which have innate sources. In particular, ambitious people, whether they are industrialists, high-level bureaucrats, or lobbyists, are animated by a desire for status. They are engaged in a struggle for pre-eminence. Such individuals would not give up everything they owned and had worked for all their adult lives to go reside in some remote trench in Colorado. Consequently, the scenes involving Galt are the worst and most far-fetched in the movie. The most absurd of these scenes is the final one, when John Galt convinces Ellis Wyatt to destroy his oil business and vanish into the inhospitable Colorado Rockies. Real people don't behave that way. They have emotional ties to their friends and family and to their possessions. They don't just throw everything overboard because some shadowy figure in a trechcoat tells them about a place where they get to keep all they earn. A real oil titan, if confronted by Galt's ideological patter, would conclude either that Galt was a madman spouting nonsense or a grifter weaving tall tales. In real life, Galt would be shown the door, perhaps by a butler or a security guard.
But in real life, most of the things that happen in the movie version of Atlas Shrugged (as well as the book) would not happen at all. Rand's entire world rests on a false premise: the view that evil is stupid and incompetent, whereas good is enterprising and brilliant. The deck is stacked against Rand's villians from the very beginning, the final outcome decided well in advance. Yet in the real world the Jim Taggarts and the Wesley Mouches are not so incompetent and pathetic (after all, as Whitaker Chambers noted, how could such pathetic incompetence become powerful enough to feared and loathed in the first place?), nor are the Hank Reardens and the Dagny Taggerts so pure of heart. If you examine most of the great capitalists and entrepeuners, you'll be hard pressed to find anyone who did not attempt to curry favor with the government, whether it was for tariff protection or land subsidies or special contracts. Business people who have scruples about using government for their own advantage simply get out-competed by those lacking such scruples. The real world, in short, is a far messier, morally ambiguous place than we find it portrayed in the Atlas movie. The air of unreality, coupled with all the blatant propaganda, is likely what turned the movie-going public away from it.
The best scenes in the movie are those involving the villians. At its most absurd, the left provides ripe targets for caricature and satire. But even here, the movie is only partially successful. Since none of these villians is more than a carricature, they can only be effective in small doses. If they were given as much screen time as the heroes, their lack of reality would become more noticeable, and their role as vehicles for propaganda would become increasingly annoying. The problem with propagandistic narratives is that they are way too condescending: they assume that their audience is too lazy or too stupid to accept a sermon without a story; but in their zeal to propagate the message, they prostitute both the story and the story's characters. Atlas Shrugged is all about the message. But even this message has problems. It's not so much wrong as it is way too simplistic. The world is not so easily divided between looters and producers. These functions are often inextricably mixed in the same person. Worse, the government is both the means by which looting is promoted and by which it is limited and regulated. Attempting to score points against Big Government and left-wing economic ideology with a simplistic narrative about looters verses producers is bound to convince no one not already on board. People tend to be skeptical of manipulative propaganda fiction; and it's difficult to believe that anyone skeptical of free enterprise will change their mind after viewing Atlas Shrugged: Part 1.
The second part of Atlas Shrugged will have new cast, new director, and a new script. Will that make it any better? No, of course not. It will only confuse those handful of brave souls who attempt to watch the two movies as a series. The problem with the first version is not the acting (which is entirely competent) nor even the direction (despite some pacing problems). The problem is the book itself and the motiveless ideological automatons that populate it.
13 comments:
The real trouble will come if they try to film part 3. That has less action and what there is is less believable. Also very dense with Rand's philosophizing. I can't see it working at all.
Greg: Real people don't behave that way [destrying their business and vanishing]. They have emotional ties to their friends and family and to their possessions. They don't just throw everything overboard because some shadowy figure in a trechcoat tells them about a place where they get to keep all they earn. A real oil titan, if confronted by Galt's ideological patter, would conclude either that Galt was a madman spouting nonsense or a grifter weaving tall tales. In real life, Galt would be shown the door, perhaps by a butler or a security guard.
An excellent point. If you look around at the people in the real world who talk big about "going Galt," who are they? Not the titans of industry, that's for sure. Most are rank-and-file employees; a few are small business owners; none (that I know of) are executives of major concerns.
I think the point you raise is much more easily ignored in the novel. Rand didn't include any scenes of Galt persuading anyone to quit, so the reader is not directly confronted with the implausibility of the scenario. We don't think about what we would say to Galt and end up wondering why Galt's target doesn't say "but what about my wife/kids/dog/BMW/poker night with my buddies ...?" The only "conversion" we see in detail is Rearden's, but that's a long slow process of realization, and it takes the loss of pretty much all of his worldly attachments before he's ready to go. We never see Galt coming out of nowhere and talking a total stranger into walking away from his entire life in a mere three hours. The novel is also helped by the fact that most of the characters who join the strike are minor at best, so thinly drawn that it's easy not to think of them as human beings at all.
But when you put them on a movie screen and give them distinctive human faces and voices -- and on top of that, you try to dramatize Galt winning them over ... then the absurdity of the whole concept smacks you between the eyes.
Bob the Angry Flower presents Atlas Shrugged: 1 Hour Later. Far more realistic than Rand's entire oeuvre.
I had a different take on it. My problem with the movie was that they tried too hard to make it "realistic." Atlas works only if it exists in a self-contained world, a parallel universe that combines elements of the 1930s, '40s, and '50s. It's a world where the Depression never ended and WWII was apparently never fought. In this twilight world, we can accept stylized characters and bombastic dialogue. And from the point of view of psychological motivation, we might even accept that titans of industry would leave everything behind, if they had been subjected to near-Soviet conditions for decades.
By placing Atlas in something akin to today's world, complete with cable TV talk shows, cell phones, and computers, the movie lost the all-important sense of an alternate reality that is so crucial to the story. I don't know if there's any good way to dramatize the novel (I would opt for a highly stylized animated TV series myself), but the way chosen by the filmmakers didn't really work.
There were some nice moments, though. The first run of the John Galt Line was rather stirring, and would have been even better with more inspired music. The guy who played Rearden was really good. And the production value was better than it had any right to be, given the budget.
The real trouble will come if they try to film part 3.
Yes, part 3 will begin to verge on Ed Wood territory, regardless of production values.
If you look around at the people in the real world who talk big about "going Galt," who are they?
And of course it's mostly "talk."
Like Greg says, most of the failings and flaws of the film comes simply from adapting a novel like Atlas Shrugged. But one of it's biggest weaknesses comes from not following the novel closely enough, which ties in with Michael's complaint about its forced "realism".
One thing the book did do right was that it effectively showed just how far the world had fallen in economic and technological terms. There were old, dilapitaded buildings and factories everywhere, people were reduced to pre-industrial modes of living, decay and stagnation was rampant - in short, it really gave you the sense of something you could call a dystopia.
The film also tries to present its world as a dystopia - but the problem is that it has to be the coziest "dystopia" I've ever seen in a work of fiction. Almost everyone we see is wealthy, well-to-do, flawlessly dressed and prosperous. Everything looks clean, well-maintained and orderly, industry and services seem to be running smoothly despite the economic crisis. The media is working flawlessy, everyone is still hanging around the internet to update their facebook profiles, and people in general seem to live their lives as they do right now. In short, the whole world seems to run just fine - there's just no real sense to the viewer that it has sunk into a wretched, poverty-stricken hellhole. It has the effect of making us care even less about the fate of Taggart's and Rearden's and Wyatt's businesses since we don't understand why they're so important in the great scheme of things.
They do have a few shots awkwardly shoved into the film to convince us that, yes, this is a dystopia and it's very bad indeed. My favourite has to be the well-dressed yuppie who walks around on the street with a cardboard sign that says his business was once on the Fortune 500 and that he's now for hire at any level or salary. Like, does he really think any respectable business would want to hire him based on him walking around with a cardboard sign over his torso? Why doesn't he just send in his application and resumé like any normal person? If he's really that desperate for cash, why doesn't he try to work at some low-level, unskilled position like a waiter or janitor? It's a perfect example of a scene that is meant to be tragic and frightening instead coming across as hilarious.
Another problem that this poor attempt at a dystopia presents for the trilogy is just how they will write the climax of Part 3, where Galt's plan results in civilization collapsing. As has been pointed out on the blog several times before, the whole concept of industrial society falling apart because a few geniuses at the top retreat to a hidden valley is absolutely ludicrous, but the world presented in the novel did make it slightly more believable. It was a world where almost every human being is a pathetic, inept loser and Dagny, Hank, Fransisco, Galt & Co were the only strong, intelligent and competent people - you could actually believe, because of the absurd way Rand's world worked, that everything really would break apart if these guys left the scene.
But the film, which as Michael pointed out strives to be more realistic, the patent absurdity of the whole scenario becomes obvious. Because it fails to portray a world that's just on the tipping point at spilling over into utter catastrophe, you have no idea how Galt's plan could have the consequences they have in the book. It seems as if all Galt's plan would result in is a small clique of identical-minded businesspeople waiting for eternity in the Gulch for world society to collapse, while the world eventually recovers and goes on perfectly without them - kinda like what would happen if this was attempted in real life.
I can only think of three ways in which the filmmakers will resolve this. Either they go ahead and let the collapse happen like it did in the book anyway, which will of course make the ending even more ridiculous. Or they remove the whole collapse and instead just let it be about the Strikers enjoying their new free life, which would be more believable but no-where near as satisfying a conclusion. Or they have Galt's masterplan turn out to be about something more than simply removing his fellow egoists, where he takes a more active approach to bringing down civilization - which would go completely against the entire idea that they're bringing about the collapse solely due to their non-participation in society to prove how much they're needed.
Michael: While they probably tried to make the film more down-to-earth in order to make it more appealing to mainstream audiences, I think the biggest reason they set it in the modern world was simply because they didn't have the budget to recreat the retro-futuristic alternate reality of the novel. Understandable, but that doesn't make the film any better.
@Echo Chamber Escapee: An excellent point. If you look around at the people in the real world who talk big about "going Galt," who are they? Not the titans of industry, that's for sure.
They probably recognize how much of their wealth depends on having other people around, both to create that wealth (customers and employees) and to provide other things in exchange for the wealth - that little thing we call an economy. A lot of the "go Galt" folk seem to think squatting on a pile of gold in a cave is a complete life. Maybe they were dragons in some previous existence :-).
Michael Prescott writes:
>By placing Atlas in something akin to today's world, complete with cable TV talk shows, cell phones, and computers, the movie lost the all-important sense of an alternate reality that is so crucial to the story.
And how can you make "Galt's Gulch" plausible in a world where people use Google Earth and GPS, and where millions of them have visited Colorado?
Samadhir writes:
>Another problem that this poor attempt at a dystopia presents for the trilogy is just how they will write the climax of Part 3, where Galt's plan results in civilization collapsing.
I can just imagine what an experienced Hollywood "script doctor" would say about trying to film Part 3: "Look, you just can't have the heroes hanging out in their doomstead in Colorado for a few months while civilization collapses around them, then show them going back to work like nothing out of the ordinary has happened. You'll have to film it like a Mad Max or zombie apocalypse movie instead to have an ending which makes any sense."
And to top it off, Rand doesn't present us with very scary villains, despite the fact that she encountered Bolshevik hard cases in the early Soviet Union who had blood on their hands. For some reason she didn't use them as models, despite the Randroids' propaganda about how Rand showed us what would happen in this country under communism. I mean, seriously, Eddie Willers could probably subdue and disarm that flabby and clownish Cuffy Meigs character.
I would rather watch an entire series of Larry Buchanan or Jerry Warren films than sit through "Atlas Shrugged". At least "Zontar, The Thing from Venus" has entertainment value and "The Incredible Petrified World" stars John Carradine.
Watching Ayn Rand's cardboard characters mouthing platitudes about capitalism would only serve to remind me of her kooky and emotionally stilted fans, one being my ex-girlfriend who was a Rand cultist.
I remember one day we were shopping for groceries... We had a list of things to purchase and the ex was instructed to choose a salad dressing. She found one and brought it to the shopping cart. Suddenly, I observed her countenance turn hostile as she scrutinized the label on the salad dressing bottle. I saw the quickly changing expression on her face and prepared for the worst. (When she raged, her cheeks would turn a reddish color and puff out like a chipmunk.) "That's bullsh*t!", she shrieked. As it turns out, she had inadvertently chosen a product in the "Newman's Own" line. As readers hear know, Paul Newman had a distinguished career as an actor in Hollywood and in his later years he turned to philanthropy, raising money for charitable donations to educational causes from sales of his food products. "This is for charity!", she barked as she stomped off to choose a for-profit product with which to replace the offending Newman dressing.
It's funny how this blog triggers certain memories of my time with her. This story is just one example of how she often took the joy out of life, constantly judging and criticizing everything around her. I later learned that she was afflicted with Borderline Personality Disorder, a trait not uncommon among Ayn Rand's adherents. The author of this article is correct that Rand's characters are unrealistic in regards to human nature. But these fictional people probably seem quite natural... to a Borderline.
I would rather watch an entire series of Larry Buchanan or Jerry Warren films than sit through "Atlas Shrugged".
Not that surprising. Buchanan and Warren were trying to provide a product that people would pay money to see. The Atlas Shrugged producers are trying to raise the consciousness of the proletariat to bring on the glorious anti-socialist revolution.
I know it seems like it should be the other way around, but that's one of those little flaws in modern Objectivism. Your ex and the salad dressing is another illustration - her rant suggests she thinks Newman should not be allowed to spend his money as he sees fit, but only in ways that are in accord with the central tenets of the Randist-Peikoffist dialectic.
I think the best thing that could happen with a film translation of Rand's fiction would be one written and directed by non-Objectivists who just find her thought intriguing. Completely re-write the dialog into something more believable and less preachy, and you have a movie.
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