Guest Column: Stalinist Altruism (Movie Review)
By Thomas E. Simmons
Ayn Rand’s fiction has never been successfully put to film. The Fountainhead miscast Gary Cooper as the uncompromising architect, Howard Roark. It is a failed adaptation of the novel of the same name. After Warner Brothers trimmed down Roark’s courtroom speech without obtaining her advance approval, Rand refused to option anything else for the silver screen for the rest of her life. She died in 1982.
Atlas Shrugged, Rand’s fourth and final novel, describes a dystopian United States in which free enterprise is straining under government coercion. A relatively low-budget trilogy adaptation was released in 2011-14. Each bombed spectacularly. Rotten Tomatoes rates the three films, respectively, at 12%, 4%, and 0%. Granted, the films are flawed. But they’re worthwhile.
The premise of Atlas Shrugged is that in response to widespread unrest, the country veers left. Altruism is forcibly imposed by expanding anti-trust laws. Patents are nationalized. The right of employees to resign or change jobs is eliminated. Prices are controlled. Soon, it becomes illegal for an individual to own more than one business (think what this would do to Warren Buffet or Elon Musk!). In response, the most talented captains of industry begin to disappear.
They’re not being kidnapped or murdered – they’re reassembling a secret society devoted to free enterprise and individual achievement. Adopting the tactics of unhappy workers, management goes on strike. They withdraw. Predictably, their businesses falter and the economic crisis worsens. Free-thinking artists and inventors follow suit. Soon, economic instability threatens the tyrannical federal government itself, which was precisely the goal of the capitalist revolutionaries.
The title of the lengthy novel was originally The Strike. Rand changed it to Atlas Shrugged, suggesting how the productive giants of the world ought to respond to a left-leaning ideology bearing down on their shoulders. They should shrug. (Atlas is the Greek titan who carries the celestial sphere – the universe – on his back.)
The film trilogy comes off as flat and preachy. But that’s true to the novel. Rand discounted the role of emotions. Reason is sovereign. Individual excellence and human freedom are celebrated. Escapism and leisure are mostly without value. Objective truth reigns supreme (hence, the name attached to her philosophy: objectivism).
The most interesting aspect of the films is the interplay between technology and government. The federal science institutes malign a new steel alloy as unsafe, not because it poses safety risks, but because of bureaucratic ambitions to reallocate the value of the invention among the masses. No tyranny can abide scientific truths. In a socialist future, facts give way to ideology – an ideology which insists that no one can be better than anyone else – and that government has all the answers, even when those answers are lies.
Thomas E. Simmons
University of South Dakota Knudson School of Law
Vermilion, SD
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The opinions Professor Simmons expresses here on are his as an individual and do not reflect the views of the Board of Regents, the University of South Dakota, its Knudson School of Law, their employees, faculty, or administrators. The foregoing represents his views as a private citizen.
Ayn Rand ended her life in a nursing home, on Medicaid. Socialism prevailed. She had outlived a considerable fortune. Her former friends and adherents were asked to donate funds to help her out. They did not respond.
Will you people ever realize that medicaid is NOT socialism, but a government program.
Socialism is clearly defined as common ownership of the production and distribution of goods in a society, controlled by the government.
And social security is/was a National savings plan. Now that government spent the savings account, won’t acknowledge the money is gone, and insists on covering all future bills on the threat of some novel constitutional challenge, what is it now? It’s either some neo-socialism, incompetence or sabbatage. Neither is mutually exclusive.
Incompetence.
i read the novel a few times and i enjoyed the trilogy quite a lot.
Atlas Shrugged is a powerful novel that will cause you to think differently about much of government action that you see. I still have the copy i read my senior year in high school. Few books are as powerful for their thought provoking ability.