I almost feel bad for Ayn Rand’s ghost. Almost.
Share this:
- Click to share on X (Opens in new window) X
- Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window) Tumblr
- Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window) Reddit
- Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window) Pinterest
- Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window) Facebook
- Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window) LinkedIn
- Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window) Email
- Click to print (Opens in new window) Print
- Click to share on Pocket (Opens in new window) Pocket
Biblioklept 
Don’t fret. She is immune, as proven by rude good health in the face of countless savage attacks by rabid dogs for half a century.
LikeLike
[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by K. M. Britt, Katrina Britt and Katrina Britt, Katrina Britt. Katrina Britt said: Atlas Shrugged Gets the Movie Adaptation It Deserves | biblioklept: Atlas Shrugged Gets the Movie Adaptation It … http://bit.ly/f7JswT […]
LikeLike
Yeah there are so many people I meet who claim that this book is “Amazing” despite the author’s very ugly personal beliefs, which they claim have no bearing on the “incredible story” here. It seems like this movie somehow avoided whatever was supposed to be good about the book and instead cut straight to Rand’s cheap, pretentious heart.
I remember an anecdote I heard her say one time where she gave a situation, something like what of her husband was deathly ill and instead of spend the money to buy him medicine she used money to buy herself dinner and drinks, she said this would be just as morally right if dinner and drinks is what she truly desired.I will suggest that this logic could be used in comparison with whatever the filmmakers spent their money on, rather than use it to pay decent actors.
LikeLike
When I was teaching for a public high school, the Ayn Rand Foundation offered to send me class sets of her books. I gladly accepted. I took 30 copies each of Anthem, Altas Shrugged, and the other one (can’t remember it now) to my favorite used book store and converted them into one class set of a Zora Neale Hurston novel that the school wouldn’t buy for me. I felt ethically justified from an Objectivist perspective.
LikeLike
I’ve read Atlas Shrugged and absolutely loved it! It appears none commenting on this forum have taken time to determine fact from fiction — that is really very sad. As for Atlas Shrugged movie, I am skeptical that it will live up to my expectations…but I loved the trailer, so I am hopeful that the movie will be good. In fact, I am really looking forward to seeing the movie and will abstain from expressing an opinion about it until then.
LikeLike
What do you mean by this sentence? —
“It appears none commenting on this forum have taken time to determine fact from fiction — that is really very sad.”
Have facts been misrepresented as fictions here? Where? By whom? And why is this “really very sad”?
LikeLike
I couldn’t agree with you more. I’m not sure what all the dissension is about. The book is an absolute classic, and a reflection on our society today. The book should be required reading in our schools.
LikeLike
“Dissension”?! LOL whut?!
LikeLike
If someone looks at this trailer and sees something lovable then I am happy for them. And many smart people have told me Atlas Shrugged is an amazing book, but knowing what I know about the author has led me to the decision to not read any of her books. It’s not even that I don’t believe that they are good, I’m sure they are very entertaining but in this case I am choosing a personal bias over the possibility of an entertaining read.
LikeLike
“Maybe you should let me finish speaking!”
What a script that must be!
The book & its fans bring to mind a pretty turn of phrase recently quoted here. Something like, “a — person’s idea of a what — — is like.” Now, I propose we revisit this exercise: Imagine a stupid person. Now, ask this imaginary stupid person what his or her idea of “great literature” is. He or she may reply “Stephen King” or he or she may just as easily reply “Ayn Rand.”
LikeLike
Oh no! My thought exercise backfires! LOL.
LikeLike
I suppose it’s always a good idea to completely disregard philosophies that we don’t agree with. Like disregarding religions and personal beliefs that we don’t agree with. It’s completely impossible for me to find any middle ground with anyone that I don’t 100% agree with, so I don’t think I’ll read Atlas Shrugged because Ayn Rand said she’d buy herself dinner instead of her husband’s medicine — therefore everything that she wrote or thought must be evil.
Oh, wait, I already read the book 15 years ago and actually had the thought that it was a great book, regardless of whether I would purchase my husband’s medication or myself dinner. I actually agree with her, for the most part, that if people would take care of themselves, I wouldn’t need to do it for them. Oh, no, I must be evil because I think Welfare is a scam.
I mean, we wouldn’t want to be open minded at all, right?
LikeLike
Jenoside, why is Atlas Shrugged a “great book”? Why *shouldn’t* we disregard philosophies which we believe to be evil or intrinsically misguided, other than to, say, document why said philosophies are so evil and/or misguided?
Also, who are all these people that you are actively taking care of? Presumably, there are no institutions that are in anyway helping to secure your well being, right?
For what it’s worth, I read Atlas Shrugged (and Anthem) in high school and thought it to be an extremely poorly written, very silly book, with a plot too preposterous to take seriously. The book is not well written. The only reason it still enjoys any modicum of success is because of the Objectivist movement, which props up Rand as a cultural figure, someone whose writings attempt to gloss a moral/aesthetic structure onto what is pretty much straight up Darwinian/Hobbesian bellum omnium contra omnes.
It would be great though if the Randers/Objectivists/people who think they believe in her ideas would act out the plot of Atlas Shrugged. These would-be John Galts — who are clearly so much more talented than the rest of us — should go on strike and quit helping our government and society, etc.
LikeLike
Couldn’t the argument be made that Cormac McCarthy does the same thing, albeit more successfully in the sense that his writings, which certainly point to a Darwinian/Hobbesian worldview, are drawn more ambivalently, so that he achieves an aestheticization of that state of affairs rather than a moralization/justification of it? McCarthy’s novels often have a quality about them that make them function almost in the way a horror novel does — what he describes is truly horrific (and often combined with the ambiguously supernatural), but these descriptions are so aestheticized that while McCarthy himself tends not to tip his cards and say what he really things about what he’s describing, what he describes is either so horrific that it functions as a repudiation of the Darwinian/Hobbesian worldview or it becomes a seduction into that worldview instead, because the ‘horror’ admits of nothing else (if we relate to it in an authentic way without deceiving ourselves).
That, anyway, is how I’ve interpreted his writings and is why I have somewhat of a complicated relationship to them.
LikeLike
@Hank–
I think that the major difference is that Rand advocates Hobbesian existence as natural and morally right — that, simply put, there is no ethical position for the subject. People should only help each other for selfish reasons.
McCarthy certainly describes a Hobbesian world, but his protagonists in many subtle ways resist it. I’m thinking of Suttree, who cares for the elderly and infirm and resists the racist brutality of the Knoxville police; I’m thinking of the “old men” in No Country who see a shift in moral order; I’m thinking of John Grady Cole in the Border trilogy, who repeatedly risks his own skin for others; I’m thinking of the father in The Road who posits love for his son as a reason for being in a world without reason; I’m thinking of the compassionate old man Uncle Ather in The Orchard Keeper (McCarthy’s first novel) who “keeps the fire” (to borrow a phrase from his latest). Even The Kid in Blood Meridian acts as some kind of moral arbiter that suggests that humanity has a capacity of spirit or soul that allows us to be more than apes at constant war. (I wrote about this in detail here — https://biblioklept.org/2010/10/01/it-was-a-lone-tree-burning-on-the-desert-blood-meridians-moral-core/ ).
I agree with you that McCarthy’s violence is by turns ambivalent and seductive, but I also think that it’s not as simple as a shock (all this violence must be bad) or a nomalization/aestheticization (all of this violence must be natural).
LikeLike
True, yes, there are some subversions of the Hobbesian order in McCarthy’s novels (this isn’t something that I’m ignorant of), but by and large, ‘the world’ is bigger than those who attempt to subvert its workings, no? The epilogue to “Blood Meridian” maybe suggests some hope in terms of modernization (maybe? — I repeat myself, I know) but then if we are to think that Judge Holden never dies, are we to think that bringing order to the West is really going to bring an end to his (His?) violence.
This is all rather off-topic, but I just think there are problems to bringing ethics into a judgment of literature and I also think that someone like Cormac McCarthy could be analogous to someone like Ayn Rand at least in some degree because McCarthy is considered to be ‘good’ while Rand is usually considered to be ‘bad’. Do you know of any writers that are ‘good’ that also have a rotten ethical core in their writing (regardless of their person)?
LikeLike
Hmmm…I’m just kind of brainstorming, but without thoroughly thinking through it — some “good” writers (or books) with rotten ethics at the cores of their works : Lolita ; Louis-Ferdinand Céline; William Burroughs, perhaps (perhaps “good,” perhaps ethically rotten) . . . I dunno — I’d have to think more — I’m sure there’s some ambiguity there, ultimately, which I value in works — for me, it’s what seems to be utterly missing in, Rand, for instance.
I get what you’re saying about McCarthy (or at least I think I do) — he does repeatedly posit an evil/apocalyptic world, a world that eats you up. I think that it’s precisely this world though that makes strange heroes of his anti-heroes, that gives them an ethical scope of resistance to the glamor of war, to the judge’s malice. I interpret McCarthy as arguing that, yes, the judge will dance forever, but one doesn’t have to give into this, even if the task is futile. In some sense, I see his work as an agnostic continuation of Flannery O’Connor’s.
Finally, I can’t help but consider the ethical scope of a literary work. I’m not saying that works have to promote “good” or “bad” ideas, or ideas that I agree with — but I think that ethics are intrinsic to literature. What is Dostoevsky without ethics? What is Hamlet or Macbeth or Othello without ethics? What is Job without ethics? Or Oedipus and his sad progeny? It’s the deep ambiguity in these works, the gaps, the fissures that prompt us to discuss them still, and often heatedly.
LikeLike
I love how me not wanting to spend my valuable reading time on this one particular author so quickly becomes a slippery slope about the virtues of open-mindedness. If Ayn Rand was a person who I actually could encounter in real life I would love to discuss ideas with her. But I have enough thousand page books to read that aren’t written by people who I already know I disagree with. People tell me that Battlefield Earth is a great book also, but I’m just not going to spend the time to find out, I’m sorry.
LikeLike
@biblioklept: Awww, don’t go all soft now! Please, please don’t feel bad about Ayn Rand’s ghost. Kindness is too good for her.
@Jenoside: Rand is often billed as a political writer, a writer who has influenced much of the neocon ethos, if you could call it that. For me, it doesn’t come down to politics. It comes down to empathy: some people can be human, others can’t. Rand was simply one of the people in the second group.
LikeLike
Lyco – I was going to respond to this thread but you put it perfectly. As a side note, does anyone find it absolutely hilarious that toward the end of her life Rand accepted government assistance?
LikeLike
“I hope you don’t have friends who recommend Ayn Rand to you. The fiction of Ayn Rand is as low as you can get re: fiction. I hope you picked it up off the floor of the subway and threw it in the nearest garbage pail. She makes Mickey Spillane look like Dostoevsky.” –Flannery O’Connor
LikeLike
First, there are certainly valuable insights that can be taken away from the works of Mickey Spillane.
Second, the Ayn Rand novels certainly are important if for no other reason than they offer a glimpse into a worldview shared by a number of your fellow citizens. It’s easy to get swept up in the plights these achievers that just get dragged down by the rest of humanity because Rand doesn’t make it her business to show her readers just what it mean to be humanity.
Whatevs, it’s not like anyone is going to actually go and see this movie. Atlas Shrugged is hardly Twilight.
LikeLike
Phew – now I don’t have to read it (or worse, be seen reading it).
LikeLike
What @Wiedling said.
LikeLike
@noquar: A great many books that we are never going to read, for want of time or other resources, offer insights to the worldview of various subsets of our fellow citizenry. Like for example Barbara Cartland’s efforts. That doesn’t mean we -excuse me, I- have to like them all, or even respect the aforementioned worldviews. Some things we can do without.
The point here being really not about the discussion over alternative political views and whatnot, all rather admirable I must admit, but another token thrashing of the dead horse that is Rand’s literature, politics, worldview, her entire miasmatic presence upon the history of this planet. Because it is fun and because she and her seriously unfun zealots deserve every last bit we can give to the struggle.
That being said, I am with you on the Spillane front.
LikeLike
My spiritual teacher John-Roger has a saying – that the secret to Soul Transcendence is to look for the good in all things, and the rest leave to God. That is what I do with Ayn Rand, and why her books have moved and changed my life. I understand her principles and theories are extreme and perhaps not applicable in actual reality. Like anarchy, I have to say that in theory, considering the spirituality of the idea, I love the concept of anarchy. However I live on the planet Earth in 2011, and for so many reasons Anarchy simply would be a bad move.
For me the way Rand exaggerates and creates extreme characters helps readers to really identify with a particular idea or ideal. Because in reality each of these characters lives within us. I’m a little greedy sometimes, a little self-righteous at others. And I can live with incredible integrity and purposefulness at times, very entrepreneurial occasionally, and consider myself to be generous and kind a good deal of the time.
So the way that Rand took these character traits and overexaggerated and manifested them in particular characters really helped me see what I’m doing and what I’m creating when I am in certain behavior or times of my life.
I have to say Fountainhead was more lifechanging and transformational for me. I mean the exampleship of Howard Roark has changed the way I see myself and my life forever. I live with more integrity and more courage and freedom to live my life for myself, for the Spirit within, regardless and despite what other people say, think or do. I’m truer to myself and more truly who I am because of Ayn Rand and Howard Roark.
So for me I do my best to look for the good in all things, and to use and take those with me, and leave the rest behind, and in doing this with Rand’s work I could have the experience I wanted and not get caught up in all of her fundamental political agenda pushing.
I’m excited to see what they’ve done with Atlas Shrugged. I’m going to a preview screening with one of the stars Jsu Garcia (plays Francisco d’Antonio) next week (Feb 24 @ Sony Studios – Invite Only sorry). Jsu Garcia is a good friend of mine and I’ve recently been working with him on his own indie film (codirected by Jsu and John-Roger, another good friend of mine who’s quite I referred to at the beginning :) that serendipitously also takes on similar themes but perhaps in a much less political and more spiritual arena. It’s called The Wayshower. It’s about one man’s spiritual journey to finding his spiritual teacher – and ultimately finding himself. It’s so powerful and I love that The Wayshower is really about presenting the audience with questions, with an experience that evokes the finding and creating of your own meaning and interpretation of the movie. Check out the trailer: http://bit.ly/twyoutubetrailer 2 minutes worth spent.
And while Ayn Rand was so obviously incredibly opinionated and pushing an agenda to some extent, my own main wish for Atlas Shrugged is that the audience doesn’t feel preached to or manipulated or blatently lectured to. But then again I never felt that way reading Rand’s work, but clearly some people do. Perhaps that’s up to interpretation also … Find me on facebook.com/zoegolightly and I’ll let you know what I thought after the preview screening February 24th.
LikeLike
Narwhal Party sounds like a real proggy retard.
“Atlas Shrugged” is going to be the biggest box office success of 2011. Remarkable for a low budget production that couldn’t even afford to hire someone to play the story’s hero “John Galt”. Producer said “let’s get it released and we’ll use the money from our success to hire a real actor to play John”.
LikeLike
Narwhal Party is quoting Flannery O’Connor, a mid twentieth century writer from Georgia. Instead of calling a stranger quoting a writer critiquing another writer a “retard,” maybe like, I dunno, respond intelligently.
If Atlas Shrugged is “the biggest box office success of 2011” it will only be because Tea Bagger/Objectivists who don’t actually care about the quality of films (I mean, jeez, did you actually watch the film? It’s sub-MOW material) will flock to it and lie to each other that it’s actually good (see also: the Christian rightists who made Kirk Cameron’s Fireproof a “hit.”
LikeLike