Running Time: 102 Minutes

Rated: PG-13 for “some sexuality”

The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) hearing room, 1947. Ayn Rand is testifying before a number of scale-weighing congressionals, HUAC’s purported goal being to rout out Communists who have infiltrated Hollywood. It’s a post-Yalta period, the globe parsed out family-dinner style to the new and rising super-powers.

Rand is a bit disappointed. She wants to testify on the communist undertones of “The Best Years of Our Lives” – a popular, Oscar-winning piece of cinema – but HUAC only allows her to testify about “Song of Russia,” a propaganda piece released to assuage Americans’ suspicions about temporarily allying with the Soviet Union in the latter days of World War II. Rand is a firecracker, an acolyte of untainted capitalism, and a scathing critic of “Song of Russia.” She posits that the film, a false portrayal of a happy Soviet Russia, dupes the American public. Rand was present during the 1917 revolution and watched as her father’s shop was seized by the Bolsheviks. She declares that there are no smiling faces in post-revolution Russia. That if people do smile, “...it is privately and accidentally. Certainly it is not social. They don’t smile in approval of their system.” The HUAC members are a bit sheepish. Didn’t the picture serve a utilitarian purpose? Didn’t it contribute to an easier alliance between the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics to defeat a common Hitlerian enemy?

Rand asks: how much time do I have? If nothing else, she is unadulteratedly earnest. Still I wonder if, during testimony, Rand felt a premonitory twitch of unease – maybe had to brush a stray eyelash from the side of her Roman nose or worry a thread in her sharply pleated slacks – that almost 65 years later “Atlas Shrugged” would be released on film to a different world. A world in which un-flagging self-interest, anti-collectivism and anti-altruism seem achingly hollow. One in which her film operates with as much integrity as “Song of Russia.”

Hollow maybe, but not irrelevant. Just take a look at 2011, the year of its release: the fringe right passes legislation barring collective bargaining rights in a number of states. Newly empowered Egyptian revolutionaries, having successfully dethroned Mubarak, order pizzas over the Internet for crowds of demonstrators camped outside the Wisconsin State Capitol. Many American families still reel from a mortgage crisis gone global. And this guy in North Africa: he christens his newborn “Facebook” in celebration of the social network that allowed for collective resistance in a fast changing Middle East. There’s a new play of heroes and villains here in 2011. I imagine that, if a modern day Rand-elitte were invited to a roundtable discussion on anyone of these topics, he or she would gladly use a copy of Rand’s weighty “Atlas Shrugged” as a gavel – would pound it on the table like Khrushchev’s right shoe.

But back to 1947 for a moment. HUAC’s interest in rooting out communist influence in Hollywood will later jump congressional bodies and become a senatorial circus. Ringleader: Joseph McCarthy. In 1947, though, HUAC is acting less circus animal, more truffling boar: witnesses are labeled “friendly” or “unfriendly” depending on their willingness to speak of red ideologies staining Hollywood’s otherwise black and white, red white and blue cinema. Bertolt Brecht for example is “unfriendly.” (In glib response, Brecht says: “Americans aren’t as bad as Nazis. At least they let you smoke while interrogating you.” He then disappears to live in communist Berlin). Rand is, of course, a “friendly,” though she is later impudent about the experience, claiming the trials were disappointing, futile. It is hard to adjudicate an ideological penetration of cinema. But, in Rand’s mind, it was okay for Congress to root out the Hollywood Communists. After all, they supported a party that used amoral means to achieve political goals. Screenwriters, directors, and actors were later imprisoned. Blacklisted. Lives ruined.

(Interesting side note: soon afterward Walt Disney Studios will put ex-Nazis – Goebbels’ leftovers – on the payroll. And the U.S. Government will commission them to create public service announcements during A-bomb testing just north of Las Vegas. Mickey Mouse may wear red trousers but, certainly, his illustrators wore brown shirts.)

…………………………………………………………………………………………………….

2011, again. The film “Atlas Shrugged” is indulgent, played out à la Harry Potter in a series of episodes. “Part 1” is released April 15. The Atlas Society is perhaps overstating things a bit when they suggest the film will help springboard Rand’s philosophies into mainstream dialogue: I can find only one theater showing the film, and a quick headcount in the movie house suggests that lines for the “Atlas Shrugged 2” premiere may not exactly queue around the block (the American public, I’m sure, is more interested in the final reveal of Voldemort than of John Galt). Still – there’s more internet buzz about Rand. Fans include Alan Greenspan, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), and Rush Limbaugh. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas laconically suggests he “is partial” to Rand. And Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) makes his staff read Rand as a matter of principle. (Ryan-he was Obama’s rebutter following the 2011 State of the Union address, the wunderkind ideologue just left of the Tea Party). A brief census of Ayn’s Cheer Squad shows: Rand is Right.

And – let me tell you – the film reads as a one hour forty-five minute commercial of Tea Party values.

A brief synopsis: in 2016 America gas prices are so high ($37 a gallon) due to Middle East unrest that rail is again the leading vehicle of commerce. Taggart Enterprises is a rail company, co-piloted by brother and sister Taggart. It is flagging, besot with a dangerously rusting railway, its stocks plummeting while train derailments become common. James Taggart is the incompetent CEO. He is un-savvy, corrupt, politicking, almost puerile (in one scene, he plays with toy trains in his office while the industry around him collapses). Dagny Taggart is the sister and heroine. She, in Randian earnestness, refuses to be a player in James’ lobbyist-populated world and instead steers the company to invest in Rearden Steel, innovator of an untested but supposedly brilliant alloy. Hank Rearden is a kind of second-level Howard Roarke (the protagonist of Rand’s first novel The Fountainhead), the alloy’s inventor and Rockefeller-style tycoon. The alloys he creates are titanium-light miracles of metallurgy, but manacled to his ankles are figurative anchors of dead weight: a leaden marriage, double-crossing inferiors. He has a metal-grey bleakness about him before being enlivened by Dagny’s investment.

Together, Dagny and Henry recreate the rail system using his alloy. They inevitably fall in love while riding high on vapors of a shared – and hugely rosy – idea of capitalism. This fuels a culminative but rather clumsy sex scene mid-film. A phallic locomotive ride over the Dagny-Reardon railway pounds to almost anti-orgasm: we are delivered a very flaccidly shot bedroom menage prefaced with dialogue that belongs in a James Cameron film. Dagny and Henry get it on, speak in essays, and continue their joint venture for unbridled capitalism. Distractions along the way include anachronistically mustachioed steel magnates, disgruntled union workers, ruddy-nosed D.C. Insiders, anti-monopoly regulators, Socialists, and government lackeys who hide in buildings gabled like modern-day Parthenons. Pretty much everyone on Michelle Bachmann’s “to do-in” list.

Meanwhile, a shadowy fedora-clad figure named John Galt “disappears” certain key players in the capital game, both frustrating and inspiring Dagny and Henry. Galt is the vigilante utopian, the Batman who promises “Atlantis,” an as-yet unrevealed hideaway for the purest of capitalist refugees. (We’ll have to wait for part II to see who Galt is and what Atlantis means. I can’t wait to present my Blockbuster card for the privilege; I don’t think ‘‘Atlas Shrugged 2” will be coming soon to a theater near you).

This movie is – to riff on Rand – objectively bad. I can’t tell if it’s because of the muddy cinematography, the poor acting, or the two-dimensionality of the protagonists who fail to ever become something real or relevant in the film. Transferred to celluloid, the heroes and heroines become easily unlikable: they’re Flat Stanleys operating in a landscape that’s even flatter. The foils – the aforementioned socialists – are so cartoonishly caricatured that the heroes don’t benefit from their “childish” shortcomings.

We are left with a film that advertises hygienized ideals. We sense the angry Rand who thought Communism a virus, whose cinematized John Galt may as well be Milton Friedman with a SAG card. Some Atlas Society trumpeters are proclaiming this film a triumph, a means of showing laissez-faire capitalism at its most ideal; and Hank and Dagny are the truest and noblest of capitalists. They are producers, virtuous in their self-interest, finding a spirituality in production. As counterpoint, fans and Randians will find evil in the injunctions of the “altruists,” the unions and redistributors of wealth. I’m not so convinced.

Rand’s moral imperative is to showcase self interest through the vehicle of laissez-faire capitalism and to reject the core of most ethical systems: a more social-minded altruism. This, however, is morality built in a vacuum and why Rand is just a footnote in philosophy. Ideologues like vacuums, though: philosophies that live beneath bell jars. Speaking of bells, Naomi Klein quoted sociologist Daniel Bell [1] on the subject: “...love of an idealized system is the defining quality of radical free-market economics. Capitalism is envisaged as a ‘jeweled set of movements’ or a celestial clockwork ... a work of art, so compelling that one thinks of the celebrated pictures of Apelles who painted a cluster of grapes so realistic that the birds would come and pick at them [2].”

Rand’s interpretation of capitalism and the heroes she produces in its defense are like these Apelles canvases: compelling but ultimately two-dimensional. Like “Atlas Shrugged.” There’s a real world outside the canvas or, in this case, off-screen. I still believe in the Keynesian safety nets built into the free-market system and would rather promote than eschew the altruism that perhaps makes the system run a few minutes slow. The beneficiaries of a mixed economy and of a classic social-minded morality are not “children” to me, as the film suggests. They are real, and they are human.

Rand’s acolytes, I believe, are those birds plucking at illusory grapes. And I wonder, sometimes, if they grow tired.

Rand spoke of her 1947 HUAC testimony some years following. Said she was glad to have had media exposure on the subject of the Communist infiltration of Hollywood. Being a good, even defected, American [Rand came to America on a visa in 1925 and stayed, becoming a citizen in 1931 -Ed.], she also alluded to the First Amendment in her writings. In summary, she posited that we can’t for the sake of the Constitution’s sovereignty silence far-Leftists in their speech. But, she adds as rejoinder, we don’t «owe them jobs and support to advocate our own destruction at our own expense.”

It is funny, really. Here in 2011 her opus is released to the big-screen. And, of course, her ideas post-requiem should still be heard. I agree with Rand on her sense of constitutionality. But no one’s going to testify against this movie. The only trial is enduring it.

References

1. Daniel Bell, “Models and Reality in Economic Discourse,” The Crisis in Economic Theory, eds. Daniel Bell and Irving Kristol (New York: Basic Books, 1981),57-58
2. Naomi Klein, Shock Doctrine. (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007), 51