2,288 words
I saw Atlas Shrugged on Saturday, April 16th. It was a sold-out showing to an all-white audience in a predominantly white area. The audience contained a large contingent of Tea Party people, mostly Christian, as well as libertarians and Objectivists.
There was geeky anti-government banter as we waited for the movie to begin. There was applause after the movie ended, but I did not join in. In fact, I found this to be a deeply disappointing adaptation of the first third of Ayn Rand’s epic novel about the role of reason in human existence and what would happen if the rational and productive people—the Atlases that carry the world on their shoulders—were to shrug off their burden and go on strike.
Atlas Shrugged
Although Rand opposed racial nationalism on philosophical grounds (with a sentimental exception for Zionism, of course), there is still much of value in her novels for racial nationalists. Rand started out as a Nietzschean, and her novels offer powerful defenses of aristocracy and critiques of egalitarianism, democracy, mass man, and mass society. All these elements are in tension with her later philosophy of reason, individualism, and capitalism. Indeed, Rand felt the need to reframe, revise, or simply suppress her earlier, more Nietzschean writings. But the “sense of life” of her novels is so in keeping with the spirit of fascism that her first novel We the Living
Thomas Hart Benton, “Steel in America Today,” 1930
The Fountainhead can be read profitably alongside The Culture of Critique, for it effectively dramatizes the techniques of Jewish subversion of American society. Rand’s villain Ellsworth Toohey sums up his game as playing the stock market of the spirit—and selling short, meaning profiting from the decline of our values, which pretty much sums up the rise of American Jewry to the top of our society on a tide of smut, decadence, degeneracy, lobbying, swindling, pop culture, and casino capitalism.
Rand, of course, never saw it that way, and Rand’s own movement Objectivism is just as much a Jewish intellectual movement as the Frankfurt School, and although they use very different arguments, they function to produce the same result: a radical individualism that renders cohesive ethnic groups like Jews invisible to the majority, which maximizes their collective security and upward mobility, since cohesive collectives have a systematic advantage in competing with isolated individuals. (Rand called the mostly-Jewish inner circle of her movement “the collective.” It is supposed to be a joke, but the joke may be deeper than most people imagine.)
Tamara de Lempicka, “Autoportrait,”
Atlas Shrugged, moreover, lends itself to a racial interpretation. Atlas Shrugged is about how a creative and productive minority is exploited by an inferior majority because of the acceptance of a false moral code (altruism) that beatifies the weak and pegs the worth of the strong to how well they serve their inferiors. When one asks “What is the race of Atlas?” it all falls into place. The Atlas that upholds the modern world is the white race, which is being enslaved and destroyed by the acceptance of a false moral code (racial altruism) that teaches that non-whites fail to meet white standards only because of white wickedness, and that whites can only expiate this racial guilt by giving their wealth and power and societies to non-whites.
Altruism is ultimately nihilism, since when the inferior finally cripple and destroy their superiors, they will perish too. But such consequences don’t matter to locusts, parasites, and people in the grip of false values. The only thing that will save us all is a moral revolution, a new form of egoism, although I part ways from Rand on the nature of this revolution, since she is an individualist and I am a racial collectivist. Rand thinks that the individual is more important than the group, which is what you would expect of a childless woman who lived largely in her head.
Rand’s aesthetic is deeply fascist—and Socialist Realist—with its emphasis on man’s heroic transformation of nature through science, technology, and industry. Rand also had a taste for Nordic types. All of her heroes are tall, lean Nordics. Rand, born Alissa Rosenbaum, was not.
Edward Hopper, “Compartment C, Car 293,” 1938
The Atlas Shrugged movie is poorly cast. In terms of looks, the best choices are Taylor Schilling as Dagny Taggart, Grant Bowler as Hank Rearden, and Rebecca Wisocky as Lillian Readen. John Polito, the Italian gangster in Miller’s Crossing (“It’s about ethics . . .”), was a good choice for Orren Boyle. Michael Lerner looks great for the role of Wesley Mouch, but his personality is a bit too forceful. Matthew Marsden as James Taggart is too handsome for the part, but he makes it his own.
The worst choices are Edi Gathegi, a black actor, for the Nordic Eddie Willers (the same actor displaced another white actor for the character of Laurent in the Twilight movies), and Jsu Garcia (couldn’t they afford a whole Jesus?), who looks like a debauched mestizo, for the blue-eyed descendant of Castile Francisco d’Anconia. The actors cast as Hugh Akston and Dr. Robert Stadler are both too young for their parts, and Stadler looks Middle Eastern and speaks with a heavy accent!
As for the acting, it is pretty much undistinguished throughout: strictly soap opera grade. The best-realized roles are James Taggart and Lillian Rearden. Eddie Willers is an embarrassment. A wooden Indian would have been just as expressive and — more importantly from the producers’ point of view — even cheaper and just as politically correct. Or is there a message in casting a black man to play a character who is essentially a faithful mediocre sidekick?
Thomas Hart Benton, “Coal,” 1930
As for the script, it is shockingly pedestrian. Rand gives us an abundance of eloquent dialogue, but almost none of it is used. It soon becomes apparent why: whenever a bit of it slips in, the actors sound as wooden as Gary Cooper in King Vidor’s 1949 movie of The Fountainhead
But given a cast of blockheads and Brooks Brothers models who read from teleprompters, we could not have Francisco d’Anconia’s money speech. We could only have colloquial naturalism with vulgarities like “crap” and “bullshit” thrown in. I suppose we should be grateful that we were not told that Galt’s motor was “awesome” and the Equalization of Opportunity Act “sucked.” (I wonder if the script contained emoticons. Maybe the performances would have been improved.)
Tamara de Lempicka, Portrait of Madame Allan Bott
The whole look of this movie is wrong. Visually it is astonishingly flat, dull, and unimaginative. Rand’s novel requires a Brazil look: Art Deco in a vague “future”: hair and wardrobe by Tamara de Lempicka, interiors by Edward Hopper, industrial scenes from Thomas Hart Benton, casting by Arno Breker (although the men would need to be less beefy), sets by Frank Lloyd Wright, all directed by Leni Riefenstahl. Of course that would have cost money, but the real poverty in this film is of imagination and taste. Instead, we get a film set in the near future (2016 and 2017) that feels the need to explain the prominence of rail transport with an energy crisis.
The greatest aesthetic flaw of this film is the contrasting treatment of nature and industry. A film of Atlas Shrugged should glorify and aestheticize human achievement, especially heavy industry, and there is plenty of fascist, National Socialist, Socialist Realist, and New Deal art that they could have drawn upon to do this (but of course that would be “politically incorrect” from an Objectivist point of view). But instead, we have only pedestrian low angle shots of rail yards full of box cars — which might actually have been visually captivating if simply viewed from the air. The scenes of the Readen factory and the building of the John Galt Line offered many opportunities for visual splendor and dynamism, but they too are pedestrian at best. The best sequence is the first run of the John Galt Line, one of Ayn Rand’s most brilliant feats of description. (This was the only scene in which I even noticed the music.) But even here the movie pales by comparison to the printed page. I was left wondering: Did the director even read this book?
Edward Hopper, “New York Office,” 1962
The inept handling of industry is underscored by the intrusion of nature photography. Ayn Rand looked at nature as merely the raw material and backdrop of human achievement. But in the movie of Atlas Shrugged, the most beautiful scenes are of mountains and prairies. During the first run of the John Galt line, Dagny Taggart and Hank Readen’s achievements are dwarfed by the beauty of the landscape. The focus should have been on the train, the rails, the rising throb of the engines, the telephone poles rushing by faster and faster, as a vast, streamlined art deco engine shot like a bullet toward the gossamer arc of the great bridge of Rearden metal. The spectacular Rocky Mountain landscape and sky should have been hidden by a drop-cloth of clouds, fog, and rain.
The treatment of sex in this film is also objectionable. When Lillian Rearden asks her husband “Through are you?” as he rolls off her, there was a gasp in the theater. (James Kirkpatrick reported the same thing in his brilliant review at Alternative Right.) Talking to Tea Partiers afterward, I discovered that the gasp was due to their strongly Christian orientation. Apparently it struck them not as vicious and condescending, but simply as pretty racy stuff. Later, when Hank Rearden began his affair with Dagny Taggart, there was a less audible but still real reaction in the audience, for the same reason. The only real criticism the Christian Tea Partiers had was that the movie portrayed an extramarital affair in a positive light.
The affair is, by the way, significantly altered from the book. In the book Hank Rearden is profoundly conflicted about his attraction to Dagny, which he attributes to mere animal lust which tempts him to violate his wedding vows, which he treats as a matter of honor, even though his marriage is a loveless hell. When he finally gives in to temptation, it is one of Ayn Rand’s famous “rape” scenes. In the movie, after the running of the John Galt Line, Rearden in effect says, “Here we are, at the moment of our greatest triumph, and all I want to do is kiss you.” Dagny coyly replies, “Why don’t you then?” Cut to a tender lovemaking montage. (I could not help but think of Rand’s own parody “Sorry baby, I can’t take you to the pizza joint tonight, I have to go back to the science lab and split the atom.”) Is moral conflict and rough, passionate sex just too politically incorrect these days? Again, what were the filmmakers thinking?
Why was Atlas Shrugged made on the cheap? Apparently the producers could not come up with a script or a concept good enough to raise the money and attract the talent to do a first rate movie, and since their option was expiring, they decided to do a second rate movie instead (and managed to pull off a fourth rate one). This level of cynicism is frankly breath-taking. One has to ask: Is this how Howard Roark would have made a movie? (If this film accomplishes one thing, it will make us appreciate the 1949 movie of The Fountainhead more.)
Tamara de Lempicka, “Tadeusz de Lempicka,” 1928
From now on this should be referred to as director Paul Johansson’s Atlas Shrugged, for it is Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged in name only. (Johansson turns out to be every bit the director that one would expect of a soap opera hunk.) It is merely an exercise in masochism to wonder how a visionary director of epics like Zack Snyder or Peter Jackson or Oliver Stone would have brought Atlas Shrugged to the screen, because we will never know. Vidor’s The Fountainhead was bad enough that more than 60 years later, we are still without a decent film of one of the greatest American novels of the 20th-century. Which means that there will never be a decent movie of Atlas Shrugged in my lifetime, thanks to the selfish mediocre bastards behind this cinematic abortion.
7 comments
Excellent review! Your observation of Objectivism being just as Jewish as the Frankfurt School (and of course Capitalism), is spot on. The sheer number of Ayn Rand devotees is stunning.
Great review.
Atlas Shrugged, moreover, lends itself to a racial interpretation.
That’s “understatement!”
Implicitly, Yockey’s vertical component of Race manifested. Only the White Race looks UP, wants, and tries to get there. Civilization is a process of transforming the Earth into the key to open the Stars.
Great analysis of the visual message – the contrast between Futurism, Art Deco, and the declining social order is perfect.
Great analysis of how the Inner Party manipulates the Culture with false language, and can’t face the fact that nothing described with such works.
Wouldn’t “Galt’s Gulch” be a Northwest Republic’s creative center?
Yes.
This review was amazing. Unbelievably good. I especially loved this cut:
Every word of that is true.
William Pierce wrote extensive critiques of Ayn Rand. Although his speech Deliberate Deception is most commonly cited, I think the argument he puts forth in his speech, Individualism and Alienation is even more compelling:
The same principle holds true when examining the effectiveness of groups like the neoconservatives and the sway the Jewish Lobby holds over aspects of both domestic and foreign policy. Cohesiveness which results from strong in-group identification is the key element of their success.
Also, while many ‘new right’ and ‘libertarian’ advocates find themselves attracted to the economic nostrums glorified by Ayn Ran and codified by Milton Friedman and the Chicago school, it is worth noting that the vision of a ‘free-market’ economy touted by Friedman’s acolytes differed markedly from the vision of ‘competitive markets’ put forth by laissez-faire advocates like Adam Smith.
Although these ideologies appear to overlap, Friedman & the Chicago School view monopolies in a completely different light. Rather than seek to break up monopolies and facilitate competition, Chicago School ideologues defend monopolies as a rightful part of a natural order in which low cost providers exert complete hegemony over their economic niche.
This defense of monopolies and the rentier economies that sustain them are the antithesis of what Adam Smith supported.
In his working paper, Judonia (see also here), Joachim Martillo, a Jewish convert Islam who runs the blog EAAZI claims that this defense of firmly ensconced monopolies is rooted in the Polish arenda system, in which Jews administer estates for absentee feudal landlords, overseeing the peasant underclass and maximizing the extraction of wealth from the peasant laborers for the benefit of the Jewish managerial class – and, of course, for the benefit of the landlord.
Speaking of Milton Friedman, Martillo writes:
Although, Martillo’s Judonia is yet unfinished, Israel Shamir sums up it’s implications for gentiles:
As economist Michael Hudson explains, classical economics, Marxist, economics, and even fascism sought to minimize this passive extraction of the economic surplus from the laboring classes by a parasitic rentier class. Chicago School libertarianism preaches a complete inversion of this economic doctrine and would become inscribed as the ruling dogma in American Economics Departments in the 1970’s when the standards of certification for economic departments were to be defined by acolytes of Milton Friedman and the Chicago School.
Until Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman, and the Chicago School are exposed for what they are, promoters of the establishment of transnational hyperwealthy Jewish olgarchy that lives off of the extraction of wealth from productive, laboring classes, we can expect more mindless and counterproductive glorification of their ideals from so-called conservatives and libertarians.
– Charles
PS: On a side note, one can learn more about the Polish arenda system by reading this paper on Traditional Jewish Attitudes Toward Poles. It gives a great deal of insight into how Ayn Rand feels about gentiles. Kevin MacDonald sums it up quite succinctly by calling Jews a “hostile elite”.
Good review.
Exactly. And this is precisely why I have never been able to stomach Ayn Rand.
It seems our people will always confuse (in the case of racialists) and miss (in the case of non-racialist whites) the mark of aristocratic values and fall for individualism (classical liberalism), libertarianism, and predatory capitalism — all of which are corrosive to our collective well-being as a race.
Our people have flourished under truly aristocratic systems, whether they be more merit based with greater social mobility or hereditary with less social mobility but greater stability. Both have their advantages and disadvantages but have proven their superiority to the Jewish fundamentally materialistic and de-spiritualized weltanschauung from which liberalism, democracy, communism, libertarianism, capitalism, egalitarian socialism, etc. spring. I should note here that Judaism and (Judeo) Christianity are fundamentally materialistic (despite seeming contradictions) and also “function to produce the same result.” The Jew is a spiritually devoid, materially obsessed cancer which resents and wishes to bring down every man and race on this earth to his grotesque state.
Part of why I find the majority American white nationalism so repugnant is its thoroughly Judaised nature. A white nationalist state filled with materialistic liberals would degenerate within 200 years to where America is today (assuming it lasted that long).
Don’t get me wrong, I would hold my tongue and work with these despicable whites to form a white nation-state; I would do what is politically necessary…but if it were achieved and had a degree of stability, I would work my hardest to free at least a portion from the Jewish cancer that infects the rest.
Trevor Lynch writes: “Rand called the mostly-Jewish inner circle of her movement ‘the collective.’ It is supposed to be a joke, but the joke may be deeper than most people imagine.” In his fascinating and witty article, “The Sociology of the Ayn Rand Cult,” the Jewish libertarian Murray Rothbard wrote of “the collective”:
“[T]he Randian movement was strictly hierarchical. At the top of the pyramid, of course, was Rand [Rosenbaum] herself, the Ultimate Decider of all questions. Branden [Blumenthal], her designated ‘intellectual heir,’ and the St. Paul of the movement, was Number 2. Third in rank was the top circle, the original disciples, those who had been converted before the publication of Atlas. Since they were converted by reading her previous novel, The Fountainhead, which had been published 1943, the top circle was designated in the movement as ‘the class of ’43.’ But there was an unofficial designation that was far more revealing: ‘the senior collective.’ On the surface, this phrase was supposed to ‘underscore’ the high individuality of each of the Randian members; in reality, however, there was an irony within the irony, since the Randian movement was indeed a ‘collective’ in any genuine meaning of the term. Strengthening the ties within the senior collective was the fact that each and every one of them was related to each other, all being part of one Canadian Jewish family, relatives of either Nathan or Barbara Branden. There was, for example, Nathan’s sister Elaine Kalberman; his brother-in-law, Harry Kalberman; his first cousin, Dr. Allan Blumenthal, who assumed the mantle of leading Objectivist Psychotherapist after Branden’s expulsion; Barbara’s first cousin, Leonard Peikoff; and Joan Mitchell, wife of Allan Blumenthal. [Former Federal Reserve chairman] Alan Greenspan’s familial relation was more tenuous, being the former husband of Joan Mitchell. The only non-relative in the class of ’43 was Mary Ann Rukovina, who made the top rank after being the college roommate of Joan Mitchell.”
Rothbard remarked: “Branden himself changed his name from Blumenthal; it is perhaps not a coincidence, as Nora Ephron has pointed out, that if the letters of the new name are rearranged, they spell, B-E-N-R-A-N-D, Hebrew for ‘son of Rand.'”
Rothbard’s article is at: http://www.lewrockwell.com/rothbard/rothbard23.html
Movie trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6W07bFa4TzM
If you have a Subscriber access,
simply login first to see your comment auto-approved.
Note on comments privacy & moderation
Your email is never published nor shared.
Comments are moderated. If you don't see your comment, please be patient. If approved, it will appear here soon. Do not post your comment a second time.