Atlas Shrugged Movie:
Variety reports yet another attempt to film Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. Variety tags Angelina Jolie as a potential Dagney Taggart. Isn't her public persona a bit, er, altruistic for a role as Taggart? She's a bit young for the role, too. Maybe Sigourney Weaver or Sharon Stone. Meryl Streep as Lillian Reardon? Jane Fonda as Reardon's mother?
But will it be directed by Oliver Stone, or Bob Altman?
I think Charlize Theron would be a better Dagny.
Speaking of all things Angelina...if Jennifer Aniston had only read Atlas Shrugged, she'd have realized that Brad Pitt's actions in leaving her for Angelina were no different than Dagny leaving Rearden for Galt. Logically, she has no reason to be upset, should throw herself headlong into her career, and be content with a lesser partner.
And what poll would that be? The poll of selfish, self-absorbed, pretentious, libertarian, young Republicans at exclusive Ivy League and Big Ten Universities.
Really, a little exposure to Rand won't kill you liberals out there. And it's funny how often I find myself thinking about Atlas Shrugged when I'm studying Admin Law.
(The best bad review of it is Chambers's written for NR, recently published in "Ghosts on the Roof.")
/off-topic
//but still funny
Just because it's inspiring for those who make it through doesn't mean it isn't often boring, repetitive, and pretentious. The inspiration could have been achieved in 500 fewer pages.
I've read Atlas Shrugged, as well as The Fountainhead and Anthem. Of the three I would be seriously hesitant to recommend Atlas Shrugged to anyone. It has its moments, but on the whole it's just not very good.
And I can't think of anyone who would describe [i]me[/i] as a "leftist".
Probably not. I consider Ayn Rand to be one of the most evil women of the twentieth century, completely morally bankrupt and fortunately unable to see any of her warped philosophy or economic theories gain any credence. If they had, the results would have been every bit as disasterous as Hitler or Stalin. To me, Atlas Shrugged is as despicable and dangerous a book as Mein Kampf.
As completely unreadable. I tried, but I couldn't make head nor tails of it. In fact I became convinced that anyone who read Das Kapital and understood what the hell Marx was talking about was lying.
If they had, the results would have been every bit as disasterous as Hitler or Stalin. To me, Atlas Shrugged is as despicable and dangerous a book as Mein Kampf.
Judging from the comments, Hayek's "Road to Serfdom" is the book you need to read Freder. You'll find that the irreconcilable conflicts inherent within socialism produced Adolf and Mein Kampf. If only 19th century Germany had Rand instead of Engels, a significant amount of bloodshed would have been spared in the 20th.
Freder said: And what poll would that be? The poll of selfish, self-absorbed, pretentious, libertarian, young Republicans at exclusive Ivy League and Big Ten Universities.
It was a poll of "people," last time I checked, but I'll look into that for you.
And as much as I'd love to see a properly done production of Atlas, there's just no way it would happen. I'd rather not see what Hollywood would do to this book.
Because yeah, then they wouldn't have cheered the deaths of the useless eaters...
As for polls that cite Ayn Rand's work as inspiring...those simply remind me of other "populist" best-of lists. Not exactly impressive.
That being said, I've certainly met a few left-leaning bookworms who actually dig Ms. Rand's style, if not her politics. They're few and far between, and not at all the most well-read friends of mine, but they exist nevertheless. We don't give them too hard a time about it.
Thank goodness. I'm glad I'm not the only person who saw The Fountainhead movie. I always thought that Gary Cooper looked too old and too tired to be playing Howard Roark. He simply looked weary the entire movie, hardly a characteristic belonging to Roark.
I have always classified Marx as sci-fi/fantasy.
Go to Google.
Type in "best books"
First link lists Atlas Shrugged as #1
It is one of the best, most inspiring books ever written and anyone who thinks it is evil is a Marxist or otherwise ill-informed.
Conservatives, or rather religious conservatives, don't like Rand because she was an atheist who relied on reason, science and objectivity for the answers to all questions.
Or literate and emotionally beyond the "angsty high schooler" stage of life.
I can assure you, too, that you'd be hard pressed to find someone more conservative than I am. Rand's books are wooden and dull, and the cult of personality she constructed is nearly as disturbing as the self-righteousness exhibited by the five or six students in the various objectivist clubs infesting campuses.
Well, as a matter of fact, he did (and I'm not talking about Capital, either). In terms of quality, Marx's unpublished novel gives Ayn Rand a good run for her money.
My intuition is that she is the equivilent of some of the more dubious pomo figures--basically playing with idea's that she doesn't really understand and skipping over the more serious arguments on the topic. "A is A" being a prime example.
Go to Google. Type in "best books"
Incidentally, I like it when fans of Ayn Rand appeal to the judgment of the masses as a source of authority. It shows they've really absorbed the message of her books.
Rand has a sort of stopped-clock cachet for me. I'm sympathetic to her conclusions, but her reasoning is suspect: most of her work is a vast semantic playground, wherein she adopts some word (say, rational) as a precise term of art in one context, argues some straightforward result from that definition, and then proceeds as if she'd actually proven something about the term as it's commonly used.
But reall,y mocking Objectivist logic is a sport all to its own.
Conservatives as such don't like Ayn Rand for much the same reason they don't like Marx. She wanted to set aside everything and institute her new, better, scientifically accurate society. Human beings, as perfectly rational beings, would logically fall into place doing exactly as they ought to. At the same time as she sung the praises of non-contradiction, she called for a system that contradicted human nature (as did Marx). Marx thought man was perfectable, Rand thought him perfect. Five minutes in the history section of your local library shows them both to be wrong.
Rand was not a good philosopher (lacking philosophic charity, for starters), but she serves at least one useful purpose: reading her works will get some people actually interested in philosophy. (I actually think that she was right about one thing: everyone has a philosophy, either one they've chosen and developed or one they've had handed to them, though it's not exactly a profound insight, and Aristotle said basically the same thing when arguing for non-contradiction).
If you're already a philosopher, she's mostly a waste of time. Read Nozick instead. It's better argued, better written, and much more coherent.
The Unlikeliest Cult in History
I agree with that. She takes a lot of shortcuts to what are (in my view) mostly good conclusions. Perhaps more importantly and usefully, she does well in pointing out some important fundamental contrdictions in statist thought. Some of those inspired at 15 by Rand's ideas can, at 20, find the nuts and bolts for supporting them properly in Nozick and Hayek.
And as John points out, the most important contribution is a general one: Getting people to realize that fundamental philosophical choices should precede and dictate politicial/social/economic positions.
1. The Bible comes in MUCH ahead of Atlas. Atlas is #2, but there's the Bible and then, much below, a clump of other books.
2. The poll is non-scientific; it was a response poll; they listed the answers of those who chose to respond to the question.
I report this as one who personally lists Atlas as one of my favorite reads, has read it many times and still gains enjoyment from many of its florid passages. But far too much is made of this oft-repeated poll. Think about it: #2 most favorite book, and yet most people you know in real life don't think that. What is the proper conclusion: that America is filled with illiterates? (OK, that may be true, too, but it doesn't follow logically!...:-> )
Rand's #1 screw up was that she completely discounted the notion of children as *necessarily* dependent. Kids don't figure into her philosophy anywhere because they are inconvenient -- an a priori obligation to another lifeform.
That about sums it up. Good luck with 'em.
Objectively -- no pun intended speaking -- Rand's writing is bad on almost every level: stultifyingly wordy, a stylistic disaster, absurd plots and characters, forwarding a logically inconsistent and psychopathically amoral philosophy. And yet she has a compelling vision of some basic truths about human beings and how they wish to run their lives.
I, and many thoughtful people I know, have read one or more of her books and been briefly galvanized by her world view. Intellectually-inclined, geeky adolescents, suffering from their inchoate and unsatisfied romantic inclinations, are particularly susceptible. Most readers who have the prerequisites to get through one of her novels are permanently influenced in some way or another. for this reason alone, she should be taken seriously.
Rand's novels could make better movies than books. Her over-the-top emotionalism is perfect in a movie setting. Putting her plots and two-dimensional characters with truncated dialogue into a movie could potentially create something with the force of "Triumph des Willens" or "Ivan the Terrible". However, Hollywood thinking is so antithetical to Rand's vision of the world, that any movie version of any of her novels is likely to wind up a travesty rather than a masterpiece.
The specific appeal of Atlas Shrugged is to a sort of upper middle tier of the intellectual spectrum. The lower end of the tier begins where individuals are comfortable enough with books to make reading selections which are not expressly for narrative value (no-one recommends Atlas Shrugged> as a fun story) but are instead for the purpose of saying "I've read Tolstoy and Rand, what are you reading?" This stage of development frequently hits senior high and undergraduate collegiates, but is by no means restricted thereto. The high end of the tier is at that strata of intellectuallism where one has attempted to mentally process a sufficient number of these "mind-expanding" novels to realize that what you feed into your brain affects how you think and should be carefully filtered.
Among the applied scientists (engineers, programmers, architects, etc.) the probability of falling inside this spectrum in college and then never bursting through the top is fairly high. As an engineer working among engineers I can say that Ayn Rand is held in very high regard by people who produce things not with non-technical management so much as despite them. Luckily there are some practical thinkers among us who can count females up to one, males up to 7 and then quickly assess the lack of appeal of Rand's solution.
That is more than one can say for the vast majority of tenured academic philosophers.
I personally don't tie anyone's intelligence into what they read (unless of course we're talking about extreme devotees of any particular philosophy or outlook). I would tend to think that if you have the patience to sit down and read something like Atlas Shrugged and can grasp its points, you're more than capable of reading most literary works.
I'm certainly not trying to flame you JFrancis; I'm genuinely interested in what material you would recommend to such people. I've always tried not to ascribe an upper limit of intelligence to people based on what they read/like for various reasons. God knows there's a lot of books out there I'd love to read, but simply don't have enough time. Work late, go to the gym, make dinner and it's already 10 PM!
Yes the book is overly preachy, but could be fairly easily adapted into a movie. I'd hate to see a happy ending added.
No flame taken. I don't think that Rand is inappropriate to read at any level of intelligence. I read Atlas Shrugged after completing my graduate work (when I finally got some free time to work through "the stack"). I read it specifically at the recommendation of a coworker. I asserted that the appeal of Atlas Shrugged, by which I mean it's ability to induce the desire to embrace its philosophy as a thinking model, does not reach people who regard reading it as "too bookish" and also does not reach people who exercise careful analysis of the content of books they read for the purpose of thinking new thoughts. The second group has invariably passed through a period of development where they would have been susceptible to the book's appeal, but might just as easily have picked up "The Celestine Prophecy", "Farnham's Freehold", "Flatland", or "The Power of Positive Thinking."
As alternatives, I would have to recommend Xenophon's "Memorable Things of Socrates", any aggregation of Epictetus, "Thus Spake Zarathustra", or even "The Prince", all of which are easily as accessible as Atlas Shrugged and have more lean meat per ounce.
I realize that my recommended list skews conservative but I gotta be me. I also reccomend the New Testament, but only if you're going to read the whole thing.
I summarize Objectivity as "the theory of selfishness."
Frankly, I was far more inspired by the Illuminati Trilogy (which also could have used some serious editing). "Think for yourself" is a much better philosophy than anything I could get out of Rand.
how about Jane Fonda just as a rear?
oh, no?
Freder really opened himself up there. What's that, like 5 "Das Kapital" jokes on this thread?
I wouldn't characterize myself as "into it", since I find many of its technique's distasteful at best. The principal virtues which recommend it in this case are
A) Accessibility; which is a necessary requirement for the audience framed by the user "So_what..."'s request
B) Internal consistency; I find two great weaknesses in most accessible "viewpoint" texts. The first and most unpalatable is a double standard, where certain of the author's ideas are not sustainable under the justification for other of the author's ideas. This doesn't justify rejection of all thoughts in the text, but it certainly makes me more critical of the reasoning. It is exactly this weakness in some elements of my own worldview that keep me thinking critically.
C) Practicality; I am by duck-like impression an applied scientist and will have that thought pattern until I punch out. Many of the texts I reject (and for Freder's benefit, much of the so-called science I reject) I reject because it is useless off the page. This goes beyond indicting theoretical navel-gazing and into the realm of "Who picked up all the Dollar symbol cigarette butts dropped around Shangri-La Valley when these elitest jerks finished puffing? Why weren't they concerned about recruiting the world's most spectacularly intuitive garbage collector?"
That is a long way of saying Machiavelli's recommendations are openly manipulative and frequently distasteful, but he was thorough regarding the complications of their implementation.
With respect to philosophical underpinnings, his model of government systems is simplistic so he spends little time on it, and instead treats the motives and interactions of the individual, extrapolating to the group dynamic without showing his work. The underpinnings are probably best expressed in the chapters on being loved or hated and being respected or feared.
My experience with it in practice has been that it is useful for predicting the behavior of people who buy into manipulation as a management technique. :)
I also just love how Randians always accuse others of not thinking for themselves when such others disagree with the Randians, however, if you agree with the Randians, then you're obviously a free-thinker. The hard left does the exact same thing, which I find at least a little ironic.
BTW, for what it's worth, I disagree with DFrancis about Machiavelli. I think he wasn't a fan of Christian morality and thought that the pagan Romans had a much better system for functioning. I think he was still concerned with "the good" but had a different conception of it. Reading The Discourses concurrently with The Prince makes it more difficult (moderns are more comfortable with The Discourses), but not so much so that they are totall incompatible.
Now, I SWEAR I'm going to finish this paper.
For anyone who actually likes to think for themselves, the sheer vitriol, name-calling, and appeals to authority in denouncing Ayn Rand and her ideas should be a clarion call to investigate the writings and ideas first hand.
Hmm, yes, I wonder what other thinkers this line of argument would also apply to?
Actually, I think the philosophies espoused in the two novels are strikingly similar. But novels argue for an anarchist society against a fascist/socialist society. Both novels claim that man should shape his own destiny based on his on individualism, rather than be shaped by others. Come to think of it, I think Hagbard Celine's character is almost assuredly based off of Ragnar Danneskjöld. They are both sea pirates stealing from the fascist/socialists.
And I agree, both novels are way longer than they needed to be.
I've read three Ayn Rand works of fiction: The Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged, and We the Living. All are compelling reads - they are utterly unpredictable upon first reading. The Fountainhead is the best of the lot for its storyline. Atlas Shrugged does get too preachy, but is still a great book. And We the Living is also a compelling read, with an utterly unpredictable ending.
Reject the philosophy behind the books but not their craft. They are no "Das Kapital," or "Mein Kampf."
Yup, I remember observing (not participating in) endless conversations about casting Ayn Rand's books as an undergrad at Harvey Mudd College back in the 1980s. Always intrigued me how many techies were Rand fanatics.
The character of John Galt is a lot more difficult to cast. No one comes to mind.
How about Kevin Bacon for Hank Reardon. He's pretty versatile - I'm sure he could do it.
Finally, I think Gary Cooper was actually well-cast as the iconic Howard Roark in The Fountainhead. He also was an iconic Hollywood figure, no great actor, but with major star presence and charisma. The casting problems in the movie were with some of the other characters, namely Dominique and Peter.
Volokh.com seems to have a libertarian bent so I'll add a little context for the readers. Ayn Rand described the Libertarian movement as the "hippies of the right" and far more of a threat to Capitalism and Liberty than the socialists. Two statements I fully agree with. Contrary to what Matthew in Denver says you can not base a system of individual rights on anarchism and Rand was as opposed to anarchism as statism.
In my experience leftists are dismissive of Rand but every-time I come across a real hater of Ayn Rand they turn out to be a Libertarian.
That may require some qualification. She seemed to despise libertarians to the extent that they represented a fad, a group as guilty as the American left of not grounding their trendy, anti gov't political stances in conscious, basic philosophical choices, leading them to contradictory and unprincipled results.
To some degree, many libertarians (both large-L and small-l) are still guilty of this, but many others (and in my experiece, most of the libertarian-leaning readers here) are not.
Okay, here's an example from someone who liked the book as a teenager and would still rank it as one of the top five books that have influenced me: (SPOILER WARNING)
Just before Dagny Taggart's airplane crashes into the valley, she and Owen Kellog find themselves on a "frozen train." Now, Dagny is heiress to a railroad fortune and VP of Operations for that same railroad. More than that, she grew up around trains. She and her childhood friends spent hours, even days, playing hooky by hitching rides on her family's trains. How many hours of her life has she spent in the cab of a locomotive? And then there's Kellog, another competent train guy who Dagny's been trying to hire to run part of her railroad empire.
And when the two of them find themselves on a motionless train, abandoned by its crew (Where did the crew go, anyway? Cross-country on foot? In the middle of nowhere?), it doesn't occur to either one of them to crank up that old Diesel and chug it back to civilization. WTF? Even if they didn't know offhand exactly what to do, you'd think these two railroad hotshots could manage to get it rolling.
Instead, they decide to walk down the track to the next station, where they find an airport nearby. Now, until that scene, airplanes barely exist in the book, and there has been zero indication that Dagny knew anything about them beyond the occasional admiring glance. Nevertheless, she buys an airplane, has a mechanic give it a cursory check, and then jumps in and flies it away. No trepidation, no thought that maybe her flying skills are rusty; she treats this new and unfamiliar airplane the way you or I would treat the family car.
Sure, Dagny is a lot smarter, more competent, and more skilled with machinery than your average 30-ish woman in the mid-1950's. She has an engineering degree, highly unusual for a woman at the time and not so common then even among men. Still, most pilots would want a check ride in any new airplane. At a minimum, she would have needed to page through the flight manual and memorize data like the takeoff and landing speeds. But she just jumps in and flies away.
Maybe she really is that good with machinery. But if she is, why can't she start up the friggin' train?
Other flaws include the treatment of friendship, love, and human relationships in general. The best way to think of Atlas Shrugged is that it's a science fiction novel which takes place in an alternate universe populated largely by computers who look like people. Still an interesting read, though.
Who is Juan Non-Volokh?
When he comes clean, maybe he'll post a way-too-long podcast.
I like the idea of Johnny Depp as Galt, but I think he'd be better cast as Eddie Willers. Eddie has a certain unappreciated depth that I think most actors would miss, but Depp could nail it. Also, Depp is the only one I know who has both the talent and the humility to do justice to a role that has to be both major (Eddie gets a lot of face-time) and minor (since he isn't really one of the players).
Jolie is wrong for Dagny. She could pull it off (just think of the "Frankie" character in Sky Captain) but her beauty is the kind that anyone could not help missing, whereas Dagny's is the sort that people never notice unless they themselves are the right sort of people. I think Janeane Garofalo would be a brilliant choice, but I've always been partial to Jodie Foster.
Banderas is D'Anconia. No one else will do.
I've never come up with a good Hank Reardon. I used to think Harrison Ford since he needs to be a bit older than Dagny, but I think he is maybe a bit too old now. And when he plays tough guys, he usually goes for the Jim Rockford tough-guy-that-gets-beat-up-all-the-time schtick. Keifer Sutherland has possibilities but he has too much of a baby face.
Sir Anthony Hopkins for Hugh Akston? Or Max Von Sydow? Maybe this is the role Harrison Ford should play.
John Rhys-Davies = Midas Mulligan.
he's not in semi-retirement, he's semi-comatose.
I used to dream about casting Atlas Shrugged and it always came down to three tragic characters and scenes:
1. Eddie Willers representing the man equal to Galt in morals but not ability attempting to repair and restart the dead train after leaving the temporarily restored San Francisco terminal for New York.
2. Ellis Wyatt throwing his glass into the fireplace knowing that their accomplishments in Colorado will not last and that the looters will prevail. His guests, Dagny and Hank, recognize the danger in his foreshadowed violence. Oddly enough, I always hear James Horner's music from Dr. Lillian Reynold's heart attack in the movie Brainstorm here but it was very popular in trailers for many years.
3. Cherryl Brooks fleeing into the night toward her death after learning the nature of her husband and that she has been fighting the very people who share her values. There is no concern for the suffering of the innocent.
Of course, it's a bit strange to treat things as fiction simply because you disagree with them.
"As for stars, book provides an ideal role for an actress in lead character Dagny Taggart, so it's not a stretch to assume Rand enthusiast Angelina Jolie's name has been brought up."
No, that doesn't make sense to me either.
Marx's fiction was infinitely more influential than Rand's
is like saying heroin is infinitely more influential than Tylenol. One causes false happiness and millions of deaths and the other just makes a lot of people feel a little better.