So let's take a brief break from fanfiction and look at another medium: Movies!
So the other day I decided "Hey! Those horrible Atlas Shrugged movies are available for streaming on Netflix! Why not give it a shot? Should be awful!"
I mean, the book's already contentious, albeit famous. Then some rich guys put together enough money to make a film version and released the first part of a trilogy. Then it flopped and they still managed to put together enough money for part 2, then it flopped again but they still managed to get enough together for the third and final part, which comes out this September.
I mean, it figures that with the economic downturn and a Democrat in the White House, that the book would get all popular and stuff. And it's a pretty big deal of a book in America. But I haven't read the book, so I can't say anything about whether it's written decently or full of crap or whatever. I mean, it’d be kinda easy to talk about how Ayn Rand comes off as a sociopath, or how she had a rape fetish, or how it’s against my religion, or how a lot of Objectivist proponents like Jay Naylor and Terry Goodkind are colossal douchebag, or stuff like that, but I think that’d be kind of cheap. So I won't. I'm gonna just look at the movie and judge it on its own merits. Or demerits, or whatever.
So before I watch the movie I notice something. It's 93 minutes long. Really? That's it? I thought this was supposed to be some kinda epic. I mean, Atlas Shrugged is about as long as The Lord of the Rings, and the first film in that trilogy is almost three hours long. Then again, Les Miserables is longer than either, and it managed to get its shit together in one film under three hours. But blimey, 90 minutes doesn't sell "epic."
Now, our story starts with a montage about how everything's gone to shit, intercut with a train. We got dire stuff about how the DOW is tanking and oil shortages are so bad (due to the Middle East falling into chaos, never mind that the Middle East isn't our only source of oil) that trains are now the only affordable mode of transportation.
This thing takes place in 2016. Not a good idea. It would've been a better idea to do what the book does and not put a year on it, because it just raises all sorts of problems. Like how 2016 is gonna come and go without the country falling to shit, despite what the scumtard Porter Stansberry tells you in his videos (he got busted by the SEC for fraud years ago, for fuck's sake don't give him your money no matter how scary his ads are).
Intercut with this are pictures of capitol hill where we hear voiceovers about how the politicians are passing terrible bills. Like one bill that makes it illegal to fire an employee from a profitable firm, and another that makes wage raises illegal wait what? If you want to present a caricature of the American left, at least present one that's, like, consistent. Or has some basis in reality. The liberals want to make it illegal to raise wages? Then who the fuck are the people bitching about the minimum wage being too low?
There's another reason that the 2016 date is a problem: this is a story about fucking trains.
Y'see, trains are a pretty big motif in Atlas Shrugged. Think of all the connotations we have associated with them. Those big billowing smokestacks and the big steam-powered wheels instantly make you think of the industrial revolution, moving humanity forward. The laying of railways was an arduous task, giving way to things like the John Henry myth, a great infrastructure built on sweat and toil. In order to get the tracks going, they used dynamite to level mountains, bringing to mind the triumph of man's will over nature, reshaping the world to his purposes. Railroads and the like also tend to be associated a lot with America, particularly again with that whole "taming the wild frontier" kind of stuff.
And Ayn Rand wasn't the only one who did stuff with trains. Italian Futurist Umberto Boccioni did it decades before her, in his painting here
◊. Look at those jagged angles. The glorification of machine might and power. And a lot of Boccioni's works have this strong sense of power in motion, down to the titles. Like Unique Forms of Continuity in Space
◊, Charge of the Lancers
◊, and Dynamism of a Soccer Player
◊.
By the way, the futurists were also assholes. Misogynistic, fascistic, and warmongering. They were cheering for World War I. Boccioni joined the army, in fact. Then he got stomped to death by his horse. Oops.
Forgive me for that, I just felt like indulging in actual art for a moment. Back to the terrible movie. The point is, people don't really care all that much about trains anymore in our time of widespread airplanes and automobiles. You could cover by, like, making it a Maglev train or some kind of Amtrak thing, but that'd dilute the connotations 'cause you don't exactly think of industry and power. Of course they just go for the classic steam locomotive, which does carry those connotations, but again, you're not going to sell to the audience that these are now the Big Fucking Deal. If you'd stripped the story of a specific year you coulda given it a sense of timelessness or sold it like "another America in another time" or something like that, but as it is you have one fucking timestamp and it causes a big problem before the movie has even started!
So our first scene in the movie proper is at a diner. On the television there's an argument going on between three people: railroad tycoon James Taggart, some politician douchebag, and oil magnate Ellis Wyatt, whose success in the industry has brought an economic boom to Coloradwait a fucking minute, you were just telling us about how bad the oil shortages were and now you're telling us about a super-successful oil magnate. Didn't you read the script before you went ahead with this?
Anyway, we instantly see that James and the politician douchebag are the bad guys, and they're talking about "giving back to society" and how "the rich have to do their part," because that's totally how people talk all the time. Wyatt fires back with stuff about how the businesses could do a fine job of anything if the durn politicians would just get out of their way and how he doesn't have time for this bullshit (to the movie's extremely limited credit, they don't have him in the same studio as the other interviewees - he's on camera). Of course, a chunk of the conversation is dulled out by pointless dialogue in the diner. Waitress goes up to a bum and asks him a question to which he responds "Who is John Galt?" Apparently that's supposed to be a well-known rhetorical question in-verse, like "What is the meaning of life?" or more specifically "Why ask questions that don't have answers?" The movie better give a really fucking good explanation for how this phrase is a thing.
So some dude in a trenchcoat and a fedora approaches some other dude in a suit and coatman goes "I know what it's like to not have to work for others" and stuff, and dude in the suit goes "who are you?" And then the screen goes grey and there's a text pop-up that identifies him as Midas Mulligan, who has disappeared. Yeah, a text blurb, like this is some kind of techno-thriller or something.
Then the next scene goes to the office at Taggart Intercontinental, where Jimmy is having a spat with a guy named Eddie about how Jimmy is doing a shit job at running the railroads. Taggart is berated for, among other things, not doing anything to update the company's infrastructure since taking over from his dad. Because being a liberal means that you never bother to, like, improve your technology or your efficiency. Anyway, there was a bad train crash that's prompting them to lose Wyatt as a client and some other stuff about how they can't afford to build a thing in Mexico but Jimmy wants to do it 'cause Mexico's destitute and he wants to build them up and shit. Eddie is on about how that's a bad idea and then Jimmy threatens him with "Well if there's one thing I learned from my father, it's that anyone is expendable." From what I understand of the book, James is actually a character you could present who has some kind of depth to him, but the filmmakers didn't care about that and just kinda blew everything in his second scene: he talks about how he wants to help the less fortunate, but he's really just a self-serving slimeball.
We are then introduced to his sister, Dagny Taggart, who is our actual protagonist. Unlike her dipshit brother, she knows what's what and chews him out for mismanaging things, and reveals she's going to go ahead and make a deal with one Hank Rearden, who has a super-duper new metal that'll make the railroads better and repair their relationship with Wyatt, and James objects 'cause he'd rather do business with smaller companies that need it. Not that he can actually do anything, so we change scene.
There's also a bit where Dagny walks through the street, and there's a newspaper with a front page article on this Ragnar the Pirate dude what'll be important somewhere in the story, and there's a bum with a cardboard sign that says "Where's my job?" Because the nerve of these people, feeling like they're entitled to have a job. 'Cause I totally see tons of bums with signs that say that. I guess the closest analogy would be, like, that one Depression-era picture I saw where there's a guy with a sign that says "Want I want is a job and not charity." But why would an Objectivist disparage someone for wanting to earn a living?
Anyway, we're then introduced to our next protagonist, one Hank Rearden, who's the head of a steel company. The first scene he's in we're shown him casually rejecting a bunch of offers from unions and state institutions. He then meets with Dagny Taggart and they spend all of a minute closing a sale.
And here we see two crippling flaws with the film: the script sucks and the cast is lousy. I mean, let's take our two leads: Dagny Taggart and Hank Rearden. These are not characters that we are meant to empathize with, to be sure. One of the first things we're told (not shown, mind you, told) in a scene between Dagny and James is that Dagny doesn't have a lot of human emotion. Rearden is later shown being incredibly disdainful of a family member's charity work, so empathy ain't going to be a strong suit with his character, either. So with characters like these what you need are actors who are charismatic and impress you with their strength of will and personality. I'm talking Gregory Peck in To Kill a Mockingbird, Christopher Reeve in Superman, that sort of thing. The actors here simply don't sell it. The woman we've got playing Dagny has no presence, and you know who she reminds me of? Tina Fey. Samantha Bee. You know, actresses known for their work in comedy. Not really gonna sell the whole tough-as-nails, driven businesswoman thing. I mean, for this role I'd go for someone like Jennifer Lawrence, or Demi Moore, maybe Kiera Knightly. Who the fuck is this woman, anyway? Apparently her name's Taylor Schilling. Apparently she's the star of some Netflix series called Orange is the New Black. Hm. I'll go give that a look...
Okay, watched the first episode. Turns out that Taylor Schilling actually can act and is capable of building a likable character and portraying a wide breadth of emotions. Like, early in the episode she’s crying on the can after scenes of her trying to put on a brave face for her friends, and she has a big meltdown at the end of the episode. She’s literally able to be compelling while wiping her ass. So maybe it isn't her fault she's bad in this. Maybe the script just gave her nothing to work with, considering that everything she's been tasked with is boring shit about business.
The actor playing Rearden ain't very good, either. He's trying to be like this dignified, confident dude, but he's really just fucking smug, and I don't like smug in my protagonist unless you're Harrison Ford from like thirty years ago.
And they're not the only ones who aren't very good. The actor playing James Taggart is completely one-note and just playing him as a sleazy douchebag. The only actor in this movie that I actually like is the guy who plays Wyatt, 'cause he manages to display a sense of personality and confidence. You really get the sense that he's a no-nonsense guy who does what he feels like doing and fuck what anyone else thinks, which is exactly what the character and the story calls for. He's also fat and that makes him funny.
So we switch to Rearden's point of view as he heads home through a very nice park pathway and I find myself thinking that the sets we've seen so far are all pretty fucking nice-looking for what's supposed to be a terrifying dystopian world. I mean, we had that montage of broken down roads and shit at the beginning, but since then apart from that one scene of Dagny walking to work it's been nice houses and nice offices. The world's going to shit and they're living cushy lifestyles, why am I supposed to believe that they're struggling or something?
Well, then we're introduced to Rearden's wife and some of the extended family. There's a thing where he gives her a bracelet made out of the first batch of Rearden metal. Or at least his wife sees it and assumes it's his. I dunno. But anyway, someone calls his gift "selfish" in another bout of this screenplay being baffling and nonsensical. Rearden goes to his office in the house and then his brother Phillip comes in asking for a monetary donation to some charity, like mentioned earlier. We then get this gem of an exchange:
Phillip: "You don't care about helping the underprivileged, do you?"
Rearden: "No, I don't."
Will there be one line in this script that isn't about trying to hammer me with the film's message?
The next scene is the morning as Rearden and some glasses-wearing douchebag discuss Rearden's PR. Rearden doesn't care about his public perception (because it's not like real-life corporations put lots of work into PR and marketing so that they can attract investors and customers or anything). "But I am just in this to make money" "But you're not supposed to say that."
It's been two nights since I watched this half-hour, so I might be a little out of order. So Dagny tells James a bit more about how to run the company because investing in Mexico is a bad idea 'cause they're gonna nationalize errything, and someone comes in and announces his resignation. Dagny's shocked and there's a bit where she makes him a bunch of offers and he gives 'mysterious' answers as to how he's leaving and there's nothing she can do. Then at the end of the scene we get a screen thing like we did with Mulligan at the start of the movie. Some dude named Owen Kellogg. I have no idea who this person is or why I should care.
I asked someone else who's actually read some of the book. Apparently this guy actually does show up earlier in the book. Y'know. So we know who he is and what Dagny thinks of him, so we understand how she feels when she announces he's leaving. It's almost as though this script was written by someone who has no idea how story structure or screenwriting works. Oh yeah. That's 'cause it's written by a dude whose area of expertise is running a company that makes fitness gear. And some other dude whose main screenwriting experience is for direct-to-dvd horror films. In fact, a lot of the people involved with this are kinda no-names. The actors are all television character actors, the directors aren’t people with substantial credits to their name, and the music… Actually, the music to this film is pretty good. What’s this dude done? Checking Wikipedia I see a bunch of movies I only recognize ‘cause someone on TGWTG did a video on them, and… huh. Guy did the music for Spec Ops: The Line that wasn’t licensed rock tracks used for irony.
Anyway, so Rearden gets up in the middle of the night to work on something, Dagny calls him and they have a conversation where she bemoans how "so many great people" (the bank CEO and the dude from earlier) are disappearing, but Rearden reassures her that his metal and her railroad are gonna be what moves stuff. 'Cause they're the movers. 'Cause railroads are the Big Fucking Deal in 2016.
Then we get another scene of the guy in the trenchcoat and fedora (spoilers: it’s John Galt) convincing some other CEO to vanish, ‘cause the world can’t keep turning of a CEO quits.
You know, that’s a problem here. I mean, Rearden has some big technology breakthrough, so I guess someone who’s actually moving shit disappearing would kinda fit with the thing. John Galt’s like an engineer and an inventor, and Dagny, while not an inventor, is head of a big industrial powerhouse (as little sense as it makes in fucking 2016), so I can sorta buy the idea that if these people hightailed it out of there they could go for that “stop the motor of the world.” But who are the disappeared dudes so far? A CEO, an Executive, and another CEO. The first one’s a banker, for fuck’s sake. Who’s going to miss a banker? People don’t like bankers! That’s where we get pervasive antisemitic stereotypes! Or is it the other way around? I'm not sure…
Gee. It’s almost like the film is trying to be all self-congratulatory for the Wall Street crowd, rather than the whole “titans of industry” thing. I dunno if that’s a problem in the book, but it sure seems to be a problem with the film. The fuck did Owen do, anyway? I dunno. You never bothered to fucking show us. Or even tell us.
So there’s more stuff with railroads and Dagny convincing James to stop the development in Mexico because they need to focus on improving the shit they have in the US! Because it’s not like companies try to globalize or anything.
In fact, I just get the feeling that for a movie meant to sing the praises of big business and the like… it doesn’t really do a good job of showing what business actually entails. Or what good business practices are. I’m no expert on business, but I take a bunch of business classes at college and there are things that just don’t make a lot of sense to me.
Like, we have Dagny and Rearden making an agreement about the metal thing in the space of about a minute. And I get that you could chalk that up to artistic license, ‘cause nobody wants to sit through loads of boring shit about contracts, agreements on pricing for resources, consulting the board of directors (Corporations are collectively-owned entities, by the way. I dunno how well that meshes with Objectivism). I mean, James Taggart seems to object to it, but Dagny’s able to just do it anyway. But then you got stuff about how Rearden don’t give a fuck about PR, even though that’s pretty important for real-world companies. I mean, the Koch Brothers gives shittons of money to the Metropolitan Opera. That don’t give them the same kind of benefits as their contributions to politicians, but being able to brand yourself as a supporter of the arts is gonna get a lot of people on your side, who will in turn give you their money. Good Public Relations is good business. If people like you it means they’ll be more likely to buy your product and it also means you don’t have to invest extra resources in trying to do damage control.
And you got Dagny who’s entering into a big contract with Rearden’s fabulous new metal, which as far as we know hasn’t been fully tested. I mean, the first metal that he cast he made into that bracelet he gave to his wife. Unless he was holding onto that bracelet for a while it raises questions as to how long this metal has been there. And then he goes and says he’s gonna stake his entire company on it. Hey, asshole! What happens if your shit oxidizes and gets brittle or something? What if it turns out to be toxic like asbestos? What if the cost of the metal becomes too much for practicality? There’s a whole lot of shit that can go wrong with a magic metal you just invented. That’s why we do things like testing and shit. A hard changeover of your company’s entire infrastructure is costly, foolhardy, and doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense. That’s why in, like, real-world companies, it’s usually a better idea to do things like parallel or pilot conversions, where you gradually phase in to a new system or way of doing things. That way you’re able to work out the kinks in the system and shit like that, and if there’s a problem it doesn’t fuck over your entire company.
And James Taggart does shit that doesn’t make sense even as a cartoonish caricature of leftism. So he makes new railroads all over the place without bothering to maintain the ones he has, which causes accidents? I thought liberals were huge sticklers for safety. Y’know, like how we got rid of child factory laborers? Or had unions who fought for safe working conditions? Or how Ralph Nader wrote a book about how the Chevvy Corvair had a tendency to roll over? And heck, he’s the guy trying to develop in Mexico. If you wanted him to be some kind of stodgy liberal, wouldn’t it make more sense that he’d object to growing the company so he can stay a “small business”? And fuck, he keeps talking about how they have a responsibility to help the less fortunate, but the film never bothers to, like, show us his wasteful Corporate Social Responsibility policies (nevermind that there are plenty of CSR policies that actually help to promote sustainable company growth or anything). Heck, portraying someone as being opposed to globalism and development and staying small-minded and stuff would actually be a pretty good way showing someone being opposed to progress, if you wanted to work with analogies.
Actually, in a way, James has the right idea when it comes to wanting to work in places that aren’t ‘Murica (granted, Mexico is pretty past the “developing” stage, but I’m just talking about his rhetoric). I mean, one of the reasons that globalization appeals to so many firms is that native markets are saturated. There are limited growth options available. But if you go to developing nations or places like India, where you have a rising middle class full of educated young people, you can get a lot of growth and a lot of money.
Wasn’t this film was written by a businessman? Is my college edumacation just steering me wrong here?
So then we get a scene in a fancy restaurant where James Taggart is talking with two political stooges and that one guy who was talking with Rearden earlier, about how they need to stop Rearden metal, ostensibly because with the iron ore shortage that has at no point been mentioned until now, that’d give Rearden a monopoly. But it’s really just ‘cause liberals hate success. We also get a brief glimpse of this Francisco D’Anconia dude, who at a glance makes me think of the cokehead douchebag from Horrible Bosses. I guess the movie will get to him later.
So then we got stuff about a “Fair Share” bill and an “Anti-Dog-Eat-Dog Act,” which is good for James Taggart ‘cause he hurts his business rivals and I almost get the feeling that if the movie were actually trying for some sort of, like, political intrigue thing, this might be a step in the right direction. But then again, I could always just switch off this movie and watch House of Cards.
Not that the movie bothers to explain what these bills are. Just that they force Wyatt to have to work with Taggart again, so he shows up and starts foaming at the mouth at Dagny, and holy shit we have an actor who’s actually able to emote and has presence and stuff. Dagny assures him that she had nothing to do with the shenanigans what shafted his business partners, and he gives her the stern talking-to about how she’d better not fuck this up.
Also, Mexico goes under ‘cause the government nationalizes everything, but thanks to Dagny’s advice, Taggart Intercontinental pulls out and doesn’t lose anything, but James takes credit for it just in case we weren’t already aware he’s the douchebag bad guy.
So I’m thirty minutes into this. I think that’s enough of it for now. Since this movie is only ninety-six minutes long, that makes it pretty easy to divide into manageable segments.
Toodles until next time!
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