Atlas Shrugged, checked phone for messages

I saw Atlas Shrugged, Part II last weekend.

[pause for howls of derisive laughter]

I saw Part I when it came out, and was not impressed. But because of how many times I read the book as a teenager and imagined a movie version of it… well, I owe it to adolescent Fang to keep going to see these things as long as they keep making them.

Which one way or another, shouldn’t be much longer. Besides the fact that there’s only 1/3 of the story left to tell, based on attendance at the screening I went to, there will be little or no financial incentive to go ahead with Part III.

Then again, there was little or no financial incentive for them to make Part II, and that didn’t stop them. It’s an interesting logical inconsistency on the part of Rand’s filmmaking devotees. Her philosophy would require that if you made part one and nobody came, you’d be a damned fool to go ahead with a sequel for which there was a thundering absence of demand. On the other hand, being a devotee means proceeding on faith—faith in an external third party, in this case Rand herself. And she would definitely not been down with that kind of hero worship (unless she was present to luxuriate in it in person).

According to her philosophy, the only person one can worship without compromising one’s morality is oneself. Bankrolling a movie you knew almost empirically ahead of time would be a financial failure—as an exercise in hero worship—would be an act one of Rand’s sniveling villains would have perpetrated, not one of her valiant heroes.

All that aside, this movie was a considerably more professional affair than the first. It moved quicker, I’d swear it was better directed (too lazy too look up the talent involved) and the whole enterprise had more of a big-screen, less straight-to-cable vibe to it.

The story picks up where Part I left off, with the world going to hell first because of government over-regulation and an extravagantly socialist, extra-Constitutional social agenda, and then because all the smartest lads and lassies start to disappear, and the businesses they created are incapable of running in their absence.

And chaos reigns.

It’s impossible to discuss this movie dispassionately because its source material is such a political hot potato. Written by Ayn Rand, who escaped Communist Russia in the dead of night as a young girl, the book is a manifesto, mostly to alienated loners (yo, are my people in the house?!) and Libertarian-leaning right-wingers, who happen to be all the rage right now. The Republican Vice Presidential candidate, for example, happens to be an avowed fan.

What is it about Rand’s prose that so riles up the right and repels the left? Well, let’s just say, as a writer, Rand didn’t risk leaving a lot to subtext. People are stupid, she would have reasoned, and will ignore subtleties if given the opportunity. So she spelled everything out. And in my experience, different people cling to different aspects of it.

God help anyone who embraced all of it, they’d be a raging sociopath like Rand.

What teenage Fang took away was that it was all right to be different if the people who were the same were boring or stupid, which in my case they pretty much were. It was quite the validation of the lifestyle that had been forced upon me by my natural discomfort with my fellow humans.

What strictly textual readers take away, however, seems to be that poor people are lazy and social programs equal legalized extortion. With which statement Rand would almost certainly agree. I knew that was what she was preaching at the time, but I’ve always cherry-picked my personal philosophy. I haven’t found anybody who’s got everything figured out yet, so I take the parts that make sense to me, and that fit together. And discard or assimilate the crazy.

Here’s an example. In almost every instance in Rand’s body of work (with the exception of Howard Roark’s design for a low-income housing project in The Fountainhead), charitable efforts are made out to be either the pastime of the guilty rich, or the last resort of honorable men and women with guns to their heads.

In the same canon, she preaches, “If it feels good, do it.” (She was so unabashedly about self-gratification, she authored a non-fiction book called The Virtue of Selfishness.)

So the intuitive leap I took was, if it feels good to be charitable, I should do that.

Which is a calculation I don’t recall running into in any of Rand’s writing, but it makes sense to me to this day.

With the movie’s content and timing so controversial, it was hard not to bring a little political baggage to the screening. I noticed two things that I thought merited mention. One was the inclusion by the filmmakers—the movie takes place in the present day—of a bunch of “Occupy” protesters in several scenes. It was so blatant it completely took me out of the movie every time they appeared onscreen.

The other was a big dialogue scene between two of Rand’s tortured captain-of-industry heroes. It was all boilerplate Rand, but again, in the heat of the political season, it was impossible not to run it through the political rinse in my brain.

In the scene, the two men are talking about what separates men of honor like them from the majority of men—the 47%? The 99%—without honor. (Every page of every book Rand ever wrote contains a version of this dialogue scene.) They agree it is because they are the Makers, and the others are the Takers. They produce the actual commodities, while the men and women they revile just buy political cover and play numbers games and make their money on the margins of the heroes’ efforts. And a light flashed on in my head, Holy crap, that’s as true today as the day it was written, back in the 1940s.

Except today, the paper-pushing smoothies are the ones sitting on the top of the heap—crafty Ivy-leaguers like Mitt Romney, who rode to riches at Bain Capital, buying and selling other peoples’ creations—and the ones who produce the actual commodities, like the visionaries who sold or lost their companies to Bain, are now the underclass.

Hardly the meritocracy-based Utopia Rand’s philosophy envisioned. The paradigm that Rand railed against still exists, but it’s been turned on its head. Worse, her philosophical banner has been picked up by the very second-raters and parasites she spent her entire career excoriating.

If they make a third film, I’ll go see that, too. For better or worse, her writing helped pull me through what was generally speaking a pretty bumpy adolescence.

But it’s a good thing Rand was an atheist so she is saved the indignity of rolling over in her grave at the offense of her cause being carried forward by third-rate film adaptations, uneducated people in funny hats with misspelled placards and the kind of leaders that are portrayed as vainglorious empty suits in her novels.