The Antisocial Socialist

“It was like a sex scene in an Ayn Rand novel, huh?” — Angels in America, Tony Kushner


Erstwhile on Atlas Shrugged III: Who Is John Galt?, society fell apart because of a lack of Minnesota wheat and an excess of socialism, and Dagny returned from the Crunchy Conservative Compound to save her railroad company.

( Speeches, shagging, and apocalypse )

That’s it folks! I’m gonna go drink myself to death.

I fucking did it. I watched the fucking movie. For science, and for you. Because unlike the characters in Atlas Shrugged Part 3: Who Is John Galt?, I believe that sacrifice and altruism are among the highest of virtues.



Actual picture of me.

Background
Are you just tuning in or forgot what happened during the first two parts of the trilogy? That’s understandable; they’re totally forgettable and I wouldn’t blame your brain for blocking out that experience. Part I begins here and Part II begins here.

If the Atlas Shrugged movies were some kind of communistic indie art film, it might be justifiable for a producer to say of them, “fuck what the market demands or desires! I want to express myself and dance naked beneath the full moon painted with my own menstrual blood, capturing the entire experience on degraded Super8 film. Art!”

But these movies are all about how awesome capitalism is, and how there needs to be more capitalism because the present level of capitalism is insufficiently capitalistic and CEOs are just too goshdarned nice. And also about how you shouldn’t beg money from anyone, not even Kickstarter. As you’ll see, our fictional heroes in this film believe that no one has an intrinsic right to exist unless they are capable of generating shitloads of money independently. In the Randroid imagination then, is a movie that no one wants to see and that will make negative amounts of money still worth creating? With everything I know about libertarianism, I would suspect the answer is no.

Naturally, they made it anyway.

The filmmakers had a particularly interesting challenge here, which was whether they could make a movie even worse than the previous two. I am pleased to report that they were successful in this. It was absolutely the only success they had. I can safely say that Atlas Shrugged 3: Who Is John Galt is the worst of three incredibly terrible movies, and that is a significant accomplishment.



The Problem of Genre
I certainly have my biases when it comes to film, but I do try to review—and appreciate—films in the context of genre. I can still get into a movie that’s not my cup of tea if it’s a well-made example of its genre and those involved seem to be into the thing they’re doing. And I can appreciate competence in filmmaking, even when I disagree with the fundamental ideology or narrative.

So what kind of a film is Atlas Shrugged? The first problem with it is that it does not actually know what kind of film it is. It wants to be a political thriller, but it also kind of wants to be a science fiction movie, but by the third movie, it’s become actual fantasy. I’m going to be overly generous and classify it broadly as a work of political/philosophical fiction. I say “generous” because a) the politics in it are heavily reliant upon literal magic in order for them to make sense, which may be an interesting narrative twist, but not exactly useful prescriptively when it comes to running an IRL country, and b) Objectivism is less of a political philosophy and more:



Film and Ideology
There are few things that nearly all political, theological, and philosophical schools agree upon, but most would accept some concept of society and interdependence—not because of some mystical concept of “human nature,” but because we have evolved as social animals, and part of the process of civilization involves teaching cranky toddlers to share their toys. Objectivism is developmentally stuck in the toy-hoarding stage, and as we can see by flicking on the news for 30 seconds, toy-hoarding is fundamentally unsustainable.

But Atlas is hardly the first example of someone taking poorly thought out and/or evil philosophy and using the medium of film to promote it. Some of the most heavily influential works of cinema were created to spread horrible ideas. But the more horrible the idea, I think, the better the film needs to be in order to convince an audience that the ideas behind it are worth listening to.

Let’s say I had an awful political philosophy. Something along the lines of “my ethnic or national group is fundamentally superior, but for some reason threatened, by an oppressed ethnic group that is darker in complexion, and that latter group should be murdered en masse as a result.” If I phrase it like that, it’s going to sound really bad, right? So in order to get people to follow my shitty idea, I would need to get a filmmaker like D.W. Griffiths to glorify the Klan with Birth of a Nation, or Leni Riefenstahl to make the Nazis look awesome with Triumph of the Will, or Zack Snyder to drum up support for bombing the Middle East with The 300.



Are these films good? They’re toxic at the core, laughably melodramatic, and ideologically abhorrent. But they’re effective at stirring emotion, visually innovative, and engaging to watch, and they’re good at getting people to shut off their brains, which is a requirement for fascism. That’s why they’re worth studying, even if one is an anti-fascist who disagrees at every possible level with their underlying ideas. I think I would say that they might not be “good” movies, per se, but they’re successful movies.

So, okay, what if I want to promote the idea that the only thing wrong with capitalism is that if your boss goes on vacation for a month, society will fall apart? That’s obviously a stupid idea, and to get someone to buy into it, I would need to have found a brilliant director. I certainly wouldn’t choose Jim Manera. Letting this man near a camera is a worse idea than letting Roman Polanski film your pre-teen daughter’s pool party.

And don’t give me any talk about the low budget either. It had a budget of $5 million. That’s over 700 El Mariachis, and Rodriguez didn’t even have CGI to spice things up back then.

There are two good things to be said about this movie:

1) It is mercifully short. Much shorter than 50 Shades of Grey.
2) There’s very little actual movie in it. They didn’t have enough money to shoot the whole movie so they did a few scenes, slapped some voiceovers on shitty stock footage, and called it a day.

Otherwise, this is the worst atrocity in cinema history since Kazan narced to the HUAC committee, or would be if anyone actually watched this movie. But no one did. Except me. I watched it so you don’t have to.


( Here we go again! )

Stay tuned next for a detailed discussion of the failconomics of Galt's Gulch and also the sound I make when, in a fit of desperation, I chew and swallow my own tongue!

The jokes just kind of write themselves, don't they?

Have at it, folks; I'm exhausted.

You know what? I'm not going to be productive today anyway, so I'm just going to post the rest of this thing.

Previously on AS:S:





( A train wreck. Literally. )
I'm feeling a bit ragey at the moment. Please send kittens. Lots of kittens. Bring ‘em in the comments. You know what to do. And someone get me a drink, stat. I’m going to drink it and then I’m going to drink all of the drinks that the actors didn’t drink in this movie. In fact, for every drink that they were holding but didn't drink, I'm going to drink two. So there.

Hey guys? Guys? I can't wait until the last movie, which will be 99.9% John Galt's radio address played over a montage of business people having meetings and looking purposeful.

Okay, you filthy commie pinkos, who's ready for a new Cheatsheet of Freedom?

Atlas Shrugged Part I (my review begins here), as you might have predicted, was a critical and commercial flop. It turns out that, well, there just wasn’t a market for a sloppily written, produced, and acted abortion of a movie based on a politically and philosophically vapid novel that also happens to be really dull. Producer John Aglialoro claimed that he wasn’t going to make Parts II and III unless Part I turned a profit, but upon being bitch-slapped hard by the Invisible Hand of the Free Market, went and made a second one anyway even though no one wanted to see it.

In an attempt to make Part II not quite as excretable as Part I (a low bar, to be sure, but a bar that everyone involved in this production manages to blunder into nevertheless) the entire cast has been changed. This does not improve the movie in any discernable way. In fact, the actors in both films are as wooden and robotic as a steampunk mecha, such that it took me awhile to realize that all of the generic white people in this movie were different generic white people from the last movie, not just some of them. They’re also, let’s face it, all too ugly for the capitalist übermenschen they’re supposed to be portraying. At least The Fountainhead has Gary Cooper. This has a bunch of bargain basement soap opera stars with smarmy faces.

The full title of the film is Atlas Shrugged, Part II: The Strike (which I’ll abbreviate to AS:S). Spoiler: There are no actual strikes in this movie. A strike is an organized withdrawal of labour by the working class. In this movie, a bunch of rich people go on vacation and then two trains collide in a tunnel. Not in a Freudian way. Possibly in a Freudian way. At any rate, that’s literally all that happens.

My alternate interpretation of the first movie still holds, which is that it’s actually about John Galt, serial killer, murdering the world’s capitalists and hiding the bodies somewhere no one will find them. My theory is not contradicted by anything in this movie either. Keeping it in mind is the only way to actually enjoy the film.

A warning: I don’t even have words for how bad this movie is. It’s worse than scat porn. It's worse than pubic lice. It’s worse than the Holocaust. It’s worse than Truck Nutz. It just pulls down its pants and takes a giant shit over the entire history of cinema. Don’t watch it. Trust me. Just don’t watch it. Like, I feel bad screencapping it for you because by doing so, I may have inadvertently exposed you to a fraction of the horror currently drumming its way inside my skull, as though I’d read you a few badly translated verses of the Necronomicon and now you can almost feel the slippery tentacles of madness tugging at your ankles.

Regardless, I watched AS:S so that you don’t have to. My application for fucking sainthood follows directly below the cut.

( and so it begins )


Part 2 of the review is here, and it's full of people holding their champagne but not drinking it and all of the leads looking pained and having no fun. Also meetings.

OMG YOU GUYS OMG

YOU GUYS

Despite the first movie being smacked down by the Invisible Hand of the Free Market, Atlas Shrugged II is out.

And it sounds horrendous. And Robert Picardo is in it, because apparently former Star Trek actors mostly get work in movies like this. I am so excited. I hope he and Armin Shimmerman are skeezy together in a scene where they plot against the heroic capitalists who singlehandedly turn the wheels of industry with their bulging arms.


THE GUBMINT IS COMING AFTER OUR COPYRIGHTS!


Are your ideals rigid or are you just happy to see me?

Okay, kids, you know the score. I need this movie in my life. First person to find me a genuine working torrent gets the review dedicated to them.

Yesterday on Atlas Shrugged: Part I, nothing happened except for some shot-reverse-shot of people with dated hairdos hanging out in opulent offices and dining rooms. Oh, and Dagny wanted a piece of Hank Rearden’s steel.

( Trains, and yes, in a Freudian way )

I got to see the naked bike ride today! That was very—not the sort of thing that you want to see while having lunch, believe it or not. But I was done my mango mock chicken and it stayed down so that was good.

I tried to snap a picture with the Infernal Device but it didn't save properly. Consider your eyeballs spared. The Infernal Device is kinder than I would have been.

Anyway, I say this as someone quite supportive of Critical Mass and its variants—how does one actually ride a bike naked? It sounds like a recipe for pure pain.

In lieu of that brain-scarring image, I offer another: ( How to succeed as an Ayn Rand character )

On an unrelated note: Bear lost — and now "kidnappers" want $10,000 in cupcakes. This is one of those rare headlines where reading the whole article actually makes it funnier. Because the cupcakes have to be gluten-free.

Ayn Rand meets the Dead Kennedys. It had to happen. Watch and enjoy before someone takes it off for copyright violations.

A few pages in, I became engrossed in Romantically Apocalyptic and was nearly late for work. It's an utterly gorgeous webcomic about people amusing themselves after the apocalypse.

When I say gorgeous, I mean it looks like this:



Completely unrelated, but also very cool: There probably doesn't need to be epic take-downs of Ayn Rand anymore, but I do admire how clear and concise The World Is Socialist is. Basically, yeah, this is why I'm a socialist, and this is why Objectivism is bunk.

Here's why she doesn't have an answer -- snow storms are socialist. They hit everyone the same. We have a collective interest in getting the streets cleared asap, so we can get to work, so the ambulances can get in to take people who have strokes and heart attacks to the hospital, etc etc. We got a tiny peek, in NYC, what an Ayn Rand paradise would be like. Because we'd still be under a couple of feet of snow, a week later. Snow doesn't care how much Reardon Metal you have or if Dagny Taggart thinks you're hot. :-)