ATLAS SHRUGGED PART 3: WHO IS JOHN GALT?

It is not the movie that I would have made; but it was not my movie to make. If I had directed the effort, then other people would be criticizing my work.  It is easy to find complaints from fans.  Mine are below.  They stem from the fact that we all have had the film in our heads for years, even decades.  We all imagined it.  However, none of us actually realized our imaginings.  John Aglialoro did.  With productive investment from Harmon Kaslow, Scott DeSapio. Ed Snider, David Kelley and a large body of fans (among them my daughter), Aglialoro finally brought Ayn Rand’s masterpiece to the screen.

 

I watched it twice.

They strayed from the book for reasons other than the translation across media.  Catering to conservatives not only violated the philosophical premises, it actually denied them in real time.  To make the message acceptable, the essence was removed.  As delivered, Galt’s Speech was an amorphous expression of emotional individualism already known from

Ahead of me in line,
another generation of fans.

Anthem.  Galt’s Speech could have been cut to the necessary length and still developed its political message from the requisite metaphysics and epistemology.  Instead, they missed their real audience, and catered to old people and political conservatives when Atlas Shrugged in particular, and the works of Ayn Rand in general, always have and always will belong to the young. 

Ayn Rand taught that contradictory premises result in conflicting and unreconcilable conclusions. One example from AS3 was the mother in the Valley who said that she chose to homeschool her children, rather than hand them over to a school that did not teach them to think.  Was there an alternative?  Any kids in the Valley would be “homeschooled” one way or another. There was no  public school for them to attend.  

Even though the heroes of  AS3 had several reasons to escape an oppressive society, you do not need to go to Galt’s Gulch to homeschool your children. 

Would it not be a huge mistake for her to keep her kids "at home" when they could be learning arithmetic at the Mulligan Bank?  The very idea that children should not work but be in school was an interventionist political plan to keep them from competing for jobs against unskilled adults.  As the d'Anconia mine is delved by human labor, perhaps the children could put in 12 hours a day to benefit from the experience of learning first hand about the early industrial revolution.  Well, perhaps not...  

September 19. On the "Galt's Gulch" discussion board contributor LetsShrug pointed out that in fact, the scene is from the book.  I found it on page 730 of the New American Library paperback. The line about homeschooling was not an element from the work of Ayn Rand.  It was just another sop thrown to the conservatives. 

• The coins obviously were not gold.  The props were brass.  Alongside Night had a real gold coin.
•  We already met Jim Taggart before the marquee card identified him.
• The names on the ceiling of producers who spent the first night in Galt’s home included many who were not in the book.  Among them was Ashish Gulhati, an open source hacker from India.  I am happy for him; and pleased that he was included. However, it was not canonical.  That being so, this was in fact a reward to contributors to the financing of the movie.
•  Where did the Wyatt workers come from?
•  Where did the d’Anconia workers come from?
•  Cool as was his airplane – a Lockheed Electra? – Galt’s plane was not powered by his own motor.
•  Dr. Robert Stadler was soft-pedaled, not identified as the government-funded researcher whose intelligence serves brutality, whose own contradictions made that not just possible but necessary.
• When meeting Mr. Thompson, how did Galt have a cell phone in his pocket?  Why was he not searched? 

Also, contrary to the book, Eddie Willers was saved by the heroes.  In the book his fate was purposely left undetermined. Ayn Rand specifically intended that and explained it.

 

Every work is a matrix of trade-offs.
From Spaceflight Technology,  Howard Seifert, ed.,
New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1959.

The movie offered many more positives.  Kristoffer Polaha’s performance was masterful.  His facial expressions spoke volumes.  He “got” the part: he understood the context.  He carried Dagny into the bedroom and laid her down. “I can walk,” she said.  “I know,” replied.  In shot after shot, he is aware, intelligent, focused, and  yet envisioning a wider horizon.  In the scene where he is captured, he was amused by the mental simplicity of Mr. Thompson.  When Galt is being tortured and Dr. Ferris asks, “How are we doing?”  Galt’s facial reply is miles deep. 

Jeff Yagher as Jeff Allen was the capable, competent worker who is not an innovator.  When the switching system breaks down, he does not know what do to, and neither is it expected that he should.  But he understands what Dagny Taggart intends as soon as she speaks her first words of command.  Yagher was also the narrator.  That was a segue was from the story of the Twentieth Century Motor Company from Part II.  That, too, was a deviation from the book, but one acceptable as the translation across media.

The door scene was good.  When Dagny pleads with John not to return to the City, they are still symbolically separated by a gulf of misunderstanding. 

The scene in Galt's apartment when the Feds force the door to the motor was perfect, right out of the book.

The best choice was to present this as a love story.   Atlas Shrugged works on many levels.  The girl-finds-boy thread was a dependable trope for Ayn Rand.  Similarly, most readers easily see The Fountainhead as Howard Roark’s biography (which it is) but miss the counterpoint of Dominique Francon’s narrative.  Here, the female lead is front and center. 

Overall, this was a finesse.  The producers, director, actors, and cinematography team all achieved as much (if not more) on $5 million as the first installment (also a grand achievement) did on fifteen.  "Third time is the charm."    

ALSO ON NECESSARY FACTS

Reflections on Atlas Shrugged: Part 1

John Aglialoro Does Not Shrug

Anthem as a Graphic Novel

Fact and Value Aboard Serenity

Love, Loss and Redemption in Atlas Shrugged

That Goddam Ayn Rand Book

John Aglialoro Does Not Shrug

Atlas 2 and Atlas 3 are still in the works.  Obviously John Aglialoro was disappointed by the lack of response.  If everyone who bought the book saw the movie, the profits would have been monumental. The rumor that he was throwing in the towel apparently began with the LA Times Entertainment section, "24 Frames" story (here).  But a week later, Aglialoro told the Hollywood Reporter (here) that he is going forward after all.

On the Official Movie Website you can get the news, watch out-takes, and buy gear.  The company started a "Demand Atlas" campaign worldwide.  The "Demand Atlas" campaign here in Ann Arbor worked.  When the initial release was announced, only 10 cities were on the list.  The Demand Atlas clicks (via an Event marketing site) brought it to 30 metro areas and 300 theaters.   It ran for three weeks here in Ann Arbor.  And right now - two months later - it is still in Grand Rapids.  

The way theaters work, if you have a local social group that wants a movie, find out how many seats you need to sell.  In addition to the big name cineplexes, here in Ann Arbor, we have two theaters downtown that show second-run and art films.  One of the malls without a theater has a converted space with Dollar Movies, sort of a 100-minute babysitter, if you think of it that way.  Atlas Shrugged Part 1 is still earning income, though not making money and if your town has not seen a run, you might have an entrepreneurial opportunity.

Harmon Kaslow, Jeff Freilch, and John Aglialoro
from the Official Movie Website Gallery

Like Star Trek, LOTR, and Pride & Prejudice, this is an entertainment product that appeals to a fan market, rather than making one. Yet, the history of entrepreneurship shows that failures are the price of profits.  Interestingly, railroading itself provides a convenient paradigm, as many roads failed financially several times in succession, going through new receiverships or the same guys back again, until the economies of scale and interconnected lines finally allowed profits.  Yet, investors still poured in money.  (Read The Man Who Found the Money: John Kennedy Stewart and the Financing of the Western Railroads by Engelbourg and Bushkoff, Michigan State University Press, 1996.   Beginning as a grocer in the 1840s, Kennedy financed James J. Hill's Great Northern in 1890.)  Considering the 50-year history of Atlas Shrugged in particular, and Ayn Rand's influence in general, it is clear that we are not yet at the end of the line.  

These comments were first posted somewhat differently on the "Objectivist Living" discussion board. Read here. OL poster "Randall" provided Donovan Albanesi's “An Open Lettter to John Aglialoro” from his Culture of Reason Center blog.

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Reflections on Atlas Shrugged Part 1

I saw it the moment it opened, 12:10 PM, Friday, April 15. The work was credible. I found it impossible to imagine seeing the movie without having read the book. So, for me, it was a matter of my own visualizations versus their realizations.   Overall, the movie is everything I wanted and a bit less.  This is true, also, of  Pride and Prejudice or the Star Trek franchise.  Atlas Shrugged is primarily for fans.  

[Note: These comments are based on earlier posts to Rebirth of Reason and Objectivist Living discussion boards.  They are edited and amended for this presentation.]

The film has been compared to My Big Fat Greek Wedding which had near-zero traffic at first but which stayed in theaters for a year, building a following.  Atlas can go to dollar cinemas at the malls for months to come.  Producers of the 1939 Wizard of Oz were reluctant to take on a story that was not popular and which failed as a film in 1910.  I hope that we don't have to wait 30 years for the next attempt. 

I felt that Graham Beckel as Ellis Wyatt did the most credible job of projecting the character. Taylor Schilling delivered her lines well, but she has not deeply felt what it is like to grow up around trains, major in engineering, and all the rest. Her acting, like all of their acting, was competent acting. But Beckel really looked and felt like an oil man from Colorado  (In the book, Wyatt is a young genius, and Beckel is not young, but that is a quibble.)  Grant Bowler did not feel like a man who bought his first steel mill at 25, after being hungry on the streets at 12. The exchange of the bracelet could have been done closer to the book.  The ride along the John Galt Line could have been shot from the nose of the cab.   But it was not my movie to make.  I appreciate the work of those who did, the producers, director, and actors.  I was happy to see Armin Shimerman as Dr. Potter.  Shimerman played the Ferengi, Quark, on the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine series.  (Quark runs a bar; and the Ferengi are consumate traders.)  At a Trekker con, I asked him if he had read any Ayn Rand.  He said that he read The Fountainhead and would be revisiting Rand to add depth to his character.

On the Objectivist Living discussion board, Kat, on 15 April 2011 - 10:05 PM, said:The Owen Kellogg scene was almost comical because the guy was such a dweeb you would think Dagny would be firing him rather than giving him a promotion.

I replied:  I liked that. I understood it, to the core. In a rational world where people who are motivated by the ideas portrayed in Rand's work, who do you think would be in charge? Our world is a collectivist tribalist remnant which is only now discovering individualism. Even the LP convention organizes people alphabetically by state. Is that individualist thinking?  Dagny would see the brilliant mind. When she said that she was "grooming him for management" what do you think she meant? He just needs a couple of classes or seminars in public speaking and project management. It is in our world of the collectivist corporation and the altruist state that the Owen Kelloggs of the world do not find leadership within complex organizations.

The theme of "the mind on strike" is deeper as every social structure knows social loafing.  We call them "slackers" because when not pulling their own weight, it is their segment of the line that hangs loose. The demise of General Motors, Chrysler, and Bear Stearns was due as much to internal expropriation of talent and "sanction of the victim" operations as anything the government did -- after all, every firm suffers government intervention in some way, though, granted that software development is not the same as investment banking and heavy industry.  But, that, too, points to the deeper theme: common wage employees who see themselves as sole entrepreneurs offering their best effort for the the highest rewards were not welcome in the corporations that failed.  Long ago, they were attracted to other kinds of work, other employers, as other workers were drawn to the failing corporations for non-objective motives. 


Even though Atlas Shrugged is a philosophical detective story about the theft and recovery of genius, this is primarily a political movie, as many people read  Atlas as a political novel.  However, the book's three parts were named for metaphysical axioms.  Dialog and narrative integrate epistemology with ethics all through the book. 


Ultimately, while the conflict between government and business is obvious, deeper is the nature of those in any social context who carry the project on their shoulders despite the loafers.  ("Social loafing" is a known fact.  In economics it more formally labeled the "problem of the free rider" or defined by various "externalities."   The counter presentation is the "tragedy of the commons."  Tragic though it be, no one suggests doing away with the commons.)  That applies to the people within a corporation - or within a government agency: police and military face the problem of "goldbricks."  In the book,  it always comes back to metaphysics and epistemology.  The movie does not hinge on those conflicts.

It could.  In a different day, a different Atlas could be an explicitly philosophical movie, derived from metaphysics and epistemology, in which the political conflicts are seen as expressions of deeper motives.

 It could be told from the point of view of John, Frisco, and Ragnar at Patrick Henry University with Profs. Akston and Stadler and follow forward from there, peaking at the 20th Century Motors, bringing Galt to the Taggart Transcontinental, Ragnar at sea, and Frisco a playboy, ending with Dagny's decision to create The John Galt Line.  "Let him come and claim it," she says.  "He will," Francisco replies.  End Part I.  The central "action" would be arguments among the boys and Akston on the proper course of action, on their isolation from Stadler over the State Science Institute.  You might think that a movie cannot be carried by dialog, but what makes Pride and Prejudice, a perennial favorite?  It is the only movie I have watched three incarnations of -- and not a gun, bomb, or starship...

A psychological Atlas could portray the disintegration of James Taggart, from "Don't bother me!" to his realization at the State Science lab machine that he wants to die.  That would be the dark shadow that illuminates Hank Rearden's self-discovery -- a story that could play out in a laissez faire utopia.   Rearden's conflict is really within himself and reflected in his relations with his family, hallmarked by his wife.  The government was largely irrelevant there, but the theme was the same and the action followed the same path: he quit working for his family; he also quit working for the government.  And, as for the mind not working, his was not properly engaged on the problem of Dagny Taggart.  Until Francisco d'Anconia gave him a kick start, Rearden's thinking about romance was not actually thinking at all. 

If you search YouTube for fan-made Atlas Shrugged trailers, you will find several efforts.  This is one of the best by high schoolers:

We will see other complete productions of Atlas Shrugged, created with animation software that allows the director to choose from the full range of Hollywood greats.

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