The Meaning

Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged is my favorite novel with an unforgettable story and an extremely memorable lineup of characters. Rand’s goal was to challenge the attitude of society and government that men of superior achievement “owe” something to the men of mediocrity. An old Japanese proverb states “the nails that stick out get pounded down”, and the pounding that takes place in Atlas Shrugged is accomplished through government nationalization, forced redistribution of assets to the politically favored, and laws and regulations that supposedly equalize competition. “Who is John Galt” is Rand’s famous line which is an expression of futility and of giving up, and the titans of industry gradually adopt that line as their own attitude and they go on strike from the world as more and more control is taken from their lives as society, absent a philosophy that recognizes achievement and reason as man’s highest moral values, continuously decays and crumbles. Rand has often been accused of being an unsympathetic individual who worships at the altar of big business. This is quite untrue as the chief villain in Atlas Shrugged is a big businessman, and in an interview conducted by Mike Wallace, Rand explained how big businessmen are quite apt to use government as a force to club the competition. She refers to such men as the original robber barons, and stresses that reverence should be reserved for men of individual achievement. Rand has also been accused of being someone who ignores or looks down upon the “little guy”. This is also quite untrue – Rand in fact mourns those men who never learned to achieve success in a society so determined to create equality that individualism is thrown out the window. When the world finally learns the answer to the question “Who is John Galt?”, in perhaps the most powerful passage in the novel Ayn Rand wrote:

“There have always been men of intelligence who went on strike, in protest and despair, but they did not know the meaning of their action. The man who retires from public life, to think, but not to share his thoughts-the man who chooses to spend his years in the obscurity of menial employment, keeping to himself the fire of his mind, never giving it form, expression or reality, refusing to bring it into a world he despises-the man who is defeated by revulsion, the man who renounces before he has started, the man who gives up rather than give in, the man who functions at a fraction of his capacity, disarmed by his longing for an ideal he has not found-they are on strike, on strike against unreason, on strike against your world and your values. But not knowing any values of their own, they abandon the quest to know-in the darkness of their hopeless indignation, which is righteous without knowledge of the right, and passionate without knowledge of desire, they concede to you the power of reality and surrender the incentives of their mind-and they perish in bitter futility, as rebels who never learned the object of their rebellion, as lovers who never discovered their love.”

We are living in society of government-run schools where children are thrown together like prisoners in a jail cell, told to memorize information they cannot use, and the nails that stick out are pounded down by peers in an environment that fosters group-think. Such peers value cheap short-term amusement over achievement and individualism and invite spite from those who dare not conform. How many individuals never achieved success, or refused to achieve it, after spending so many years in such an “equalizing” environment? The world may never know.

The Movie

So how does the motion picture stack up against the written word? The good news is that the scenes and events that take place in the movie are very faithful to the novel. Railroad tycoon Dagney Taggert teams up with steel industrialist Hank Rearden to rebuild the rail-line that Dagney’s brother Jim has let decay, Rearden has to contend with Washington bureaucrats determined to knock him down a peg in the name of fairness, and Dagney ultimately has to confront the consequences of lost opportunity due to the actions of Jim and his Washington cohorts. The acting is good and the cast is also very faithful to the main characters Rand created – the viewer is left with no doubt that Dagney is a woman who believes in competence and honesty, that Rearden is a man who values results, and that Jim is always ready to steal credit and run with his Washington buddies but never seems to take the time to actually run a railroad company.

There are some problems with the movie, however. One is that instead of having a mixture of highs and lows, or alternating slow scenes with scenes that are more upbeat or have action, the pace and tone of Atlas Shrugged stay fairly flat. This differs greatly from the definitive anti-state movie V for Vendetta. The other problem is that because of the large cast of characters, some of the key smaller figures are not sufficiently introduced and the events that they help drive might fly by a viewer who has never read the novel. Will viewers remember that Ellis Wyatt is an oil tycoon whose business represents perhaps the last best hope for Taggart Transcontinental? With so little time onscreen, perhaps not, and perhaps viewers will fail to understand the importance of the final scene of part I when Wyatt decides to go on strike. There are other scenes in the movie that may too easily be glossed over by the non-reader. In one moment in a seemingly ordinary scene, Dagney is lamenting the lack of engine parts to Rearden, and later on the subject quickly comes up again and they go on a wild goose chase across America to find the engine and the man behind it. I’m concerned that readers of the novel will be able to follow what’s going on, but others will preoccupied with why it’s going on.

As a fan of the novel, I’d rate the movie a B-. It gets points for being faithful to the book and for the fine job done by the main characters, but gets marked down for the flat pace and tone and for not sufficiently introducing or punctuating certain events and characters. I believe that those who fall outside the libertarian or conservative spectrum can certainly enjoy Atlas Shrugged part I – I certainly never got the feeling of being beaten over the head with free-market ideology and the virtues of big business. The filmmakers simply showed that some will try to go about their business while others are willing to use the government to stifle competition. The bottom line is that fans of the novel should go see Atlas Shrugged, and newcomers may enjoy it but should prepare to pay attention to scenes and events that aren’t properly punctuated in order to get the most out of their viewing experience. The release of the film adaption of Atlas Shrugged is unlikely to become the talk of the town but is a long awaited treat for Ayn Rand fans. At the very least, it may spur interest in getting new people to read the novel that correctly predicted many of the events we are seeing in society today.