Story by Jacob O’Gara
Photos as noted

“Who is John Galt?” asks the homeless guy in the greasy spoon. Others, people far more wealthy and fashionable and in the know than the aforementioned vagrant, ask the same question. Unless you’ve already read the book by Ayn Rand (which, full disclosure, I haven’t done), you spend the entirety of the new film Atlas Shrugged: Part I asking along with them. Maybe someone should have Googled it. Whoever he is, this John Galt fellow must be pretty important—his presence is felt in every frame of the 102-minute long movie. At one point, the heroine, Dagny Taggart (played with efficiency by Taylor Schilling), names her railroad company the John Galt Line and declares that “we are” John Galt. Occasionally, someone who you assume is Galt appears, wearing a fedora and cloaked in shadows, whisking Important Business Leaders and other “men of the mind” away to Atlantis—a place free of pesky regulators and bureaucrats. Presumably, the fedora will come off and the shadows will be lifted in time for Part II.
Released on April 15, Tax Day, Atlas Shrugged: Part I was produced by the CEO of Cybex International, a manufacturer of fitness gear, John Aglialoro. He spent about twenty years and twenty million dollars trying to adapt Rand’s novel into a moving picture. Surprisingly—considering Rand’s profound influence on businessmen and politicians, and her status as a still-bestselling author almost three decades after her death—the only other Hollywood version of one of her works is the 1949 adaptation of The Fountainhead, directed by King Vidor and starring Gary Cooper.
In 1999, Atlas Shrugged almost became a TNT miniseries. In 2006, all the showbiz publications speculated that it was going to be made into a movie produced by Lionsgate and Aglialoro starring Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie (close call there). Previously, Albert Ruddy, who produced The Godfather, sought to give Atlas Shrugged the same treatment he gave to Mario Puzo’s surprisingly terrible gangster novel. His efforts attracted the attention of actors like Clint Eastwood and Faye Dunaway. Too bad he failed: an Atlas Shrugged movie starring Eastwood as Henry Rearden, the self-made and large-and-in-charge steel magnate, and Dunaway as Taggart would have been mind-blowing.
Not that John Aglialoro’s Atlas Shrugged adaptation is bad or anything. I’d hate for him go Galt on us, as he’s threatened to do. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Aglialoro declared that the critics, a bunch of damn collectivist liberals like Roger Ebert, have “won.” They, said Aglialoro, “[came] in like lemmings” to hate on his movie for no good reason. This resulted in Atlas Shrugged: Part I having a lackluster performance at the box office. “[D]o I wanna [sic] go and do two? Maybe I just wanna [sic] see my grandkids and go on strike,” said Aglialoro. Apparently the world of exercise equipment manufacturing doesn’t breed thick-skinned film producers.
The source material for Aglialoro’s box-office disappointment was published in 1957, and like its filmic counterpart, was pilloried by “the critics.” Whittaker Chambers, an ex-communist and a writer for National Review, deemed Atlas Shrugged “remarkably silly” and wrote that Rand’s message, part of her larger philosophy called Objectivism, was similar to the Nazis’ or Stalin’s. Calling Rand and her philosophy Hitlerian is rather harsh. The problem, it seems to me, with the totalitarian regimes of Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union is that those leaders cared a bit too much about “the masses” they ruled: Adolf Hitler was terribly obsessed with the Jewish people of Europe, and Joseph Stalin, well, he was worried about everyone.
The problem with Objectivists is that they couldn’t care less about anyone, that is unless it’s in their “rational self-interest” to do so.
Self-interest isn’t a bad thing. Without it, people would starve to death. However, self-interest needs to be tempered with some sense of altruism—considered a dirty word by Rand and her acolytes (I’d call them “Randroids,” but I’m above that). In her book The Virtue Of Selfishness, Rand wrote, “The moral cannibalism of all altruist doctrines lies in the premise that the happiness of one man necessitates the injury of another.” Well, no. When you help someone move furniture, and you do so because it’s a nice and helpful thing to do, unless you hurt your back or something, you’re not destroying your self. You’re just being a goodhearted, upright friend. In other words, you’re the exact opposite of someone like William Edward Hickman.
In 1927, Hickman, only nineteen years old, waltzed into a Los Angeles junior high school, told the school administration that Perry Parker—a banker of some stature in the community—had been sent to the hospital after an accident and wanted to see his daughter, and that he, Hickman, was here to pick her up. Instead of bringing her to her father, who wasn’t in the hospital and had no such accident, Hickman wound up killing and mutilating the twelve-year-old Marion Parker.
Around the same time, Rand, then in her early twenties, began working on a novel called The Little Street. The hero, Danny Renahan, was inspired by Hickman. The Little Street was never completed, but Rand’s notes for it were collected and published in her Journals. Reading them, you forget that Rand was writing about a child murderer. In response to Hickman’s motto—“What is good for me is right”—Rand scribbled: “That is this boy’s [Renahan’s] psychology. (The best and strongest expression of a real man’s psychology I ever heard.)”
Rand described Renahan, modeled after Hickman, thusly: “Other people have no right, no hold, no interest or influence on him. And this is not affected or chosen—it’s inborn, absolute, it can’t be changed, he has ‘no organ’ to be otherwise. In this respect, he has the true, innate psychology of a Superman. He can never realize and feel ‘other people.’” Hickman, Rand continues on, “shows how impossible it is for a genuinely beautiful soul to succeed” in modern life. He “wanted to command and smash away things and people he didn’t approve of.”
The only thing missing from this gushing, purple-prosed adulation are the hearts dotting the “I”s. It’s also wholly, gaspingly depraved. Rand’s above description of her ideal man roughly matches the description of sociopathy in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Sociopaths, like, arguably, Hickman, feel no empathy with others and feel no remorse when they commit a wrong. They “can never realize [or] feel ‘other people.’” Such a disconnect from others is “not affected or chosen” by sociopaths. That’s part of the tragedy of mental disorder: it’s not the person’s fault. A person like Hickman is sick, not Superman.
There’s something punk-rock about the Randian worldview. To be a “genuinely beautiful soul,” the Objectivist philosophy goes, one must rebel against the societal demand of “hypocrisy.” Living in accordance with social norms—generally known as being a sane member of society—is somehow inauthentic. But if you want to “smash away things and people [you don’t] approve of,” (you know, Hitler does spring to mind right about now), then you’re real, and well on your way to becoming John Galt.
The story of Atlas Shrugged, the movie at least, is in contradiction with the philosophy it expounds. It is a love story—When Henry Met Dagny. Taggart is in search of a strong, rugged individualist to give her the steel she needs, and Rearden has the “hardest” steel around. Of course, the relationship is strictly platonic and out of mutual self-interest…but then they do fall in love, Rearden’s wife a miserable hag and Taggart living the single life. That’s when things change, and when Rand’s philosophical framework falls apart: The essence of romance is about giving yourself up to your lover, and vice versa. Love is about living for the other person. If you want an example of a real-world Objectivist romance, look at the relationship between Nicole Brown and O.J. Simpson.
In a world teeming with slimy, control-freak bureaucrats and people filled with “stupid altruistic urges,” two hard-charging mavericks—Henry Rearden and Dagny Taggart—find the one thing they need: each other.
 

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