Train à grande paresse

Like the New Testament, Atlas Shrugged suffers in comparison to the book it was ostensibly designed to sequel and improve upon.  It lacks the blood, sweat, and rape, and it relies instead on the sermons, although both Atlas and the Bible Part 2 do admittedly culminate in pretty fantastic science fiction set pieces.  The Fountainhead isn't a very good book, but there's a very good book in there somewhere, and its skeletal presence keeps the proceedings dancing along.  Ayn Rand professed to have loved Victor Hugo above all other novelists and to have, in part, based her own romantic theories of art on his work; you can imagine what he would have done with the material.  A man, a genius, born into the most modest circumstances, at spiritual war with a world that prefers mediocrity to greatness and accommodation to inspiration, rises nevertheless through the strength of his own will to the pinnacle of his art.  Yet for all his genius, he's proud; his pride ultimately destroys his nobility.  When his work is bowdlerized and popularized, he goes mad and commits an act of unspeakable violence and destruction.  The mood would be tragic.  Instead, we get treated to a triumph; had Rand gotten her hand on Oedipus, the dramatic music would have swelled (swollen?) as he achieved victory by carving out his eyeballs.  Well, look, uh, the point is that there are some characters in The Fountainhead who are sufficiently compelling that not even an architect like Ayn Rand could dynamite the whole thing; as much as she tried to bury it beneath the rubble of her crackpot theology, some portions of it remained standing.

The film adaptation of The Fountainhead was infamously terrible, but last year's home-video version of Atlas is totally amazing.  There is a scene about two thirds of the way through in which Hank and Dagny--don't worry; you either already know who these characters are or don't; either way it's thoroughly irrelevant--and an engineer ride in a new train that goes ruhl fast n' at.  The engineer dutifully intones.  100 miles per hour.  150 miles per hour.  200 miles per hour!  This is set in America, 2016, even though SNCF and RENFE have been doing this shit since the eighties.  A bad CGI model train is then shot from a fake helicopter angle as it . . . wait, is that train winding along a curving riverbed?  Slow down you guys!  Yer gonna derail!  The whole thing is a marvelous hash.  The Argentinian copper magnate, whom everyone makes a point of calling Señor, talks like a GWU fratboy, although he occasionally slips into a vaguely Latin solecism and/or accent to remind us that he is frumah zee Sows Uhmereekah.  Hank and Dags actually manage to evince a bare hint of frisson, until, that is, they actually rub together during a sex scene that suggests--hard to be sure, because the camera doesn't move below the earlobe--that once Hank manages to get it in, they both stop moving and put on the blinkers, paused at an intersection, GPS recalculating the route as if they missed a confusing turn-off a mile or so back.  The secondary characters are even better.  A congressman is played as Charlie Rangle channeling Jon Polito as Johnny Caspar in Miller's Crossing, and then you realize that it is Jon Polito, giving everyone the high hat.  Dagny's executive assistant, Eddie, is played by the black guy who was the first to die in the last X-men movie.  I kept expecting him to evaporate in a phaser blast.  Alas, no.

Everything echoes Rand's habit of writing business from a fan's perspective, a drive-time sports radio take on the intricacies of a professional game.  In this world, declining stock prices have a direct and immediate impact on company cash flows and bonds are peddled person-to-person, like Avon.  Everything Rand and her followers ever said about business can be boiled down to one famous quote: "Are you kidding, it's the ship that made the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs!"  C-level executives have conversations like, "You're desperate.  I could charge you anything for this steel.  I'm gonna charge you $40,000 per ton."  "No, you're desperate.  I'm going to offer you $20,000, and you're gonna take it."  Kiss.  Exeunt.  In the back office, an assistant comptroller and a junior spend analyst blow their brains out, blood spattering gorgeously across a set of Raw Materials and Work-in-Process T-accounts.  Some salaried engineer invents a miracle engine and is pissed because the IP and patent rights go to his employer.  The most fundamental principles of the big ugly economic system that Rand purported to admire as the crowning achievement of practical philosophy escape her; the lessons she draws from capitalism are like spelunking guides based on the Allegory of the Cave.  I suspect if you showed her the old A = L + S/E equation, she'd think it was some kind of commie redistribution plan.

Well.  The movie makes it through a third of Rand's Corbusier-sized apartment block of a book in a lithe hour and a half.  It is relentlessly expository, and yet, because the book is even more so, nothing follows.  When Dagby, apropos nothing, says "What's with all this crazy altruism, sheesh," toward the film's end, it lands with dog-walking plop, because unlike the novel, which spends thousands of words upon the topic, the screenplay has never yet used the word altruism.  It arrives, like a mad Russian emigre, out of a foreign country and makes no sense.  An oil tycoon sets his shale drilling operation on fire as a big fuck you to the moochers, and Dagby, once more echoing Star Wars, cries NOOOOOOO! and sinks to her knees.  The actual John Galt slinks around the film in a fedora, straight out of Spillane (another of Rand's favorites, beeteedubs), and convinces plutocrats to hie unto Kolob . . . their departures are reported on film with spare type-titles rescued from a dumpster behind the latest Bourne Film.  For so resolute an atheist, Rand's eschatology was straight outta Dispensationalism, and if the next installment of Atlas really wants to get going, the producers could hand the whole project over to Kirk Cameron, sit back, and wait for the hosannas to roll in.