talkpolitics | "To a Gas Chamber -- Go!"

From Whittaker Chambers' review of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged:

From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: 'To a gas chamber — go!'

So the filmed version of Atlas Shrugged is at last coming out and will be released on April 15 (get it?) The marketing director has a stunt going where he’s inviting fans to film themselves declaring “I Am John Galt.” Looking over the video responses, it’s striking to note the number of children, some barely old enough to lisp “I am John Galt,” some of them teenagers. No doubt every single one of these youngsters covers the cost of his or her own food, shelter, clothing and education through the labor of his or her own plump little hands. No moochers they!

As I said some time before when I first heard about the movie, it will be very interesting indeed to watch how the train disaster sequence is depicted. Will it truly capture, as the passage in the book does, the essence of Rand’s murderous contempt not just for the poor, but for anyone who isn’t a Randian? She begins with a one of those pious, eyes-to-heaven intros that callous creeps like Rand typically use to introduce a foray into callous creepiness:

It is said that catastrophes are a matter of pure chance, and there were those who would have said that the passengers of the Comet were not guilty or responsible for the thing that happened to them.

Did “those” who said this include Ayn Rand and her followers? Of course not.

… The woman in Roomette 10, Car No.3, was an elderly schoolteacher who had spent her life turning class after class of helpless children into miserable cowards, by teaching them that the will of the majority is the only standard of good and evil, and that a majority may do anything it pleases, that they must not assert their own personalities, but must do as others were doing.

…The man in Drawing Room B, Car No. 4, was a newspaper publisher who believed that men are evil by nature and unfit for freedom, that their basic interests, if left unchecked, are to lie, to rob and murder one another - and, therefore, men must be ruled by means of lies, robbery and murder, which must be made the exclusive privilege of the rules, for the purpose of forcing men to work, teaching them to be moral and keeping them within the bounds of order and justice.

…The man in Bedroom H, Car No. 5, was a businessman who had acquired his business, an ore mine, with the help of a government loan, under the Equalization of Opportunity Bill.

…The woman in Roomette 6, Car no. 8, was a lecturer who believed that, as a consumer, she had "a right" to transportation, whether the railroad people wished to provide it or not.

The man in Roomette 2, Car No. 9, was a professor of economics who advocated the abolition of private property, explaining that intelligence plays no part in industrial production, that man's mind is conditioned by material tools, that anybody can run a factory or a railroad and it's only a matter of seizing the machinery.

The woman in Bedroom D, Car No. 10, was a mother who had put her two children to sleep in the berth above her, carefully tucking them in, protecting them from drafts and jolts; a mother whose husband held a government job enforcing directives, which she defended by saying, 'I don't care, it's only the rich that they hurt. After all, I must think of my children.'

…The man in Bedroom A, Car no. 16, was a humanitarian who had said, 'The men of ability? I do not care what or if they are made to suffer. They must be penalized in order to support the incompetent. Frankly, I do not care whether this is just or not. I take pride in not caring to grant any justice to the able, where mercy to the needy is concerned.'

….These passengers were awake; there was not a man aboard the train who did not share one or more of their ideas.

Reading this, one wonders how Rand would have written about the Triangle Factory disaster, you know, the industrial accident where all those “looters and moochers” who'd been striking for better conditions got burnt up because their bosses had locked them in.

So, how will it be done? How will these individuals’ deaths be rendered palatable to audiences? Will it involve close-ups with voiceovers and flashbacks?

Or, will the film just kind of smooth over that embarrassing-but-pivotal passage, try to pretend it doesn’t exist?

Kind of like Rand’s fans do when they talk about the book to the rest of us?

Crossposted from Thoughtcrimes

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

underlankers.livejournal.com

Erm.......so Atlas Shrugged has a particularly nasty passage in it. Does this mean people who make films of H.P. Lovecraft's writings are raving Jew-hating Ku Kluxers and anyone proposing a film of S&M Stirling's Domination-series are all closet Apartheid-Nazis? It's indisputable that Ms. Rosenbaum the serial-killer admiring welfare cheat had some messed-up ideas but how is putting that into a film any worse than say, making a movie out of the Dune series?

From:

paft.livejournal.com

Lovecraft was not writing a thinly disguised political polemic, and did not promote a school of thought based on the premise that nonwhite cultures were worshippers of malevolent elder gods. Nor was I aware that Stirling was a philosopher promoting his views through his fiction.

Presenting a the victims of a disaster as though they deserved it merely because they disagree with the writer on some philosophical or political point is light years away from a fiction writer merely including a character with messed up ideas.

A place to discuss politics without egomaniacal mods.

"To a Gas Chamber -- Go!"