With all due respect to my intellectual betters, though I have no doubt there will be valid criticisms to be levied against the new Atlas Shrugged movie, this one seems to be so obtuse as to have come from someone who hadn’t even bothered to read the book…
O’Rourke goes on to make a point I’ve made here previously, which is that Shrugged’s producers really should’ve considered either: a) setting the film in some sort of ‘alternate’ future, in which trains were not considered the most vital means of transportation (requiring some alteration of Rand’s basic storyline), or; b) simply setting the film in an ‘alternate’ version of 1957, when the novel was actually published.
I suppose as a shallow observation this would ring true, but if the movie stayed true to the tenor of the novel, even the first time I read it the theme that stood out most prominently to me was that of a future America in social and industrial decline. Starting from the first page, it is obvious that it’s humming industrial engine is slowly breaking down, losing all its vital parts. The entire book is sprinkled with tiny vignettes that serve as marks of the decline – towns where roads have been neglected back to dirt and impoverished hovels reverting back to horse and cart for travel, due to a decline in manufacturing and rationing of fuel.
When Rand spends so much time painting the picture of an environment where technology, innovation and success have been stifled for decades, what could possibly lead the reader/watcher to expect a future where cross-continental travel is accomplished by any means that would require those vital incentives to exist?
At the dawn of the industrial revolution, a cross-continental railroad was a symbol of the height of man’s accomplishment. We have progressed much further since then, but if you project forward into the beggar’s nightmare we seem to be descending into – one so prophetically detailed by Rand in the novel – it seems foolish to believe that the inevitable decline wouldn’t degrade things to the point where we too have to revert back to the railroad as the only reliable long distance transportation left. Her story begins when other more advanced technologies have already been squandered or lost to incompetence. But Rand was careful to warn that the decline wouldn’t stop there. It would simply be the tipping point where the loss of the railroad, as the last vestige of a better world, would signal our full plummet into darkness – a darkness symbolized by the loss of all electrical power on the eastern seaboard, at the novel’s end. If you honestly expected the future laid out by Rand to include anything more futuristic than a rusting railroad, then I respectfully think you’ve sorely missed the whole point.
So many of us have been conditioned to see the dystopian future as highly repressive yet technologically advanced beyond imagination. It is to the credit of authors like Orwell and Zamyatin that they were able to leave that imprint as a general assumption of the totalitarian future. But I once read a criticism of this template, from Rand, that technological advancement and innovation requires freedom for an individual to think and experiment, and in a totalitarian state where those are repressed or punished no such advancement is possible. With this I completely agree and would even point out that this very concept is borne out in reality whenever one looks to the east of us, at the state of North Korea.
In this context, when you really do think about it, who are the silly ones here? The ones who build a story in the future around a railroad, or the ones who expect a future as painted by Rand to have anything better?
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And one last thing on P.J. O'Rourke's smarmy comment about John Galt presumably being played by a raincoat...In the book, a shadowy figure in a raincoat was all we saw of Galt until the second of the novel's three parts. It's part of the suspense. It's disappointing to see such a shallow toss off from someone who usually engages in more depth.
