There’s a scene towards the middle of Atlas Shrugged that ended up serving as a useful symbol for the whole thing. In Part II, Chapter IV, Hank Rearden is put on trial for selling his patented Rearden Metal to Ken Danagger in defiance of a new law making it illegal to sell to anyone but the government. When the trial begins, one of the judges – for there are three – asks him to put in a plea. He refuses, and refuses to recognize the legitimacy of the court. This baffles and befuddles the judges, who are left with no idea of how to proceed or what to do with him.
Who is John Galt?
Now, I’ve never been arrested. I’ve never been called to jury duty, I’ve never even been inside a courtroom. I am not what people would refer to as a worldly man. But even I have the capacity to imagine that a judge would respond to a defendant that acted this way with “Okay, fine,” and inflict some kind of reaction on them. Ayn Rand, author of the titanic (in weight) and miniscule (in terms of intellectual heft) AS had what I can only think of as ‘sadistic naivite’.
That is to say, she was really fucking stupid and she thought the rest of us were even dumber than she was.
Much ink has been spilled on the evil of Ayn Rand and her ‘philosophy’, Objectivism. The thing is, much of the text of Atlas Shrugged is given over to contemplating this; all of the villainous characters at various points accuse the various heroes of being evil, and said heroes introspect about this, testing out the word as an identity, with the emotional arc of the story being them deciding no, everyone else is evil.
Much less is said – and I think this is to the detriment of the discourse around the novel and Objectivism – about how she was a grade A fuckin’ moron who not only had no idea how anything worked, she lacked the capacity to consider that things might have to function, and thus imagine procedures they go through. Adam Lee, in his blow-by-blow analysis of the book, expertly lays out the mistakes she and her characters make, and almost anytime she makes a practical decision, Lee points out it would either have disastrous real-life consequences (in the case of her heroes) or would actually function quite well (in the case of her villains), and indeed he often points out moments where Rand accidentally reinvents, uh, socialist policies.
I actually agree with some of her principles when they’re reduced to their most abstract – that is to say, I agree with her when she says personal happiness is the most useful guide to doing good in this world, and I think reason is the way to get there. I think whatever makes you happy – and I mean in a real, meaningful sense, not superficial pleasure but happiness – is where you’ll genuinely do the most good, and I think it’s important to work out rationally how to do that. Where Rand falls down for me is that she was completely lacking in self-awareness and completely irrational in chasing her goals.
There’s inconsistency, which we’re all guilty of. I consider empathy and compassion to be the highest of virtues, and I sometimes lose my temper. There’s hypocrisy, which we can be guilty of; I consider empathy and compassion to be etc, and I know I have a mean streak in my humour. But then there’s whatever the fuck Ayn Rand was doing. It is truly incredible how she’s guilty of every single fucking thing she accuses her ‘looters’ of doing.
I don’t mean things like her going on Social Security towards the end of her life; apparently there are genuine extenuating circumstances there, where she was quite rich at the end of her life and only took Social Security as part of her will or to retain legal control of something or something like that (it doesn’t matter and I don’t care). No, I’m talking about the fact that she had the unmitigated cheek to accuse everyone else of being irrational and then write a thousand pages of unchecked hysteria.
It’s obvious upon superficial examination, so I’ll articulate myself with a subtler example: it’s very funny to me that her characters are apparently all business, mechanical, and scientific geniuses who can simply look at a thing and immediately know how it works and how to make it better, and yet not only are they incapable of explaining how anything works, they’re contemptuous of the idea they have to. At no point does Rand actually explain how anything here works or why her characters are better at things than everyone else.
A point of comparison: while we never learn how to cook meth goodly on Breaking Bad, we do know the characters combine ingredients and cook them, and can infer that Walt brings a level of pedantic detail and patience to the process; more specific amounts of each ingredient, a specific cook length, and of course a cleaner kitchen. Or, on Stargate: SG-1, where the characters are smart because they can spout off facts and techniques with ease. You can argue whether or not any of these qualities are ‘smart’, but you have a basis to begin with.
Rand’s characters are essentially magic and expect to be taken as such – Lee refers to them as feudal lords, deities walking the earth and making decisions informed by divine right. You may notice this contradicts Rand’s stated atheism, but it also contradicts her idea of these people as rational; if you want to be mean (and I do), you’d describe them as impulsive, but I think you could also describe them as purely intuitive. Of course, good intuition comes from experience and, often, reason; I think of the jazz greats saying greatness came from practice, practice, and practice, and then just fucking about when you’re onstage. Rand’s characters have nothing to base their intuition on; no experience, no knowledge. In fact, she openly describes them all as geniuses from birth.
When I told people I was reading Atlas Shrugged, the near-universal reaction was that I’d lost my fucking mind, and rightly so. This is not a book I would recommend you read for pleasure; either you won’t get pleasure from it, or you will, thus forcing me to remove you from my life. It is, however, a book I recommend to writers – perhaps not beginning writers, but those who’ve churned out some work and lack some confidence in themselves. You will come away from this book marveling at your own abilities; no matter what storytelling element you choose to look at (characterization, style, structure, humour, imagination), you will do it better than Rand.
The bad structure is what gets me. Rand actually has the core of a good idea and plot; her characters are just under the primary movers and shakers in a world that’s falling apart with turbulence in their personal lives; Dagny Taggert, working under her brother Jim in their family-owned railway line*, frustrated by her brother’s incompetence; Hank Rearden, fighting against government intervention and his own increasing disdain for his wife, mother, and brother. Both are observing the world shattering around them, puzzled about why people act the way they do.
(*You may notice the apparent contradiction between Dagny being a self-made woman with an inherent genius, and her being the scion of a rich family. If I don’t draw attention to contradictions and absurdities like that, it’s because Adam Lee did it first and I’m trying to focus on what I believe are my original insights.)
Built on top of this are two inherently cool ideas. The first – and most famous – is the myth of John Galt; the people of Atlas Shrugged rhetorically ask ‘Who is John Galt?’ as a way of saying something is unknowable. Dagny hears quite a few stories trying to explain John Galt that only serve to amplify the mystery. The second and marginally more subtle is the slow disappearance of business owners and creators – shops closing up, businesses being sold, and above all, people disappearing. The first scene with Dagny, all the way at the start of the book, is actually a nice one where she overhears someone humming a remarkable tune, and when she asks him where he heard it, he accidentally lets slip that it was the work of a famous composer who recently retired and vanished.
There are a lot of moments like this in the book that are between plot points, creating a cool atmosphere and hinting at a mystery that is begging to be solved. This does escalate into something resembling a real plot when Dagny finds a wonderful infinite-energy engine buried in junk, and resolves to find the person who invented it, which in an incredibly roundabout and inefficient way leads her to eventually find John Galt.
There were a few cases where reading Atlas Shrugged was something of a lightbulb moment for me, unlocking other works. 2008 was something of a Randian criticism in popular culture; I can see that both Breaking Bad and Mad Men are almost built around criticising Rand’s ideas, with each in its own way pointing out that building one’s life around production, domination, and the accumulation of wealth with no focus on emotional connection to others is not emotionally sustainable.
Walt may be an amoral monster, but he also sincerely loves his family and his actions have a severe emotional cost. Don at the beginning of Mad Men is the pinnacle of Randian success, but he’s also driven by a desire to connect with other people, ruins his life multiple times because he feels shallow and disconnected, and indeed is visibly uncomfortable in an early scene when directly compared to Rand’s characters. The two shows, together, say that human beings want to connect to one another, and denying this leads to tragedy.
But the book was also clearly an influence on video games. 2008 was also the year the game Bioshock was released, a first person shooter entirely built around a satirical takedown of Ayn Rand and Atlas Shrugged in particular; its plot concerns a rich businessman who built a libertarian paradise under the sea (as opposed to in the depths of Colorado), a paradise which has been reduced to violent looting by the time you get there.
Even more interesting to me, though, is the Fallout games. This is a franchise that has seen semi-regular releases since 1997, concerning a post-apocalyptic America that retained 1950’s culture for hundreds of years, even after nuclear bombs were dropped across the country. It too contains satire of Randian philosophy, though as part of a rich stew of American culture as opposed to it being the raison d’être like Bioshock. When reading Atlas Shrugged, I was also struck by how its plotting is very similar to how Fallout generally plots itself.
Indeed, one specific plot in the third game is eerily similar to the two plots I laid out above. One of the channels of the radio is an older man who calls himself President Eden, constantly ranting and raving about the evils of Communism and professing the true American way, something that must surely be a specific parody of the infamous John Galt Monologue towards the climax of Atlas Shrugged, given how he’s also trying to stir the listener to act. You find, through exploration, that Eden is actually a superintelligent AI aiming to wipe out humanity and start over, and of course you deal with him as you wish.
Rand’s structural ideas were best served in the form of video games, above all other mediums. Video games at their most engaging are about someone exploring a world; much as I love many heavily cinematic games (and would argue that Metal Gear Solid is the peak of the form), games as a whole are better when treated as a world the player explores; beloved Magpie Cap’n Nath has said better than I could how the Axiom Verge series conveys deep and even emotionally affecting storytelling without a word of dialogue or a single cutscene.
Dagny, there’s nothing of any importance in life – except how well you do your work. Nothing. Only that. Whatever else you are, will come from that. It’s the only measure of human value. All the codes of ethics they’ll try to ram down your throat are just so much paper money put out by swindlers to fleece people of their virtues. The code of competence is the only system of morality that’s on a gold standard.
I do believe, also, that this cuts across genres; Axiom Verge is a sidescrolling beat ‘em up explorer – more commonly known as a Metroidvania, in reference to the two most popular examples of the genre, Metroid and Castlevania – but this same principle works in dialogue-heavy RPGs like Fallout, open world shooters like Grand Theft Auto, or corridor shooters like Left 4 Dead. The point is that video games can convey story through incidents carefully chosen to illustrate a pattern (commonly referred to as environmental storytelling in the video game world), and indeed, I think a good video game asks themselves not ‘what will be different in this room?’ but rather ‘what will be the same in every room?’.
Of course, where Rand fucks up is that she beats her ideas into the ground until there’s nothing but mulch, then goes further. Apparently, her favourite book in the world was Les Misérables, and she replicates Victor Hugo’s length whilst lacking his substance; the novel is meandering and repetitive, especially after Dagny finds John Galt, with incident after incident repeating the same points and indeed much of the same language (aside from her belief that all good people know the words ‘moocher’ and ‘looter’ and exactly what they mean, she radically overuses the word ‘naked’, to the point that I counted it six or seven times across two pages).
The other thing that gets me about Atlas Shrugged is the characterization. Ayn Rand had an absolute paucity of imagination – her three big science fiction ideas in what I’m told is a science fiction novel are a strong metal, an engine with infinite energy, and a large bomb – and nowhere is this more apparent than in her characters. You have heard that she only has two kinds of characters – extremely attractive good guys and extremely ugly bad guys – and this is simultaneously wrong in that there are, like, one or two characters more nuanced than that and wrong in that these two types of characters are spectacularly peculiar.
Again, early on there is actually something of interest here (one of Lee’s smaller interesting points is that Rand clearly ran out of energy and interest in the last hundred pages of the book). The first few scenes of Hank with his family perfectly capture small, neurotic people, to the point that Rand clearly must have taken these incidents from her actual life; Hank’s mother mirrors some passive-aggressive neurotics I’ve known trying to manipulate people into being around them, and their criticisms of Hank sounds fair, reasonable, and most importantly like something an actual human being would say.
There’s no way Rand invented these ideas because they very quickly fall away. The novel is at its second-most incoherent when Rand tries to explain why the villains are acting the way they do, whether that’s in the form of her omniscient third-person narrator literally explaining their thoughts or the rhetorical tactics the villains use to defend themselves. Philosophically, the only reason Rand can conceive of why people would disagree with her is because they resent her talent and drive to live, whilst they themselves are empty, useless, and desperately want to die.
Obviously, that’s not true – Lee himself represents the main bulk of her most passionate critics, who are just as perplexed that anyone would not want to help other people. It also fails to capture the way humans can mix-and-match different traits and qualities. People whose drive and ambition is to improve the quality of life of others; people whose drive and ambition is motivated by a desire to make a specific figure proud; people who want to be widely admired; people seeking a very specific outcome; and, of course, people who simply gain pleasure from the happiness of others.
It’s the tactics of her characters that are even more revealing, and it’s really funny that it’s behaviour that both her villains and her heroes do, because it’s almost exclusively aggressive bullying. The sole action that the villains engage in is berating; they repeatedly tell (or at least ask) the heroes to ‘do the right thing’ in the name of collective action, pummelling them with what they want and being perplexed when it doesn’t work, eventually descending into long and incoherent psychological analysis projecting their insecurities onto the heroes.
The thing is, the heroes also do this, if with slightly more variety. Another layer of Rand’s hypocrisy is how she loudly decries the use of violence when it’s also literally the only way her heroes do anything, both literally and rhetorically; they alternate between stubborn (and often stupid) one-liners and long speeches accusing their enemies of all sorts of mental instability, and the only difference is that the things the heroes do ‘work’ and the villains fail.
The sole meaningful exception here is the secret best character in the novel, Jim Taggart. Of all the ‘looters’ in the novel, he gets the lion’s share of the characterization, and indeed he can be seen as much of a protagonist as Dagny or Hank, with an emotional arc of his slow implosion over the course of the novel. It’s also the most sincere and affecting part of it; Jim’s story is of a neurotic wannabe seething with resentment over his more successful sibling, unable to accept his own mediocrity and destroying everyone and everything in his world – up to and including himself – to run away from that.
Obviously, this was Ayn Rand explaining herself.
‘Every accusation is a confession’ has been my preoccupation the last year or so; aside from it being relevant politically and topically as we watch the far-right be responsible for everything it shrieks about, it’s become something that fascinates me as a deliberate choice by an artist. When I was younger, the main obstacle to my success in art was having this conception that I could control the narrative about me through it, and the idea that I could reveal things about myself was frightening. I have come around though, in that not only is unintentionally revealing things about yourself in your art inevitable and not only is that really cool, it’s an effective way to interrogate your contradictions in a healthy way and, like, get over them.
Holding enormous official powers, he schemed ceaselessly to expand them, because it was expected of him by those who had pushed him into office. He had the cunning of the unintelligent and the frantic energy of the lazy.
Ayn Rand is the absurd maximum end point of confession through accusation, and Jim Taggart is the sole expression of this that becomes almost poignant (or at least pitiful). He exists in a world where people are simply magically able to achieve great things with seemingly no effort beyond the time and force of will they put in; he believes in these powers unquestioningly and is consumed by the unfairness of not having them. Again, this is something that drives all the characters; Jim simply gets the most honest and realistic expression of them, gaining a young wife with Randian ideals by his superficial imitation of Dagny (and claiming her achievements as his own) and then driving her to suicide out of rage-fuelled insecure spite.
In fact, ‘resentment’ is the major textual element of Atlas Shrugged. Rand could not conceive of mechanical procedures, of laws, of policies, of science fictional devices, of names that don’t sound fucking stupid, of philosophy, of natural beauty; the one thing she had the ability to creatively generate in spades was seething rage at others having things she desperately wanted. There are, of course, expressions of beauty throughout the book (mostly of people she wanted to either fuck or look like) as well as expressions of ugliness, but 90% of the book is people filled with billowing anger that someone else has something that they believe themselves entitled to.
Dangy and Hank, furious at the fact that they never receive the esteem they feel entitled to, to the point of destroying the world out of spite. Jim, green with envy over Dagny’s abilities. The villains almost universally resent the heroes for their control – both materially and in their emotional self-control (despite the fact that the heroes snap at the slightest inconvenience – another Randian hypocrisy). The sole exceptions are a scientist who is supposed to be, effectively someone smart enough to think like Rand but allows himself to be destroyed for the sake of others, and Jim’s wife, the sole character to be content with what she has and genuinely indifferent to what others have.
I end up thinking of HP Lovecraft. Like Rand, he had views I find rancid (even if he repudiated them at the end of his life). Like her, he had wooden dialogue that came from not really understanding people unlike himself, he had limitations that came both from his position in life and his personal psychology, and he had very specific tastes that he defended with elitism. On the other hand, unlike Rand, he surrendered to something larger than himself – in his case, genre, and more specifically horror. Lovecraft was motivated by ego as much as any of us, but he also believed that horror was something independent of himself and far more powerful, and in writing, he was serving that genre.
This led him to qualities that frequently counteracted his worse tendencies, and even found their best expression. It drove him to learn things that he could place in his stories; scientific advancements like the discovery of Antarctica or Pluto. It also led him to invent things – not just his vivid collection of supernatural creatures, but alien processes and procedures. The similarities between Lovecraft and Rand pale in comparison to their one important difference: Lovecraft was an artist and Rand wasn’t.
I’ll concede something to the friends who questioned my judgement in reading Atlas Shrugged: I was filled with an unrelenting despair. My approach to criticism is really armchair psychoanalysis and amateur philosophy, and nothing except AS made me feel so foolish and ineffectual in chasing that. The fact of the matter is, many people before me have diagnosed Rand as a narcissist; AS represents as well as anything a narcissistic meltdown, threatening to burn down the entire world if you’re not going to throw uncritical adulation at them 100% of the time, all day, every day.
The bullying, the sociopathy, the delight in declaring 99% of humanity as not human; many people before me have pointed out how evil and stupid this is and deconstructed Rand’s psychology. The humiliation that my perspective is not particularly special was bad enough; what really hurt was how ineffectual it was. So many people saw what a fucking evil idiot Rand was, right from the start; they tore into her shoddy writing with gleeful enthusiasm. But it doesn’t seem to have had any effect.
This is the final, most extreme, and most ludicrous example of Rand’s hypocrisy: the apocalyptic future she envisioned and feared seems to be being brought about… by her philosophical descendents. Rand’s ruthless, self-interested capitalists are the ones stripping the world of its resources, causing the collapse of civilization and civil infrastructure for their own selfish (and frequently unqualified) selves. All those people who pointed out what a fool she was – the initial critics, the later ones like Adam Lee, Breaking Bad and Mad Men and Bioshock and Fallout – seem to have had no effect.
And yet. And yet, at no point did I ever question what I was doing. Despite the misery of actually reading this fucking book, despite the criticism I got, despite the humiliating futility of aspects of this waved in my face, and despite the limits of my own endurance (I initially planned to try and read the whole thing in one day; this proved ambitious, and progress got slower and slower until I was reading 25 pages a day), not once did I ever question the project of reading and writing about Atlas Shrugged. There are a few reasons for this. The first is simply that I am no more immune to defensive thinking than anyone else. Secondly, and I cannot stress this enough: it is just a fucking book. I have suffered far worse than a string of bad words arranged badly – the way people were talking, you’d think I was licking fuckin’ plutonium.
But to think is an act of choice. The key to what you so recklessly call ‘human nature,’ the open secret you live with, yet dread to name, is the fact that man is a being of volitional consciousness. Reason does not work automatically; thinking is not a mechanical process; the connections of logic are not made by instinct. The function of your stomach, lungs or heart is automatic; the function of your mind is not. In any hour and issue of your life, you are free to think or to evade that effort. But you are not free to escape from your nature, from the fact that reason is your means of survival — so that for you, who are a human being, the question ‘to be or not to be’ is the question ‘to think or not to think.’”
The importance of this book lies not in the physical damage it does to its immediate readers, but in the way it articulates the thoughts of so many people. One thing that brought me more rational perspective on it was recognizing that Americans had a tendency towards selfish individualistic capitalism long before Rand came along; one of my favourite historical anecdotes is that, during World War II, America was the only country that had a significant minority believing that necessary oil rationing was a conspiracy to curtail individual freedom, nearly costing America their place in the war.
What I found towards the end of the book was that I was simply burning myself out of my rage. I had become so beaten down by the insufferable smug evil hypocritical stupidity that I simply accepted it, and in fact blasted through the final hundred-ish pages in one go. This has led to me able to exhibit greater emotional control around Randian thinkers; I see them and their irrational self-serving thinking with a little more emotional clear-headedness.
Like I said at the start, I do see myself in Rand in a lot of ways. Aside from the other ways I’ve described, I also admire the monomaniacal chasing of a single goal, and I also have felt anxiety over lack of achievement and resentfulness at things that seemed to come so easily to others, and I believe rational pursuit of an individual goal is the source of happiness and emotional stability (also, trains are cool). It is indeed best to react to the emotional intensity of others by remembering the goal one is actually trying to achieve. It’s just Rand found the absolute wrong way to act upon all these thoughts.
And specifically, reading books is a necessary strategy for dealing with life – particularly, once you’ve established your own values, the books of people you disagree with. Tweets and posts and jokes and whatever are funny and I will enjoy them in that vein for the rest of my life, but you really can’t beat a book for the full coherent thought process of another human being – one complex thought that can be felt, processed, analyzed, and then dismissed or interpolated as necessary. Even a thought as incoherent, simple, and stupid as those conceived by Ayn Rand.
About the writer
Tristan J. Nankervis
Tristan J Nankervis (aka Drunk Napoleon) has been a writer, pop culture critic, dishwasher, standup comedian, waiter, potato cake factory worker, gamer, TV worker, and various other things. You can find him in Hobart, Tasmania.
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Year of the Month
What if the world was something to learn from?
Everything is weird, everything is broken, everyone is confusing.
Department of
Conversation
What did we watch?
It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia, Season Seventeen, Episode One, “The Gang F*cks Up Abbot Elementary”
“I can’t believe these shitheads forgot they were mic’d.”
“That’s the lice being racist.”
Seeing the Gang in a completely different aesthetic is weird. They have all the same rhythms but the show has a different rhythm.
I went to write that Dennis was going Walter White on the coffee right when he said it. It makes sense, his needlessly complicated approach to everything.
“I keep forgetting about the cameras, every time!”
Dennis being useful is the funniest plot turn.
The Gang being horrified that the kids don’t take 9/11 seriously is insanely funny (of course someone actually knowing less than them would enrage them). It’s actually quite old-fashioned for this show to have the Gang yelling at each other for hours. This episode really feels like a throwback for this show, actually. If it has a downside, it’s that the Abbot Elementary come off fairly generic.
“I let that lady kick my ass so I could look like a victim!” The Gang yelling directly at the camera is great.
“Yeah, no, we’re off water altogether now.”
It’s Always Sunny etc, “Frank Is In A Coma”
Classic cut to title. With the opening where Mac brought up why they brought Frank into the Gang in the first place, this season feels like a throwback so far.
“Well that’s just sleep!”
“Huh?”
“You’re describing s–”
“That’s sleep.”
“You’re describing sleep.”
“What’s the difference?”
“I deny what you’re saying, by the way.”
“There aren’t chairs, there’s one chair, and it’s covered in wax.”
“I believe that’s cheese.”
“I don’t wanna sit in cheese either.”
“I didn’t really love talking to him when he was alive, you know?”
Seeing Dee is really weird having seen Kaitlin Olson in various other contexts now.
“How does that get us closer to the goal–”
“I can’t forget it, coz he said it now.”
“I’m not gonna tell her about the Gala!”
“I can hear you!”
“I think she can hear me.”
“I can!”
“Dennis also ran through the wall, and I did too.”
“You know what, I blame Frank, because he did not give us to tools to survive this world.”
Even Simon feels like a very old-fashioned kind of Always Sunny character.
“FRANK! IF YOU CAN HEAR ME! I’M TAKING YOUR BIG BUTT MAGAZINE!”
“Do you mind if I stand?”
“TAKE AN IDEA AND FUCK ME WITH IT!”
Hey, the closest this show has ever come to a sincere moment, aside from the Gang locking people in a burning apartment and deciding all they need is each other.have
The punchline of the whole thing made me fucking cackle.
“WHY WOULD YOU DO ALL THAT?!”
“Frank, you’re delicious!”
“His father was right about him!” Charlie in astonished mode might be my favorite Charlie.
Right in line with “There’s not enough salt in the world for that woman!”
I screeched at the reveal – top notch stuff.
I legitimately forgot about that whole thing until the climax. It caught me completely off guard.
Me too – they pivoted so well into the other plots that it had completely slipped my mind.
And yet it is so in character for Frank, it’s perfect in that regard.
The sheer pettiness of his motivation is so funny to me!
Sinners – So let me say up front that this came close to living up to the hype. Well acted almost entirely across the board, amazing production values and music, and very intense. I can easily see why horror fans and most critics love this so much. But….and anyone who’s read my posts knows there is a but…I have qualms. The biggest is personal: it’s just too intense for me. My usual reason for not liking horror is the gore and violence. This time out I didn’t have a big issue with that. But the specific sort of intensity found in a lot of modern horror is something else I don’t deal well with, and boy we get it here. So much so that my dreams were affected by the movie and then I couldn’t fall back asleep. There is no reason anyone should not make a movie like this, but this is clearly not a movie for me.
Beyond that, I found the supernatural elements to be a lot less interesting than the real world stuff. I didn’t find the vampires very engaging, and don’t think the rules for them really make much sense. Once we crossed from harrowing and engaging story of Black people in the hell of 30s America into a horror film, things flattened a bit for me. It’s not fair to demand of Coogler that he should have made a movie without the supernatural, but I think I want that movie too. i also have some smaller issues – the sex scenes added little, and while my wife would punch me if I said this to her, the “spirits of the past, spirits of the future” fantasia could have been left out and the story would have been the same – but those are I think a matter of taste. For the most part, Coogler set out to make a complex movie that requires all sorts of effects and also a high degree of difficulty in acting by Michael B. Jordan, and outside of a few shots that looked off (and maybe looked better in IMAX than at home), he succeeded big time.
Two other thoughts: did Coogler see O Brother Where Art Thou and think “I need to make a movie in respond to take back our music and our history?” And why wasn’t there music in the style of Louis Armstrong and Dizzy Gillispie?
MASH, “Change of Command” – We needed a change of pace, so back to Korea, and introducing Colonel Sherman Potter, the only regular on MASH played by an established TV actor in Harry Morgan. The bulk of this is set to establishing the new status quo, with BJ and Potter both new to the OR, and with Hawkeye and BJ quickly becoming friends with the gruff veteran of three wars. Interesting choice to not have any antagonism between the characters. Oh, and Frank flounces off but that feels tacked on.
Frasier, “First Date”/”Roz and the Schnoz” – In the former, Niles is ready to ask Daphne out (again) but she overhears part of a conversation where he says he’s in love but not the part where he says with who, and he has to pretend he’s fallen for someone in his building. One thing leads to another, and Daphne ends up cooking for Niles for a fictional date. In the end, they do have dinner together as friends, but Daphne says once again that she would never date a man in the throes of a divorce. We’ve covered this ground before but at least it’s still kind of sweet. In the latter, Roz meets the prospective grandparents of her baby, and is shocked to see both have big noses (and seem not to know). Given how many obvious nose joke this one has, it’s not bad but it’s also hard to get past the fake noses.
Sherlock and Daughter, “Kith and Kin” – We inch ever closer to answers, and Sherlock is getting a telephone. At this point, in the middle of what is an eight part serial, there’s little to say.
I think he’s specifically dealing with Mississippi delta blues here, and I don’t get the sense from my even casual interest in recordings that there was a ton of social overlap between Louis Armstrong and the likes of Geechie Wiley and LV Thomas. Armstrong for example got to be in movies and play white clubs, while the latter played small Texas juke joints and recorded six songs in total. Delta Slim would be likely thrown out of the Cotton Club.
Ah, but as the flashbacks and flash-forwards covered a lot of ground, and were drawing from the pasts and futures of those in the joint. Louis Armstrong could have slotted in at least visually with 70s funk and the Monkey King. But you might be right about the history. Or my wife could be right that the musical styles just collide.
The Sudbury Devil – This is really impressive and genuinely creepy, especially for a movie from a YouTube personality (albeit not a fascist, Mr. Beast-adjacent, or Breadtuber) and costing $25k. Andrew Rakich is taking cues from Witchfinder General, The Witch, and A Field In England, but the use of time dilation, something not always seen in occult films but often discussed in occult circles, eldritch imagery, and even more historical detail than Eggers (the Original Pronunciation English!) is cool as hell and adds up to a blistering, bleak indictment of white colonialism and the suffering it caused/causes. The ending suggests the title character is a curse on the future of our country as much as a sentient being. My major qualm is that the movie is intentionally playing with fire by recalling 17th century racist imagery early on, but this also diminishes pretty fast and my most generous reading is that the witch hunters are being manipulated by their own prejudices. On Tubi and Prime.
Andor, first episode – Really, really good, though I dunno if I needed the flashbacks. Feels unlike any Star Wars show or movie (I refuse to use the word “property” or “content”, this brings out my inner Reynolds Woodcock) in that the baddies’ death here is more out of a Jim Thompson novel than a rah-rah moment. These guys suck, but the murder is senseless and awful (the one guy is horrified to realize his friend is dead), a grim necessity, as is the corporation trying to cover it up. Ingredients for good drama here: people on this mining planet are crooked or trying to get by, the corp as represented by the Chief Inspector doesn’t care, one guy really does*, and Cassian is almost out of options, a la Han Solo, and on borrowed time.
* this is a type I’ve often seen in institutions: the asshole who believes in following The Rules against all orders, logic, and common sense, especially when being told to disobey them suggests said Rules are a grim joke.
“(I refuse to use the word “property” or “content”, this brings out my inner Reynolds Woodcock)”
Damn right.
If you like some of the time effects in The Sudbury Devil, I would definitely recommend The Endless to you if you haven’t seen that yet. (EDIT: Ah, never mind, you have!)
Cassian’s childhood flashbacks were my biggest complaint about the first couple episodes of Andor, too, but the fantastic “they were in a brothel, which we’re not supposed to have. The expensive one, which they shouldn’t have been able to afford, etc.” speech and Syril’s inability to bend to it won me over immediately. Love the way conflict naturally arises just from having different kinds of characters all operating in the same space and yeah, love the way there’s a kind of grimy humanity to everything.
Was thinking of that movie too, probably an influence! And agreed on Andor, there’s always been casual corruption on Star Wars but this feels more lived-in and nasty, and Syril not being able to live with that is interesting. Much like Pete Campbell, he’s right, but you don’t want him to be.
I could mostly do without the flashbacks, too, although they’re really only present in these first three episodes* and they are building to something.
(* – with the exception of one episode toward the end of the series, where they serve a different but significant purpose.)
Live music — on vacation with the family and we made a snap decision to catch Rumors, the Fleetwood Mac (and occasional Nicks and Buckingham song) cover band. They were good! “Step Back” is essentially a New Order song, or at least the way they played it it was, and “Holiday Road” is especially great on holiday yourself. Very strong “Gold Dust Woman,” less so on “Edge of Seventeen” when the vocalist somehow wound up out of sync with the rest of the band for a minute. But some deeper cuts and some hits (a bro next to us went apeshit when “Landslide” came on), with the band’s secret weapon being the wind machine constantly blowing “Stevie Nicks'” shawls and robes for that witchy vibe. Lots of fun and my mom had a great time, which was the most fun to see.
Wooo, live cover bands!
Woooooo live music on vacation!!
That’s cool and makes me imagine the original Holiday Road with more Nicks harmonies.
Night of the Comet
For movie club. Colorful, cheerful zombie apocalypse that’s less about zombies and more about the end of the world as a cure for disaffected Valley Girl aimlessness: all of a sudden, you’re independent, everything is possible, and you don’t even need money when you go to the mall. This loses a lot of energy for me when the scientists get involved, unfortunately. Light fun overall, not sorry I watched it but probably not going to see it again.
The Sudbury Devil
Interesting indie horror passion project, a bit like a union of The Witch and Alan Garner’s Red Shift. It arguably bites off more than it can chew, especially in how it handles race, and, within that, especially in how it handles Flora’s sexuality. But its ambition and conviction also lead to several definite pluses, including the geekiness of its immersive history and the scope of its ending. The acting isn’t always great, but that’s balanced out with a strong sense of casting as character (Goodenow’s Gollum-like pallor and wet, staring eyes). Good score and some genuinely impressive (and cosmic) visuals, especially when you consider the budget.
Source Code
Two-and-a-half stars for much of its runtime, but then there’s some four-star material towards the end that makes it all average out comfortably. Also, it’s on a train, and as this article points out, trains being cool is one of the things Ayn Rand was actually right about.
Essentially, whenever Jake Gyllenhaal is ignoring the imminent crisis he’s been told about to fuck around trying to figure out his personal situation, I’m annoyed at him. It’s cleverly done, but spend less time doing it! Work smarter, not harder! This is also one of the weakest on-screen romances I’ve seen in a while, so I could not for the life of me invest anything in it. But when Gyllenhaal arranges a beautiful, entertaining last minute for what could be a dying universe, that does hit. It would be a stronger ending if it stopped there, but I don’t entirely mind that it doesn’t, because I’m a nerd and I liked the reveal that this created a legitimate parallel universe where these decisions would have separate consequences.
Taken, “Beyond the Sky” and “Jacob and Jesse”
Started watching this because of Tristan’s article, and since that covers the story, I’ll just do highlights:
* Cool, beautiful shot of the three lights gathering in Sue’s rearview mirror, where we (and she) see the reflection before the real thing. (Also, are UFOs often supposed to present as three lights close together? Because I actually did see that once back in Indiana, moving exactly the way these move here, and watched it for quite a while before they vanished.)
* Love the cut from Owen brutally beating Sue to death to Bowen giving a glowing toast at Owen and Anne’s wedding.
* I like whenever you get someone asking the necessary next question or proposing the necessary next idea, even as it presses outside of the realm of the normal: “So what did it collide with?” is a good early example, but it feels like the same logic applies to Kreutz’s decision to bring in test subjects with high ESP ratings and even to grown-up Tom saying, “Well, then, whatever you do, don’t act special.” (Grown-up Tom kind of rules. He doesn’t–at least for most of “Jacob and Jesse”–believe in any of this, and he’s not above trying some tricks to jar his mother out of her “fantasies,” but he emerges as a guy who loves his family and is absolutely committed to that. His sense of loyalty is unshakeable.)
* Going off the Tom parenthetical above, one of the great pleasures of this, even this early in, is seeing the effects of the passage of time. Sometimes things get worse–Russell Keys is hanging by a fraying thread, and then it’s not only snapped but snapped a long time ago–and sometimes they get better, but always, there’s a believable and moving sense of the passing years. What grows, what decays, what lasts. In “Beyond the Sky,” Catherine Dent–who has an earthy ’40s look to her and should be cast in more historical dramas–plays Sally with a lot of warmth but also with a tamped-down weariness (it’s very Danny-like); in “Jacob and Jesse,” after the passion and intrigue of her peculiar affair has energized her (and after her husband’s death has freed her), she’s much more vibrant, not a woman who’s lost a lover but one who’s gained a life. (For a while, anyway.)
* Owen’s hard-edged, triumphant smile when he sees the photo of Sally and Jacob at the UFO convention is fantastic–instantly, he’s remembered where and when he saw her, and he’s calculated Jacob’s age, and he knows, and we don’t need the exposition for it, it’s all in his face.
* This squirrel abduction scene is both ridiculous and eerie (horror has always made great use of children not knowing what they’re really describing or experiencing, and this is one of the moments that channels horror over sci-fi). It’s also interesting to me that the aliens go to some trouble to make Jesse’s initial abduction gentle and candy-coated, but they make no efforts to soothe, say, Russell, let alone explain things to him, even though we understand by this point that they certainly could. But then, the humans are hardly a unified front either–if you only met Owen, you’d have a very different impression of the species than if you only met Sally.
* Young Anton Yelchin was already good, and he and Catherine Dent make me cry in their scene at the end of “Jacob and Jesse.”
* It can be hard to make decency feel interesting, but this show does a good job of it, especially since it tends to put its characters in a variety of high-pressure, no-right-answer situations where their moral choices still get individuality and texture and feel specific to them rather than just Gallant over (malevolent) Goofus. You get this even with the smaller characters, like Jesse’s stepdad, who doesn’t want Russell around but will still emphasize Russell’s heroism to Jesse to bolster him.
“But when Gyllenhaal arranges a beautiful, entertaining last minute for what could be a dying universe, that does hit. It would be a stronger ending if it stopped there, but I don’t entirely mind that it doesn’t, because I’m a nerd and I liked the reveal that this created a legitimate parallel universe where these decisions would have separate consequences.”
I loved the ending, and then it kept going for two more minutes and lost nearly all of my goodwill. Because perhaps I missed something, but where does this other dude come from, and more importantly, where does he go now that Gyllenhaal Quantum Leaped his ass? To compare to another of your watches, I think the scientists are not as fun as the gals in Night of the Comet but that movie comes to a better understanding in its end, Woornov realizes she has to let this bullshit go and makes a decision Source Code can’t. But also, Comet’s vibes are immaculate, Mrs. Miller was a big fan and pointed out how its blasted urban landscape has an odd reflection in another favorite, Mystery Train. Much more about the hang than the plot, and if its cool is Day-Glo instead of Jarmuschian detachment, the two complement each other well.
I tend to think the other dude is just dead now, but to be fair, he would have been dead if Gyllenhaal hadn’t done anything, either: the only way to intervene was to occupy somebody’s body, and it doesn’t look like there was a way to vacate it again. But it does have a little bit of Wonder Woman 1984 to it.
The hang in Night of the Comet is indeed great, complete with the dress-up games at the end: trying on adulthood and civilization before sort of shrugging and casting it aside. I hadn’t thought of the Mystery Train comparison before but can see that now.
And remember folks, Night of the Comet is not about a merry search for a missing bottle of rare wine. Or maybe it is as well. I always get that mixed up.
Yeah, the principal problem in Night of the Comet is that the scientists largely fit Nigel Tufnel (Spinal Tap)’s intro, to “Stonehenge”: “No one knows who they were or what they were doing”
Is Gyllenhall perhaps not a romantic lead? I base this theory on two and a half datapoints — no chemistry with Paltrow in Proof, having liked him in a lot of stuff in which he not significantly involved in romance, and your post to which I am replying.
My friend who’s visiting for the weekend decided he wanted to spend last night getting into Andor, so we watched the first three episodes of that, again. The show works a lot better in the beginning when you actually know who everyone is, admittedly. And while it still does play like a sort of prologue to the rest of the series (particularly in the extent to which so many major characters and settings aren’t even introduced until the fourth episode), it’s still really fun in how it ends, with Cassian and Luthen completely owning Syril and his band of mall-cop morons who thought they could play-act at heroism. (Note, too, what fucking bullies they are, trashing Maarva’s place and assaulting her and Bix.)
I also showed him “If You’re Going to Write a Comedy Scene, You’re Going to Have Some Rat Feces in There” because I had to make sure he understood the Van Hammersly and Gay Son sketches.
Then I watched the pilot of Party Down – was in the mood for the show, and I’ll probably save more detailed thoughts for Thursday, but man does that pilot get everything right. (Particularly Ron’s self-inflicted humiliations.)
Oh! And I forgot we tried to show him The Room but he fell asleep about halfway through. What an incoherent marvel.
Don’t plan too much it may not come out right
I love how ridiculously generic all the dialogue is. Johnny has a “position” at a bank and is expecting a promotion (from? to?). The one scene with Denny and the drug dealer– “What kind of drugs?” “It doesn’t matter!”
Then, of course, there’s just how incoherent and possibly non-linear the storytelling is. The “throwing the football in tuxedos in the alley” thing is absurd to begin with, but… when is this supposed to be happening? Are they at a wedding? Whose wedding? I think it’s supposed to be Johnny’s? But then they’re not married the rest of the film.
This is the kind of bad movie I love because it’s clear Wiseau was trying to make something deeply personal and failed in every conceivable way. Even on the level of telling the story he wanted to tell– Tommy has clearly told himself this story about what a great guy he was and the woman and best friend who broke his heart, but in the movie Johnny just kind of comes across like a clueless jerk.
And, of course, what fucking room?
Sounds like a Ron Donald do!
The Killers (1964) – Stacked with 60s sadists and badassess (well, except for Ronald Reagan.) It’s filled with intense violence contrasted against pop art Technicolor and a bongos filled soundtrack. John Cassavetes speaks for all of us when he punches Reagan in the face and throws him out of a moving car. Lee Marvin’s attack on a blind woman is shocking but he’s almost upstaged by Clu Gulager’s sadistic hitman. Marvin’s death scene is fantastic. Apparently, according to Gulager, he was drunk and those falls were real with no rehearsal or pads. Slows down in the turns for love and racing but speeds up for the final lap. I could go on but, “Lady, I don’t have the time.”
“Slows down in the turns for love and racing” is a very good way of putting this — I don’t think either adaptation fully figures out how to make a movie from a short story and the flashback stuff here loses momentum (on the other hand, keeping the killers themselves as the protagonist instead of making a vile insurance man the hero is the right call). But Marvin is the fucking man.
I’d like to think that Cassavetes was fucking with Reagan throughout the shoot.
It’s annoying that Reagan in person was probably so bland as to be as inoffensive, like how his biographer literally quit because there’s nothing to the guy.
’64’s version of THE KILLERS feels like the official transition of Hollywood crime films from the classic era to the more modern era in terms of its use of color, un-censored brutality and complete amorality. I’d argue that Neo-Noir begins in Europe and Japan, Siegal’s film is the first wholly American contribution, particularly in its utter lack of romanticism and psychological motivation–It’s pure, unfiltered obsessive self delusion and greed.
What did we play?
This week’s round of Strahd was pretty low key, which was fine as I was starting to doze. We did level up, though. (After Sinners, I maybe appreciate Strahd’s style of vampirism more.)
Euchre! Hilarious to try to teach this to someone who doesn’t know the game, just a ridiculous thing to explain as you go. Not my best showing otherwise but still fun.
Reposting this in the correct place now:
Hollow Knight on Nintendo Switch
I’ve been making steady progress, and made it into the Fog Canyon. The dash has been quite useful already, both for navigation and combat. And I found the bank, which should let me worry less about losing all my money if I mess up.
Burnout Paradise Remastered on Nintendo Switch
I’ve been playing a lot of Burning Routes, which are played with specific cars. This is useful at getting myself acquainted with a lot of cars I already have and hadn’t driven, plus they’re quite varied in event type and difficulty. Plus, many of them unlock new cars, which starts the cycle anew.
F-Zero 99 on Nintendo Switch
Played for a while, even got a victory. My 18th, if memory serves.
<strong[Marvel vs. Capcom: Clash of Super Heroes; Marvel vs. Capcom 2: New Age of Heroes – Marvel vs. Capcom Fighting Collection: Arcade Classics on Nintendo Switch
I played a few rounds, online and off. Won a few. Funny enough, during one online MvC2 match my controller ran out of battery, and the other player noticed something was off and actually stopped fighting me and waited while I swapped for another controller. That was quite classy, any other person would have just pummeled me.
SEGA Ages Out Run on Nintendo Switch
3D Out Run on New Nintendo 3DS
A few rounds just to refresh my sense memory the Switch version actually does a very good job with its arcade-ish features (screen curvature, filters, square resolution), and the 3D in the 3DS version is still one of the best uses of the effect I’ve ever seen.
Woo Hollow Knight! Keep me updated on your progress.
Gobsmacked to learn partway through this that Rand’s favorite book was Les Misérables, when you would have to go a long way to find anything less Randian than that. Did Rand in fact contain multitudes, or was she just terrible at understanding Victor Hugo? I’m guessing the latter.
This is both a great critique of Rand’s thudding shallowness (I feel like the bad writing in her case isn’t just ineptitude but is also part-and-parcel with her ideas; as a lot of people have pointed out, fascism is not kind to art, and a lot of the qualities that make Rand’s writing shit feel like they’re borne of what she thinks are virtues) and a great defense of the value of exploring noxious ideas noxiously expressed.
I know, right??? I actually would describe her as containing multitudes – apparently she was deep in the throes of anxiety after this book was released, wishing she could have the fortitude of her heroes – and that much of her flaws as, well, anything came from flagrantly ignoring anything that was inconvenient to her. I plan on reading a biography of her (mainly to take pleasure in whatever suffering she went through), but the impression I already have of her is that she didn’t even have the emotional capacity to live up to her own half-assed philosophy. Objectivism is simply not sustainable in any context; apparently, she hated the Libertarian party that was created towards the end of her life because she couldn’t stand that they only took bits of pieces of her views and not the whole thing uncritically.
You know what’s really gonna fuck with you? Her favourite philosophers were Aristotle and fucking Thomas Aquinas, of all people.
And thanks!
If you want to get at the heart of the lack of self reflection at the heart of Rand’s “movement” (besides the accidental confessions listed in your piece) read Nathanael Brandon’s “Judgement Day”, written by one of Rand’s lovers (later spurned and exiled), which demonstrates that her cult of personality drew narcissists into its web. A fascinating, clueless read. I’ve heard good things about “The Passion of Ayn Rand” even though it is written by someone rather sympathetic to the subject.
I have to go to work now, but I would like to chime in tonight on how one might contextualize Rand’s novels historically outside of the framework of Objectivism. While it is now read as the magnum opus of her philosophical opinions, even critics sharing Rand’s views (or those who admired her provocations) found significant fault with the book, and it probably initiated schismatic breaks within ojectivist circles. I wonder if reactions to “The Split Saber” in P.T. Anderson’s THE MASTER was partly inspired by reactions to ATLAS SHRUGGED. Other than that, I think this is a fantastic essay, touching on a lot of the book’s quirks. It’s not a knee jerk takedown of Rand, which is a really welcome alternative.
Reminds me of this book’s one joke that American theatergoers get all weepy over Jean Valijean getting arrested for stealing bread when they hate the French, the poor, and have never been hungry.
Ha, and the thing is–to ruin the joke by taking it completely seriously–I feel like that’s when stories have the opportunity to change people, when you can think, “Huh, maybe I can take these feelings out into the real world.” But alas, “you can enjoy things in fiction that you wouldn’t enjoy in real life” applies not only to, say, murder but also to compassion.
Rand’s plutocratic utopianism doesn’t exactly align with Fascism. The latter does depend on collectivistic hive mindedness, and even political management of the economy, to achieve the power it desires. Her argument is that society operates best when personal self interest supplants altruistic and utilitarian goals. It’s more like dime novel Nietzchianism (a philosopher Rand publicly deplored) than national socialist.
The art that predates Randianism might be described as Dark Romantic Nietzchean Speculative Fiction. If you can find it I’d, well, not recommend, but consider, Marie Corelli’s “The Secret Power: A Romance of the Time” (1921) and for further shits and giggles, Garritt Serviss’ “Edison’s Conquest of Mars” (1898) whose plot is pretty much explained in the title. Rand’s books have a deliriously pulpy sensibility, leadened by the fact that she wants to be taken seriously.
I’ve been looking forward to this essay ever since you announced the project and it does not disappoint! (Quality aside, there’s something fascinating about just how many words this weird book has inspired over so many decades.)
Thank you for taking the hit so that we get to enjoy the essay.
Thanks! I honestly felt bad when I saw the WordPress editor describe this as taking twenty-five minutes to read, like I would be inflicting this book on you people for half an hour. It’s incredibly easy to pick apart because the obvious surface errors hide even deeper errors underneath – layers and layers of idiocy – combined with the fact that there are over a thousand pages of this nonsense. It’s so ill-conceived and so badly done that you could get dozens of people going into dozens of different ways it sucks.
As I get further and further away from the time of my life in which I read it, and reflect on the experience, the thing that I keep coming back to…
I read it without any knowledge of the cottage industry of discourse and influence that it spawned – so it was just a book. A very long, weird book, interesting in some places and staggeringly tedious in others – but still just a book that I put down at the end and moved on to something else. But I don’t think it ever occurred to me to treat it as the kind of book worthy of deep critical interrogation – because even back then I could tell that it would fall apart if thought about too hard.
Same here. I came upon this book when I was 14 on the recommendation of a friend of my mom who knew I liked heavy tomes in the vicinity of “serious” middlebrow fiction (like Michener, for example) and had no real idea of the books controversial political reputation. Even upon reading it, the extremity by which it championed individualism wasn’t entirely out of line with the liberal anti-authoritarian literature, like “Animal Farm” and Fahrenheit 451″ that was on the approved school reading list. I wasn’t fully aware of the extent of Rand’s philosophical apostasy from the politics of liberal concensus until about a year later. In a weird way, adolescent literary awakenings in the form of science fiction dystopic fiction serve as gateways to Rand’s style of thought, unless one is exposed to a wider spectrum of literature.
Saving for later, I’m very excited to read your thoughts on a book I burned in honor of a dead friend. (The only book I ever set on fire!)
You’ll be pleased to know I didn’t pay for my copy, even though it made it wildly inconvenient to read. Granted, I thought I was going to knock it out in a day, but I committed.
“Now, I’ve never been arrested. I’ve never been called to jury duty, I’ve never even been inside a courtroom. I am not what people would refer to as a worldly man” oh no! Reading Atlas Shrugged has turned Tristan into the Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer!
Great stuff, I love the observation that her geniuses are entirely intuitive and fraudulent because of this — not because intuition is fraud, but because a book that is nothing but a thousand pages of explanations can’t get away with actually not explaining anything. I gave this 100 pages back in high school and tossed it aside, I think your conclusion of a book as a way into understanding a person/philosophy is true but I have a limited amount of time on this planet and I understood enough to walk away for something more interesting, or at least something that will fail in a less tedious way.
And on pre-existing U.S. objectivism — Daddy Warbucks is right there, right? WHO IS LITTLE ORPHAN ANNIE. I think the attitude is definitely ingrained, I think Rand’s own history of escaping Godless Communism gave her a phony cred here, to make her anti-community part of anti-communism and cover its essential dumb greed.
Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer would run rings around Ayn Rand.
Thanks – the funny contradiction I’m falling into is that I think this was a worthy project while also warning people to keep as far away from this book as possible. I had to go slowly, occasionally using Lee to make it easier, occasionally just venting to people. There are useful things to pick up from reading the whole thing – mainly, it’s what she doesn’t say in over a thousand pages. Part of the reason I think we should lean in on pointing out what a dumbass she was is because at no point in the thousand pages does she ever question the competence of her protagonists – nobody ever says “Well, Dagny, I think you’re just not very good at this,” and thus she doesn’t ‘rise against’ said accusations the way she does being evil.
But at the same time… it’s hard to argue anyone less crazy than me should read this shit.
This book seems like it willed the Billy Madison “no points” speech into existence.
It occurs to me while reading this discussion that Rand can’t explain why her protagonists are geniuses or how and why anything they do works because she’s simply too fucking stupid to.
One thing I have realized over the years is that it’s not terribly difficult to write a character who’s less intelligent than you are, but it’s very difficult to write one who’s more intelligent than you are. Especially if you don’t realize that you just aren’t all that bright.
See also: why most prose authors should at all costs avoid writing famous poet characters and providing excerpts of their “brilliant” poetry.
Pale Fire, the absolute exception because Nabokov is an OKAY poet and the annotations are really the thing! (And on the comedy side, Hacks, because Jean Smart really is funny.)
Hacks is definitely written by people who care about and understand comedy and standup comedy. Compare to, say, Studio 60, written by a man who likes the idea of an important late-night sketch show but who doesn’t actually give a shit about comedy and whose only cultural reference point is Gilbert & Sullivan.
The poem is my favorite part, so I’d call him way better than OK
Memories of “Night “Film”
Well, uh, the Axiom Verge series absolutely has dialogue and cutscenes. A lot of the story is told through the notes we find throughout the game, having to discern who wrote them and to whom, and how they confirm or contradict what we’ve been told on the surface and how we can interpret them to point to the truth of where we are and what’s going on. (The games also serve well as an expression of Tom Happ’s ideas of the nature of the multiverse, how it’s structured and why it exists, and the literal idea of perception as reality.)
Arrgh, I mixed it up with the other Metroidvania game you play. The one where you’re a masked guy fighting bugs and shit.
Hollow Knight – Which isn’t completely devoid of dialogue and cutscenes, either, but they’re minimal compared to the sheer amount of gameplay, and the story is told through the environment as much as anything.
I read We, the Living many years ago because I was fooling around with someone who really liked Ayn Rand and I did not yet know enough to know what a giant red flag that is. I have not read anything by her since, because it turns out I do like myself at least a little.
Hollow Knight on Nintendo Switch
I’ve been making steady progress, and made it into the Fog Canyon. The dash has been quite useful already, both for navigation and combat. And I found the bank, which should let me worry less about losing all my money if I mess up.
Burnout Paradise Remastered on Nintendo Switch
I’ve been playing a lot of Burning Routes, which are played with specific cars. This is useful at getting myself acquainted with a lot of cars I already have and hadn’t driven, plus they’re quite varied in event type and difficulty. Plus, many of them unlock new cars, which starts the cycle anew.
F-Zero 99 on Nintendo Switch
Played for a while, even got a victory. My 18th, if memory serves.
Marvel vs. Capcom: Clash of Super Heroes; Marvel vs. Capcom 2: New Age of Heroes – Marvel vs. Capcom Fighting Collection: Arcade Classics on Nintendo Switch
I played a few rounds, online and off. Won a few. Funny enough, during one online MvC2 match my controller ran out of battery, and the other player noticed something was off and actually stopped fighting me and waited while I swapped for another controller. That was quite classy, any other person would have just pummeled me.
SEGA Ages Out Run on Nintendo Switch
3D Out Run on New Nintendo 3DS
A few rounds just to refresh my sense memory the Switch version actually does a very good job with its arcade-ish features (screen curvature, filters, square resolution), and the 3D in the 3DS version is still one of the best uses of the effect I’ve ever seen.
Year of the Month update!
This August, we’ll be covering 1959. Check out all these movies, albums, books, et al
And there’s still time to write about any of these movies, albums, books, et al this month!
TBD: Captain Nath: Separation Sunday
TBD: Captain Nath: The Sunlandic Twins
Jul. 28th: Tristan J. Nankervis: Sin City
My only slight quibble with this otherwise fantastic essay, is that I don’t think Rand, as writing a novel, has to explain how her characters display their genius, just the actions that result from that. Ultimately the novel fails to establish a philosophical argument (one who her presumed readers already agree to), but that seems to be a problem with the vessel itself. I’ve read a lot of science fiction that goes into laborious exposition of how things work, but that doesn’t make them good books.
There’s an idea Lovecraft had that when you’re writing about mysterious events, even if you never explain to the audience exactly what’s happening, you as a writer absolutely need to know – or at least have to be able to convey the sense that you do. Admittedly, if she had an actual plot, my attention wouldn’t go in that direction. Which is another way of saying I agree and I’m basically saying what you’re saying in a different way.
And thanks!
Ah, what a week to be on vacation and miss the dropping of the long-awaited AS piece! Lots of great points in the essay and these comments, so I’ll just relate my personal experience with the book. As a high school senior I entered an essay contest put on by the Objectivist Society with a scholarship money prize for the best essay on The Fountainhead. I didn’t win, but I turned in what I thought was a very good piece on the merits of very good gentleman Howard Roark. Which in terms of actual written materials means I’m on the record as on the opposite side of Tristan.
And what high school senior with high grades and moderate-low self-esteem wouldn’t love The Fountainhead? Finally, I could stop pitying myself as Ender Wiggen and glorify myself as Roark, undeniable genius and able to nail a woman on the marble flooring I installed my own muscled self.
Then a couple months later I went to college, tried reading Atlas Shrugged, hated every moment of its stupid strawman arguing, gave up in under 200 pages and never looked back. So thanks, Atlas Shrugged, for putting some sense back into me! I still have a bit of affection for The Fountainhead, partly because of its nutty movie adaptation where Gary Cooper (who always kinda strikes me as a secret asshole even when he’s the protagonist) rails against charity in a studio picture like Preston Sturges wrote him as a joke, but mostly because it was the first time I took on a bigass book without being told I had to and actually grappling with it in essay form. An Ayn Rand book is at least partially responsible for making me the man I am today, in a very narrow sense that I would never advertise to people I didn’t know well.
You were only reading Rand to get directions to get away from Rand