Atlas Mugged

For almost as long as Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged has been out, someone or other in Hollywood has thought about adapting it. A friend just sent me a not too old article in Variety about some recent activity on this front.

It's always fun to see the nominally anti-capitalist mucky-mucks of Tinsel Town scrambling to make the ultimate capitalist tale. They may not subscribe to Rand's philosophy, but the idea of one person going against the world appeals to their romantic (and perhaps ruthless) viewpoint.

Whether Atlas Shrugged could work as a movie is questionable. The more compact--but still very long--Fountainhead would probably adapt better. (I know it's been done, but I mean a freer version, not one with a screenplay by Rand herself). On the other hand, cutting down on all that plot and speechifying would probably be an improvement.

One sentence in the Variety piece struck me as odd: "The violent, apocalyptic ending has always posed a challenge but could prove especially so in the post-9/11 climate."

Quite the opposite. The ending is the one thing that works. (SPOILER ALERT:) For those of you who haven't read the novel in the 50+ years it's been out, here's the secret: all the superior people are disappearing, leaving the "looters" to run things. There is some violence in the end, though it's more about how the world implodes when the people who believe in redistributing money rather than creating value are in charge, and can't count on the productive people to bail them out. Once this happens, the strike can be over and the top people can return and run things properly.

No, the one thing that doesn't work is the female protagonist, Dagny Taggart, is in charge of a railroad. No one cares about trains any more, certainly not in America. You could only put them at the center of a plot if it were a period piece, which would take away from the immediacy of the story. (Plus Hollywood generally avoids period pieces if it can.) But if you set it in the present, or the future, you'd have to make it about something else, and pretty much rewrite Rand from top to bottom. Dagny would need a new job--one that represents our age. So where would she work? At an airline? At Microsoft? Apple? Wal-Mart? Starbucks? The mind boggles.