Essay #1 Bare Metal An Appreciation of Atlas Shrugged

Bare Metal

An Appeciation of Atlas Shrugged

w.B.Lees

April 24, 2011

Copyright (C) 2001 W.B.Lees

Science fiction is an unexpected genre for the reasoned intellectual work of Ann Rynd, pictured here in the film Atlas Shrugged (2011) by director Paul Johansson. The story clearly has had an influence on the story behind the movie Contact (1997, Director Robert Zemeckis, Writer Carl Sagan), and brings to mind the distopian economics in the background of the movie RoboCop (1987, Director Paul Verhoeven). I see another connection to the film Gattaca (1997, Director/Writer Andrew Niccol). In a curious, true coincidence, I just started re-reading Robert A. Heinlein's technocractic future story "The Roads Must Roll" (1951) while waiting for the film to begin; Heinlein's short story is clearly cut from the same cloth as Rynd's 1957 novel featuring themes of economic mismanagement and the perils of lack of investment in the scientific innovative radical engineers.

Coming of age in the 70's and 80's, I missed out on the whole Ann Rynd big deal. So it was with an open mind that I approach the film and the Objectivist philosophy behind her work. Having only just started Rynd's other class The Fountainhead (1943) and having no grounding in Atlas, I can only approximately infer the themes of her message. What surprises me at first encounter is the distain and reverse prejudice of other reviewer and commentators, dismissing her ideas as elitist and adolescent and uncompelling. It is perhaps appropriate that these same feelings of revulsion drip from the society of the film in relation to its struggling innovators, Dagny Taggart and Henry Rearden. Both are seen by their closest relations in the film as unfeeling and uninvolved and detached and consumed with building something purely of themselves. Similarly has been the reaction to this film, as something almost alien and inhuman and inhumane to be eradicated. The film is almost too heavy handed in its message that creating something truely good oneself, in and of itself, being a reason foreign to many minds.

A memorable scene from the film occurs when Dagney, heroine railroad executive, trades her diamond necklace for a bare metal bracelet forged from the first fires of Rearden's new metal, then being nearly cast aside by the untrained eye of Rearden's inferior wife. The constast of values between this new alloy's potential and old world jewels tradition and fashion and obviousness gives the audience a pears before swine moment. The scene is curiously remeniscent of the class Star Trek episode, the Dolman of Elas, where the discovery of crude stone necklace marks the turning point of a crisis.

One theme reappearing throughout this film is the superior quality of work, of doing ones own work, of achieving and building and naming something completely new: of accomplishing through one's own personal, unique and self-reason the steps of achievment. The film portrays a small circle of true originators, surrounded by the unoriginal inferiors who party and squander and are powerless to stop the crumbling infrastructure of their playhouse. In this sense the film is reminescent of the 50's SF themes and fears of technological regression (such as in the work of Heinlein and Phillip Dick), that we will lose and forget the native capability to build and create and generate new things as we depend on copies and derivatives. There is a danger that we as Americans, and indeed 20th Century Man, will be left behind in a crumbling backwater we can no longer make as the few genetic supermen and women escape to the space and the future of mankind.

A question that might be asked by today's viewer is, why railroads as a metaphor of the vehicle of progress and development. In a world today where rail has been apparently supplanted by the automobile, truck and air transport systems, what does a film about rebuilding and rejeuveating the rail infrastructure speak to?  We might observe that the three legs of the rail network: business lines, metal supports and engine powers, are the fundemental pure scientific pursuits that carry us forward. We can observe that the modern derivatives of these things, transport companies, ports and mobile fleets, are simplifications that avoid the truely hard work of running a rail line, and that eventually the false economies of these modern model businesses will collapse back to the bare metal where the hard work truely happens.