Ayn Rand is such a perfect storm of horribleness its hard to even believe she's real. Of everything you published in The-Formerly-Respectable-Religious-Journal-That-Shall-Not-Be-Named, this one made me laugh the most. What a nice surprise to see it again.
Great essay. You've expressed so elegantly everything I feel about Ayn Rand. I once attempted to read Atlas Shrugged, prompted by a libertarian I worked with. I got to the part after Henry Rearden and Dagney Taggart were driving through the countryside after Rearden's success creating the new alloy. They both were bored with nature and Taggart says " You know what I miss? Billboards!" Or something like that. I closed the book and never picked it up again.
I really have never understood why Ayn Rand ever got any attention. I was forced to read Anthem in middle school and still feel twinges remembering the apparently triumphant ending wherein the protagonist lifts a banner that reads "ego." If it's gross to a twelve-year-old, you'd think the better informed might not be so taken in, although I fear the opposite is more generally the case.
Rand's personal philosophy probably seemed slightly (but only slightly) more plausible and palatable back when the Soviet Union still existed. I mean, she's always been a bad writer, a worse philosopher, and generally a horrible person, but Objectivism at least had perverse appeal as a sort of Bizarro Leninism back when the latter was a live political force. But then again, Cold War conservatives usually hated Rand just as much as those on the left, so maybe nobody ever did like her, and Anthem just ended up in schools through some fluke of curriculum development.
I am convinced that a good share of bad ideology out there is kept in place by an emotional fear from the opposite end of the dialectic. I want to cut Rand some slack for having an utterly absurd pro-Selfishness pseudo-philosophy because she was raised in the Soviet Union. How much of her philosophy was just an emotional attempt to “sail to Tarshish” (Jonah 1:3) and get as far away as she could. How much of contemporary right wing discourse is behavior and beliefs one could never come to in a positive program but exists as a counter movement to be anything but the left. False dichotomies screw with peoples brains. “In order to most defeat left wing ideology, I must become a right wing nut.” “Trump is horrible yes but he is the only one that can save us from the Swamp.” The bozos that continue her philosophy without that upbringing, God help them they’re probably just grifting.
Does that mitigate her stupidity, her excruciatingly lousy novels, or her revolting character? If anything she produced had a trace of value, then her biography might redeem her bad ideas. But it really doesn’t matter, since she was objectively devoid of so much as a shred of intellectual or artistic talent.
In case anybody was wondering, I can confirm that the Atlas Shrugged movie was so terrible that even a teenager who actually liked Ayn Rand at the time could recognize that it was completely worthless.
Should Atlas Shrugged have been brought to the silver screen? Probably not, judging from Rotten Tomatoes. But I have a different take on Ayn Rand. Her entire life project was a response to pure evil (i.e. totalitarianism). Yes, she was an atheist and a materialist, but surely you can’t hold that against her. The virtue of her “philosophy” was in being truthful and transparent about one’s motives. Everybody pursues their own self interest. Most people attempt to cloak it as the pursuit of good. Some engage in that deception more perniciously than others, usually at the cost of other people’s freedoms. I’ll take Ayn Rand’s “egoism” over false virtue any day of the week. Enjoy your time down under.
She was an imbecile, a brute, and a hack, and being truthful about vicious motives is the virtue of a psychopath. And totalitarianism isn’t conquered by selfishness.
Ayn Rand wasn’t just an atheist (who cares) but rabidly opposed Christianity, not for the usual good reasons but specifically because Jesus taught care for others—the poor, the oppressed, the dregs of society. This is the opposite of her “philosophy,” to dignify a childish simpleton’s moronic blathering with such a term.
The Upanishad put the full range from false virtue to Christ like love quite well:
"It is not for the sake of the husband/wife/child that the husband/wife/child is loved, but for the sake of the self/Self."
Forgive me if I'm using Christian language erroneously - but when we live in sin, in the false lower case "s" self - it is in fact, as the Upanishad observes, a kind of false virtue, assuming we are altruistic for the sake of others but ultimately for our egoistic needs and desires.
And, we live united in Christ, ALL we do is for the sake of God in all.
But this understanding of the Upanishadic verse sets up a false duality. In fact, even if I appear to be writing this comment for the sake of what others' think of "me," at the very same time, just below the "surface," the Light of the Divine, the Power of the the Divine, the Bliss of the Divine, is moving every thought, every feeling, and the fingers that type this comment.
All of creation is yearning for the full expression of the Divine.
I read a funny account somewhere regarding a party which was attended by both Rand and Friedrich Hayek. She would keep on babbling on about whatever and Hayek kept yelling at her to shut-up. I should say that a lot of libertarians who love Hayek never really read him. Ditto for Adam Smith.
I remember “The Tree of Life”. I was enthralled. I’ll never understand the people who walked out and demanded their money back, as they say happened when that film released.
As a lifelong Malick fan, I wander if you have any plans to write something (not necessarily a review) on “The Thin Red Line”? I have been drawn to that movie since I saw it as a very young lad since I saw it in the theater in 98. Perhaps the most profound war/ anti war movies ever made. It’s just one of those movies that is impossible to put in to words. It was over shadowed by “Saving Private Ryan”, which came out a couple of months before if memory serves correct, even by cinephiles. I never understood why that was.
a friend of mine wrote recently, "i find Malick's aestheticization of pseudo roman-catholic dip**** authentic-spark-of-life spiritualism to verge on fascism in the benjaminian sense" (he did not employ asterisks, but i am mindful of the author's extended family). i don't entirely agree, but i don't entirely disagree either.
The use of the word fascism there is so ridiculously excessive that it makes the critique toothless. Since TofL, he’s made some inferior films (Knave of Cups was simply bad), but he seems to be recovering.
Well that's why he adds "in the Benjaminian sense," referring specifically to the end of that essay where fascism is the aestheticization of politics. But I am someone who believes Malick made one good movie, his first.
Yes, and even in that sense the word is rhetorical overkill.
Malick’s first five films are all brilliant. Badlands is great, but The Thin Red Line is just as great. Who else could have turned James Jones into Melville?
although you could probably rearrange 3-5 in any order and I wouldn't bat an eye
Everything else I've seen after those have been almost a parody of himself. To the Wonder was meh. Knight of Cups was really bad. When I first saw it, several people walked out a quarter of the way through, and it was already a small audience to begin with. One guy actually flipped the screen off on his way to the exit. Not that Malick's ever been the most "accessible" filmmaker, but still.
Song to Song was soporific. Yet to see "A Hidden Life." By all accounts, it's supposed to be a return to form, of sorts.
I liked Thin Red Line at the time, but it has come to seem less astute about the war than I had convinced myself it was—it becomes just another platform for banal existential musings. I admit I have never finished Days of Heaven—anyone who makes it through that film has my respect if not my admiration. And I sat through both Satantango & Jeanne Dielman in the theater.
He has a gift for imagery, I grant. The camera is often in just the right place. Which is why he's worth arguing about, I suppose.
I haven't bothered with the "bad ones" and probably won't. I am looking forward to the Way of Wind. I don't often get tickets to the theater for the first night debut of a movie, but that one I will.
Tree of Life remains my favorite (and probably most providential) cinematic experience of all time. I was deep in studying De Lubac when I saw it, and it just crashed upon me. It was an utter revelation. I left the theater a different person. I agree with you, in the end, it is a bridge between the two ways, stunningly realized. Now, as I raise my young children, I often think of the montage of the children growing to Smetana's The Moldau, which perfectly captures the chaos, joy, and exhaustion of it all.
David Bentley Hart is timely as ever. Last week a book came out from Penguin Press by an internationally bestselling, award-winning writer and philosopher titled "The Visionaries: Arendt, Beauvoir, RAND, Weil . . . and the Power of Philosophy in Dark Times." [with Rand, what about the Nadir of Philosophy in Dark Times]
Hard to believe that this is hailed by NYTimes, The Guardian, and Financial Times.
I’ve long held the belief that Terrence Malick’s films are as close an example we have of cinematic icons or film as prayer.
Ayn Rand is such a perfect storm of horribleness its hard to even believe she's real. Of everything you published in The-Formerly-Respectable-Religious-Journal-That-Shall-Not-Be-Named, this one made me laugh the most. What a nice surprise to see it again.
This is one of my favorite DBH articles from this era.
Great essay. You've expressed so elegantly everything I feel about Ayn Rand. I once attempted to read Atlas Shrugged, prompted by a libertarian I worked with. I got to the part after Henry Rearden and Dagney Taggart were driving through the countryside after Rearden's success creating the new alloy. They both were bored with nature and Taggart says " You know what I miss? Billboards!" Or something like that. I closed the book and never picked it up again.
I really have never understood why Ayn Rand ever got any attention. I was forced to read Anthem in middle school and still feel twinges remembering the apparently triumphant ending wherein the protagonist lifts a banner that reads "ego." If it's gross to a twelve-year-old, you'd think the better informed might not be so taken in, although I fear the opposite is more generally the case.
Rand's personal philosophy probably seemed slightly (but only slightly) more plausible and palatable back when the Soviet Union still existed. I mean, she's always been a bad writer, a worse philosopher, and generally a horrible person, but Objectivism at least had perverse appeal as a sort of Bizarro Leninism back when the latter was a live political force. But then again, Cold War conservatives usually hated Rand just as much as those on the left, so maybe nobody ever did like her, and Anthem just ended up in schools through some fluke of curriculum development.
I am convinced that a good share of bad ideology out there is kept in place by an emotional fear from the opposite end of the dialectic. I want to cut Rand some slack for having an utterly absurd pro-Selfishness pseudo-philosophy because she was raised in the Soviet Union. How much of her philosophy was just an emotional attempt to “sail to Tarshish” (Jonah 1:3) and get as far away as she could. How much of contemporary right wing discourse is behavior and beliefs one could never come to in a positive program but exists as a counter movement to be anything but the left. False dichotomies screw with peoples brains. “In order to most defeat left wing ideology, I must become a right wing nut.” “Trump is horrible yes but he is the only one that can save us from the Swamp.” The bozos that continue her philosophy without that upbringing, God help them they’re probably just grifting.
Does that mitigate her stupidity, her excruciatingly lousy novels, or her revolting character? If anything she produced had a trace of value, then her biography might redeem her bad ideas. But it really doesn’t matter, since she was objectively devoid of so much as a shred of intellectual or artistic talent.
Yeah I’d say you’re right. The mitigation would be of a minor degree. Nothing close to an excuse or apologia.
I'm always reminded of the joke ''the worst thing the USSR ever did was give ayn rand a free degree''.
In case anybody was wondering, I can confirm that the Atlas Shrugged movie was so terrible that even a teenager who actually liked Ayn Rand at the time could recognize that it was completely worthless.
Should Atlas Shrugged have been brought to the silver screen? Probably not, judging from Rotten Tomatoes. But I have a different take on Ayn Rand. Her entire life project was a response to pure evil (i.e. totalitarianism). Yes, she was an atheist and a materialist, but surely you can’t hold that against her. The virtue of her “philosophy” was in being truthful and transparent about one’s motives. Everybody pursues their own self interest. Most people attempt to cloak it as the pursuit of good. Some engage in that deception more perniciously than others, usually at the cost of other people’s freedoms. I’ll take Ayn Rand’s “egoism” over false virtue any day of the week. Enjoy your time down under.
She was an imbecile, a brute, and a hack, and being truthful about vicious motives is the virtue of a psychopath. And totalitarianism isn’t conquered by selfishness.
Ayn Rand wasn’t just an atheist (who cares) but rabidly opposed Christianity, not for the usual good reasons but specifically because Jesus taught care for others—the poor, the oppressed, the dregs of society. This is the opposite of her “philosophy,” to dignify a childish simpleton’s moronic blathering with such a term.
The Upanishad put the full range from false virtue to Christ like love quite well:
"It is not for the sake of the husband/wife/child that the husband/wife/child is loved, but for the sake of the self/Self."
Forgive me if I'm using Christian language erroneously - but when we live in sin, in the false lower case "s" self - it is in fact, as the Upanishad observes, a kind of false virtue, assuming we are altruistic for the sake of others but ultimately for our egoistic needs and desires.
And, we live united in Christ, ALL we do is for the sake of God in all.
But this understanding of the Upanishadic verse sets up a false duality. In fact, even if I appear to be writing this comment for the sake of what others' think of "me," at the very same time, just below the "surface," the Light of the Divine, the Power of the the Divine, the Bliss of the Divine, is moving every thought, every feeling, and the fingers that type this comment.
All of creation is yearning for the full expression of the Divine.
I read a funny account somewhere regarding a party which was attended by both Rand and Friedrich Hayek. She would keep on babbling on about whatever and Hayek kept yelling at her to shut-up. I should say that a lot of libertarians who love Hayek never really read him. Ditto for Adam Smith.
Yeah, it seems like libertarians who actually engage with what Hayek wrote spend most of their time chiding him for being insufficiently libertarian.
I remember “The Tree of Life”. I was enthralled. I’ll never understand the people who walked out and demanded their money back, as they say happened when that film released.
As a lifelong Malick fan, I wander if you have any plans to write something (not necessarily a review) on “The Thin Red Line”? I have been drawn to that movie since I saw it as a very young lad since I saw it in the theater in 98. Perhaps the most profound war/ anti war movies ever made. It’s just one of those movies that is impossible to put in to words. It was over shadowed by “Saving Private Ryan”, which came out a couple of months before if memory serves correct, even by cinephiles. I never understood why that was.
a friend of mine wrote recently, "i find Malick's aestheticization of pseudo roman-catholic dip**** authentic-spark-of-life spiritualism to verge on fascism in the benjaminian sense" (he did not employ asterisks, but i am mindful of the author's extended family). i don't entirely agree, but i don't entirely disagree either.
The use of the word fascism there is so ridiculously excessive that it makes the critique toothless. Since TofL, he’s made some inferior films (Knave of Cups was simply bad), but he seems to be recovering.
Well that's why he adds "in the Benjaminian sense," referring specifically to the end of that essay where fascism is the aestheticization of politics. But I am someone who believes Malick made one good movie, his first.
Yes, and even in that sense the word is rhetorical overkill.
Malick’s first five films are all brilliant. Badlands is great, but The Thin Red Line is just as great. Who else could have turned James Jones into Melville?
Wholeheartedly agree. I'd rank them:
1) The Thin Red Line
2) Days of Heaven
3) The New World
4) The Tree of Life
5) Badlands
although you could probably rearrange 3-5 in any order and I wouldn't bat an eye
Everything else I've seen after those have been almost a parody of himself. To the Wonder was meh. Knight of Cups was really bad. When I first saw it, several people walked out a quarter of the way through, and it was already a small audience to begin with. One guy actually flipped the screen off on his way to the exit. Not that Malick's ever been the most "accessible" filmmaker, but still.
Song to Song was soporific. Yet to see "A Hidden Life." By all accounts, it's supposed to be a return to form, of sorts.
You have good taste.
I liked Thin Red Line at the time, but it has come to seem less astute about the war than I had convinced myself it was—it becomes just another platform for banal existential musings. I admit I have never finished Days of Heaven—anyone who makes it through that film has my respect if not my admiration. And I sat through both Satantango & Jeanne Dielman in the theater.
He has a gift for imagery, I grant. The camera is often in just the right place. Which is why he's worth arguing about, I suppose.
What rubbish. The Thin Red Line is the gnostic-Christian cinematic masterpiece. It’s the Moby-Dick of American film.
Days of Heaven is magnificent.
Pot (leaning out with a spyglass from the crow's nest of the Pequod): The kettle is rhetorical overkill!
My ranking (of the ones I've seen) would be:
1. The Thin Red Line
2. Tree of Life
3. The New World
4. Days of Heaven
5. A Hidden Life
6. Badlands
I haven't bothered with the "bad ones" and probably won't. I am looking forward to the Way of Wind. I don't often get tickets to the theater for the first night debut of a movie, but that one I will.
You know I've heard Rand be called the last of the enlightenment. I've also heard she died while on government welfare.
True, Cooper was not a great actor. There are so few of his films I really feel inclined to sit down and watch.
Hope you're having fun in Australia. This is one of my favorite all time pieces of your writing.
Tree of Life remains my favorite (and probably most providential) cinematic experience of all time. I was deep in studying De Lubac when I saw it, and it just crashed upon me. It was an utter revelation. I left the theater a different person. I agree with you, in the end, it is a bridge between the two ways, stunningly realized. Now, as I raise my young children, I often think of the montage of the children growing to Smetana's The Moldau, which perfectly captures the chaos, joy, and exhaustion of it all.
David Bentley Hart is timely as ever. Last week a book came out from Penguin Press by an internationally bestselling, award-winning writer and philosopher titled "The Visionaries: Arendt, Beauvoir, RAND, Weil . . . and the Power of Philosophy in Dark Times." [with Rand, what about the Nadir of Philosophy in Dark Times]
Hard to believe that this is hailed by NYTimes, The Guardian, and Financial Times.