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Nov. 17, 2011 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
23:40
2034 Atlas Shrugged: The Freedomain Radio Review

Stefan Molyneux, Host of Freedomain Radio, reviews the movie 'Atlas Shrugged'

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Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux, host of Free Domain Radio, which is the largest and most popular philosophy show in the world.
40 million downloads and counting.
And this is my review of the movie Atlas Shrugged, which I watched yesterday and again tonight with my wife.
And before I give my review, just a little bit of background, because I'm going to dig into some serious artistic stuff here and establish a little bit of my history so you have some idea of where I'm coming from.
I studied acting and playwriting for two years at the National Theatre School in Montreal, in Canada.
And I've written, I don't know, maybe two dozen plays.
Produced a play. I've acted considerably.
I was the lead in Macbeth in the 90s in Montreal and had a bunch of other roles, not particularly important to go into detail about them.
I'm a novelist, I've written five or six novels.
And I did actually make a short film that was a finalist in the Hollywood Film Festival So I have some A little bit of experience, and I've also studied a lot of art.
I spent two years studying English literature at Glendon College of York University, and then I did two years at National Theatre School, and then I did two years to finish my undergraduate in history, and then I did a graduate degree in history, focusing on the history of philosophy at the University of Toronto.
So, I have a fairly wide-ranging artistic background, and hopefully that will bring some value or maybe some slight credibility to what I'm going to say about the movie.
Secondly, to give full, I guess you could call it bias, exposition, I'm a huge, huge fan of Ayn Rand.
Ayn Rand is one of the most astoundingly original and powerful minds of the 20th century.
An extraordinarily accomplished woman.
To become one of the major, major novelists of popular philosophy Without even growing up speaking English is absolutely astounding.
I mean, can you imagine being a national treasure in Spain when you only learn Spanish in your 20s?
Literally. I mean, it's astounding what she did.
And she wrote movies and she wrote plays.
The night of January 16th is an enormously entertaining and engaging play.
And nonfiction and fiction and just amazing, amazing stuff.
Philosophically, extremely challenging and rigorous stuff.
I have some departures with her, you know, with massive respect.
I have some departures with her in terms of the role of government, in terms of ethics, and to some degree in aesthetics.
Not particularly important.
I agree with Ayn Rand or submit to the force of her superior reasoning far more than I diverge.
So I want to sort of put that out there as well.
So, on to the film.
The film is magnificent.
The film is magnificent.
And I can't really think of much to say about it as negative.
So I'm not going to.
Yeah, Eddie Willers could have been a bit of a stronger actor, but it doesn't matter.
So let me tell you about the things that I thought were fantastic.
First of all, I'm glad that there were no name actors in there.
With apologies to the actors.
It's sort of like when you watch a foreign film, then you don't have a star that you know in the role, and so you can actually just deal with the person as a human being.
So the Brangelina team was supposed to be looking at it.
So if you'd had, I don't know, Brad Pitt as Hank Reardon and Pillow Lips, what's her head as Dagny Taggart, then you would have been thinking, oh, that's Brad Pitt, that's Pillow Lips or whatever.
And that would have been kind of distracting, but with these actors, because I didn't really know them from previous roles, they sort of looked a little familiar here and there, I could really just engage with them as the people that they represent in the book.
It's true that some of the physical stuff was different, but...
I mean, if you and I have a dream about a cat, and I say the cat was black, and you say, well, my dream about a cat was orange, who's right?
Who's wrong? Doesn't matter. The physical stuff doesn't matter that much.
I mean, I thought the acting was great.
One of the wonderful, wonderful things about film...
Is that film can deliver extraordinary nuance that the written word cannot deliver.
That's really important to understand.
This is one massive advantage.
And why the characters in the movie seem in some ways more fleshed out and ambivalent or ambiguous than they do in the book.
So, you know, in a novel you'll say...
I love you, he sneered, right?
It means you get the I love you, which is good, and then he sneered, which is bad.
But an actor can deliver, a good actor, and I think the actors in this film are really good, really good, kudos to everyone, and with extremely, extremely challenging material.
A really good actor can deliver six or seven or eight layers of Of meaning and subtlety and contradiction and ambiguity in a line.
I mean, it's just a magnificent skill to watch, and the great actors can do it beautifully.
And that was delivered really, really well in the movie.
Again, if you see it again, you can look at all of the subtlety.
And this is, I mean, huge praise to the director as well.
Having directed actors on the same level, but having directed actors myself, I know it's a real challenge to bring out some of the Real talents that came out shining in this film.
So kudos to them. And that's one thing that you can get in a movie is a layer, huge layers of interactions.
I mean, so in a book, you're reading a sentence where one character is talking.
You don't know what the other character's reaction is until if the author decides to tell you what their reaction is.
But if you watch the people listening in this movie, you can see their reaction to what's being said.
You can't do that in a novel.
There's things you can do in a novel that you can't do in a movie.
Like you can have an interior life in a novel with language and Ryan Rand does this really really well but you can have an interior life if the character thinks this but of course in a movie if with a really skilled actor you can show that rather than have exposition in text but nonetheless I mean so there are strengths in both mediums and I thought this film was a great adaptation I hugely applauded the decision to set it in the future I mean obviously with the budget they had to set it in the past would have been impossible But hugely applaud their decision to set it in the future.
I thought it was a great idea and brilliantly executed, wonderfully done all round.
It makes it much more contemporary, of course.
And, of course, the society that Ayn Rand was talking about was in the future from when she was, right?
So that's an important thing to remember, right?
Ayn Rand was a novel thinking about in 1957, but she was talking about a society somewhat in the future.
And so it makes sense that it would be a little bit in the future from here, whereas a lot more in the future from where she was writing.
So again, just fantastic and wonderful and...
They're beautifully done, beautifully shot.
I mean, good heavens. I mean, they had a $5 million budget and they had five weeks to shoot this movie.
I mean, it's astounding what was pulled together.
And the music is great and stirring and the subtlety.
It's like there was great direction given to almost everyone in every scene.
Even the extras seemed to know what was going on and have some intention.
So, you know, kudos on the extras, too.
I just thought it was really well done.
And the bad guys...
I mean, Rand is often accused of creating caricatures rather than characters.
I don't agree with that at all.
I do not agree with that at all.
I think Rand has incredibly layered and subtle and moving characters.
But I thought in the movie, you got it even more fleshed out.
Who had subtlety, who had ambivalence and so on.
And, I mean, Reardon's brother, I thought was wonderfully played and has that kind of ambiguity.
He was trying to help his brother, but got sucked into politics thinking he could do it that way.
And, I mean, just fantastic all round.
I really can't say enough good things about it.
What I really, really liked...
I tried to throw aside my preconceptions about this being a book that I read and loved since the age of 16.
And I tried to think, okay, it's just a story.
It's just a story. And what I really loved about this film...
It's a truly, truly adult story.
Swear to God, most of the time that I'm watching Hollywood movies, which is not that much I guess anymore, I really feel like I'm watching movies designed for somebody 14 to 17 years old.
And not a very advanced 14 to 17 years old either.
And this was a truly adult film.
A truly adult film.
And the drama that was in this film was really powerful.
I mean, there's lots of stupid hanging from helicopters over volcanoes kinds of drama in Hollywood films, which is all just, I mean, it can be exciting, but it's kind of crap and nonsense, right?
It's, you know, Terminator-style suspense, you know, or Tarantino, you know, everybody in the room has a gun pointed at each other, that kind of nonsense.
But this was real drama.
The real drama is where the food gets delivered to cities.
You want to see real drama?
See what happens when food supplied to cities is interrupted.
And that's really what they're talking about with the rail line and so on.
And that to me was real adult drama, real adult business challenges.
And combat in movies is almost always portrayed as Yelling or violence, right?
People yell at each other or they hit each other or they shoot each other or whatever.
That's how conflict...
But conflict in the real world is never like that.
I mean, conflict for almost all adults in the real world is like subtle jabs and undermining and a little bit of verbal abuse followed by a laugh and a, oh, don't take things so seriously.
The way that people are broken and undermined in the real world is through a steady drip, drip, drip.
Syllable after syllable.
That builds up on people's spine like a stalagmite and then eventually just breaks them.
It's little, little words that burrow into your brain like termites and nest and egg and feed and grow and eventually just take your soul out from the inside out.
That's how people are broken.
Not on a wheel, but they're broken like rocks in steady rain.
Eroded. We are eroded.
We are never, almost never, attacked directly.
But as adults, the way that our integrity is broken is through the soft, insistent, scraping caress of seemingly tender hands that are just doing the slowest strangulation known to man, which is the ignoring of essential issues.
It is the trivialization of that which is most powerful and meaningful to us.
It is the constant diversion of anything important into meaningless trivia.
It is the eye-rolling whenever an important subject comes up.
It's the snicker. It's the laugh.
It's the gossip. It's the undermining.
Planting of the hell seeds of insecurity in a particularly fertile mind.
This is how people are really broken in the world.
And that is really shown beautifully in the film.
How there's never a direct attack.
It's always oblique. It's always behind someone.
It's never even a stab, really.
It's just a slow gravitational minusculization of human potential.
To keep people small, to keep people petty, to keep people addicted to food and sports and fashion and inconsequentialities.
I mean, this is how we are broken and enslaved and turned into a kind of grim and defeated lifestyle.
And this is shown in the film.
So to me, this is what I mean by a very adult film.
What they did on the budget is superhuman.
You have no idea, if you've never been involved in filmmaking, what they have done with the budget is astounding.
For example, I can't even remember.
I've searched for somebody again out there.
There was some runaway train movie with Denzel Washington.
God, it was bad.
And they spent like $150, $175 million.
The kids movie Tangled was $280 million.
$280 million.
Sorry. $280 million and another dollar for the songs, which were really bad.
And this film was made on $5 million.
I mean, amazing, wonderful, astounding kudos to everyone.
The amount of work...
I mean, of course, it's a labor of love to make a film like this.
Absolutely, astoundingly great.
The great tragedy in not casting me as John Galt, I will overlook for now.
Of course, you've got more to make. So, let's talk a little bit about...
Just the context of the film and the story.
This is one of the greatest stories ever told.
It has a fatal flaw, in my opinion, but that's relatively immaterial.
It is a great and fantastic story.
Ayn Rand comes from the Russian tradition, and in the Russian tradition, not just the Russian tradition, sure did this as well in Arms and the Man, but there is this idea that people are who they are Because they have accepted certain arguments or they are inhabited by certain ideas.
And those ideas are like little men inside a big giant robot, right?
They're just moving the levers and making the person walk here and there and back and forth and up and down.
And if you can go in and talk to these little men who hold the ideas that move the man, Then you get them to change their minds and they'll start moving levers in a different way, pushing levers in a different way.
The person will turn around and be different than he or she was before.
This goes all the way back a lot further, but one of the greatest examples is Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment.
is a man who murders for the sake of an idea.
He has an idea come into his head that to be a great man is to overleap human morality, to overleap the common bounds of human morality, to become like a Napoleon or like an Alexander the Great or like a Caesar and to take what you want regardless of the petty ethics of the herd.
This idea gets its way into Raskolnikov's head, and he goes to commit a murder to get the money to complete his studies, and he murders a foul porn broker woman who is wretched and horrible and so on.
And the idea is that...
These arguments sit inside people's heads and make them do stuff.
And if a better argument comes along, then you get different behavior.
So it's like human beings are programmed by arguments or by ideas or by faith or by philosophy.
But they're programmed by ideas.
And in order to get human beings to change their behavior, all you need to do is give them better ideas, better arguments to disprove their existing premises.
And then human beings will change.
And it's not true.
It's not true. And I think this is why Ayn Rand didn't write any more fiction from 1957 until she died in, I think, 1982.
Because she understood that the central premise of her philosophy, and all philosophers who don't study some form of psychology or self-knowledge, I think, fall into this trap.
Better arguments do not change the world.
Superior reason, superior evidence, Better logic does not change the world.
Human beings are impervious to rationality for the most part.
And so better arguments are like bullets off Superman's chest.
I mean, they don't penetrate.
They just bounce off. And everyone who's tried to argue a human being into better behavior through reason and evidence and appeals to commonsensical virtue that everybody accepts, like don't steal, don't kill, don't rape, don't assault kind of thing.
Realize that human beings are not driven by reason.
They rationalize ex post facto from their actions, right?
So people don't have a theory, say, about spanking kids being good.
They spank kids because they're angry, because that was what was done to them, because they don't want to question the virtues of their own parents when their parents assaulted them in this way.
So people spank because of emotional baggage that they have and petty, irrational rage, entitlement to the feeling that your children should obey you and so on.
And then they come up with justifications for why they spank.
People do immoral things and then come up with justifications why.
And so since Justifications are the effects of actions.
The, quote, reasons that people give for what they do were not there before they did it, and they're not why people do stuff.
The reasons are generated after the fact.
This isn't just my opinion.
This is the scientific evidence.
The fact as it stands so far, right, that people can see through brain scans, psychologists can see people's impulses occur in the base of the brain and the action occurs and only then is the reason created afterwards through language.
It could be one of the main reasons why language exists.
It certainly is one of the main reasons why philosophy exists, is to provide justification after the fact for what people, through emotional crap that they have, want to do anyway.
And so one thing that is missing in Russian literature, I think in Fathers and Sons, which I actually adapted to the stage by Turgenev, almost all the Dostoevsky that I can think of, and Ayn Rand, what's missing is childhood.
It's childhood. So for instance, you have Dagny, the protagonist and antagonist is Dagny Taggart and her brother James Taggart.
They both come from the same family.
They've gone in completely opposite directions.
And there's no explanation as to why, really.
And since these directions, there are some scenes flashing back, not in the movie, but in the book, there are some scenes flashing back to Dagny and James' childhoods, and there is no reason given.
They grew up in the same family, and they went completely opposite directions, and there's no reason given as to why.
It's the same thing, of course, in Crime and Punishment, that Raskolnikov comes from the same family as his sister does.
His mother is nice, his father is absent, if I remember rightly.
His sister is really nice, the sister he's trying to save from, was it Lu Xin?
Anyway. So the rest of his family is really nice.
He just becomes a murderer. And there's no reason given.
But historically, murderers are abused as children.
Significantly, seriously, extremely, savagely abused as children.
And so the missing link in these stories It's always the childhood experiences of the characters.
Dostoevsky knew something about this.
I mean, Dostoevsky was raised by a man so unbelievably foul and such a vicious drunkard that his serfs actually killed him, murdered his father.
By forcing him to drink alcohol until he died of alcohol poisoning.
Can you imagine what a brutal, unholy scene that must have been?
And this was the man. And Dostoevsky himself was addicted to gambling, which is, you know, these kinds of addictions to dysfunctional behaviors are very typical for people who've gone through these kinds of absolutely wretched childhoods.
But what's missing, of course, is other childhoods.
And this is not a criticism of the movie.
I just really wanted to point it out because I think it's really, really important that we understand that the human soul is forged in its early years.
And that is not determinism because there's a lot you can do to change.
Who you are as you progress.
But if you don't understand the forces that shaped you, then you will be trying to fix the engine of the boat at the front rather than the back.
You'll just be working on the wrong end of things.
And so... The speech.
I mean, so to give an example.
Sorry, spoiler. Stop if you haven't read or seen.
No, you know what? I'm not going to give any spoilers.
I'll talk about this another time.
So anyway, I don't want to go on too long here.
I just wanted to say that as a proud objectivist, and I say that because I'm in agreement with almost all that objectivism stands for, as a proud objectivist, I'm enormously thrilled.
And stand proudly with this film.
I highly recommend it to people.
Some people have said, oh, I don't like this about it, I don't like that about it.
Come on, let's get behind this magnificent production.
I'm glad that it's in the world.
I'm really glad at the amount of commitment and energy and passion that went into this project.
I think the results are just a wonderful shining beacon.
I mean, the fact that it got savaged by the critics, of course it's going to get savaged by the critics.
Of course it is. I mean, that's how you know it's good.
I mean, culture is shit.
And shit likes to attack gold, because gold makes shit smell itself, right?
That is a metaphor to work with for a while.
But, you know, if you're not being attacked in a world that is largely corrupt, you're actually not doing any good.
You know, if the virus doesn't notice you, it's because you're not doing anything to the virus.
So, I just really wanted to...
And I talked to one of the producers on this show before the movie came out.
I'm very glad I finally came to Canada.
It's available on iTunes.
I know it's available on Amazon.
Buy it. Download it.
Watch it. Watch it again.
Show it to your friends. If they don't like it, it's a wonderful starting point for discussion.
Why don't you like it? What's wrong with it?
And remember that you might need to sit there.
I mean, the plot moves fairly fast.
It can be a little complicated, but...
It's just a wonderful and magnificent film.
And, you know, hats off to everyone involved in the production.
I just think it's something to go to your grave with a smile about if you've had anything to do with this.
So, good stuff.
And please, I'm going to put the link below.
Rent and buy this film and watch it.
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