Look Who's Filming "Atlas Shrugged"
by Adam Reed
Ayn Rand saw human civilization perishing in an orgy of self-sacrifice, and wrote Atlas Shrugged to stop it - by taking morality away from the Christians, whose mythology was the source of the universal orgy of self-sacrifice that Rand meant to stop.
The Christian myth is deadly. It proclaims that men are born sinful, unworthy of living their lives for their own sake. That God sacrificed His highest value, His human self in the person of His only begotten son, Jesus the Christ, the only sinless man, for the sake of sinners. And that human action is only moral if it is motivated, in imitatio Dei, by duty and self-sacrifice. And that the duty of self-sacrifice extends unto death for the sake of God, because life on earth is a mere test for subsequent eternal life of the supernatural soul, to be spent in eternal bliss or eternal damnation.
Given their attitude toward the value of life on Earth, it is not surprising that Christians find the acme of their morality in the paradigm of the Crusader, the Christian who is willing not only to die but also to kill for the sake of Jesus the Christ. The paradigm of the Crusader comes from the men who served Jesus as "the mailed fist of the Church Militant," dedicated to unconditional murder of infidels, heretics and Jews. They were faith-drunk thugs, whose closest imitators in Rand's lifetime have been the Cheka, the new crusaders of self-sacrifice, the "mailed fist" of the Bolshevik Revolution. And so we come to the recent TOC notice that a movie version of Atlas Shrugged is about to be filmed by, ahem, "Crusader Entertainment." Sort of like signing up "Chekist Entertainment" to film a re-make of "We the Living."
On reading the notice, I ascribed the film outfit's bloody name to mere ignorance on the part of "Crusader Entertainment's" owner, Philip Anschutz, an influential Republican "businessman" whose pull-peddling exploits have been documented by "Markets Magazine" (Google [Republican Crusader "Philip Anschutz"] and click on "view as HTML") and characterized in "The Alabama Baptist" as a "Christian billionaire". It could be that Anschutz, like Charles Keating before him, was stung by the exposure of his pull-peddling swindles, and was buying himself a newly moral image among both Christians and Libertarians. The fact that Crusader Entertainment is a pull-peddler's propaganda mill need not, by itself, prevent it from making a great film. Not even if its other work has been effusively praised by Pat Robertson's "700 Club" (see story) for being, in the words of Howard Baldwin, president and CEO of Crusader Entertainment, "spiritually rewarding, meaningful and inspirational." So I just crossed my mental fingers and hoped for the best.
And then Ari Armstrong's post to OWL (Objectivism at We the Living) pulled out the rug. His post (cited in Diana Hsieh's blog) (Ari's review of Contact) noted that Crusader Entertainment "also announced that it has signed veteran screenwriter James V. Hart, whose film credits include the ambitious adaptation of Carl Sagan's science fiction novel Contact, to write the screenplay .... Hart managed to turn a great pro-reason, pro-science book by Sagan into an apology of faith."
In the film, scientist Dr. Ellen Arroway is played by Jodie Foster as a heroic, Dagny-like character. Her chief adversary, a sanctimonious scientist-bureaucrat played by Charles Bronson, is Dr. Floyd Ferris incarnate. The theme of Sagan's book is Arroway's loyalty to primacy of existence and to objective knowledge, which makes Contact one of the great anti-faith novels of the twentieth century. Her inward struggle, parallel to her outward struggle with theocratic democracy, is against the temptation to fill the void left by her father, who died when she was in her early teens, by faith in a father in the sky. In the book her reason wins against that temptation, and she even turns her previously Christian lover away from faith. Hart's script is a credible adaptation of Sagan's novel well past the middle of the film. And then, in the last ten minutes, Hart twists the film 180-degrees against Sagan's theme: Arroway is put in the position of asking the world to take her on faith, and leaves the screen with a theistic message on her lips.
For those of us who love Ayn Rand's ideas, the best hope now is that the project falls through again. If Hart stays in character, his script will end with Galt converting to altruism and tracing, over the empty Earth, not the sign of the dollar but the sign of the cross.
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