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Saturday, April 09, 2005
Ayn Rand Would Have Found It Far From Incredible...
A friend of mine pointed out this article to me, "Ayn Rand Watches The Incredibles", where the author suggests that the movie reflects the Objectivist philosophy of Rand - but with concessions to community needs and the value of sacrifice which actually make the movie "neo-Objectivist" in its message.
Ack.
My first reaction to reading the article was, "So basically, The Incredibles is about as Objectivist as... well, any superheroic story, really. This guy needs to read more comics." If superheroes are anything, it's the praise of the unique individual who stands above the crowd. That's Rand Lite, at best.
But something still gnawed at me, and I figured it out. The writer of this piece has to explain away the inconsistencies of the movie as neo-Objectivist. But wouldn't such compromise run counter to Ayn Rand's stubborn dogmatism? For Rand, this neo-Objectivism wouldn't be Objectivism at all. (As the author almost concedes at the end with that throwaway line of Rand not smiling.) She always struck me as somebody who loathed the slippery slope.
I'm reminded of the way Rand was asked to speak before HUAC and, while they were happy to hear her criticize obscure, blatantly pro-Communist films, balked at her attempt to point out the anti-individualist themes in widely popular films, whose messages she found more insidious because they weren't as obvious and were more popular.
As I write this entry, I just looked it up - there's a nifty web page devoted to Rand and HUAC - and it was only one film in each category, though the general point remains the same. At any rate, I doubt Rand would have approved of The Incredibles at all. The woman was more right-wing than HUAC, for God's sake!
That said, it'd be real cool to see Pixar do The Fountainhead. Draw Howard Roark to look like The Watchmen's Rorschach out of costume, have Matt Damon do his voice, maybe a song or two by Randy Newman...
Ack.
My first reaction to reading the article was, "So basically, The Incredibles is about as Objectivist as... well, any superheroic story, really. This guy needs to read more comics." If superheroes are anything, it's the praise of the unique individual who stands above the crowd. That's Rand Lite, at best.
But something still gnawed at me, and I figured it out. The writer of this piece has to explain away the inconsistencies of the movie as neo-Objectivist. But wouldn't such compromise run counter to Ayn Rand's stubborn dogmatism? For Rand, this neo-Objectivism wouldn't be Objectivism at all. (As the author almost concedes at the end with that throwaway line of Rand not smiling.) She always struck me as somebody who loathed the slippery slope.
I'm reminded of the way Rand was asked to speak before HUAC and, while they were happy to hear her criticize obscure, blatantly pro-Communist films, balked at her attempt to point out the anti-individualist themes in widely popular films, whose messages she found more insidious because they weren't as obvious and were more popular.
As I write this entry, I just looked it up - there's a nifty web page devoted to Rand and HUAC - and it was only one film in each category, though the general point remains the same. At any rate, I doubt Rand would have approved of The Incredibles at all. The woman was more right-wing than HUAC, for God's sake!
That said, it'd be real cool to see Pixar do The Fountainhead. Draw Howard Roark to look like The Watchmen's Rorschach out of costume, have Matt Damon do his voice, maybe a song or two by Randy Newman...
