Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life

This documentary presents a well organized and concise picture of one of the most important thinkers of our time. If you don't know much about Ayn Rand, this film is worth watching, if only to be introduced to her ideas. Even though her philosophy is more aligned with the founding principles of America than that of any other 20th century thinker, she is all but discarded in American public schools. The popularity of twentieth century anti-mind/anti-humanism philosophies, amongst the Ivory Tower, has muted the voice of Ayn Rand in the classroom. If you grew up in the United States, you probably missed out on her side of the debate altogether. Rand's ideas are worthy of your consideration, and they're highly worthy of serious critical review.

I hope you will take the review of this film written by ChrisWN with an entire shaker of salt. The size of the shaker is up to you, but you should know that the immature ranting of ChrisWN is typical of those who despise Ayn Rand. Let the fatuous nature of his writing be the measure by which he should be taken seriously as a film critic or as a critical thinker. And, further, let his ramblings be recorded as representative of the opposite of Ayn Rand's devotion to reason.

The memorable, and ultimately appalling, thing about Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life,the new film biography of the right-wing novelist-philosopher, is that it is perfectly true to its subject. Just as Rand, who was born in 1905 in Leningrad as it was convulsed by revolution, declared that she had not changed her ideas about anything since the age of 2½, this reverential documentary presents her thoughts as uncontested truth.

The evangelical tone is set by filmmaker Michael Paxton, quoted in the press material as saying that he first found Ayn Rand when he was an adolescent trying "to find a book that would answer all of my questions and give my life meaning." A Sense of Life contents itself with interviewing her friends and acolytes. It acknowledges that she was much criticized, and even considered a crank, but her critics don't appear on screen and their views are not explained.

But neither Rand nor the film should be dismissed, if only because she is widely read and her ideas have been deeply influential. They lie behind much neo-conservative commentary, which recasts democracy -- essentially an untidy contest of ideas and interests -- as a secular religion (she called it Objectivism) where competing points of view are greeted with adolescent impatience.

But more particularly, Rand's influence helps explain the concealed romanticism of much right-wing commentary, which replaces iconic figures from other belief systems with buccaneering businessmen and entrepreneurs. As this film unwittingly makes clear, Rand herself was one of the great romantics. A worshipper of Hollywood, and partly successful screenwriter, she laments that the film version of her novel The Fountainhead "lacked the Romanticism of the German films she had loved as a youth." That these films were the precursors of fascism seems to have escaped the notice of Rand and her disciples.

This appealing simplicity, a charming oblivion to her own contradictions, gave Rand a widespread following among those looking for answers, even as it exasperated intellectuals. She believed that each individual has a sacred core of personal talents and dreams which can be expressed in a free society. People may choose to co-operate, but these choices must ultimately serve their self-interest. If an action is truly selfless, she often said, it is "evil." Her reasoning was that selflessness in one's own life can be enlisted by political systems such as communism that call on human beings to sacrifice themselves for the state.

These views were apparently burned into Rand's consciousness by the horrors she witnessed during and after the Russian Revolution -- a period the film recalls through family photographs and archival film footage. She decided that capitalism was the only hope for mankind. "Capitalism leaves every man free to choose the work he likes," she declares on screen, oblivious to the deadening monotony of most people's jobs, not to mention unemployment.

Like her spiritual successors she prefers the grand and distant vista, and does not approach closely to see the outcasts and victims who are part of every great undertaking. She loved "the view of the skyscrapers where you don't see the details," declares the film, unselfconsciously.

This made her a formidable popular writer. She was seriously able to declare that Marilyn Monroe seemed to have come from an ideal, joyful world, that the star was "someone untouched by suffering." The hero of her last novel, Atlas Shrugged,was the direct descendant of Cyrus, the hero of a boy's adventure story she read at the age of 16. Like most libertarians, she had a deeply childish world view.

Never beautiful, Rand's intensity (and searching black eyes) seduced more than a few men. According to Harry Binswager, one of her academic admirers, "her idea of feminity was an admiration of masculine qualities." This was also Hitler's idea of feminity, and Rand's screenplays invariably include an idealized hero or heroine standing on a distant promontory, Leni Riefenstahl-style, but these fascinating parallels are of course not examined in A Sense of Life.

Rand had a powerful, if not searching, intellect. In many on screen interviews seen in the film, she gives apparently convincing answers to her critics. But the answers are always framed in absolutes -- "man wants freedom, suffering has no importance" -- which are essentially empty postulates. But they have an attractive ring.

A Sense of Life is worth seeing because its naive presentation of Rand is consonant with Rand herself. In fact, it feels like nothing so much as an in-house biography of the founder of some fundamentalist religious sect. It acknowledges its subject's imperfections (her infidelity to her husband of 50 years, for example), but only to declare them redeemed by her quest for truth.

Rand was, of course, a lifelong atheist. But her work is a testament to the yearning for belief. The film concludes on a lingering shot of a poster for Atlas Shrugged,"Don't call it hero worship: it's a kind of white heat where philosophy becomes religion." Or, perhaps, the ashes that are left when you turn up the temperature on a new belief system to the point where human community and compassion are burnt away. Conrad Alton, Filmbay Editor.

What a horrible woman. I have never read anything by her or about her but was really astounded by this documentary. Basically, she believes that everyone should be selfish and think only of themselves. Government should not take care of anyone. There is no God. she babbles incoherently about the future of the human race and her greatest philosophical achievement is a book about an architect that every selfish conservative in the world has bought next to only the bible. She sounds like a cult. I plan to watch Fountainhead. I wonder how it became the favorite book of Anne Hathoway (The Princess Diary). Wonder what her parents were like? If I somehow come up with a different opinion, I will let you know. Until then, watch this and tell me if you can find any redeeming value. Check out the parts where the audience is watching her on talk shows of the 70's with a collective look of horror as she spouts out her ideas that God doesn't exist, people should not seek help from their government and people who believe in helping others are wimps. Now you will know why conservatives love her and shun Jesus, Gandhi, Martin Luther King and other petty altruists. Ugh....

Rand philosopher or Novelist?

Rand seems to exemplify the notion that our unreflected ideas are products of our environment and childhood experiences. The chief force motivating her life was a hatred of left-wing politics from the time when her family was expelled from Russia, and an accompanying acceptance of the glamour of the fascist dictators of the 1930s and 40s.

Is she a philosopher? I have just read a rather good synthesis of the History of Philosophy from Plato to the modern day. "The Passion of the Western Mind" by Richard Tarnas. I heartily recommend it to all. He does not mention Ayn Rand once. In fact he does not mention ANY novelist because novelists do not do serious philosophy. Rand plays no part in Philosophy her ideas are bankrupt and without merit. They are second hand and undigested reflections on the now discredited Vienna school of logical positivism applied to wider society, yet her limited bourgeois effete experiences prove of no use for the sort of pan-social application to which her words are increasingly being used by the neo-cons of the present day. Her ideas are simple and appeal to simple people. The sort of people who glean their philosophical ideas from the back of a Cornflakes packet: homespun red-neck notions delivered by a naive middle-class woman under the spell of the glamour of the fascists of the pre1945 period.

Rand is no philosopher.

Chazwin

I find this film to be little more than veneration for a woman who claimed she had no time for veneration but was more than willing to have people worship her. Rand was a hypocrite. At the end of her life she took Medicare for her lung cancer which was due to her lifetime of smoking. Thats not even mentioned in the film. I gave Rand's ideas my full attention for some 3 months a few years ago and was intrigued by them before coming to the conclusion her ideas are badly flawed. I read the Fountainhead and a number of her essays but didn't get far with Atlas Shrugged, by then I'd had enough. I'm a geriatric nurse, and I meet many people near the end of their lives and I meet their families, and see the quality of their relationships (or lack there of) and I can tell you, consistently, its those who live and care for others and open themselves and receive the care of others who have the happiest lives. I see it again and again and again. There's a name for it, its called love. Rands "individualism" is suicidal for the individual, the family and society. I'm rating this film so low because it does little more than promote these ill gotten ideas.