Laughing at the Abyss

I have to confess that — up until yesterday –  I’d not read any of Ayn Rand‘s work (although I’ve heard a little about her ideas over the years).

A couple of days ago — while browsing a local Borders store — I skimmed the first few pages of some of her books in the literature section.   That’s sort of how I separate the wheat from the chaff, in my reading life.  I pick up a book and read the first paragraph.  If it snags me, I’ll buy it.  If it doesn’t, it goes back on the shelf.

Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead didn’t snag me.  But Anthem did.

Unlike her better known work, Anthem is a work of speculative fiction — a dystopian story set in a near future in which a new dark age has overtaken humanity and individuality is squashed.  Even the word “I” has been outlawed, and our protagonist (named “Equality 7-2521″ )  refers to himself repeatedly as “we” .

It is a tale about leveling — a tale about a state that worships equality to such a degree that any talent is discouraged (because talent implies uniqueness, and uniqueness is blasphemy).

It is, all in all, a grim tale to start off with.  It should go without saying that this piece of work is not exactly Disneyesque.

And yet, Disney was exactly the man who Rand wanted to bring Anthem to the silver screen.  In the introduction to Anthem, Rand’s “intellectual heir” Leonard Peikoff quotes from a letter Rand wrote to Walt Disney.  I haven’t read the letter in its entirety, but the quoted section itself is slightly amusing.

Rand writes to Disney that if Anthem were ever made into a film, “I would like to see it done in stylized drawings, rather than with living actors” (Hint, Hint…Walt).

The idea of Disney taking on Rand’s statist dystopia (“Walt Disney’s ANTHEM”) makes my brain hurt.    It’d be like if Disney had filmed Orwell’s 1984.  It’s just…not-very-Disney.

Perhaps I’m thinking this way because Disney has, fairly or unfairly, come to symbolize suburban conformity.  At the very least, from a  feminist perspective, classic female Disney cartoon characters were never iconoclasts.  They defined their success as snagging the right man (Cinderella) or changing the wrong one into the right one (Beauty & The Beast).

Granted, at the time Rand wrote Disney, the theme parks hadn’t been built.  A generation hadn’t been inspired to don silly mouse-ear beanies.  But surely, Rand had to have some sense that she was barking up the wrong tree.

But then again, maybe not, a quick Google search of “Ayn Rand Walt Disney” revealed that an Ayn Rand quote appears emblazoned on the wall of a Disney attraction, The American Adventure, at Epcot Center.

Which just heightens my resolve to add the Disney/Rand connection to my list of Great Moments In Bizarro History.