Ayn Rand’s 13 commandments for making capitalist movies
An often-revered, equally maligned philosopher and unashamed champion of capitalism, Ayn Rand managed to weave her steadfast and forthcoming ideology into her works as an artistic writer. As a capitalist, Rand’s novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged mirrored her belief in individualism and the pursuit of material gain.
Many of her characters were driven by personal success and capitalist ideals in environments where they were expected to conform to the good of society rather than focus on the advancement of the self. Using her philosophical insight, Rand developed a readership of anti-communists, and to this day, she remains a truly provocative writer.
Rand’s beliefs and works also made their way into the realm of the movie industry, and when the film adaptation of The Fountainhead arrived in 1949, she said it was “more faithful to the novel than any other adaptation of a novel that Hollywood has ever produced,” although later she turned her back on it as a work of quality.
When it came to creating pro-capitalist movies, Rand felt that there were specific criteria that directors and writers ought to stick to and in 1947, she wrote the ‘Screen Guide for Americans’, a pamphlet that was meant to heighten awareness in Hollywood studio producers of a growing pro-communist sentiment.
“The purpose of the Communists in Hollywood,” she wrote, “Is not the production of political movies openly advocating Communism. Their purpose is to corrupt our moral premises by corrupting non-political movies — by introducing small, casual bits of propaganda into innocent stories — thus making people absorb the basic premises of Collectivism by indirection and implication.”
The pamphlet contained 13 commandments for making capitalist movies, and the first was to not take politics lightly but to treat it with care and serious attention. Several of the commandments also put forth the idea that several pro-capitalist ideas should never be “smeared” when making a film but ought to be championed instead.
They include the free enterprise system, industrialists (“all of us are employees of an industry which gives us a good living”), wealth itself, the motive of profit, success and the independent man. The idea behind this was to combat the “Communist idea that personal success is somehow achieved at the expense of others and that every successful man has hurt somebody by becoming successful.”
Villains can be rich in a movie, but that ought not to be the reason for their villainy, nor are they representative of an entire social class. Equally, the failure and depravity of the “common man” should not be “glorified” lest the “worst instincts of the weakest members of an audience” be justified.
The collective should be put way behind the individual, and current political events should not be used carelessly. Quite simply, the entire manifesto makes for a rather sickening reading and puts Rand across as the heartless, wealth-driver maniac that she undoubtedly was. Thankfully, the movie industry, though capitalist to its rotten core, was not totally swallowed up by Rand’s suggestions and films that rightfully glorify the injustice of the common continue to be made.
Ayn Rand’s 13 commandments:
- Don’t take politics lightly
- Don’t smear the free enterprise system
- Don’t smear industrialists
- Don’t smear wealth
- Don’t smear the profit motive
- Don’t smear success
- Don’t glorify failure
- Don’t glorify depravity
- Don’t deify “the common man”
- Don’t glorify the collective
- Don’t smear an independent man
- Don’t use current events carelessly
- Don’t smear American political issues
