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In the crabbed notebooks in which Nietzsche found himself healthy amid the ruin of his physical body, he predicted that the Twentieth Century would be convulsed not only by unparalleled military actions – to which, by the way, he did not look forward – but wars of interpretation. Just as he sensed, from charting certain patterns in the sciences, a change in physics coming long before Einstein imagined what it’d be like to ride a light ray, so he quietly noted that a breakdown in the European worldview was coming, and that armies of interpretation would deploy across the cultural fields.

Europe proved him right, and United States culture of the last thirty years has proved him never more right than now. He is the interpreter and meta-interpreter for and of our time. And the image of our time is that inescapable tableau from 1990s movie posters: two hated enemies, inches away from one another, with guns cocked into each other’s foreheads, frozen and insoluble. Whether it is the stubborn percentage of one of our great political parties who believe that the President is a Kenyan Marxist out to blow up the foundations of the Constitution, or the startling percentage of the other party who believed that his predecessor allowed the 9/11 attacks to happen through foreknowledge, whether it is the interchangeable attacks on personal character, teenaged indiscretions, childhood school records, or the insider stories that are as colorful as they are anonymous and never-verified, we present an historic spectacle: a violent war, of decades’ duration, with no evolution or movement. We are participants in a World War I of the spirit, decamped along No Man’s Lands, shelling the enemy to gain, or prevent our loss, of a few yards of earth. The weapons of assault are now fully interchangeable, with each side differing only in who is the first to use them. We may expect that soon the first words out of anyone’s mouth in a formal debate will be “fascist!” or some variant – “socialist!” or some variant – “hater!” or some variant. The enemy has become the pure enemy, the enemy of all that the decent-minded, decent-hearted people, our people, could want or uphold.

In San Francisco, near the facade of the City Hall, is the statue of a forgotten politician from a hundred years or so ago. The plaque’s recitation of his character qualities, the brief memorial of his public life, ends with the words, “An Honorable Foe.” Is this imaginable today? Perhaps, only perhaps, after a foe is dead, and at that mostly professed for the public. There is still a faint flicker of the old code of honor – when the enemy is dead. But while he lives, give him pure hell. For, above all else, we must not lose, and surrender to those purely bad ones across No Man’s Land.

And so we hunker down, firing at our enemy, without even the hope of victory any longer, at most the hope of drawing a few more soldiers to our side, of having a slight advantage in numbers, and so defending what we have left.

And in all this, beyond the convulsive uproar around a George W. Bush or a Barack H. Obama, a George Soros or a Milton Friedman, stands – if measured by the extremes of delight and revulsion, defense and attack – the arch-polarizer of our time: a short, often-slightly-dissheveled, cigarette-smoking Russian woman. You know whom I mean: it’s Ayn Rand.

And since she – that is, our reaction to her – is the paragon of our American Standoff, it is with her that we must begin, if we wish to understand where we are and what we are – which will tell us something of who we are. For, as doctors through the ages have known, health reveals its nature when something goes badly off. One learns the most from the most extreme cases.

For both sides of the war seem fully agreed in this: our body politic is ill, and needs healing.

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Rand. That impossible writer! Celebrator of rape, genocide, atavistic corporations, sociopathy, and dog-eat-dog. Scrooge’s rationalizer. Machiavelli’s daughter. Nietzschean. Anarchist. Hater of the poor, the helpless, the placid. Adulterer. Replacer of democratic government with the tender mercies of unchecked corporate monopolies.

We know the other side, too. Ayn Rand, the liberator of reason. Joiner of mind and body. Resolver of ancient philosophical problems. Aristotelian. Unpretentious, even playful, in private. Writer of philosophical thrillers. Charmed enemies when they met her personally. “Changed my life.” Second most influential U.S. book ever.

And yet, there is a third way, and it involves not shutting one’s eyes to one side or the other, but opening them, more fully and cleanly, and seeing the whole, and where it came from.

And now there is a movie for us to look at, the first ever made of her Great Work, Atlas Shrugged, the first Rand movie of the modern era – the first, even, in color. We now have a chance to look at Ayn Rand anew, and if we see her fully, without closing our eyes to anything, we may see her for the first time.

The plot of the novel, written over twelve years and published in 1957, is well-known. Beginning in, as Rand always said, “the day after tomorrow,” a deeply driven, intransigently-determined heiress to a great American railroad, Dagny Taggart, journeys through an America both familiar and strangely deteriorated. There are buses, planes, railroads, unions, lobbyists, and the rest, but the sunset color the novel opens on permeates the country of the book. A subtle and unsubtle rotting has set in, and it is as universal as it is sourceless. America’s optimistic expansionism has somehow transformed into a contraction in which everything works a little less well each day. It is as though the voltage not just of electric lines but of life itself is being dimmed, soon to be interrupted. Dagny – who is enough of an autobiographical ideal that the author hid her own name in the character’s – strives to save her railroad even as the rot extends to the nation’s most competent businessmen upon whom her railroad – and the national economy – rely to function. One by one, those very people disappear, and none rises to replace them. The one who shows no sign of disappearing is Dagny’s peer in all ways, steel industrialist Hank Rearden. Dagny aims to save the railroad – and begin the country’s revival – through transporting crude produced by oil magnate Ellis Wyatt out of Colorado and into the rest of the country – and Dagny, alone, believes in an alloy invented by Rearden that will be to steel as steel was to iron or bronze. She foresees running trains at far higher speeds, carrying far heavier loads, and Rearden invents a type of bridge – it can only be built using Rearden Metal – to carry Dagny’s new line across a great space, to its final terminus. Dagny and Rearden fight to build the new line, each of them critical to one another and to the country, and in time the line is built, the train runs successfully, Dagny and the deeply-unhappily-married Rearden become lovers, and a better future seems in the offing.

And then the base of it all, quite literally, is blown up. Dagny’s journey has but begun. The voltage drop cannot be stopped by the oil or natural gas in Ellis Wyatt’s fields, and it is a question if Dagny, the superlatively-able, can stop it.

There are two further parts, each about 300 pages long. It is with this Part I that the new movie concerns itself, ending – with a textual fidelity Rand would have appreciated – at precisely the moment the novel’s Part I does.

This summary will polarize the lovers and the haters. Lovers may ask where the famous speeches are, where is the tagline refrain “Who is John Galt?”, where is each beloved scene and character, where is the social criticism, where is the philosophic explicitness? Haters may ask questions curiously similar: the intolerable speeches, the stupid tagline, the prolixity, the hatred of society, the childish (or evil) philosophy?

Both sides are right, and both are wrong. This summary is the novel’s Part I, taken to its most essential lines. Through abstracting what both sides would demand to see included – and acting in accordance with the author’s own dictates, which held plot supreme (indeed, she’s said to have told Godfather producer Al Ruddy, who held the rights in the 1970s, that it was essentially a thriller, a love story, and a supreme female character) – we see the core of the novel unfold in two petals joined at a common stem.

The first is a celebration of Homo Faber, “making man,” nature’s manipulator in the antique sense (“method of digging ore”; oldest Latin: “to fill the hand”). The novel defines its America by showing it resting on the past achievements of Homo Faber – and even with the physical structures seemingly standing firm, they are in some way decaying – which is to say, something, somewhere, has decayed. Such celebration is not entirely unknown. Ironically, in light of Rand’s famous anti-Communism, it (in its simplest, laboring manifestation) can be found in artworks that touted New Soviet Man and the Stalin-utopia he would inhabit.

However, the core is not to be separated. We do not understand this book without understanding its core as a whole. The second is a celebration of the joy, beauty, and potential of this life on this earth, experienced by persons working to their full potential for that experience’s own reward.

To look, for just a moment, out far beyond this novel, one may see these two strands as two of the fundamental contributors to the river of our history. The first is what we may call the pragmatic stream: the drive to do, to make, to transform the givens of nature into things that serve us and our fellows. And there is what we may call the aesthetic stream, which Tolkien quietly remarked seems to have little basis in any biological imperative: the drive to create forms for pleasureful experience and contemplation, be they in musical or decorative or literary or kinesthetic or other modes.

We are now in a position to see the core of this novel, regarded in the abstracted essence of Part I. Here is where Ayn Rand is at her most positive, most original, perhaps most imperishable, and most misunderstood: the entire project of her life, of all of her work, from the two mature novels to her philosophic and political work for nearly twenty years after this novel, is to unite these two streams into one. These two furthest extremes, the points that may never touch and are nearly never conceived as touching, she aimed to fuse together, completely. Or, more properly, to go a step further yet and depict a world in which they are fused, as man’s natural and proper state – yet have gone apart, and then to show what happens.

Below the novel’s famous denunciations of nearly every role in society – do not think that she does not criticize business or businessmen, for her criticisms are acute – and of most accepted ideas and practices, this is the core of the novel.

And it is this core that has, for the most part, been made visible, at points almost tangible, in the new movie of Part I of Atlas Shrugged. It is well-known to be the labor of love of one man – exercise equipment entrepreneur John Aglialoro, who bought the rights from Rand’s heir in the early 1990s and tried for many years to get the film made through Hollywood channels, then began producing it entirely independently when the rights were due to expire in 2010. An alliance of movie people was formed – experienced, but not famous; a quick-script-doctor screenwriter with a background in horror turned out the screenplay in thirty days; actors were auditioned and chosen on the shortest notice; and the movie was shot in under a month – and the 300 pages of Part I were to come in under 100 minutes. And all this – business locations, collapsing world, revolutionary bridge and metal and train – on a shooting budget of about $10,000,000.

There are signs of the film’s tussled genesis. Is Taggart Transcontinental headquartered in the modern glass-and-steel tower of the exteriors, or the legacy wood-panel-and-stained-glass offices of the interiors? Did Rearden Metal obviate centrifugal force in a train taking unbanked curves at 250 miles per hour? Did Dagny’s hand holding a cup in one scene instantly travel upward, cupless, to be at her chest in the next? Would the plane we briefly see flying above a train traveling into sunset still be flying in the world depicted? Would a great philosopher, Hugh Akston, really look quite so vague and scruffy? (There may be a reason for this last. We’ll have to see in the next part.)

But all of those things are so unimportant. If in live theater a few blocks of wood or a few strips of construction paper make us feel a character is behind bars or amid trees – why not in a movie, too? Why should we be evicted from make-believe, when the core of a movie is there?

And that is why Atlas Shrugged: Part 1 works: because the core of the novel is there, and the core of the novel works.

It is not something we are used to. It is something we may not be prepared for. But in finding the essence of Part I, the movie exposes the core of this most controversial, most hated book – and how good it is.

Those who knew her said that there were times Ayn Rand was as delighted as a child, when she could dance around to music in pure, innocent joy. At the bottom of the novel, we can meet that part of her – and come to see the complexity of this writer’s personality and thought. The powerful reactions she provokes are not accidents. They flow from her sweeping-away of some of the categories by which we have made sense of life, and from the intensity of the personality that claimed the right to do so – then offer a wholesale alternative. The mature Rand was no Nietzschean, but she did break the old tablets of good and evil – and undertake the Revaluation of all Values.

The two streams of which we have spoken have other names, and by some of those names a fusion of the two has been entertained, perhaps most notably in the Asian concepts of the metaphysically masculine and the metaphysically feminine.

In our public political life, too, these archetypes recur. We call them the right and the left.

And it seems to be just dawning, together with our ongoing conduct of the interpretation-war that endeth not, that perhaps in some ways each side needs the other, in fact cannot do without the other. Just as left and right in space cannot, indeed are never found without one another.

Observe how the archetypes play out. Where the right calls its enemy permissive and weak, the left calls its enemy closed and authoritarian. Where the right upholds a patriarchal nuclear family, the left explores non-hierarchical alternatives. Where the right seems ruled by a severe code of wrong-and-right, the left appeals to empathy and social development. And where the right at its best champions innovation and self-sufficient markets, the left at its best queries if that is quite enough.

Looked at from this elevation, though, is it not abundantly clear that each is lost without the other? One may as well declare we can live without skeletons – or without sensitive flesh.

How, then, is this most divisive of authors to help us self-diagnose, wherever on the various spectra we lay? How shall we heal, rather than become still worse?

She can aid us, because she has brought together such extremes, and proposes another way. And at this deep level, that other way works. And it bears a curious affinity to the project of the left: because, contrary to superficial representation, she tolerates neither immoral businessmen for an instant – or, as she makes explicitly clear in the novel’s Rearden, technically moral but emotionally repressed or self-alienated businessmen.

The rest of her philosophical project, in my estimation, was most deeply to establish the sufficiency of the individual person to attain a happy life through the fusion, in his own life, of the two streams: Making Man and Aesthetic Man.

===

There is not enough space in a book to cover even the controversies associated with Ayn Rand, much less the various ways she proposed to attain this deep goal of hers (and indeed how well her ways succeed). Few writers have had every angle of their personal lives so scrutinized – their financial decisions (yes, she collected Social Security – she’d said she would), their bedroom behavior (yes, she took a lover – and her husband knew), their almost-teenaged journals (would any of us like to have fragments of our journals replace our entire life?) And again, a curious exception is made. Picasso had infinitely more sexual drama. D.H. Lawrence misled readers about how poor he was in the 1920s. Bernard Shaw was more waspishly condemnatory, albeit with great wit, of whole classes of people.

But here, just perhaps, is a way to approach Rand the controversialist. “Man is a thought-adventurer,” wrote Mr Lawrence, and so he is. So are we all.

Rand’s thought-adventure was a very striking one. Imagine, it goes, that those two streams are actually united – or should be – and yet there are people who teach us, from the earliest age, that they are not. There are forces – be they church or State or family – that want to sever that unity and make us prisoners of their ideas or their labor camps, alienated from our birthright and the joy that it brings when properly executed in our life. Now imagine that everyone else, villain or hero or common-folk, shares this thought-adventure. What, then, does the world look like?

Rather differently, does it not?

Every drama requires a villain, and this thought-adventure supplies them in abundance. The odds must be stacked high against our heroes and heroines (or heroine) – so that their dangers move us, and their successes likewise.

Now imagine that all it takes is the strongest possible arguments to break through those destructive, life-sapping ideas, accepted when one was very young – and that you, the creator of the adventure, have the ability to make them, and to state the positive principles in an integrated philosophic structure that upholds that kind of richly unified life.

Now imagine that you express all that in the most ingenious thriller form you can devise, a thriller that puts the whole world, all the attainments of Making Man and Aesthetic Man together, in peril, and that ultimately rests on a handful of people – and then turn it around and make that handful of people succeed or fail by their ideas …

Then you have Atlas Shrugged, and maybe a little bit of a sense of what it was like to be Ayn Rand.

This is not a story, or a movie, for the Tea Party or the Republicans or the libertarians alone. As an extra curveball, Rand makes her worst villains of all corrupt businessmen ruining things through crony capitalism – and some of her most sympathetic characters not business giants, but ordinary persons. The most tenderly tragic character of all is a government regulator who becomes a kind of son to Rearden for a too-brief while. Hopefully we will meet him in the promise Parts II and III of the movie.

This movie, contrary to scuttlebutt on any side, is not restricted to any sectarian audience. It can be for all of us: whether to love, like, be indifferent to, or hate. But it demands engagement, and rightly understood can force a deepening of one’s own sense of oneself.

As Rand said, it’s a a thriller, a love story, and a great female character: Dagny Taggart, a.k.a. Ayn Rand, as she said once, humorously, “with any possible flaws omitted.”

That this view of the movie will change many minds is too much to hope. Yet somehow I think, if Ayn Rand could watch us all freaking out about her, pro or con, she – well, she would not laugh. But somewhere, I think in those famous eyes – watch them in the Tom Snyder interviews on YouTube – there would be just the hint of a twinkle.

It’s there in the movie, if we let ourselves see it.