Disney/Pixar Shrugged

I've gotten a couple of e-mails grilling me for a throwaway line in my criticism of Ben Shapiro from a few days ago. I wrote:

What's the "family friendly fare" whose triumph over a very bad Oliver Stone movie Shapiro is so enraptured by? "“National Treasure,” “The Incredibles,” “Christmas With The Kranks,” “The Polar Express,” and “The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie.”...In other words, three cartoons and two movies too bad for words. The is the same discriminating taste that covinced Shapiro that cutting his own hair without a mirror was the way to go.

As you can see, I'm doing my level-headed best to be coldly rational and dispassionate. My mistake, apparently, wasn't taking a deserved cheap shot at Shapiro's hair (did I mention that he's a 20-year-old virgin?), but in including The Incredibles in the category of Shapiro-beloved movies that I was dismissing.

My anonymous correspondents agree with me---or so I interpret them as saying---that everyone involved in the production of National Treasure, Christmas With The Kranks, and The Polar Express, and that includes the coffee boys, should be pistol whipped. Spongebob is just a kiddie movie they say, incommensurate with the others, while The Incredibles, despite its animatedness, is a great film and my consideration of it alongside the Nicholas Cage and Tim Allen atrocities is totally unwarranted. Well, the fact is that neither Shapiro nor I chose those five movies arbitrarily; those were the five that grossed more than Alexander at the time Shapiro wrote his column (assuming he told the truth).

But I understand the point; though I haven't seen The Incredibles, this is not the first time someone has told me that it's really good and that I ought to see it. So I had mixed feelings about the comparison of The Incredibles to the other films at the time of the original post, and decided for the sake of brevity not to add a meandering qualifying clause. As long as I'm allowed to take a mulligan on that post, let me point out, as I should have at the time, that Team America, which is raunchy, campy, gory, and awesome on every level, acquitted itself nicely at the box office, and is surely the highest-grossing puppet movie ever. [The Muppet Movie? The Muppet Christmas Carol? Muppet Treasure Island? The movie with the guy who looks like he's real but is actually made out of plastic and is operated by having some guy's hand up his ass, er, what's that called...The Matrix?--ed.]

One potential counterindication I've heard about The Incredibles, however, is that it's a cartoonization of the philosophy of Ayn Rand. That rumor might come from predictably hysterical corners of the left, but suppose it's accurate. If somebody could successfully make a film that's true to Rand and also subversively funny, he deserves an immediate Oscar for lifetime achievement. I myself have been working on a one-act dramatization of Randianism, and in fact, everything in this post so far has been a been a bit of throat-clearing and build up to this point.

My working title is The Egotrip, although I'm considering Masturbatory Pseudo-Intellectual Nerd Wish Fulfillment Writ Large as a secondary option:

[The setting is a luxury hotel on the top floor of the tallest skyscraper in the world which is on top of the tallest mountain in the world which overlooks Manhattan. The year is 2045, at the conclusion of a transnational global war, in which the world's 634 richest, and therefore best people, declared war on the remainder of the earth's population and defeated them in hand to hand combat, despite being outnumbered 9.46372x10^6:1, proving conclusively that A equals A, that a being of volitional consciousness has no automatic course of behavior, and in a real surprise, that existence exists. They have gathered at this place to determine on the basis of objective rationality the entire future course of human history. We enter the grand ballroom of the hotel.]

[The best leadership of the world stands about in nervous clusters. A man can be dimly overheard suggesting the expenditure of capital to improve the lot of suffering humanity. He is drawn and quartered, in accordance with the principles of reason. We're going to want to actually draw and quarter somebody here---it would be altruistic not to. And if the actors' union complains, we can shut ourselves up in a mountain until they relent.]

[Enter our hero, Ragnarok Miguel Antoninus Herodotus Hercules Gramsci Thornjulffson d'Acosta d'Atrophe Augustulus.]

Eunuch #76548 [known as David Goldschmidt before the war and the revelation that he belongs to a lesser species---he speaks into a megaphone with the word "Galtcorp." etched in letters shaped out of dollar signs and wreathed by an unquenchable flame]: Gentleman, Ragnarok Miguel Antoninus Herodotus Hercules Gramsci Thornjulffson d'Acosta d'Atrophe Augustulus has arrived.

[If any audience member smiles or giggles at hearing the name, shoot the offending party in plain view of all the cast and audience. Men would shudder if they saw a mother bird plucking the feathers from the wings of her young, then pushing him out of the nest to struggle for survival--but that's life, whaddya gonna do?]

William Bronzium Cobalt [a former professional football player, he discovered the cure for cancer back in 2023, when he realized that experimentation was useless and that the free exercise of rationality alone justifies the existence of mankind---he currently has controlling shares in the world's largest producer of nanotech enemas, and due to his courageous, innovative, individualist, rational, and aesthetically triumphant policy of firing and then flaying the skin of every employee, the company currently operates at 60000000% productivity]: Look there, Calliope, I'd say Ragnarok Miguel Antoninus Herodotus Hercules Gramsci Thornjulffson d'Acosta d'Atrophe Augustulus is about to speak.

[Ragnarok Miguel Antoninus Herodotus Hercules Gramsci Thornjulffson d'Acosta d'Atrophe Augustulus turns towards the assembled crowd---a countenance of neither fear nor hope, but of serene intensity, of the cold hot fire of a rational consciousness aware and in command of its own rationality is evident from the bottom to the top of his 9'4" inch body, which at the time of his birth was made of the average man's fleshy hydrocarbon, but had been transmogrified by sheer force of will into a form of marble harder than steel. We may need to up the make-up budget for this.]

[Where there had been nothing but air before, a box comes into existence, the product of Ragnarok Miguel Antoninus Herodotus Hercules Gramsci Thornjulffson d'Acosta d'Atrophe Augustulus's creative productive intelligence. The looters outside the gates of the hotel at the top of the world's tallest skyscraper on top of the world's tallest mountain overlooking Manhattan could not have appreciated the box. Theirs was an aesthetic of collectivism, of weakness, of slavery. But the assembled best leadership of the world immediately recognizes the box as an object of raw and untameable genius, by which all previous art has been invalidated. It is also made out of soap. Ragnarok Miguel Antoninus Herodotus Hercules Gramsci Thornjulffson d'Acosta d'Atrophe Augustulus ascends the box and clears his throat.]

[Calliope Margaret Elizabeth Hecate Davenport, a woman universally recognized by all free volitional consciousnesses to be the most beautiful woman in the world, orgasms loudly, but in a way that only Ragnarok Miguel Antoninus Herodotus Hercules Gramsci Thornjulffson d'Acosta d'Atrophe Augustulus can hear.]

Calliope Margaret Elizabeth Hecate Davenport: Aaaahhhhhhhhh!

[Calliope Margaret Elizabeth Hecate Davenport is the world's leading expert on commercial travel at lightspeed, having proven at the age of 13 that the dirty relativist Einstein was wrong in every particular. She is named in memory of her parents, who were 329th generation Americans as well as descendants of the Olympian gods (we have the DNA testing on this). Their greatest gift to her was to kill themselves 53 minutes after her birth, an act of charity for which she would hate them if she were capable of irrationality, which forced her to raise herself from infancy to adulthood. At 27 months old, she had annexed the state of Nebraska, which she renamed Reasonland. In adulthood, her voice began to take on a strong and unmistakable Russian accent, which surprised many of her acquaintainces considering her very American lineage and the fact that she had never been to Russia, but those who knew her best knew that the modulation of her voice was dictated by the universally applicable and understandable laws of reason. No man could hear her voice without wishing to penetrate her gential cavity, rationally.]

Ragnarok Miguel Antoninus Herodotus Hercules Gramsci Thornjulffson d'Acosta d'Atrophe Augustulus: Those of you who wish to know knowledge, I bring you the reason you as an autonomous consciousness already possess, if only you could volitionally understand your own powers of rational creativity. [Ragnarok Miguel Antoninus Herodotus Hercules Gramsci Thornjulffson d'Acosta d'Atrophe Augustulus's speech is as yet unfinished, though a skilled reasoner should have little difficulty determining its precise contents. The speech is estimated to begin sometime around 9:30 pm and conclude just before next Ramadan. Carry on with the show.] Life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generating action. If an organism fails in that action, it does; its chemical elements remain, but its life goes out of existence. It is only the concept of 'Life' that makes the concept of 'Value' possible. It is only to a living entity that things can be good or evil. Thank you.

[A cheer goes up, but Ragnarok Miguel Antoninus Herodotus Hercules Gramsci Thornjulffson d'Acosta d'Atrophe Augustulus silences the assembly. He gestures into the crowd, making the clear and unmistakable sign of the Reasonland Pound Sterling (which had become the world's last legal currency at the conclusion of the war. It looks similar to the dollar sign, except that it is shaped like a penis, pen tucked into its foreskin, drawing the blueprints of an experimental architectural design. You can see the veins and hair.)]

[Ragnarok Miguel Antoninus Herodotus Hercules Gramsci Thornjulffson d'Acosta d'Atrophe Augustulus steps off of the soapbox and grabs Calliope Margaret Elizabeth Hecate Davenport and in one move puts his tongue down her throat, into her esophagus, down into an indeterminate point somewhere in her GI tract. She orgasms again. This time, the assembled dignitaries hear her.]

Calliope Margaret Elizabeth Hecate Davenport: Aaaaaahhhhhh!

William Bronzium Cobalt: Bravo!

[A tender, passionate lovescene ensues, in which our heroine acquiesces to rape. Ragnarok Miguel Antoninus Herodotus Hercules Gramsci Thornjulffson d'Acosta d'Atrophe Augustulus is able to come 76 times before going flaccid, during which period Calliope Margaret Elizabeth Hecate Davenport orgasms another 1022 times. After he comes for the 47th time, she begs him to stop.]

Calliope Margaret Elizabeth Hecate Davenport: Stop!

[Ragnarok Miguel Antoninus Herodotus Hercules Gramsci Thornjulffson d'Acosta d'Atrophe Augustulus's arousal increases with the knowledge that she has become his property. Once again, she acquiesces to rape. N.B.: When she told him to stop, she actually meant "keep going." If he had stopped, she would have torn his head off and continued copulating, then devoured the rest of him in emulation of the praying mantis, a creature more rational and volitionally conscious than the looters who comprise the bulk of humanity. Finally, they conclude.]

Ragnarok Miguel Antoninus Herodotus Hercules Gramsci Thornjulffson d'Acosta d'Atrophe Augustulus [while replacing his trousers]: I don't love you.

Calliope Margaret Elizabeth Hecate Davenport: That's why I love you.

Ragnarok Miguel Antoninus Herodotus Hercules Gramsci Thornjulffson d'Acosta d'Atrophe Augustulus: Again?

Calliope Margaret Elizabeth Hecate Davenport: No.

[He removes his trousers again. She acquiesces to rape.]

The End

[N.B.: During the lovemaking, the stage manager should assign the audience members most closely resembling beasts of burden to take down the set, mop up the blood from the execution(s), and clean the santorum stains off of the stage with a toothbrush. If they refuse, tell them to stand on line for the glue making machine. Don't worry, they're too dumb to notice.]

Well that's what I've got so far. I'm a bit worried that it's unstageable. It's obviously unwatchable---but it's Rand, and if you could sit through it, either I wouldn't have done my job or you'd be missing the point.