Zack Snyder: A World Based On Spite (Patreon)

Preface: The parable of Dick Suckle

It was probably the third time I watched Suicide Squad that I noticed the executive producer credit for Steven Mnuchin, Donald Trump’s Secretary of the Treasury. That one threw me for a loop.

Since about 2008 the MCU has been growing in an unprecedented way with no signs of really slowing down, and all the while they put a lot of money via well-known and well-liked storytellers into striking a balance between completely expected, safe, formulaic films and artworks just interesting enough to grab people and drive news and online discussion drumming up more free press for the film. It’s important not to take too much of a risk though, because y’know, people might not come see the movie. It’s pretty much the perfect model of how capitalism extinguishes art - never innovate, only iterate.

It’s often commented on how Disney’s Marvel’s Avengers Assemble 3: Rise of Avatar - A Star Wars Story engages younger audiences, celebrates diversity and minority representation and usually plays out a very by-the-numbers liberal morality story, all while being part of the biggest, most homogenous and grim media monopoly on earth, and it’s sometimes darkly comic to see DC Comics enter this media landscape and try to construct a cinematic universe to rival Marvel’s, knowing that it’s a move motivated so blatantly by just making money.

That’s the first thing I’d like to get into here. This story is first and foremost about two companies competing for markets. It’s such a fascinating moment, noticing Steven Mnuchin’s EP credit on Suicide Squad, because it confirms what is already fundamentally very apparent - money has been poured into a product by people whose only intention is to make a profit, and who have seen the success of a rival product they feel they can replicate.

It’s an odd catharsis, this feeling like the worst art being inflicted upon the modern world, just like so much other terrible stuff, is literally coming from a handful of specific people, but it’s a little too tempting.

On the same credits sequence, directly adjacent to Steven Mnuchin is another credit, for someone very unfortunately named Richard Suckle. When I first spotted this name, which was of course the first time I saw Suicide Squad, I really wanted to believe I could pin a hefty part of the blame on him. Suckle, president of Atlas Entertainment, has producer credits on a number of properties: Dirty John, a Netflix series I watched that was absolutely bafflingly terrible; Wonder Woman, which was probably the best DCEU movie when it came out but is still pretty shit by generic standards; an upcoming Robocop reboot which will probably be total piss - and I really like the idea of finding this person to blame. I like this narrative: There’s a guy called Dick Suckle and he’s ruining movies.

But being realistic here, Suckle is just a producer. As with Mnuchin, we can infer some things about a movie based on his connection with it, but a producer’s influence on a film, just like any one actor, director, or editor, can range from a completely detached work-for-hire approach to an incredibly involved, integral role in the storytelling and the way the final thing is ultimately shaped. Movies are made by tonnes of people, and if you want to determine what one person believes, or means in their work, you’re going to have to compare and contrast across all of their work to eliminate other mitigating factors that change between properties, and at the end of the day the best you’re going to be able to say is “Richard Suckle’s films send these messages” or “use this technique” or “really commonly use over-the-top pop songs with extremely on-the-nose lyrics crammed into scenes that do not need them” and none of those statements actually definitively prove what Richard Suckle really thinks or feels, or what role he has in making movies, but also, all of those statements are actually more important than getting inside a single person’s head.

So as we progress, I’d like to be clear, not to say that the analysis we’re doing is flawed but just to make a distinction - this is about how ideology affects art. If we can see what ideology is having what affect and draw out some insights and conclusions, that’s a success. We don’t need to put Zack Snyder on trial. There’s a common understanding, hopefully, that when we talk about Zack Snyder it has less to do with the actual guy and more to do with his works and their implications. It’s fun to imagine there’s a guy called Dick Suckle and he’s ruining movies, but being realistic, it’s neither productive nor all that interesting.

Introduction:

Hans Holbein’s painting, The Ambassadors is lavish and rich on many levels. Oil paintings, since the dawn of, well, oil paintings, have been a symbol of wealth, something only the very wealthy could commission an artist to make and to compound that display of wealth, throughout history many many wealthy nobles would sit for oil portraits in their finest clothes in front of their finest treasures with their expensive well-groomed pets and their expensive, well-groomed children.
In Ways of Seeing, John Berger writes, about The Ambassadors, “except for the faces and hands, there is not a surface in this picture which does not make one aware of how it has been elaborately worked over - by weavers, embroiderers, carpet-makers, goldsmiths, leather workers, mosaic-makers, furriers, taylors, jewellers - and of how this working-over and the resulting richness of each surface has been finally worked-over and reproduced by Holbein the painter.”

And then, on the top layer above all of this exquisite finery, Holbein has just added this weird shitty smudge that just ruins the whole painting except wait a second if you look at the painting from the right angle that isn’t a shitty smudge that’s a human skull, it was an optical illusion painted with incredible photorealism that can only be perceived by looking at the painting just right. Wow. Good job Hans, that’s sick as hell.

This optical illusion obviously requires an incredible level of mastery and study to pull off correctly and so the technical difficulty of this piece adds ultimately to its splendor and display of wealth. These guys had to pay for an artist who could afford to throw in this extravagant extra element that risks ruining the entire piece. The scientific instruments, the lute, the furs, the skull, they’re all the same thing - look how much money I have.

It’s probably no coincidence that if you’re viewing this painting at a height relatively close to eye-level, to appreciate the skull you would have to go down to one side and kneel in front of the Ambassadors. I say this from having seen the painting in real life.

And so looking at this painting you can really have two reactions. Looking at the spectacle you might say “yeah that’s pretty fucking Tiger King, that’s baller as fuck actually!” or, considering the extreme opulent, decadent display of finery, the sheer visual language of money in this portrait, the culture of inequality and hierarchy and exploitation that produces this kind of thing and the place of these two men in the society of their time, you might say “what a pair of total dicks”

Anyway let’s talk about Zack Snyder.

Zack Snyder: A World Based on Spite

Part 1: A Mess of films

Before we get into Snyder’s films, it’s worth understanding the structure of this analysis. The intention is to first examine a pattern of what Snyder does in his films and then interpret what messages his films send, what politics and ideology they reflect, and re-examine his movies through the lens of that ideology. The intention is not just to go through and pick at things I consider bad.

I could do that, I could make some insightful observations in a pithy, quippy way and some pretty bland observations, and even some that don’t make sense but the format would tell you that I was being funny and insightful, maybe I’d even ring a little bell like Pavlov conditioning his dogs so that you develop a learned response ding to me saying things ding so that you laugh every ding I say something whether ding it was ding or not. I could also structure this as a long aimless ramble and the simple act of sitting down to watch it would require a commitment to not think too hard about any one thing I was saying, even if I suddenly started supporting inhuman cruelty or reactionary politics, but instead I’m really hoping I’ve laid out my ideas here in a way that people can follow the logical construction of what I’m saying.

Zack Snyder’s first film, Dawn of the Dead is an adaptation of George Romero’s gentle, soft, comedic zombie movie from 1978 where for the most part some characters just hang around in a mall and speculate about the philosophical nature of zombies. The comparison between the original and Snyder’s adaptation marks a bigger general trend that can be boiled down to whether you see zombies as people or not.

Zombies in George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead are sad pitiful creatures who shuffle around half-remembering their old lives trapped in a haze of waking death. Sure, they’ll eat ya, but if you set yourself up so you can avoid them, it’s really not that big a deal, and the real threat comes from the gun nerd losers who take joy from the opportunity to be violent. When the bikers show up in Romero’s Dawn of the Dead and start killing zombies as a sport, you realise both how mostly harmless the zombies are and also instantly how much these guys suck total ass. “What a load of piss,” you say, watching Tom Savini, “That Tom Savini needs to get a new hobby.”

The thing about viewing zombies as people who something terrible and tragic has happened to - something that could happen to you - is that this way the zombies, whatever they represent (consumerism, disease, consumerism, technology, consumerism or mindless consumerism) it’s a sad thing, sad for them, oh no, poor zombie oh no.

The thing about the shift to seeing zombies as less than human, is that these disgusting things are a faceless horde of monstrous threatening ghouls. They look like people but they have no agency, so they’d be better off if you shot them dead. Human beings who no longer have the ability to take responsibility for their actions and decisions are disgusting subhuman monsters. And furthermore, the human survivors in these stories who try to take care of one another and maintain a model of society where we inherently owe things to one another get punished by this same morality.

I should fess up here that I’m repeating a lot of points from Matthew, the quickest and strongest of my children, who made a video called Who Ruined Zombies on the channel ScaredyCats which I think is very good and you should watch.

Romero’s Dawn of the Dead isn’t the only important Dawn of the Dead to which it’s worth comparing Snyder’s, because the screenplay, originally by James Gunn, was rewritten multiple times, and seeing the differences between the screenplay and Snyder’s film is especially interesting knowing they are changes that can be largely attributed directly to ZERK.

It’s a good example of something that will be useful going forward - almost all of Snyder’s works are adaptations of one kind or another, and therefore the things that get changed in his final product are the most telling things. Like for example, the James Gunn script is much more comedic in tone, drawing out dark humour from the grim situation, whereas the film - as is apparently Snyder’s wont - is just shockingly humourless.

The shot of muslims praying with a horror sting over it implying islam has something to do with the zombies - that’s not in Gunn’s script. The fundamentalist preacher telling the audience directly that the zombies are God’s punishment for gays, premarital sex and abortions - not in Gunn’s script. This bit where the one character spitefully tells another how everyone he knows is dead - not exactly in Gunn’s script. It was originally from a scene where Ana and her romantic interest go on a walk around the mall and look at posters in a shop and darkly laugh at how all the celebrities are dead to cheer themselves up. It goes something more like “Morrisey? Dead. Carrot Top? Dead. Smash Mouth? All fucking dead.”

There’s the famous part from the original Dawn of the Dead where the characters speculate on how the zombies are returning to the mall because they remember shopping from their mortal life. In Gunn’s script it’s a pretty funny exchange: “the mall was the most important place in their lives. It was the only place where they were happy, doing the only thing that made them happy.” “If that was you down there Terry, you’d be jerking off!” “Ha! I would!” So it keeps the original poignant observation but also breaks the tension with a joke so as to not feel overly serious. In the final film it simply isn’t there.

There’s also the bit just before the title sequence which isn’t in the script, where Ana pulls in on the highway behind a bus, and two figures are struggling with a third who is being held down as, outside the bus, a dazed-looking naked woman walks away from the bus. We know what’s going on here, obviously, these are zombies - but Ana doesn’t know yet, and we are invited to see this situation from her perspective, and from that perspective it looks like a gang rape. This really plays into the reinterpreting of zombies as a faceless horde of subhuman people coming to destroy your way of life, instead of a population overtaken by disease.

I’d really not labour this point if it weren’t for how much rape comes up in Snyder’s films. There’s rape or implied rape or this rape-fakeout in all his movies except the animated children’s film about Owls he did and the two Superman movies where it would be… pretty jarring. Crucially it’s focused on in 300: Rise of an empire as one of the reasons to fear and oppose the Persians. In one stroke Snyder will make his bad guys all rapists so you have to agree with the moral arguments because the alternative is siding with the rapists, but in another stroke he’ll take source material that already contains a sexual assault, like Watchmen and completely reframe the scene to sexualise the victim.

The original book doesn’t do this, it shows the scene as a relentlessly terrible experience that happens as Sally is trying to get on with her life. Snyder’s Watchmen has, to put it simply, a camera that is interested in seeing Sally’s body, and as such shifts the viewer’s perspective from Sally (whose memory this scene is actually supposed to be) to be more sympathetic with Eddie. Eddie is sexualising Sally while she’s just trying to live, we shouldn’t be doing the same.

Watchmen all over is a really fascinating place to see how Snyder adapts stories to shift them to his worldview. The simple reason that scene with Eddie and Sally is the way it is, is that Snyder’s Watchmen is way more sympathetic to The Comedian than the book is. From his death scene showdown to the riot set to disco music, The Comedian is set up in the film as a classic antihero whereas in the book his edgy nihilism is a limp excuse for his blatantly fascist ideals, in the film he’s a dangerous bad boy who sees through it all with the wrong methods but the right ideas.

In the book, old retired man Eddie Blake just gets straight-up murdered, pretty much exactly as you might expect, but in the film it’s this needless action scene where he gets to fight back. He even punches a hole clean through a wall, and then as he’s defeated he gets to laugh it all off. “It’s just a joke” he says, because of course in Snyder’s version of the story he can’t be a sad scared old man unable to defend himself. No, he has to be a nihilist rational big boy.

Speaking of death scenes, another death scene in Watchmen serves as an absolutely mesmerising study of how Snyder can adapt comic books incredibly faithfully, almost down to a shot-for-panel adaptation, and still create totally different meaning in the scene. In the book, this scene of an old helpless man getting jumped by gang members and murdered is intercut with panels of his old exploits as a hero. The third person perspective lets us compare the glory days of Nite Owl with the old man unable to defend himself now. It’s sad, and a little scary, and maybe you’re also thinking about how these vigilantes are just perpetuating a cycle of violence rather than making anybody safer, especially since it’s the new Nite Owl’s actions that led to this retribution by the gang.

In Snyder’s Watchmen there are some notable differences right off the bat. For example there’s a musical score - something the comic book couldn’t have had. The scene also uses first-person perspective to compare the gang kids to Nite Owl’s old nemeses, and in this scene he gets in a couple of punches in and holds his own a little before being overwhelmed. This shifts the tone of the scene really dramatically while still keeping mostly faithful, at least visually. It becomes a celebration, a “last hurrah”.

This story that is so much about characters who are flawed and corrupt and weak loses a lot in translation when every character gets an equal amount of ass-kissing hero worship, but really nothing affects the movie as much as the reframing of Rorschach as a cool edgy antihero. It’s worth saying again: Rorschach is a bad dude, you’re not supposed to like Rorschach. He’s a cringe weirdo who writes angry scribbles about how unfair everything is in his diary, he says out loud in words “you might as well call me a Nazi”, he defends The Comedian being a rapist like it’s no big deal - what a weird coincidence that the movie also treats Rorschach like he’s right.
Alan Moore has said when fans approach him who say Rorschach is their favourite character he runs away, so it’s pretty laughably wrong to make this guy your gruff tough voice of the night. “The accumulated filth of all their sex and murder will foam up about their waists” - this guy talks like an evangelical, like a fundamentalist far right crank.

“Okay, so let’s suppose that the streets, okay, the streets are extended gutters. Okay? So for the sake of argument, okay, they’re gutters, and the gutters are full of blood. And when they finally scab over, okay, all the accumulated filth of all the sex, and murder, will foam up, okay? I have seen this city’s true face.”

Mmmmm what a cool dude...

It was something often said already that Watchmen was unadaptable, that the book could never be turned into a movie or show, and there might be something to that, in the way that film biases as a medium, but if there was one single thing to not do - just one thing - it would be to make Rorschach cool.

We’ll get into it more later, but Snyder’s Watchmen almost perfectly inverts the meaning of the original story, which as I’ve been saying, is a pretty good lesson in how an adaptation is so much more what the person adapting it wants it to be than what the source material is. And I bring this up because when I try to talk about 300, this is one of the two most common arguments I hear: “It’s an adaptation of a comic by Frank Miller, so the absurd hyper-fascist elements of the movie are Miller’s fault”

To be clear: Frank Miller absolutely is, a great big fascist. The dude, sucks. And Snyder is a huge fan of his work, which is why he keeps adapting his stories into movies.

The other argument I hear all the time is that because the story in 300 is being narrated by a Spartan to a bunch of other Spartans, it’s actually fascist propaganda, and the whole movie is actually satirical. Jesus, this argument.

“My movie where Man of Steel fans eat donkey shit is narrated by a Zack Snyder hater, so you see, it is satire.”

This is such a bad take it’s gonna take some deep digging to fully go over why it’s wrong. For one thing, we should look at things like the homophobia in the film, when Leonidas calls the Athenians “boy lovers”. He’s referring to a sexual practice that was completely normal across all of Ancient Greece including Sparta. Things like that can’t be seen as anything but this story’s homophobia, and that’s a pretty good microcosm of all the various bullshit that 300 does that doesn’t fit with this satire narrative.
Gosh, it’s just so hard to explain why -- nah I’m just kidding, the American military screened 300 to psych up troops going into Iraq into an east-versus-west red mist bloodlust, because they understand what the movie is about perfectly well. Stop fucking kidding yourself.

300 is a grim experience, honestly. It’s grey, and grim, and boring and relies on islamophobic tropes of the faceless horde of eastern monster-men - the barbarians at the gates. It relies on the terror and threat of being assimilated into the faceless masses, because the faceless masses are subhuman creatures who would be better off dead. Does that sound familiar, because I feel like I’m being over the top here with pointing out the obvious comparison to Dawn of the Dead.

Snyder tends to have characters who get to be characters, and then an unknown faceless mass villain. It comes back again and again and again, the fear of losing agency and becoming one of the aimless submissive creatures of the horde. When I first heard that the Wonder Woman sequel was going to be set in the 80s I thought oh fuck yeah, 80s Wonder Woman with bubblegum and rollerskates, a walkman and a perm? Sick as hell and then I found out it was going to WW84, like 1984, like the book Americans are incorrectly taught in school is about communism, and I quietly and sadly put my Wonder Woman action figure back in her packaging. Are we really going to get Diana Prince defending Reagan’s America from the Red Menace? Can’t she just go back to her roots of being a thinly veiled BDSM domme?

Before we move on, no discussion of 300 should really go by without mentioning the significance the Battle of Thermopylae has in the history of racism. Even though it was a relatively inconsequential battle, and the more important events are the naval battle of Salamis - which is easy to remember because Salamis are tasty - it has been told and retold as a story of martyrdom in protecting something nebulously called “the west” from something nebulously called “the east”. The story of the 300 spartans really took off in popularity with white europeans in concert with the increasing antagonism towards islam and the Middle East, portraying Leonidas and pals as martyrs, and naturally therefore insisting that his army was as small as possible, insisting that the persian force they held off was as large as possible, and that the effects of holding them off were crucial, where actually uhhh, nah? The Persians just breezed through after that and burned Athens down. It was again, the battle at Salamis (mmmmm salamis) that made Xerxes turn back. And absolutely most vitally, the Spartans actually allied with the Persians against the Athenians not that long after, because the petty squabbles within the region were infinitely more important to these people alive at the time than some notion of fragile white women who need to be protected from the barbarians. That’s all nazi shit that was tacked on later, and I mean, nazi shit. The nazis loved Sparta, they modelled their economy, iconography and even racial-underclass slave state on things the Spartans did.

None of this focus is to call Zack Snyder a white supremacist, it’s just important to understand the context that this story carries with it, and the white supremacist baggage that it has, and to some degree the fascist propagandistic ideas that were being revived by this movie in the wake of 9/11. Again: the US Army showed this film to troops to hype them up about killing brown people.

But here’s the thing. For Dawn of the Dead you can argue that it mostly comes down to tropes of 2000s era horror, which was pretty shit. For Watchmen you could say it’s that the book is about a set of superheroes who all suck and aren’t supposed to be liked or admired, and Snyder thought they were all really cool. For 300, as piss as I find this excuse, yes, you can say that it’s Frank Miller’s story primarily.

But when we get to Superman? Everyone knows who Superman is - everybody knows what he stands for, how he behaves, what he does. Superman saves the cat (Maggie, the smartest and most cunning of my children is making a wonderful Zack Snyder series and particularly you should watch Superman Saves The Cat). Superman is the guy who is so upset that one person died that he makes time turn backwards. We all know who Superman is, and this character Snyder gives us in Man of Steel simply put - isn’t Superman. This is… something else.

He spends the whole film deliberating over whether or not he owes it to people to save them? He violently threatens Batman, and Lex Luthor? Superman and Zod tear Metropolis apart killing thousands upon thousands of people before Superman takes the now meaningless step of killing Zod? Maybe you don’t have a sense for what story Snyder is trying to tell in Man of Steel, but I think intuitively you get that it isn’t a Superman story.

I have to make it clear here - of course, telling a different kind of Superman story isn’t inherently wrong, and if I liked the story Snyder had told, I’m sure the fact that it upset the traditional fans would only make me like it more. This is art! You just don’t get it! Eat shit Clive! But at the end of the day, Man of Steel is where we get down to the bedrock, the real crucial, unavoidable sin of Snyder’s filmmaking. You can twist the characters to serve a different ideology, you can show off with pointless spectacle, you can throw in all the edgy toughboys you want, but nothing redeems your movie if your movie is just boring.

This is why when I talk to people about Snyder I get such a mixed response. When I dig into how he’s perverted source material, sometimes to make a text gain sinister and shitty messages, sometimes just to make it utterly meaningless, so many people say they still find Dawn of the Dead, or Watchmen, or Sucker Punch fun. But Man of Steel and Batman v Superman are just PISS.

The characters are dull, the action drags in a directionless, tedious way reminiscent of childhood play - just baby Zack smashing his Superman doll and his Zod doll together over and over while making skyscraper collapse sound effects - and the direction seems to have seriously limited the performances. In The Witcher Henry Cavill plays a far more upbeat and charming protagonist, and really gives a glimpse of what a good simple, corny, wholesome Superman he could have played, but under Snyder’s direction he’s a scowling, brooding grim Superman.

Jonathan Kent, of course, is usually the moral centre of a Superman story, giving us direct thesis statements on how Superman should appear and behave, and what he should strive towards. In Man of Steel however, he tells teenage Clark Kent that maybe he should have let a bus full of children drown. That’s not okay, don’t tell your son that, what’s wrong with you?

His basic problem with Clark using his powers for good seems to just be that if he does it people will expect things from him. Then, before the issue of saving people versus selfishness can be resolved, Pa Kent insists on Clark letting him die in a hurricane, in honestly a pointless display because we all know there are a million ways Superman could sort out this situation without letting other people know about his powers - what matters here is the argument. Clark’s dad is telling him no, and insisting that he let him die, and in doing that he’s having the final word. He kills himself to win an argument with his kid. I’m sorry but that’s abuse. That’s literally abuse. A-BUSE. That’s fucked up.

I get honestly quite upset thinking about what Zack Snyder did to Superman. I love Christopher Reeves’ Superman, I don’t think it’s without flaws, I don’t think the original character or comics or stories are perfect but I love them, and I actually find Man of Steel and Batman v Superman really stomach-churningly horrible. Even alongside the weird racism of 300, the depressing nihilism of Dawn of the Dead, the misguided attempt at feminism in Sucker Punch - come to mention it, all the sexual assault too - and the complete reversal of Watchmen, I still find Snyder’s Superman films so upsetting because of how deeply, deeply wrong this Superman is.

Like, why in the hell would he make a Superman who demands adoration and fealty from the people he saves? Why would he think any of the heroes in Watchmen are meant to be cool, or even likeable? Why would he adapt 300 - a fascist propaganda story that pretends this slave-owning king was somehow a defender of freedom?

Big breath in.

Because he’s an Ayn-Rand-Libertarian.

Part 2: In Which John Galt Fucks The World

Zack Snyder has wanted to adapt The Fountainhead for a long time. He co-founded a production company with his wife called The Stone Quarry, named for a Fountainhead reference and he’s worked a bunch with Atlas Entertainment, named for an Atlas Shrugged reference. It’s been sitting in his upcoming projects queue for years and years, with him saying it’s really important to him, that he wants to get it just right, that it’s his “dream project”, and that “People will think it's hardcore right-wing propaganda, but I don't view it like that.” Wait… no… hang on…

Okay we’re going to need to rewind a little bit. By about 80 years, actually.

The Fountainhead was written by Ayn Rand in 1943 and tells the story of an architect called Howard Rourke who is simply too much of a rugged individualist to bow down before anyone else’s demands or expectations. It’s nominally a philosophical text, meant to espouse Ayn Rand’s personal philosophy, objectivism.

In The Fountainhead Howard Rourke is a student who is expelled by the architecture school  because his design teacher feels so personally threatened by his big muscular brain. People automatically react to seeing Rourke with disgust and discomfort. He doesn’t respect tradition or authority or establishment, only talent and raw, throbbing, veiny power. He works for a while in architecture, gets done over dirty by the subhuman creeps who don’t believe the same things as Ayn Rand, winds up working in a quarry, meets Ayn Rand, builds a cool building but then dynamites the building as an act of petty, pathetic protest after being asked to change his plans slightly. He is called into court for this action and gives a speech so good that they let him off for his crimes because they decide his crimes were morally justified.

If you want the quite short version of objectivism it is summarised in a pledge that one of her most famous characters swears: “I swear by my life, and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine”

Or if you want it even shorter:
“In society we don’t owe anything to one another and acting like we do is harmful”
Or even shorter:

“Greed is good”
To make statements like this sounds very reductive but I hope that I can show clearly that having read a fair amount of Rand’s work at this point (hello darkness my old friend) I am representing her philosophy accurately as she would like it described. This is where we run into the first big hurdle:

Ayn Rand’s work reads like satire.

While herself being an aspiring philosopher, her first book was titled Who Needs Philosophy Anyway? In which she rejects almost all previous philosophy.

Rand has said that her intention in writing The Fountainhead was to depict the ideal man. Howard Rourke, this rude, arrogant, shitty, entitled, uncompromising jerk, is - according to Ayn Rand - the ideal man. This ties into the fact that Rand refused to acknowledge any philosophers that came after Aristotle, and Aristotle and pals were big into Virtue Ethics. Virtue Ethics is a branch of moral philosophy that seeks to discover the principles (or virtues) that the ideal person would live by and by which everyone should live to create the ideal society. This will matter later, please hold this carefully in your hands, like a baby bird.

This is why characters react with automatic discomfort and dislike upon seeing Howard Rourke - they just aren’t ready for how cool he is. But again, this reads like satire, he is simply a horrible person who everybody hates.

The writing, and therefore core ideology of Rand’s stories is deeply inhuman, primarily because she claims to champion objective facts over trivial, silly feelings - I feel like I know that from somewhere - but at the same time her characters are deeply emotional. As such they just seem completely alienated from their own feelings and unable to understand why and how the feel things. Again, it reads as satire.

The most beautiful and charming of my children, Big Joel, made a video about Ben Shapiro, and specifically about Ben Shapiro’s opposition to John Lennon’s Imagine. He says in it “if I were making a movie where Ben Shapiro is the bad guy I couldn’t do a better job of it than this scene does, because everything about it tells us that John Lennon is winning” and in a big, big, big way, that’s Ayn Rand’s writing.

So when I say that Rand’s philosophy is “greed is good” I’m being sincere, and it comes back to virtue ethics. Rand believes that the ultimate virtues are self-interest, productivity, and rationality or what she calls rationality but is more pointedly just ignoring everyone else’s feelings. Virtue ethics but the virtue is greed.

But if we’re going to understand Objectivism, we’re going to need to go straight to the source, and talk about Rand’s greatest - here meaning physically largest - work, her magnum opus, the complete depiction of the ideal man reshaping society in his image. We need to talk about Atlas Shrugged.

Atlas Shrugged, later adapted into seminal TV series Kiss Him, Not Me, is primarily about railroad heiress Dagny Taggart and her harem of boyfriends, Fransisco D’Anconia, Henry Rearden (no, not Howard Rourke, Henry Rearden) and John Galt. Howard Rourke - sorry I mean Henry Rearden - is so clearly named after the protagonist of her previous book and acts so much like him it’s beyond farce. He even pulls the exact same stunt of making a speech to the court about how his crimes should be legal because the law is immoral and they let him off because his big powerful brain is just too masculine for them.

Dagny Taggart is every shitty boss you’ve ever had combined, possessed by the ghost of Margaret Thatcher. She is introduced into the book pulling rank on a train engineer and forcing him to ignore a stop signal, saying that she’ll take responsibility if there’s an accident, where his refusal to ignore the stop signal is painted as weak and morally bankrupt because it could cause a horrible catastrophe - the train would run late.

The book takes place in a world overrun by bureaucratic altruism, where every government of the world is rapidly falling to socialism and America is the last free capitalist state. The American government in the book is crumbling under the weight of completely nonsensical regulations - for example regulating that Rearden can only make as much Rearden metal as other metallurgists would be capable of making if he gave them the secret sauce recipe. This is, of course, a fucking gibberish bullshit law that no government would pass as are the rest of the laws in the book. I’m sure libertarians would tell me this isn’t unrealistic and governments would do this, but I’m afraid we’re just going to have to differ here.

Objectivists, one might assume, would be more interested in a book like Das Kapital which starts with 50 pages of maths, which is pretty dang objective, but one would be wrong, wouldn’t one, because instead objectivists cling on to Atlas Shrugged, the basic premise and plot of which relies on 4 different miracle science-fiction inventions. You see, to be really objective in economics you have to imagine a fake metal that is cheaper, stronger, lighter and more durable than all other metals so you can realistically simulate what the economy is like.

The basic overview of Atlas Shrugged is that American society is crumbling as CEOs are being forced to make less profits, which is bad for the country because. These individualist CEOs are disappearing one by one it turns out, to a small commune they have created hidden in the mountains behind a hologram cloaking device invented by their leader John Galt.

In this commune, these men (and they are all men) are on strike. They’re refusing to give their productivity to society so instead they’ve made their own, where, according to Rand’s version of virtue ethics, they act primarily based on greed. Greed is, according to Rand, a virtue. According to Rand, money isn’t just a thing we made up to make bartering easier, money is necessarily imbued with virtue. When one friend lends another his car to get around in the commune, he charges him a flat rate for using it.

Where is all their money coming from, you ask, if they have seceded from society? Well this is where things start to get really fucked. A character called Ragnar Danneskjold is going to all the places where these men used to work and blowing them up with cannons from a warship. This, we are assured, somehow, is letting him take back their money from the people who have leeched it away from them, and then all their fortunes wait for them in bank accounts in the commune in, of course, gold - the objective currency.

The commune is very clearly meant to be a sort of heaven on earth. All the “good” people who have disappeared are there and they all treat each other in a morally idealistic way and there’s even a big gold reward waiting for Dagny there when she arrives. So it’s more about demonstrating the ideal society, but I’d like to focus for a minute on Danneskjold’s piracy. Putting aside exactly how he makes the money from blowing up factories, Danneskjold is intended as a reverse Robin Hood. He even points this out explicitly and at length. He says that Robin Hood is a cultural ideal that should be abolished. Danneskjold robs from the poor to give to the rich, but what I find more troubling than that is the awareness of marxian economics and tactics that this betrays. Danneskjold is destroying the means of production.

To get really basic about this - we all understand that if CEOs everywhere went on strike, or even just holiday, tomorrow, there are managers, foremen, overseers, and a billion other people who would take care of things while they’re gone - if, and we’re being really generous here, those CEOs even did any work in the first place. So to stop that from happening in the book, Rand adds in a character who makes it physically impossible by destroying the physical machinery and equipment used to conduct business - the means of production.

This shows how clearly Rand actually understands that the ruling class own the means of production and that that is the source of their power, because otherwise she would feel confident leaving it behind and letting the plebs have it. No, it has to be destroyed for Galt’s plan to work. This gets even more sinister when you learn that she was originally going to call the book The Strike.

When I think about this, I think about the old union song line “without our brain and muscle, not a single wheel would turn”, which highlights that it’s workers’ labour and the means of production together that make anything happen at all. Rand clearly gets this, and furthermore she gets that a workers’ strike works because they withhold their labour, so she writes that the rich withhold the means of production because withholding their labour is fucking meaningless.
At one point in the book Dagny tells a train-workers union leader who is concerned about the safety of a line she has built on untested materials that “I can drive a train, but your workers can’t build a railroad”. It’s pretty convenient that she has this conversation at this point and not with the workers who built her railroad for her.
This is a crucial feature of the economics of Ayn Rand. It works a lot like Minecraft. The chunk you’re in is loaded in and all the interactions have to be accounted for, but as soon as you travel far enough, the chunk behind you despawns and you don’t have to think any more about what’s happening there, only concern yourself with the witches and goblins spawning in the next chunk. It is a world of 1000 contradictions and focusing too hard on any of them is just going to make you grow eyes on the inside.

You can, in many cases very easily, debunk these contradictions, lies and fictions of Rand’s world, but the contradictions don’t matter. This isn’t a house of cards, this is an impressionist painting, and pointing out hypocrisy doesn’t pull out the bottom card bringing the whole thing down, it just erases a brushstroke. The overall impression is still there. It might be even more apt to say the contradictions are the point, because

Big breath out.

Atlas Shrugged is a cult text.

Earlier this year when I was researching for a video about HP Lovecraft I read the entire collected works of Lovecraft. The audiobook of those entire collected works - everything Lovecraft ever published - is 50 hours long.
The audiobook of Atlas Shrugged is 60. The Fountainhead is another 30. The experience of reading these books is probably the most apt use of the word gruelling I could imagine. They are long, they are gibberish, and they are poorly written in a very very specific way.
Rand constantly spoon-feeds the reader conclusions about characters’ motivations and feelings and parts of her worldview while pretending that these are subtle things she is alluding to, not just saying. For instance a character will look at another and where you might expect a metaphor, Rand will write “he looked at her as if he was feeling sad” or “she didn’t know what this feeling was, like disgust, that she felt looking at the homeless man”. The reader is given the opportunity, if they are the kind of person to do so, to convince themselves that they are drawing these conclusions on their own.

Then when she does use metaphor it’s an aimless long stream of consciousness that barrages the reader with so much nonsense that they have no choice but to live in the moment of what she is saying and simply accept each sentence entirely on its own.

"But the stranger was still haunted by a ghost who was herself, and the ghost had a mission to accomplish [...] She had to learn to understand the things that had destroyed her. She had to know, even though she felt that the headlight was closer and in the moment of knowledge she would be struck by the wheels."

So combined with how absurdly long these books are, this writing style serves to reprogram the way someone thinks. I mean, that’s the explicit intention but it doesn’t do that by laying out philosophically rigorous frameworks, they just make constant allusions and virtue signalling gestures to the notion of objectivity and then argue everything from emotion. I have a right to this, this is good, this is bad, they can’t take my stuff, I earned it.

I can so clearly see, reading this, how this would have worked on me as a 17 year old. I can so clearly imagine this kid who is good at STEM subjects and thinks that only rational objective facts matter and feelings just get in the way, who is upset that teachers spend more time on struggling students than on them, reading this shit and thinking it explains why they’re the smartest person in the fucking world.

And look, when I say it’s a cult text, I do mean literally. In Haaretz article I Visited the Secret Lair of the Ayn Rand Cult, Itay Mierson explores the history of Objectivism and how Rand maintained a literal cult following of businessmen in her social circle. Her followers had to wholly buy into her objectivism, hook line and sinker and would be fully excommunicated if they disagreed with her on as small a thing as their taste in art.

What the fuck is this Brian? Doja Cat on your Spotify playlist? Get the fuck out of my house and never speak to me again, you cretin.

The cultish nature of Rand’s writing is blindingly apparent once it clicks, from the way it works to condition the reader, to the length, to the frankly, most troubling element: In the final chapter of Atlas Shrugged, the protagonist and Rand’s self-insert, murders someone for not being able to take personal responsibility. The passage says “she who would have hesitated to kill an animal did not hesitate”. This is the dark turn at the end of the indoctrination process. Here we can see - the lives of people who rely on the social fabric, whose decisions are made with consideration for others in mind, their lives are worthless and they’d be better off dead.

The cult does still exist to some degree today with things like the Ayn Rand Institute, also discussed in the article, but mostly it has dissolved into the economic legacy of right-wing libertarianism. Free markets are good, gun control is bad, abortion is good, but driver’s licenses are bad, gay marriage should be allowed but COVID face-masks are literally Hitler. Libertarianism is a bizarre brainfart politically, because it acknowledges the need for what you’d call negative freedoms - the government shouldn’t stop you from doing things - but refuses to support positive freedoms - society facilitating you doing things. Because of that it’s kind of a pick-and-mix politics which is why the Republican party is very much big government but leans on libertarian propaganda like “Don’t Tread On Me” and anti-gun-control “Come And Take Them” and most crucially, insisting that the political spectrum is a straight line from Capitalist freedom to authoritarian Communist fascism.
Pro-tip for any libertarians watching this, have a little think about those positive freedoms, like “what good is legal weed, unless society facilitates you to have free time to enjoy it?” and like “what good is legal abortion if society doesn’t provide it for free to any person who wants one?” and you’ll eventually find yourself somewhere in the bottom left of the political compass with me and the ladies, and you will have taken too much estradiol valerate to mind very much.

As much as her fans might not want to label her right or left wing, Rand’s writing is inherently reactionary. She constantly espouses an idea of a prelapsarian past where things were good before Big Government meddling got in the way. In Atlas Shrugged she constantly refers back to the protagonist’s grandfather, Nat Taggart, and how he was able to build a glorious rail empire because nobody was messing with his business. Sure, some people tried to make regulations that would get in the way, but then he just murdered them and everything was fine. Normal, cool, normal, normal guy, Nat Taggart.

What’s troubling about Ayn Rand’s writing is that while you can’t pick up the words of Jim Jones or Charles Manson without any context or critical lens, you can still buy Atlas Shrugged, maybe even with a bunch of footnotes and underlined passages if you buy second hand. So while Rand’s cult may be gone, her cult following still exists in some form.

And that’s the point at which we need to ask the crucial question: can you think of another set of insufferably long media that prizes the aesthetics of intellectualism, that has a cult following of belligerent fans who constantly insist you’ve misinterpreted the author or taken them out of context, that treats the emotional and the socially conscious as subhuman animals that would be better off dead, that concerns itself primarily with the modern ideal man, or hero?

No, not YouTube media criticism, I mean Zack Snyder’s movies.

In the first trailer for Man of Steel, the first hint of what Snyder’s Superman would be, we hear Jor-El talking to his son, saying “You will give the people an ideal to strive towards. They will race behind you. They will stumble, they will fall, and in time they will join you in the sun.” set over choral music.

This is laying out almost the perfect mission statement for a Superman movie that embraces virtue ethics. Now to be clear, Superman has always embraced virtue ethics - truth, justice and the American way… hmmmm… truth and justice!

Snyder differs from Rand in some crucial ways - like he really loves the military and also Jesus - like oh boy can he not get enough of Jesus, and presenting Superman as Jesus, and condemning characters for being sinful. It’s kind of odd to see Snyder say that he doesn’t think Ayn Rand is super-right-wing when the key ways he differs from her actually just make him more right wing and more aligned with the Republican party.

This is a feature of Rand’s writing as opposed to her strict cult following in real life. In Atlas Shrugged all the countries of the world have fallen to socialism except America. In all her books there are special chosen people who are believers, and lost souls who don’t believe and follow false prophets. Repeatedly her characters use a will-to-power approach to get what they want, for example Dagny Taggart just murdering a man who stands in her way because she deems him unworthy. Rand’s works aren’t explicitly nationalist, but if you’re an American nationalist, they work pretty well for you. They aren’t explicitly fundamentalist christian (in fact she was an atheist) but if you are, they work pretty well for you. They aren’t explicitly fascist… you get the idea.

On the other hand there are just so many places where Snyder’s work aligns with Rand to the point that you can view Snyder’s films in the Randian tradition. For example, although Ayn Rand supported gay marriage she was a massive homophobe, and she often queercoded her villains to let you know who was pathetic and weak or sinister, but at the same time, her stories are about beautiful ideal men, and every other character is only there to observe them, so when two of these men come into contact things get… really sus.

Here’s an excerpt from when two of Rand’s ideal perfect beautiful men encounter each other:

“and the second moment was when he landed at Francisco's side, held him in his arms, hung swaying together between space and ridge, over the white pit, then gained his footing and pulled him back, and, for an instant, still held the length of Francisco's body against the length of his own. His love, his terror, his relief were in a single sentence: "Be careful, you goddamn fool!"”

Randy!

Likewise Snyder queercodes the Persians in 300 while depicting the Spartans in the most hypercharged homoerotic way possible. He throws in little homophobic jabs throughout his films, and changes source material to become more homophobic - like in Dawn of the Dead, in Gunn’s script the scene of the gay man telling CJ about his feelings was supposed to be a light comedic scene as part of a sequence where the characters all get to know each other, making CJ’s homophobia the butt of the joke, and instead is presented in this jarringly humorless way that puts the audience in the homophobe’s shoes. We, just like CJ, are suddenly being subjected to this man’s homosexual agenda.

Speaking of shockingly humorless, that’s another place where Snyder’s films are just like Ayn Rand’s books. Now to be clear, I have cried laughing at both, but not for reasons that either author intended.

And of course there’s the core ideology - the virtues of individualism and selfishness, but moreover the ideology of spite - Snyder’s stories, much like Ayn Rand’s, exist in SpiteWorld™.

Don’t talk to me about the DC Cinematic Universe, talk to me about SpiteWorld™.

Libertarian ideology allows for some progressive politics of course - libertarians are typically pro-abortion for example, and so sometimes you will be pleasantly surprised. You can see this on display in Snyder’s misguided attempt at feminism, Sucker Punch, which would have greatly benefited from him reading any feminist text, rather than he, a cis man, trying to invent feminism himself from first principles. That’s an Atlas Shrugged joke. My brain just does this now. Please kill me.

Likewise Snyder is opposed to drone warfare, which is a subtle thread recurring throughout Batman vs Superman - the US government is sending in a drone to blow up the compound Lois Lane is in when Superman intervenes, with mere frames of him appearing at super-speed stopping the drone, so that Superman is substituted in for the done, and for the whole second act of the movie, the governmental debate about Superman’s unilateral military action is actually a veiled discussion of drone warfare.

However for the most part SpiteWorld™is not a fun or positive place. And who represents SpiteWorld™ better than Rorschach?

The original author of Watchmen, Alan Moore, a socialist libertarian - or anarchist for the ladies back home - saw the ranting of objectivist libertarians as pathetic, spiteful garbage with no sensible underpinning ideology, one might argue, correctly. Rorschach is actually a parody of an objectivist superhero written by Steve Ditko, one of the creators of Spider-Man. Mr A is a noirish detective known for his uncompromising principles and love of money.

Jesus Christ look at that wall of text it’s like a leftist facebook meme.

It shouldn’t really take much being in on the joke to get that Rorschach is a shitty guy who you aren’t supposed to sympathise with, but unfortunately edgy teenagers, the prime demographic of comic books, are absolutely notorious for taking away the worst possible message from any piece of media.

Add to that a love of The Fountainhead and we can see what’s happened here. Snyder sees Rorschach as a cool guy because in Rand’s work the cool guys who are right about things are rude, antagonistic loser loner characters that everyone else hates who constantly rant on in long diatribes about how wrong everyone else is. Rand’s philosophy is beyond parody, and as such, Rorschach is simply the King of SpiteWorld™. He roams the streets looking for an excuse to violently punish the people he sees as to blame for everything, and when he finds them he says “sometimes, the night is generous to me”.

Becky wouldn’t go on a date with me, but she’ll be sorry when I’m rich and famous and she’s fat with three kids by different dads - rorschach, probably

Watchmen and Snyder’s Superman films represent two sides of the same coin when viewing his work in the Randian tradition, and the reason Watchmen doesn’t feel so instantly wrong to as many people is that Watchmen was already originally a cynical and pessimistic social critique, so Snyder’s recuperation of it into SpiteWorld™ doesn’t feel so out of place. The analysis of what’s wrong in society doesn’t necessarily differ that much, except in the subtle places where it’s the exact opposite but who cares about that right? Superhero go swoosh swoosh punchy punch!

On the other hand, Superman’s story is a beacon of hope. It’s the prescriptive message of how we should be - in the model of virtue ethics Superman is the virtuous man and by acting like him we can improve society and live our best lives. However in SpiteWorld™ the virtues that Superman evokes aren’t truth and justice, they’re individualism and selfishness.

In Man of Steel Clark spends the whole first act working various blue-collar jobs so that we can all get off to the virtue of hard work and in the meantime we learn his origin story primarily through flashbacks. For example, Jonathan Kent telling Clark he should have let children die, and Jonathan Kent forcing Clark to let him die. Jonathan Kent comes to represent the rational-self-interest strain - the objectivist ideal of “greed is good”. He is trying to stop Clark from accepting the weight of the world onto his shoulders you see, it’s kind of like as if Clark was like Atlas and it’s like Jonathan is telling him to sh

Jor El, Superman’s other dad, gets represented as an action hero where traditionally he’s been a scientist and aristocrat. Snyder constructs Krypton as a Brave New World-esque society with everyone genetically engineered for their societal roles, which is par for the course for Snyder’s anti-authoritarian thing, and again is cool… more or less.

He rebels against this by having Superman’s mum be the first Kryptonian to have given birth naturally in many generations, which is not really where the focus should be. Women avoiding childbirth isn’t the problem on Krypton, the problem is the authoritarian eugenics regime, surely? But alongside Superman being shrouded in Christian imagery this reads as a morally correct naturalistic correction. Fuck naturalism, all my homies hate naturalism. It’s Lara reclaiming the original sin of birth, which was God’s punishment to Eve for taking the fruit from the Garden of Eden. Gotta love getting a good dose of Jesus juice in your superhero movie.

Another thing that’s strange on Krypton is the need to represent Jor El as an action hero. Why do we need his dad to be a hero? Why do we need his family to be special? It feels like a need to prove that Superman comes from a good bloodline, which you would think in a story that’s against eugenics is… counterproductive. This crops up in Atlas Shrugged too, by the way. Ayn Rand needed a way to justify inherited wealth when it runs completely counter to her ideology, so she wrote a character whose family are all successful geniuses, which if we look at say, the Trump family, we can see is a very accurate depiction of hereditary wealth.

The last thing about Snyder’s Krypton is that while Jor El is a frustrated climate scientist trying to warn the ignorant elites about their imminent doom, Zod is… also trying to prevent the doom of Krypton. This is another crucial feature of SpiteWorld™ actually. Rather than coming up with villains who have conflicting interests or motivations, both Rand and Snyder tend to write heroes and villains who want exactly the same stuff. That’s part of why both The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged end with the throbbing brain genius character making a speech so good that all his enemies give in. Why bother imagining another position when all your characters can just share one?

You can see this in Batman vs Superman too. BvS is somewhat based on Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns where Batman is just a reactionary fascist. Cool! In TDKR Batman is an underground freedom fighter rebelling against the tyranny of the state, where Superman is the stooge of collectivism. But Snyder had already spent a whole film setting up Superman as a freedom loving individualist, so… what to do? Make Batman a collectivist? Maybe give him an army of Robins. No, instead Batman & Superman are just the same guy, and Batman essentially hates Superman because he’s jealous.

Furthermore it should be noted that while those are Batman’s implicit motivations, those are Lex Luthor’s explicit motivations.  Batman, powerful individualist obsessed with gaining more power to protect earth from threats, Superman, powerful individualist obsessed with maintaining his power so he can protect earth from threats, and Lex Luthor, powerful individual obsessed with gaining more power so he can protect earth from threats are all the same guy, albeit operating on different levels of unhinged power-trip and with opposing ideas of who the threat is.

If you’ve noticed that I’m not really talking about Justice League here, I feel it’s worth just taking a moment to acknowledge why: after watching and rewatching Snyder’s filmography with an eye to understanding their ideological drive I do now see how much the theatrical release of Justice League is clearly not a Zack Snyder movie. I’m not trying to give free license to the fans who demand a Snyder-Cut, but I can see why people who like Zack Snyder would be really upset by Justice League, and while I’m not saying that the Snyder Cut will be actively good, it’s worth understanding that the ways in which Justice League is bad are also ways in which it isn’t Snyder. Also, y’know it will be funny as shit and I personally can’t wait because the Snyder Cut is going to be such raw piss.

300 is an interesting case, because the original comic, also by Frank Miller is retelling the story of Leonidas as fascist propaganda - it’s all about east versus west. Now that isn’t absent from Snyder’s film, and it can’t be said enough, this film was used to hype up American troops about killing brown people. A friend of mine even told me the recruiter who recruited her was even in a command that called themselves The 300 and made a logo with a spartan helmet on and the words “only the hard” I swear to god these guys just need to suck a dick and calm down.

However, Snyder’s film is more philosophically about freedom, because the story of Leonidas is a cultural touchstone that both fascists and libertarians adore. Fascists for the racism, libertarians for the anti-authoritarian, anti-imperialist messaging, and also often the racism. To a libertarian the threat of the persians is the idea of assimilation into the horde. Loss of agency and individuality. Human beings who no longer have the ability to take responsibility for their actions and decisions are disgusting subhuman monsters.

We see this come up again and again with Snyder. Lobotomies in Sucker Punch. Zombies in Dawn of the Dead. Moon-hypnotism in Owls Ga’Hoole. It’s a pretty common trope in hollywood cinema but Zack really really likes it.

The thing about this idea is that it isn’t quite what it seems. The answer isn’t for everyone to be self-directed individualists, because in society often people need things. So the fear of assimilation is actually fear of being ruled over. It’s the fear of becoming a Dependent, abstracted by pretending that the powerful don’t deliberately create that dependency. When your worldview fundamentally rests on the idea of the conquerors and the conquered, the free and the enslaved, you can’t conceive of surrendering power without becoming lower in that hierarchy.

It’s kind of a reflexive metaphor that Snyder and others would retell the story of Leonidas while leaving out the Spartan slave state. While slavery existed in different forms all over the Ancient world, the Spartans were quite uniquely inhuman to their neighbours. Typically a slave was someone working to pay off a debt and gain their freedom, and subjugation of a specific people didn’t typically exist in this way before the transatlantic slave trade, but the Spartans enslaved their neighbours, the Messenians, and created a slave-society of first and second class citizens. Under Sparta the Messenians were born into slavery and usually died enslaved, and it was legal for spartans to just kill any messenian they encountered. This was the society that afforded Sparta the privileges of rigorous warrior training and let them focus on building up their brand image, which still lasts today.

So Snyder and others represent these people as great lovers of freedom, and handily leave out the people they were directly oppressing most, because to acknowledge that their hierarchy exists at all would shatter the whole illusion.

There is a contradiction that will never be addressed in any of Rand’s work, which is that the basic premise is that rich people own the world and can do anything, but also the world sucks. The clear answer to this contradiction, to any rational logical person, would be that rich people should not own the world, but Rand needs to obfuscate and disguise that contradiction, because she fundamentally can’t acknowledge it. It doesn’t matter to her.

What matters to her is that rich people are resented by the powerless and poor. It’s not enough for you to be the most powerful man in the world, and it’s not enough to get to choose whether people live or die, they have to love you too, and they have to love you for your power over them.

After all, the rich and powerful could choose to completely secede from society, as demonstrated in her stories - they’re wealthy enough to live without the consequences of society at all. But crucially, if they did that, they’d need to know society missed them, and if it didn’t, they would have to make it miss them by force.

And this is where we get to the root of the objectivist ideology - it is a world based on spite.
In one truly striking scene in Atlas Shrugged, Hank Rearden’s baby brother Philip who Hank paid to put through college is complaining at the dinner table because his college education has given him disgusting socialist morals and now he resents Henry’s wealth-hoarding, so Rearden turns on Philip and kicks him out on the street.
Now I’m not going to get into the moral calculus of being an ungrateful house-guest versus making your brother homeless, because this was written by an author - Ayn Rand. She constructed this situation, and the reason this scene is so striking to me is that it really speaks to the deep emotional truth of the entire hateful book. This is a philosophy that refuses to acknowledge any wrongdoing on the part of the powerful, and demands adoration from the powerless, and furthermore, it actively fantasises about an opportunity to cut off the powerless and force them to suffer without the support they need.
First you make them dependent on you, then you resent their dependence, and then you resent their resentment of you, and then you long for the day that they’ll commit a worthy transgression that will allow you to cut them off completely. This is the ideology of an abusive parent. “Say that to me again you little shit, and you’ll be out on the street.” “One day I’ll just leave and then we’ll see how well you do on your own”

But of course, Ayn Rand’s magnum opus has to rely on science fiction inventions, because in the real world Superman doesn’t exist. Nobody who has people depending on them is in that situation because they are so special. Either their dependents simply need support, like the elderly, the disabled, or children, or their dependents were forced into this situation by the same system that gives them power. Either way, the dependents have no choice here, and you can’t expect to be powerful, loved and to get to decide who lives and who dies. In society we fundamentally owe things to each other.

If you have an immense amount of power and you want an easy way to be loved, there is one. And if you want to understand it there’s even a great movie that can teach you. It’s called Superman: The Movie by Richard Donner.
In the real world though, Superman doesn’t exist, and the people like Ayn Rand who like to fantasise about their opportunity to deny support to the powerless are nothing like him. To put it all really simply, Zack Snyder’s superhero movies are so fucked, because this isn’t Snyder’s Superman, this is:

“And they will look up, and shout save us and I will look down, and I’ll whisper, no”