An interesting new movie depicts a businessman’s struggle to build the largest retail chain in the world. Hiring former welfare recipients and paying them well above the minimum wage, the businessman uses economies of scale to bring necessary goods cheaply to low-income customers.
Along the way, our hero has to fight off an evil consortium of opponents: Left-wing politicians who can’t tolerate their government-dependent power base transforming itself into a self-sufficient working class; greedy “civil rights” lawyers who take advantage of red-tape violations to win easy money through lawsuit settlements; and, of course, “crusading” newspapers that rail against the businessman’s worker-benefits policies even while firing their own workers so that they have no benefits at all. Despite these, the businessman triumphs, becomes enormously wealthy and gets the girl.
As you will have guessed by now, this film will be opening at multiplexes throughout an alternate universe, because it’ll never get made in this one. In our universe, Hollywood consistently portrays businessmen in only the worst possible way.
Whether it’s “Wall Street’s” luciferian Gordon Gecko or the uncaring polluters of “Erin Brockovich” and “Michael Clayton,” the casual mass murderers of “Syriana” and “The Constant Gardener,” or the CEOs who get busted on “Law and Order” every other week, whenever you see a rich corporate executive on screen, you know the villain has arrived.
On the face of it, this seems strange coming from the movie industry — a corporate enterprise itself so enormous and lucrative that columnist Andrew Breitbart has wickedly christened it “Big Hollywood.”
But, of course, Big Hollywood runs on ideas from Little Artists and the people who hire them — and these are too often products of a leftist cultural elite obligated by ideology to despise capitalism even as they participate in it. As a result, we are treated to the absurd spectacle of corporate employees being funded by corporations to make movies about how evil corporations are.
Now I rarely object to the movies Hollywood makes: There really are villainous businessmen, and it’s legitimate to tell stories about them. But I often deplore the movies Hollywood doesn’t make: In this case, films that show how businessmen — even big businessmen — often help improve lives, develop technologies, cure diseases and create jobs and prosperity for millions.
How startling and wonderful it would be to see a moviemaker with a spirit independent enough to throw off his ideological straitjacket and give us a CEO for a hero.
I suppose it could be argued that the artistic soul is naturally antagonistic toward the unaesthetic realities of business.
It’s easy to see why a mystic like William Blake would recoil from the “dark satanic mills” of the industrial revolution, or why the pastoral William Wordsworth would regret that in “getting and spending, we lay waste our powers,” or why a sentimentalist like Charles Dickens would create an Ebenezer Scrooge as the spirit of capitalism. Like the globalization of today, industrialization and the resultant consumerism and capitalism were violent and painful changes that ended eras and disrupted lives.
Yet this current moment in our Western world — the most democratic, prosperous and healthiest age in all the long history of humankind — is to some degree the product of those changes. And while there were surely pleasures to the preindustrial life, it required an awful lot of serfs and slaves to bear those pleasures on their backs.
At least one artist understood this. Ayn Rand’s massive philosophical novel “Atlas Shrugged” has been languishing in Hollywood development for years, and it’s easy to see why.
Her depiction of heroic capitalists with romantic names like Dagny and Galt facing down grasping political looters hilariously christened Mouch and Boyle presents a different ideology from the left’s entirely.
Rand understood that money, trade and honest self-interest are the ways humans interact when they are not relying on force, theft and puling connivance. She understood that an industrialist who makes a product, a capitalist who funds him and a consumer who exchanges his cash for their goods are operating in a peaceful and mutually profitable system of free will — as opposed to governments that loot the profits of those exchanges backed by the threat of imprisonment.
That may be an oversimplification, but it’s not an untruth. Big Business is responsible for far more of the good in our lives than Big Government ever will be. And if the businessmen who run Hollywood can give us their endless legions of Geckos, it wouldn’t kill them to give us an occasional Galt as well.
Andrew Klavan’s new novel is “Empire of Lies.” His web site is andrewklavan.com.
