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ATLAS
TWITCHED Ayn Rand: a Sense of Life is a documentary about the overrated objectivist, which had a brief, limited theatrical release about three years back. It is not to be confused with the made-for-Showtime film The Passion of Ayn Rand, starring Helen Mirren as Herself. Confusing the two would be wrong, since The Passion of Ayn Rand probably got much closer to the truth of Rand's life than the documentary could hope (or would want) to do. A Sense of Life has three kinds of footage. First, it has clips from Rand's appearances on talk shows: Mike Wallace, Tom Snyder's Tomorrow show, and, of all things, Donahue. (Would that she had lived to appear on Oprah, or Live with Regis and Kathy Lee.) Second, it has Leonard Peikoff and Harry Binswanger talking about Rand's sublime genius. Third, and last, you get lots and lots of newsreel and still photography showing you the awfulness of the Soviet Union in the twenties, and the vim and vigor of New York and Hollywood in the same era. The semiotics of those sequences are somewhat contradicted by Peikoff, who observes that Rand didn't just hate the Soviet Union, but Russia and everything about Russia.
Those who follow matters Rand know that the appearance of Peikoff and Binswanger is a tipoff. A Sense of Life is hagiography - authorized, marketed, and all but made by the company store (The Ayn Rand Institute). The film sanitizes Rand, to the point of almost making her seem boring (not her writing, which is another thing), and making Ayn Rand's life boring is no mean trick. Of course, any 115-minute film biography of Ayn Rand which omits any mention of her longtime lover and collaborator Nathaniel Branden is clearly working from an agenda. In fact, none of her many disciples from the 1950s and 1960s are ever interviewed or mentioned by name - only the active heirs and keepers of the flame, Peikoff and Binswanger.
Now, Voyager (Irving Rapper, 1942).
I have to add that the vibes between Charlotte Vale and her mother are sicker than anything in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? A proper remake for the new millennium would feature Angelina Jolie as Charlotte, with Sandra Bernhard as her mother, and perhaps Madonna in the Paul Henreid role . . . Live Nude Girls Unite! (Vicky Funari and Julia Query, 2000)
Live Nude Girls Unite! certainly shows live nude
girls, and it shows bits of Query's standup act, but it avoids gratuitous
skin or cheap humor. Despite the novelty of the subject matter, it is
essentially a straightforward labor organizing documentary. Since it also
avoids heroic rhetoric, the film actually manages to be somewhat bland
in spots. Live Nude Girls Unite! has had a few midnight-show gigs and campus screenings. I saw it on cable, which must mean it will be available for rental soon. Highly recommended. And "Two, four, six, eight, don't come here to masturbate!" is a truly inspired picket-line chant.
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by
Les Phillips
Actually,
there's a fourth kind: old movie footage. Gary Cooper orating as Howard
Roark in the film of The Fountainhead, and, as a special bonus,
a mob scene from Cecil B. DeMille's King of Kings, with Ayn Rand
as a spear-carrying extra. This is one of two really intriguing bits in
the film. The other is the Canadian professor who heard her speak once,
almost forty years ago, and then couldn't sleep for three days. I'll bet.
A
Sense of Life was nominated for a Best Documentary Oscar. Many of
us have wondered - since the Academy ignored Hoop Dreams, Crumb, Roger
and Me, and the entire oeuvre of Errol Morris - what is Oscar-worthy
in a documentary? I'm still wondering. Is there an Objectivist cell among
Academy members, even yet? 
Bette
Davis plays Charlotte Vale, a reclusive Boston spinster who could use
a good bonking. (We must not say so.) Her vicious Brahmin mother ("I have
made all the decisions for Charlotte. The right decisions.") is
determined to keep her cooped upstairs, but a sympathetic, sneaky psychiatrist
(Claude Rains) tricks Mama into letting Charlotte go on a cruise. There
she meets Paul Henreid, who teaches her how to smoke cigarettes correctly.
Thoroughly transformed, Charlotte returns to Boston, learns how to cope
with her mother, suddenly has fashion sense, becomes the toast of all
those society parties she used to shrink from, acquires proper-Boston
admirers. But is she happy?
Now,
Voyager is drivel, but it isn't boring (though the men in it are).
Davis famously hated the director, and though he's certainly no Wyler
or Cukor, he's serviceable. There's a whole lot of plot, and it keeps
moving right along.
Most
of the female supporting performances are quite good, especially Gladys
Cooper as the maternal Immovable Object. But mostly Now, Voyager
has Bette Davis. I really don't think Davis ever gave a bad performance,
despite scripts which gave her many, many opportunities to do so; she
was impressive even in her late-career horror movies (e.g., The Nanny).
She is so credible in Now, Voyager that Paul Henreid actually does
seem to have magnetism, simply because Davis believes he does. 
This
is a documentary about the strippers at the Lusty Lady Theatre in San
Francisco who, in 1997, won a union contract after picketing and prolonged
negotiations. Co-director Query is one of the strippers; in fact, she
was a member of the negotiating team. She is also a standup comic and
writer.
What
makes it unusual is not the focus on live nude girls but the focus on
the relationship between Query and her mother, Dr. Joyce Wallace. Joyce
has devoted much of her own career, as a Manhattan internist, to making
health services available to New York prostitutes. She is profoundly committed
to the welfare of sex workers - but that doesn't mean she wants her daughter
to be one. The scenes between Julia and her mother really are deeply moving.
The conversations between them took real courage, and it took even more
courage, particularly on Dr. Wallace's part, to allow them to be filmed
and exhibited.