[Returning guest writer John Perich takes on literature and video games today. Leave your reactions in the comments. —Ed.]
“Who was he?”
“John Galt was a millionaire, a man of inestimable wealth. He was sailing his yacht one night, in the mid-Atlantic, fighting the worst storm ever wreaked upon the world, when he found it. He saw it in the depth, where it had sunk to escape the reach of men. He saw the towers of Atlantis shining on the bottom of the ocean. It was a sight of such kind that when one had seen it, one could no longer wish to look at the rest of the earth. John Galt sank his ship and went down with his entire crew.”
—Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand
“To build a city at the bottom of the sea: insanity. But where else could we be free from the clutching hand of the parasites? Where else could we build an economy that they would not try to control, a society they would not try to destroy? It was not impossible to build Rapture at the bottom of the sea. It was impossible to build it anywhere else.”
—BioShock
BioShock shattered critical expectations when it debuted in August 2007. It received some of the best awards of any first-person shooter videogame that year, or ever: 10/10 from Electronic Gaming Monthly, Eurogamer, Game Informer and the Official XBox Magazine. Not only was it the sort of engaging, tactical gameplay you’d expect from the makers of System Shock, but it boasted a vivid and breathtaking setting—the underwater Art Deco city of Rapture—and an original score worthy of a classic horror film.
But even with all this, BioShock would have stunned audiences for one point alone: it’s a video game that makes you think.
Ken Levine, head writer and creative director of BioShock, made explicit the inspiration behind the game: Ayn Rand’s 1957 doorstop of a novel, Atlas Shrugged. Atlas Shrugged depicts a world whose creative minds have fled, leaving society to collapse into self-destructive anarchy, and who build a cloistered paradise for themselves. BioShock depicts a cloistered paradise full of creative minds, and the problems that turn them into paranoiacs, murderers and mutants.
Hundreds of pages could be written about the philosophy that inspires Rand’s novel—and have been—and you could probably fill another hundred pages on BioShock‘s playability as a first-person shooter. But we’re narrowing our focus today. This article will compare Atlas Shrugged to the video game it inspired, to see what was similar and what was left out.
A word on SPOILERS: I will spoil significant portions of Rand’s novel in the following article. I think this is only fair—it’s been out for 50 years, you can study it in school, it’s part of the American culture. However, I will try my hardest not to spoil the crucial elements of BioShock‘s plot. I’ll tell you nothing you couldn’t learn in the first hour or two of gameplay. However, we may spoil more of the plot in the comments later on, so be warned.
“I AM GOING TO STOP THE MOTOR OF THE WORLD.”
Atlas Shrugged takes place in the very near future—the day after tomorrow. The giant corporations that turned the U.S. into an economic powerhouse have begun to dissolve. Washington, D.C. reacts with legislation designed to prop up failing businesses—measures to keep them from competing with each other, or to force them to cooperate.
Throughout the first two-thirds of the novel, a recurring bit of popular slang sums up America’s cynicism: “Who is John Galt?” John Galt’s not a real person—he’s a mythical figure like Murphy or Kilroy. Asking “who is John Galt?” is the equivalent of saying, “why are you asking the impossible?” It’s a statement of resigned helplessness in a decaying world.
Dagny writes this slang off as a symptom of the world falling apart—until she suspects that John Galt might actually be real.
In the remains of one of the first companies to go under, she discovers the shattered remains of a motor driven by atmospheric electricity—a motor that would have brought cheap, abundant power to the entire world if it had been completed. She tracks down financiers, artists and engineers who have disappeared, and learns that in each case they had a visit from a mysterious man. This man talked with them for a few minutes and said something that made them leave the world behind.
Some of these creators vanish. Some of them go into blue-collar professions—driving trucks, or flipping burgers. But none of them return to their chosen work.
After an epic cross-country chase, Dagny finds a secluded mountain hideaway, protected by holographic illusions. The world’s greatest creative minds have retreated here, pursuing their masterpieces in private. They pay no income tax and perform no charity—they work for the joy of working and trade in mutual benefit to each other. And the entire gulch is powered by a motor driven by atmospheric electricity—the invention of one John Galt.
Galt tells Dagny what he told each of these fugitives: that society will never value the importance of creators so long as creators remain around to sustain society. It’s the output of rational people that allows the irrational to survive—and, at the same time, to question why the rational people should get all the acclaim. These inventors and artists didn’t walk away from their careers regretfully—they walked away joyfully, laying down the burden of supporting an ungrateful world.
They were the Atlases, supporting the world on their shoulders. When the time came, they shrugged it off.
Note: this is a woefully incomplete summary of the 1100-page epic that is Atlas Shrugged. I skipped over all of the subplots—such as the tension between Dagny and her brother James, Dagny’s affair with the industrialist Hank Rearden, Rearden’s deteriorating marriage, Dr. Stadler and his State Science Institute, Galt’s radio speech, Galt’s capture by the bureaucracy and the gang’s gung-ho rescue, etc, etc.
I also skipped over a lot of the substantial flaws in the novel. The rather melodramatic writing style, where every gesture is violent and every statement passionate. The substantial emotional repression which the protagonists inflict upon themselves. The odd epistemological ladder inherent to Rand’s philosophy, in which emotions necessarily reflect thoughts, which necessarily reflect value judgments, which necessarily reflect your worth as a human being. And finally there’s the moral quandary with which the novel ends, in which the supergenius protagonists leave the rest of the U.S. to starve while they hide in their mountain fortress.
It’s a superficial take. Bear with me.
“A MAN CHOOSES. A SLAVE OBEYS.”
BioShock is the story of John Galt’s paradise run amok.
You play an anonymous stranger (other texts give you the name “Jack”), stranded when a passenger plane crashes in a trans-Atlantic flight in 1960. You discover an uncharted lighthouse and a bathysphere that leads you to a breathtaking underwater city. This is a secret hideaway for creators—artists, surgeons, engineers and traders who all felt stifled by the world above them. Refusing to choose between the imperialism of the U.S., the mysticism of Judeo-Christian faith or the collectivism of the U.S.S.R., they choose a fourth way out—the city of Rapture.
Unfortunately, the idealism of Rapture does not bring peace. The biologists in Rapture discover ADAM—the stem cells of a newly-discovered species of sea slug. ADAM not only promotes incredible strength and regeneration in mammals, it also allows the rewriting of the genetic template. Humans can use ADAM to grant themselves incredible powers: the ability to create fire, to turn invisible, to manipulate objects telekinetically.
ADAM comes in very limited supply. However, surgically implanting a sea slug into a young girl turns her into a breeder of ADAM—a “Little Sister.” An entire generation of adorable moppets are turned into walking batteries of genetic fuel.
The scarcity of ADAM begins to stratify Rapture. Class resentment grows, as disenfranchised citizens attack Little Sisters for the ADAM they carry and the rich barricade themselves behind labyrinths of security drones and genetically-enhanced bodyguards. The Little Sisters receive protectors to keep them from being rounded up like cattle—”Big Daddies,” lumbering ogres in armored diving suits who attack with animal ferocity. A mobster named Frank Fontaine rises to power in the undersea city, attracting followers before he’s gunned down in a fiery battle.
It’s into this fracturing city that you descend in your rusting bathysphere. The beautiful Art Deco architecture has begun to crack, flooding the corridors of Rapture with oil and water. Perky public service announcements warn against dealing with parasites, even as insane “Splicers” attack Little Sisters for their cargo of ADAM. All you have is a wrench, a shortwave radio—and a choice.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhZLtyo47vo
John Galt, in Atlas Shrugged, serves two opposed purposes—the creator and the destroyer. He invents amazing machines that make futuristic advances possible, but he also sabotages the world around him in guerilla warfare. BioShock splits this character into those two separate roles.
The creator, Andrew Ryan, is a business tycoon and genius of electrical engineering. He’s the one who created Rapture, powering it with geothermal energy from sub-oceanic volcanoes. He considers every attempt to share or tax his wealth the work of parasites. He fled the surface world in 1947, building Rapture as a haven for creators who wanted to avoid the reach of governments.
The destroyer, Atlas, is a populist hero who rises to oppose Ryan. He strikes back at Big Daddies and Little Sisters, liberating ADAM to power his allies. He sabotages the machinery keeping Rapture intact under the ocean. Smugglers keep him supplied with arms and ammo. His sympathizers are publicly lynched in Apollo Square, but his popularity grows. Posters of a faceless hero begin to appear on walls everywhere: “WHO IS ATLAS?”
THE SANCTION OF THE VICTIM
Even if we didn’t have it from director Ken Levine’s own mouth, we can see a clear connection between Atlas Shrugged and BioShock. But what does the one tell us about the other?
Is BioShock a commentary on John Galt’s “mind on strike”? That’s certainly a tempting approach—the video game starts in a cloistered city of inventors, descended into brutality and madness. But Rand didn’t mean the strike depicted in Atlas Shrugged as a literal suggestion for followers of her philosophy (at least, not at first). She meant it as a symbol.
Society, she asserted, cannot survive without the creative efforts of rational people. Some of the most revered institutions of society—like the Church and the State—also contrive a lot of rules to harass, punish or limit creative people. If these creative people were ever to pack up and vanish—withdrawing the sanction that they give to their oppressors—society would wither and decay.
(This is a tough sell, because it’s hard to think of billionaire industrialists as “oppressed.” I’m just recounting her philosophy here.)
That being said, any social order left to its own will begin to stratify into upper and lower classes eventually. Even if everyone is rich, smart, creative and free, there must be some differences that separate them—differences of luck, of ambition, of good connections. And even the freest people are good at rationalizing rules for “the sake of security” or “just to deal with this one emergency”—even if they’re the sort of rules they dropped out of other groups to avoid.
BioShock is not simply a critique on Rand’s ideal society of pure reason. It’s a critique of any ideal, “planned” society. Human beings don’t form ideal societies. We can’t step outside of our own bodies and debate social frameworks behind Rawls’ veil of ignorance. We form patchwork societies, cobbled together from scraps of the Magna Carta, John Locke, imperial aspirations and some good old-fashioned Deism. Perfect on paper can never be perfect in practice.
I LOVE MR. RYAN, BUT I LOVE RAPTURE MORE
Atlas Shrugged gets unfairly pigeonholed as a Wagnerian clash between bold, uncompromising Nietszchean super-geniuses and sniveling, impotent parasites. That breakdown overlooks some of the more tragic characters in the novel—like James Taggart’s wife Cheryl, or Dagny’s subordinate Eddie Willers.
Cheryl thinks that James is the driving force behind Taggart Transcontinental, instead of his sister Dagny. She worships James until he shatters her illusions in a night of drunken self-loathing, laughing in her face as it falls. She runs, heartbroken, into a city night full of dishonest hucksters and cynical opportunists. In despair, she kills herself.
Eddie’s a hard worker and honest (Dagny’s friend Francisco d’Anconia has a paean to the Eddies of the world midway through the book), but he’s not quite as creative as Dagny or the rest. He continues struggling to keep Taggart Transcontinental running, even as the rest of the creators abscond to Chicago. The last we see of Eddie is on the last Taggart train to leave New York, stalled due to engine failure. He slumps in front of it, weeping helplessly as the crew abandons it.
Rand included these characters to show that a society turned against creators and reason doesn’t just hurt the lantern-jawed individualists. It also hurts everyone else—people who don’t necessarily buy into the cycle of parasitism, but can’t see what else to do.
BioShock includes this sympathetic character in the form of Bill McDonagh, Andrew Ryan’s chief engineer. He becomes enthralled with Ryan after working for him in the surface world:
“I met Ryan the day me and the lads were installing the bathroom plumbing up in his posh Park Avenue digs. ‘Oi!’ says he, ‘what’s with all the brass fittings? General contractor had me down for the tin.’ ‘Well,’ I says, ‘I supposed it’s the contractor then who’ll be bailing out your loo once a fortnight, is it? If it’s price you’re worried about, I’ll be picking up the brass, so not to worry, squire.’ ‘And why would you be doing that,’ says he? ‘Well, Mr. Ryan, profit or not, no man bails water out of privies built by Bill McDonagh.’ The next day I finds out, I’m Ryan’s new general contractor.”
However, the aftermath of the shootout in Rapture with mobster Frank Fontaine sours McDonagh. When Ryan seizes Fontaine’s business holdings, rather than disposing of them officially, McDonagh sees it as more of the same-old mess that he fled the surface to avoid.
“Mr. Ryan, I believe in Rapture, but that doesn’t mean we always win. Fontaine Futuristics is the biggest thing goin’ in Rapture, so let me be plain. When we arrest that toe-rag Fontaine for his thieving and smuggling, we must make it clear that we won’t touch his business interests. We sit on the council because these poor sods trust us… not because God gave us a chair.”
Finally, as Atlas threatens the city with his guerilla sabotage—which is where you, the player, come in—McDonagh’s messages to Ryan grow increasingly more desperate. McDonagh realizes that Ryan’s betrayed his own ideals and has taken for himself the power that he despised. Further, in making ADAM freely available for his followers, Ryan’s bred an army of monsters. McDonagh can’t sit idly by:
“I never killed a man, let alone a mate. But this is what things come to. I don’t know if killing Mr. Ryan will stop the war, but I know it won’t stop while that man breathes. I love Mr. Ryan. But I love Rapture more. If I have to kill one to save the other… so be it.”
Like Eddie Willers or Cheryl Taggart, Bill McDonagh is a poor casualty in the war between creators and destroyers. He’s honest, he’s loyal and he knows what’s right. But that’s not enough to save him.
IN WHAT COUNTRY IS THERE A PLACE FOR PEOPLE LIKE ME?
BioShock exposes the fantasy for what it is. Left to their own devices, the independent creators of Rapture resort to the violence, predation and parasitism that they decried on the surface. They readily make exceptions to their ideals when there’s a precious resource—ADAM—on the line. The city of Rapture becomes just like the cities they fled: a detached elite waging war on an anarchic underclass. Only this one’s darker, because there are literal monsters on both sides.
Email John at perich AT gmail DOT com.