I dragged Mu with me to catch a Monday afternoon matinée of that Tea Party monstrosity: Atlas Shrugged, Part I.

And it was every bit as famously and hilariously bad as we had been led to believe.

It followed the events of the book (at least the first third of it, for this is a trilogy) with exacting, religious devotion (taking into account that the action was moved from the fifties to the year 2016 – not coincidentally, I imagine, coinciding with the end of Obama’s second term). This devotion extends so far as to turn Ayn Rand’s embarrassingly awful literary sex scenes into embarrassingly awful cinematic sex scenes. In fact, the sex is so awful to behold that you might almost suspect it of being self-conscious parody were the filmmakers not obviously being so painfully earnest.

I don’t (or shouldn’t) need to tell you about Atlas Shrugged‘s (the novel and the movie) painful didacticism and ridiculously constructed straw men nor how the first quality makes for a turgid novel and how the second makes for a poor excuse for “philosophy.”

What I do want to tell you is my dream, wherein Atlas Shrugged turns into a midnight movie cult classic, with people shouting something or doing shots whenever some painfully unrealistic villain appears or when the people on screen are pouring themselves a drink (the world of Atlas Shrugged: The Movie is filled with people who drink so much alcohol [mainly what is supposed to expensive looking scotch] that you’d think the ghost of Hunter Thompson had helped write the stage directions).

Some small part of this dream came true as one of our fellow moviegoers (there only five or six of us) was constantly laughing or exclaiming “Who is John Galt.” I can’t be sure whether he was a liberal parodying the ripe for parody dialogue or whether he was a true Tea Partier expressing his deep appreciation for all that grand, Randian genius on screen. Either way, he acted like a brilliantly senile Greek chorus to the proceedings. Mu was not amused, but I felt he added a real touch of meta to the experience.