Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #161 The Fountainhead (1949)
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In one of the less surprising revelations in The Vow and Seduced, the impossibly juicy Nexium mini-series, it turns out that Nexium founder/sex-cult proprietor Keith Raniere was a big Objectivist.
The “tech” that Raniere sold to worshipful acolytes as revolutionary was a hodgepodge of discredited ideas from terrible people, a lazy melange of Objectivism, Scientology, neuro linguistic programming, MLM and EST.
If Raniere believed in anything, it was in his own unassailable greatness and divine right to whatever he desired, whether it was the bodies of branded, brainwashed sex slaves or the millions of the Bronfman heirs whose inheritance helped fund Nexium.
The volleyball-loving Izod super-fan preached individuality and free-thinking and brainwashed his followers into seeing liberation in slavery and empowerment in submission.
It turned out that Raniere was, in fact, a C student and not, as he insisted, the smartest man in the world in addition to being a concert level pianist and world class judo master. Yet he aggressively and successfully promoted the Objectivist fiction that if a a man of his singular greatness, integrity and strength were to relentlessly pursue his goals regardless of their legality and morality it could only help humanity as a whole.
Donald Trump similarly cuts an Objectivist figure. Like Raniere, he believes in nothing but his own greatness. For Trump, as for Raniere, laws that govern lesser men do not apply to him. All that matters is that he pursue his own power and pleasure.
By treating the sociopathic amorality of laissez faire capitalism at its most heartless as the only true morality Objectivism has empowered generation upon generation of suggestible college students to be their worst, greediest, most insufferable selves.
The very qualities that make someone a hero in the world of Objectivism—egotism, selfishness, indifference to the suffering of others and blind self-regard—make them monsters in our world.
Where DO you come up with your terrible ideas?
King Vidor’s spellbinding 1949 adaptation of Rand’s The Fountainhead makes so much more sense if you view protagonist Howard Roark, the muscle-bound, perpetually scowling personification of Objectivist ideals, as a larger than life villain rather than the impossibly romanticized, idealized hero Rand intended.
Roark does, after all, blow up a low-income housing complex rather than compromise on its design. Within the context of Rand’s story this is a heroic act of individualism. In any other context, that is some super-villain type shit.
Gary Cooper plays the macho architect and arch-enemy of conformity and collectivism as a perpetually scowling, glowering maniac who would sooner blow up his creations than accept compromise in any form.
As a hero, Cooper is wildly unconvincing. As a bad guy, on the other hand, he is endlessly compelling, absolutely hypnotic in his awfulness.
Howard’s problem, you see, is that he is too brilliant and too original and has too much integrity. Actually that’s not his problem, it’s society’s problem because Howard is cursed to live in a world that abhors the original, the new and the legitimately great because originality, invention and greatness makes the unwashed masses feel bad because they’re incapable of transcending the awful plague of mediocrity.
Like Rand, Howard is of the mindset that humanity fucking sucks, and the endlessly romanticized “common man” sucks hardest of all. Consequently no one should ever set out to help anyone deliberately. If society is improved it should only be a side effect of a heroic individualist pursuing their own selfish needs.
Say what you will about its politics, The Fountainhead is a gorgeous movie
In the very first scene, architecture student Howard is dressed down by the first of an endless series of tradition-obsessed conformists who angrily inform him that the world has no place for men like him, lecturing ridiculously, “Do you want to stand alone again the WHOLE world?!? There’s no place for originality in architecture. Nobody can improve on the buildings of the past! One can only learn to copy them. We’ve tried to teach you the accepted historical styles. You refuse to learn! You won’t consider anyone’s judgment but your own. You insist on designing buildings that look like nothing ever built before! This school has no choice but to expel you! It is my duty to say you’ll never become an architect.”
This establishes a template where characters talk like no human being in the history of the universe has ever communicated, in giant chunks of clunky, undiluted philosophy. The idea of subtext does not exist in Rand’s weird world. Rand does not believe in the concept of show, don’t tell. To her, it was essential to tell, and then tell some more, and keep on telling until even the densest clod in the audience understands her.
To cite a particularly egregious example, as The Fountainhead barrels towards a climax Ellsworth M. Toohey (Robert Douglas), its primary villain, a persnickety fop of an aristocratic architectural critic the movie preposterously posits as a hero of the common man angrily insists, “Who is society? We are. Man can be permitted to exist only in order to serve others. He must be nothing but a tool for the satisfaction of their needs! Self-sacrifice is the law of our age! The man who refuses to submit and to serve, Howard Roark, the supreme egotist, is a man who must be destroyed!” and gets a response from the audience that Oprah had to give every audience member a new car in order to achieve.
Over and over Howard is offered Faustian bargains by evil collectivists threatened by his incontrovertible greatness: he can realize his most ambitious projects as long as he compromises and lets a weak-willed, pathetic sap of a sub-mediocre conformist water down his dazzling originality and brilliance with their tradition-minded hackwork.
Howard would rather wield a deliciously phallic jackhammer in a rock quarry than compromise the slightest for a world that is unworthy of him and his genius.
At the rock quarry Howard is ogled shamelessly by Dominique Francon (Patricia Neal), a whip-wielding newspaper columnist as brilliant and uncompromising in her own way as Howard. Dominique is impressed by Howard’s sweaty muscles and cold, arrogant personality but she’s really blown away by his architecture.
Neal makes Dominique a force of nature, a doe-eyed arch-individualist who spends the entire film in a frenzy of pure lust. Like Cooper, the wildly charismatic, gloriously unhinged Neal is impossible to buy as a heroine but utterly riveting as an arch-villain.
This, friends, is a set!
As part of her peculiar seduction of Howard Roark, Dominque refers to herself as “a woman completely devoid of feeling”, which Rand seems to see as not only positive but as a feminine ideal.
Dominique is introduced destroying a statue on the basis that she loved it so much that her attachment to the statue made her weak and she never wants to be so attached to anything that losing it might make her sad so she resolves to never be attached to anything, including Howard and his architecture.
This proves difficult given her all-consuming physical desire for Howard’s body and reverence for his god-like creative genius.
Genius, stud AND insufferable asshole. What a catch!
Like Trump, Rand saw the press as the enemy of the people and seemed weirdly obsessed with the idea of architectural critics as hiss-worthy figures of Satanic evil single-mindedly devoted to bringing down great geniuses out of jealousy and insecurity.
For Howard, work is its own reward. His only ambition is to create something new and original and great, something pure. He thinks he has an opportunity to do just that when a sniveling sub-mediocrity asks him to design a low-income housing complex that he promises will not be compromised in any way.
Being a sniveling sub-mediocrity, this sad excuse for a man compromises all the same. Howard of course has no recourse except to blow up the housing complex rather than let his genius be altered.
The evil, conformist media tries to make Howard the bad guy just because he BLEW UP LOW-INCOME HOUSING RATHER THAN LET HIS PRECIOUS BLUEPRINTS BE TAMPERED WITH. But Howards delivers a rousing speech at his trial articulating Rand’s philosophy and is found innocent despite confessing to the crime he is on trial for.
The Fountainhead is the best movie that could have been made out of a singularly terrible, toxic novel. It’s a glorious Art Deco fever dream that understands that the only way to realize Rand’s didactic nonsense cinematically is to crank everything up to 11, to be as melodramatic and operatic and over the top and dream-like as possible.
Vidor wisely never attempts to convince us that the film’s characters are anything but cartoonish vessels for Rand’s philosophical sophistry. At this point I have seen The Fountainhead three times. It gets better with each viewing.
The Fountainhead is the antithesis of the recent Atlas Shrugged movies. The low-budget, widely reviled Atlas Shrugged trilogy was made by incompetent amateurs as a means of evangelizing on behalf of Objectivism.
The Fountainhead, in sharp contrast, was made by brilliant craftsmen and women who understood that Objectivism was bullshit and consequently saw Rand’s novel as something to work around, not something to embrace.
Show me your most phallic design!
I kind of fucking love this crazy movie precisely because it’s one of the most bonkers films ever churned out by a major studio, particularly in the 1940s. It’s a dazzling anomaly, a once in a generation combination of manifesto and melodrama.
Rand had such a bad experience with THE BEST POSSIBLE ADAPTATION OF HER TERRIBLE FICTION that she insisted on having creative control over future projects based on her work.
Given Rand’s right wing political beliefs it’s beyond curious that at one point Oliver Stone wanted to adapt The Fountainhead with Brad Pitt as Howard Roark. That adaptation understandably never got off the ground. More predictably Zack fucking Snyder has attempted to make his own version of The Fountainhead. I hope to God that Snyder never gets his grubby paws on this material because there is a zero percent chance that he will outdo King Vidor and a 100 percent chance that he would embarrass himself even more than Objectivists usually do.
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