Drill Gary Drill

I knew King Vidor's adaptation of The Fountainhead would be something very special from its opening shot: a skyscraper set among the New York skyline. It is revealed--by turning!--to actually be the side of a book--The Fountainhead!--which opens to let us know it's adapted by its author--Ayn Rand! It's tacky and ridiculous, but strikingly so. It also bespeaks a fidelity to Rand and her novel which is, shockingly, not a liability. Far from it--it manages to retain enough of Rand's "philosophy" to satisfy all but the most ardent Objectivists (including Rand herself, but more on that later), and also translates her wild-eyed sensibility with such craft that the ordinarily suffocating didacticism can be safely bypassed and the movie enjoyed as a luxurious camp artifact.

The process of adaptation began within a year of The Fountainhead's publication. Though initially slow to sell, over the summer of 1943 it became a runaway hit, and by the end of the year Warner Brothers came knocking. Rand demanded what was then an extraordinary sum for the rights, $50,000, which the studio paid. Rand, a Hollywood veteran, produced a script treatment for them. After several years in development hell and wooing by an A-list that included Clark Gable and Humphrey Bogart, the studio attached Vidor and star Gary Cooper to the project. Rand tightened her screws and, along with being guaranteed that she would write the script and that it would be adhered to, she was regularly consulted on the set about character motivations and acting style.

The resulting screenplay is a masterpiece of concision, at least as far as the normally logorrhoeaic Rand goes. The core story of rugged individualist Howard Roark struggling against and triumphing over the forces of collectivist blah blah blah remains, but with whole sections either excised completely or drastically condensed; gone is Peter Keating's mother as well as his sometime lover, along with Ellsworth Toohey's circle of intellectual mediocrities. Numerous episodes have been expunged in order to let a few major events drive the action forward.

The film's opening scenes are a terrific example of its economical approach: an aggressive montage, with Roark standing in shadow, back to the camera each time. First Roark being ejected from architectural school, then being told by Peter Keating to be like him and make what everybody else likes, and then listening to curmudgeonly mentor Henry Cameron (Henry Hull) argue with himself before offering him a job. Then: "Wait! What's your name?" "...Howard Roark." The door shuts, and the camera pivots to the pages on Cameron's daily calendar, blowing in the wind and all but blaring, "PASSAGE OF TIME." It's not even necessarily good, but it's compelling viewing.

The relentless editing gives new focus to the story, away from the vacuous Peter Keating (Kent Smith) and inhumanly mediocre Ellsworth Toohey (played with effete European relish by Robert Douglas), and onto newspaper tycoon Gail Wynand  (Raymond Massey) and love interest Dominique Francon (Patricia Neal), who  doesn't show up until two hundred pages into the novel but here makes her first appearance within twenty minutes. From a structural standpoint this is a problem; Toohey doesn't do much to become a full-on villain, and Keating his patsy, until well into the third act, so there is no consistent opposition to Roark. But with so much else to gawk at along the way, this ends up not being nearly so much a problem as one would expect.

For the film lives and dies by its style, which makes eminently watchable a script that would be otherwise unsalvageably hokey, stuffed as it is with dialogue chunks like:

WYNAND: I merely wanted to show you that all men are corrupt, that anyone can be bought, and that you are wrong in your contempt for me. There is no honest way to deal with people. We have no choice except to submit or to rule them. I chose to rule.

DOMINIQUE: A man of integrity would do neither.

Yet rather than try to mine this for psychological depth, the actors instead play it with a crazed earnestness suggestive of religious fanatics. This I think is a kind of Rosetta Stone for Ayn Rand's enduring appeal and for why her sensibility tends to translate so poorly to flesh and blood depiction. In portraying them, it doesn't matter what these people believe--an ugly amalgamation of the unchallenged, the impossible, and the indefensible--but that they believe. Most real people have doubts and internal conflicts, while Rand's creations have all the mythic judgmental certitude of an Old Testament prophet.

None of the performers demonstrate this better than Neal as Dominique Francon, a character who comes off on the page as an irritatingly contrarian bitch but who Neal imbues with a sad longing that makes her, not necessarily sympathetic, but sexy and entrancing (Neal replaced Lauren Bacall at the last minute, and began an off-screen affair with Cooper; Rand initially wanted Gretta Garbo for the part). It's the eyes that do it. Rand wrote Dominique as "myself on a bad day" and there are indeed a couple shots in which Neal wears a manic stare that encapsulates, within a few frames, everything about Rand and her "glare that could wilt a cactus" that Helen Mirren spent 90 TV-movie minutes trying and failing to capture.

The performances are augmented every step of the way by Vidor's direction, which goes for the garish gusto every step of the way. Max Steiner's music swells and stings to underscore, as it were, every very emotional beat of the story. The set design is delightfully ostentatious, with a giant map of the world befitting a James Bond villain that spans the wall of Wynand's office, and little details like a fish tank lamp or a giant, tacky portrait on the wall of newspaper editor Alvah Scarret. The lighting is bold when it wants to be, such as the giant shadows in the rape scene. The framing and editing work hand-in-hand to bring all this together and scream the subtext. Consider the scene of Dominique's first glimpse of Roark, a back-and-forth edit that contrasts Patricia Neal's idealized Hollywood goddess looks with the most brute sight and sound of masculine penetration possible.



The most unnatural aspect of the whole thing is, obviously, Howard Roark's five-minute courtroom speech, unusual and unprecedented in its time and perhaps even more out of step with today's jump-cut driven movie rhythms. It's a dramatic dud for all the obvious reasons (the same reasons that have me salivating with sadistic glee at the prospect of the two hour John Galt radio speech being adapted for the nigh-guaranteed Atlas Shrugged Part III), but it is helped in no way by Cooper, who is, somewhat inscrutably, the one weak link among the major players. He is simply, at age forty-eight, too old for an archetype of timeless virility. His gaze communicates confusion more than stoicism, and he makes the kiss-of-death mistake of trying to make Rand's heavy-handed dialogue sound believable, which comes off all the worse when everyone else is acting on a completely different level. (He admitted as much after seeing the finished cut of the movie.)

Though Rand was initially proud of the film and the fact that it had been shot as originally written, she later denounced it as hopelessly compromised after discovering that a line of dialogue had in fact been cut, and from Roark's speech no less: “I wished to come here and say that I am a man who does not exist for others.” Outside that hardest of cores, the movie is appreciated by Randians for--what else?--its spirited defense of individualism. Yet, as I have hopefully made clear, there is considerable outside appeal as well. Though it remains true to its source material, in letter and spirit, more than any adaptation I can think of, it tempers Rand's poisonous opinions with enough actual style and skill that those opinions are easy enough to ignore.

That irony, that paradox, is what is so fatal to Objectivism as a whole: it is because of "others" that The Fountainhead exists on film as anything more than an incompetent joke; Atlas Shrugged, as we will find, would not be nearly so lucky.

La Miserable

I decided to pick up Les Miserables (Ayn Rand's favorite novel by her favorite novelist) to read in my downtime this summer. I'm not going to do a blow-by-blow response series, for it's beyond the scope of this blog and I'd like to not lose another half-year of my life, but I might occasionally throw in an observation or two. Like now.

Reading the opening chapters of Les Mis after coming off of Atlas Shrugged, two facts present themselves: Rand was unusually charitable in her love of Victor Hugo, for his worldview is about as far from hers as can be imagined. We are introduced to the Bishop of Digne, Monsieur Charles-François-Bienvenu Myriel, his life story, his home, his routines. He is an utterly selfless man, devoting every free moment and spare income to the poor. A looter and moocher, in the Randian parlance. Rand in fact originally was going to include a priest character in Atlas Shrugged, a genuinely altruistic man who toils to realize his moral vision and then comes to understand it has already come to pass and ravaged the world, but she abandoned the character because she didn't think such a creature could ever be convincing (not that an inability to craft believable characters never stopped her before). It is amazing, then, to know she could admire Hugo in spite of him standing for everything she despised.

And not only did she admire him, but she owed him certain characteristics of her own writing (one hesitates to call it style). Her first and "objectively" best novel We the Living owes much to Hugo in its panoramic view of post-revolutionary Russia, but the strongest influence I can trace--perhaps because it's so immediately obvious--is what looks to be a shared tic of anecdote. All three of Rand's full-length novels dole out their exposition of character histories with a series of vignettes, that always end with a pithy line or action or fact to emphasize a character's essence. A representative sample from The Fountainhead, detailing the rise of self-made newspaper magnate Gail Wynand:

He remained in the building, sitting on the stairs outside the city room. He sat there every day for a week. No one paid any attention to him. At night he slept in doorways. When most of his money was gone, he stole food, from counters or from garbage pails, before returning to his post on the stairs. 

One day a reporter felt sorry for him and, walking down the stairs, threw a nickel into Wynand’s lap, saying: “Go buy yourself a bowl of stew, kid.” Wynand had a dime left in his pocket. He took the dime and threw it at the reporter, saying: “Go buy yourself a screw.” The man swore and went on down. The nickel and the dime remained lying on the steps. Wynand would not touch them. The story was repeated in the city room. A pimply-faced clerk shrugged and took the two coins.

Les Mis is absolutely rotten with this kind of character building, even as it builds in the completely opposite moral direction. Here is the bishop dealing with the problem of an overcrowded hospital:

"Monsieur," he said, "How many beds do you think this hall alone would contain?" 

"Your Lordship's dining hall!" exclaimed the director, stupefied. 

The bishop ran his eyes over the hall, measuring and calculating. 

"It will hold twenty beds," he said to himself; then, raising his voice, he said, "Listen, Monseiur Director, here's what I think. Obviously this is wrong. There are twenty-six of you in five or six small rooms; there are three of us in space enough for sixty. That is wrong, I assure you. You have my house and I am in yours. Give me back mine and this will be your home." 

Next day the twenty-six indigent patients were installed in the bishop's palace and the bishop was in the hospital.

Another example of characterization-by-anecdote:

His conversation was cheerful and pleasant. He adapted himself to the level of the two old women who lived with him, but when he laughed, it was a schoolboy's laughter. 

Madam Magloire sometimes called him "Your Higheness." One day, rising from his armchair, he went to his library for a book. It was on one of the upper shelves, and as the bishop was rather short, he could not reach it. "Madam Magloire," said he, "bring me a chair. My highness cannot reach that shelf."

It's almost like telling a joke, with the point of the story, the character's defining quality, revealed like a punchline. It goes without saying that her reading of Hugo did not, alas, impart to Rand a sense of humor.

We Are All Individuals

Before I get into the weeds of Atlas Shrugged I want to consider further the out-of-the-box popularity of The Fountainhead. Rare enough is the standalone 700 page novel of quasi-Nietzschean ethics, violent sex, and architecture,  by an unknown author; rarer still is it for such a novel to become a publishing sensation. How does such a book go on to sell hundreds of thousands, and eventually millions of copies?

The answer is hinted at in the responses of some of its most fervent readers. Along with the growing sales in the years after publication came an avalanche of fan mail, often from teenagers, who had been deeply affected by The Fountainhead. Some representative samples:

But now, when I reach the point—and I reach it often these days—where the pain can go down no further; I read part, any part, of The Fountainhead…

…I was profoundly challenged and frightened. The challenge has outlived the fright…. Thank you….

…It is like being awake for the first time…

It’s easy for (liberal) readers to sneer at these reactions and to write them off as youthful indiscretion. This isn’t entirely wrong, but nor is it the whole truth. Many encounter Rand’s work in their rebellious teenage years, yes, but the books can exert an influence long after. Modern Library in 1998 petitioned readers for what they thought was the greatest English language novels of the twentieth century, and Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead were numbers one and two on the list. (It should be mentioned the mechanics of the survey make it more of a reflection of intensity of a given book’s followers than an absolute measure of popular taste.) There are plenty of adults who aren't even hardcore Randians that would consider the book an influence.

The key is Rand's seriousness. A look at the sordid details of her life makes it hard to take much of what she says seriously, but the monumental fact of a 700 page manifesto to individuality reflects an intensity of purpose that (even in skeptics) is hypnotic. Moreover, as rancid as a lot of Rand’s ideas are, they come from a strange  but relatable innocence, an outsized idealism, which often takes the form of a frustrated longing for greatness (this is the character Dominique Francon in a nutshell). Here is the most open and straightforward expression of this sentiment, in the setup to Roark’s courtroom speech:

The people had come to witness a sensational case, to see celebrities, to get material for conversation, to be seen, to kill time. They would return to unwanted jobs, unloved families, unchosen friends, to drawing rooms, evening clothes, cocktail glasses and movies, to unadmitted pain, murdered hope, desire left untaken, to days of effort not to think, not to say, to forget and give in and give up. But each of them had known some unforgotten moment—a morning when nothing had happened, a piece of music heard suddenly and never heard in the same way again, a stranger’s face seen in a bus—a moment when each had known a different sense of living. And each remembered other moments, on a sleepless night, on an afternoon of steady rain, in a church, in an empty street at sunset, when each had wondered why there was so much suffering and ugliness in the world. They had not tried to find the answer and they had gone on living as if no answer necessary. But each had known a moment when, in lonely, naked honesty, he had felt the need of an answer.

Amid Rand’s savage social Darwinism and rape fantasies is a desire for a person to be able to follow his heart and do what he wants to do without having to make all the mundane concessions to the world as it is: networking, doing a job you hate to pay the bills, working up the ladder, sacrificing integrity for the sake of the safe and profitable. Rand resented the time she spent in the trenches, feeling that all it did was keep her from being able to write. It’s easy to understand why teenagers and young adults, now having to begin providing for themselves and instead of having fun and being creative all day, would be drawn to the idea that it doesn’t have to be that way. It’s arguably even more appealing to adults who have already had to make those sacrifices and settle for a career that is merely satisfactory rather than satisfying.

Middle America goes for this kind of story all the time. ‘Everyman breaks out of straightjacket of modern (middle-class/suburban) society’ is a riff on the American Dream that’s gone through countless iterations, from Revolutionary Road to Little Children to American Beauty and a bunch of the great movies that came out of 1999 (The Matrix, Fight Club, even to an extent Being John Malkovich). One of one of the vicious ironies of Rand’s putative radicalism is in fact how conventional it is. Her “be yourself” message is what she hated most of all, a bromide. “The creator is the man who goes against the current,” says Howard Roark in his courtroom speech, as if this were the most profound observation ever, and not the stuff of virtually every self-help and motivational poster ever made.

Righteous philistinism I suspect plays a similar role in The Fountainhead’s popularity. There’s a narrative substrata—it never quite becomes a subplot—involving demonic collectivist Ellsworth Toohey’s relationship with the New York avant garde. This includes Gertrude Stein caricature Lois Cook, as well as sundry pretentious artistes who make and promote crappy “abstract” art in order to debase actual greatness by association. Rand makes a hash of the satire, of course, essentially by mistaking effect for intent—there’s a lot of bad and overrated art, but Damien Hirst and the Young British Artists notwithstanding, the bulk of them don’t set out to be deliberately awful. But dismissal is an easy response to challenging art and ideas, and for someone not inclined to engage them on their own terms, full-out demonization as that on display here is quite appealing.

Essentially, Rand’s snobbery cuts both ways: it is contemptuous of easy entertainment while also suspicious of willfully difficult art and literature, leaving its own stubborn earnestness as a virtue. It aspires to intellectual deepness and becomes so by definition, after dismissing any dissenters for obscurantist sophistication. One might call it extremely middle-brow. Most readers’ tastes are, obviously, in popular fiction, and most believe themselves to be quite smart; who would describe himself as an idiot? Thus those who didn't come to regard Rand's every utterance as gospel could still glom on to what are trite if inspiring entreaties to follow one's dreams. Rand’s achievement was appealing to this sweet spot of aspirational inertia in an audience she scorned, and—if the Modern Library survey is to be believed—convincing a majority of readers that they are above average.