The Fountainhead

[shipperx]

Back in college, it was always the 'thing' to read Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead. Having developed a fairly good idea what it was about, I avoided the book like the plague. Tonight the old B&W movie of it is playing on AMC and, excuse me but I have to say it's terrible!. Every character's dialog is a speech diatribe about 'artistic pretentiousness integrity. It's okay to be incredible assholes as long as one is narcissistically 'true to themselves.' And I won't even try to analyze the female lead (or the female author) and the rape that is rape except it isn't (except it most certainly is). You see, it's because she doesn't want what she can love... but she can love what completely ignores her in favor of his own world-eclipsing ego... because, after all, he's true to himself by being a totally self-centered douchebag.

But really it's the godawful dialog that kills me. Everyone speaks in speeches and the actors look crazed... and they're actually good actors (with Gary Cooper and Patricia Neil) . Their characters, however, are sociopaths and lunatics.

Googling: Ayn Rand also wrote the screenplay, so... OMG did the characters speak like this in the novel too? The dialog is truly, astoundingly awful. George Lucas levels of awful, except perhaps more long-winded and overblown (yeah, suck on that one for a moment). And OMG they take architecture waaayyyyyy too seriously (and I'm an architect!)

Sure, this would get you off for blowing up a building in New York City...

Yes, your honor, I blew up a building, and it's totally justified... because they [value engineered it] --I used that line with a co-worker this morning and he completely cracked up. 'Value engineering' is a way of life. It's called a budget-- Pay no attention to the financial loss over my blowing up public housing in an egotistical temper tantrum. I'm an individual! The world is dying because of an orgy of self-sacrifice... o.0?!!!

Which world would that be again? I'm pretty damn sure that it isn't this one.

Dear lord... ::head desk::

Comments

[shipperx.livejournal.com]

Well, Frank Lloyd Wright wasn't actually Bauhaus. Bauhaus were Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, etc. largely a group of intellectuals fleeing Hitler. U.S. architectural critics pretty much fell at their feet the moment they arrived in the U.S.. Wright was an American and already of an older generation. Bauhaus eclipsed him for a while and he. was. not. amused. Ultimately, he ended up adopting some of the aesthetic and got a second shot a fame and fortune (his earlier shot was largely killed by scandal what with his abandonning his first wife, his family's murder, etc). So he was heavily influenced by/resentful of the Bauhaus movement instead directly part of it. Van der Rohe is probably the one most influential in architecture and the way that architecture is taught, though.

[fenderlove.livejournal.com]

Now I want to go get an architecture book. It's probably the area of art history I know the least about after 1880. Oh, my brain is totally dead today.

Speaking of Frank Lloyd Wright, his Ennis House was on Lovely Listing. Poor Angel. His mansion is all crumbly. :(