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

[rahirah]

The only Ayn Rand I ever read was a much shorter SF novel she wrote (and I can't remember the name of) but even at fourteen it had my bullshit detector twinging...

[penny-lane-42.livejournal.com]

From everything I've ever heard (from reputable sources), basically the only people who like Rand are the ones who agree with her (horrible) ideology that takes social darwinism to the extreme and is misogynist and "libertarian."

And yes, from what I understand, the characters really do talk like that, because she doesn't so much write novels as polemics in the guise of novels.

[thedabara-cds.livejournal.com]

Did the exact same thing a few months ago and that movie was painful to watch. And what jury would have let him completely off like that? He could have killed people!

[shipperx.livejournal.com]

Sure, the 'other man' committed suicide, but, hey, the protagonist got to build his building just the way he wanted to and marry the dead guy's wife so... yay? o.O?!

[shipperx.livejournal.com]

It's pathological narcissists in love.

It's really, really obnoxious with the only entertainment value being that the dialog is so relentlessly TERRIBLE (that and how wild-eyed Patrica Neil's character is as she... enjoys being raped. Whut?!)

[shipperx.livejournal.com]

I don't think I can adequately describe just how incredibly terrible the dialog is in this movie.

[fenderlove.livejournal.com]

I had to read The Fountainhead for an essay contest for a scholarship in high school. I never wrote the essay because I was rather disgusted with the book, and the essay contest, I felt, was meant to praise Rand's work. I cannot abide the idea that achievement is only ever done for the individual and never for the benefit or wishes of others and that no achievement was ever created through a collective of individuals working together towards a common goal (guess someone should have told the scribes of Egypt who worked together to unify their written language that they suck). That is sheer madness. I think Socrates, Plato, and other "philosopher-kings" would be rolling over in their graves if they were told that the symposia made them "parasites" upon the land that was meant for hermitish individuals who do nothing to benefit the world at large and stew in their own elitist self-indulgence.

[shipperx.livejournal.com]

Oh I know! It was disgusting.

And as an architect I was terribly offended about his decision to 'design' public housing, not to make anyone else's life better through design (which is what we are taught) not to think about how the people who would live there would actually live, and god knows they couldn't be allowed to alter anything just because they actually had to LIVE there, but it was all. about. him. It was his design and that was all that was important. Screw whoever had to live in his glass and concrete box. It was about his 'artistic expression' (which was really just bad, clunky copies of Frank Lloyd Wright... many decades after Wright had been designing it).

[fenderlove.livejournal.com]

The post-industrial and art deco illustrations from the book were enough to make me cringe. Yes, let's steal from the Bauhaus movement, which was a totally about collectivism and communal learning, and turn into the signature of a book all about the importance of a single individual who has no moral center whatsoever.

One of my "favourite" quotes from Ayn Rand was about the rape scene in the book. She said, "If it was rape, then it was rape by engraved invitation." What a sick, disgusting piece of work she was.

[owenthurman.livejournal.com]

I like the minor characters in the book: Keating and Wynand and the sculptor and the older architect. I don't think you're ever supposed to really feel close to the protagonist or the love interest in the story.

But the movie was world class awful.

And I never liked or understood the scene with the marble scratch. But I figure that's just my issue; the ladies seem to love it (not here; maybe LJ is an isle of sanity?).

[beer-good-foamy.livejournal.com]

I tried watching that clip, and my computer recoiled in horror and shut down halfway through. I'm pretty sure this saved my life. Good god. It's like the terrible twos elevated to ideology.

Incidentally, here's how Ayn Rand fans spend their free time.

[timeofchange.livejournal.com]

Yes, it really is that bad. I think of Ayn Rand as one very effective tool in my arsenal of early-warning systems: If I meet a person, and that person in any way suggests that Ayn Rand is a genius--in any way at all--I back away slowly and then run in the other direction.

[timeofchange.livejournal.com]

But I figure that's just my issue; the ladies seem to love it

Ewwwww.

See my comment below. Which, I guess, supports your theory about LJ. *g*

[hazel75.livejournal.com]

I've never seen the movie, but I did like the book (which from what I can tell makes me a bad person). Preferred Atlas Shrugged as I felt like it was just a better book -- better characters, better plot, better dialogue.

Rand is not for the faint of heart. She's very extreme but that doesn't, imo, mean there's nothing of value to be taken from her ideas. I think one has to remember that she's coming from the perspective of someone who lived through the Russian revolution and was very opposed to communism. Which I suppose probably makes me a misogynistic narcissist.

[fishsanwitt]

Bwah! Jim wanted to watch it but I nixed it!!!

[shipperx.livejournal.com]

I wasn't thinking of it politically so much as a statement regarding architecture and design (as it is my profession). It's...

The protagonist is designing buildings as a monument to himself, not as spaces where people live. In fact, he verbally and disdainfully dismisses such a concept, saying that it is for himself and himself alone as he embarks on a project dismissing that it is for the people who will live and/or work in the place. It aligns oh-so-perfectly with the (later and real-life) case of the Pruitt-Igoe building, which is studied to this day in architecture schools because it was designed in the very pure Mies van der Rohe/ Louis Kahn model that Ayn Rand (and this movie) promoted. It was a giant monolith of architecture that held disdain for the masses it was built for, no compromise for how anyone would live in it -- pure vision, pure design, forget the vernacular, forget comfort, forgo detail, forgo humanizing the space. The purity of the designers vision, etc. is what mattered most. And it took only a matter of years for the building to turn into a notoriously dangerous hell-hole, because it was an inhumane space. It was ultimately declared such a disaster as housing that it had to be destroyed so that something that worked could be built in its place. Architecture is not a monolith. Architecture is the definition of space and it functions in how we live.

Much of Roarks (Rand's?) design philosophy is contradictory. They have the characters mouth the most famous of Louis Kahn lines that "form follows function," yet the protagonist later says that he doesn't build for people or how people use the space. Inhabitants/plebs/parasites certainly aren't allowed to adapt the space. He doesn't build for the human. He builds to his own ideal.

That's not 'form follows function'. That's the architect feeding his own aesthetic kinks without regard to and at times in contempt of function.

Architecture was a very poor choice for Rand's arguments. It is not an object d'art. It is not about putting a gigantic monument to oneself on the landscape. It is the art of defining space and evoking experience. Architecture is experienced not just observed.

And, it is not an artform of the singular. Any building of any size is not the construction of any individual. You don't design a skyscraper on your own (you can't design a 20,000sq. ft. building on your own, even with modern computers. No one designs a skyscaper on their own. There are teams, there are fellow architects, draftsmen, engineers, interior designers, craftsmen, contractors, sub-contractors, fabricators, and artisans. It is a multi-disciplined endeavor. No building belongs to just one man, unless he designed and built the whole thing with his own bare hands, and how often does that happen. How is any building just about one man? How can it be? This is not how architecture works, not if it aims to actually be good architecture.

An interesting discussion about these design concepts is in From Bauhaus to Our House ( http://www.amazon.com/Bauhaus-Our-House-Tom-Wolfe/dp/055338063X ) which, while I have issues with some of its points and think he overreaches, illustrates some of the history of the Modernist design and how parts of it proved somewhat problematic. (And The Pillars of Earth http://www.amazon.com/Pillars-Earth-Ken-Follett/dp/0451166892 is probably a better novel about architect as artist and the role such endeavors have in the fabric of time and history).

Modernism is still in vogue, but it's now old enough to have been examined, backlashed against, re-examined and modified, such that it isn't nearly as iconoclastic and far more realistic, touchable, and humane now.

[shipperx.livejournal.com]

It was actually good for a few giggles because the dialog was unbelievably grandiose, stilted, and speechy. Every character lectured the whole darn time! It was rather astounding.

[shipperx.livejournal.com]

Well, Bauhaus design was all about 'purity', so I see how she incorporated it into such an anti-humanist philosophy. As originally designed, it created a lot of anti-humanist buildings. It reminds me of Frank Lloyd Wright and how he would not only design the building (well) but design the furniture (horribly uncomfortably) and would design the clothing people were supposed to wear in it! megalomaniacal! He bankrupted many of his clients as well. Though my favorite are his 'wha-huh'? design mistakes like the building where he had lights under glass... and absolutely no way to replace the light bulb but to break out the glass (and it's in masonry, so how were they to replace it again?)

That said, "Falling Water" is indeed a masterpiece... that this Rand movie appropriated badly making it not only more clunky but completely missing why it was a masterpiece, that being the way it interacted with it's context. In this movie? It was just a clunky layer cake of concrete. None of the ethereal mimicking of the waterfall that it actually incorporated into the house. And it is enlightening to see the modern houses he designed in the Victorian and Edwardian eras. That was innovative. The problem with Rand's philosophy meets Modernist Architecture is that in the time of the book and the move it was the intellectual vogue... not running counter to it. Oh how radical in the 1930s to be an intellectual snob embracing the Modernist movement how... utterly predictable, actually.

[hazel75.livejournal.com]

Actually, after I posted my reply, I was thinking about some of the stuff you've said: That perhaps Rand would have been better served by using conceptual art rather than architecture as the vehicle for her story. Because I hear arguments like those from Roark from conceptual artists all the time -- no compromise, pure vision, blah, blah, blah. And this doesn't work so well with something that people have to live/work within.

Instead, I think I was annoyed with some of the responses which dismissed Rand, her work and anyone who might happen to agree with anything she wrote. Your criticisms of her use of architecture, however, are well-taken :)

[fenderlove.livejournal.com]

I guess I see the Bauhaus from the graphic design area where there was a lot of concentration on settling on a community graphic style and everyone seeming to stick to that- functionality and rigid structure of type faces, which seems a little ironic considering some of the architectural design choices within the movement as you listed.

Oh how radical in the 1930s to be an intellectual snob embracing the Modernist movement how... utterly predictable, actually.
Predictable indeed and will forever be a mystery to me as to why Rand chose it instead of maybe building upon it to make up a fictional style to make her point.

[shipperx.livejournal.com]

Okay that's... kind of pointless and disturbing.
I mean, really? This needed to be done why, again? Guess this is how they're choosing to "Go Galt".

[shipperx.livejournal.com]

I honestly didn't know that much about her, just that when I was in architecture school it was 'the thing' to read her and having heard about her endlessly I knew that The Fountainhead was all about the protagonist architect feeling that he was the very most special snowflake and that no one could question his vision, damn it! No one!

It was very Design 105. Everyone in first year design thinks they're the most specialist snowflake ever.

Then the Tea Party adopted Galt last year and I learned a bit more about Randian thought and o.O?

[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. :(

[lindaseton.livejournal.com]

the movie is hilariously awful but the book as melodwamah was entertaining if one skims over all the speeches (which make up about 90% of the bk). I read it in college because Rand was a friend's favorite all-time author and we broke up because she was offended that I would dare skim-read this and ATLAS SHRUGGED. It was probably one of the best things that ever happened to me. She was a self-important prat.