Sipping from the Fountain By
HENRY P. RALEIGH WORD
IS THAT the screenwriter of “Braveheart” and “We Were Soldiers”,
Randall Wallace, is attempting to boil down Ayn Rand’s 1200 page
novel, Atlas Shrugged, to a two-hour film. Published in 1957, efforts
to turn the novel into a digestible film or, at least, a mini-series
for television, have come to naught. One problem had been the pseudo-philosophy
espoused by Ms Rand in person and through her novels. Called Objectivism
(a cult school of which had formed before her death in 1982 and
exists today), it laid heavy emphasis on free enterprise, the rights
of individuality and the privileges and superiority of the creative
person. This
notion did not sit well with many, sounding as it did a bit Nazi-like.
The plot motivation of Atlas Shrugged is the disappearance of America’s
free thinkers in industry, science, and the arts and the consequent
collapse of society. Considering that most people wouldn’t pay any
attention if such types were removed, I suppose it was figured they
wouldn’t pay to see a film about it, either. Mr. Wallace will most
likely arrive at a standard Sci/Fi film and avoid the philosophical
diatribe. Ms.
Rand’s earlier and first novel, The Fountainhead, was made into
a film in 1949. Directed by King Vidor, it held Objectivism to a
more manageable level, substituting symbolic expression (liberally
drawn from the legend and designs of Frank Lloyd Wright) for Ms
Rand’s brand of lengthy rhetoric. Seen as the most bizarre work
of King Vidor and the film’s star, Gary Cooper, it was dismissed
by most critics, although David Thompson has called it a beautiful
film, praising it for exploring the conflict between elemental creativity
and the forces of social compromise (it had also generated an intense
affair between hero and heroine, Cooper and Patricia Neal). The
film’s message was generally viewed as being on the loony side for
how could anyone make sense of a character so single-mindedly idealistic,
so ego-centered, so perfectly convinced of his creative and aesthetic
righteousness that he blows up a building of his own design because
another architect of lesser talent had stuck on some superficial
classic details. Opposing
the morally pure architect, Howard Roark (Cooper), is the equally
unbelievably evil architectural critic, played in suave nastiness
by Robert Douglas, whose negative critiques (always of Roark’s designs)
are widely read by the public and cause rioting in the streets.
Where Roark would advance the clock of modernism, the critic, out
of spite and envy of a true genius, would turn it back. There’s
the symbolic conflict, you see, spelled out at length in Roark’s
courtroom speech (well, you can’t really go about dynamiting buildings
without the law taking some interest) in the film’s finale: the
creator versus the parasite, the individual versus the collective.
Ever the good man in a bad world, Roark avows that, “… my ideas
are my property.” and “… my terms are the right of any man to live
on his own terms.” Good stuff, all right, if you don’t mind a little
anarchy. If
the audience in 1949 found the film incredible, today’s will find
it laughable. It does pop up on cable channels and is worth watching
it for no other reason than to recall there was a small audience
back then that much admired both novel and film. The abstract artists
of the late ‘40s and for most of the ‘50s in many ways viewed themselves
as Howard Roarks. Macho painters and sculptors who had been fighting
the heroic fight against the Philistines of art, the uncomprehending
critics, galleries, and museums that clung to the past. The art
club meetings in New York City resounded with perorations much like
Gary Cooper’s. By the end of the ‘50s though, postmodernism was
emerging, pop culture was in. Ironically, the stuff-shirt architectural
critic of “The Fountainhead” who would halt the march of modernism
was right — the day of the Howard Roarks was over. “The
Fountainhead” may be an anachronism; still it is, in its way, the
“Rocky” of the arts. “Rocky”, by the way, has been selected for
inclusion in the National Registry of Films — maybe “The Fountainhead”
is there, too; I don’t know — it should be. It’s interesting
to note that Atlas Shrugged is still going strong, especially among
college students. In one way or another, we miss our Howard Roarks.
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