Weirdest, snarkiest and... er... funny(?)

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

The Insanity of Ayn Rand: The Fountain-Brain-Dead.

by Tallulah Morehead

June 4, 2009

Huffington Post

This is the weirdest of the weird, snarkiest of the snarky and most boneheaded of the boneheaded critiques or satires of Rand I ever read. But it's funny, too, if you don't take it seriously...

From the article:

I just finished watching a doozy of a terrible movie on TCM, one that has to be seen to be disbelieved: the ultra-hilarious piece of right-wing objectivist claptrap, the movie of Ayn Rand's ridiculous novel, The Fountainhead, starring Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal, as glamorous, sexy Fascists, I mean an architect and his best gal.

. . .

Enormously well-hung Gary Cooper plays Howard Roarke, the most brilliant, unpopular, and egotistical architect in the world. The movie is all about how people are always trying to get Howard Roarke to design buildings just like the same ones everyone else designs, but Howard is too great to listen to anyone, even his clients.

. . .

The villain of the story is a newspaper architectural critic, who wields tremendous public power. He writes a column of architectural criticism, and his slightest word can bring the city to a halt. What planet is this? When the publisher fires the architectural critic, the staff walks out in support of the critic, and the paper buckles under to the critic, and the publisher shoots himself.

. . .

He's [Roark's] found innocent, and the jury and the whole courtroom erupts into applause at this horrific miscarriage of justice. He has admitted committing the crime on the stand. His defense was that he has way better taste than the pigs who paid for it, so he should be able to blow it up.

. . .

Patricia Neal is an architect's daughter who hates anything that makes her happy, because her taste is too supurb, and the masses with their bad taste will destroy anything she likes, so she deliberately throws out any stuff she has that she likes (We first meet her dropping a lovely nude statue down an airshaft), and she refuses to marry the man she loves, and instead marries a man she finds creepy, to avoid being happy, so happiness can't be taken from her. She'd rather be miserable, than be happy, and risk being made miserable by the masses. If you can find any sense in that, let me know.

. . .

Her idea of sight-seeing is riding her horse to the quarry and then wandering around, drooling over the hunky, muscular workmen driving pickaxes into walls of granite. This is, in my opinion, the only sensible thing in the whole movie. And her favorite workman is Howard Roarke, who is working there after driving himself out of business with his too-high standards of taste. She first sees him holding a jackhammer, drilling away into into solid rock. She is turned on by the ever-so-subtle sexual implication of his drilling into rock with a jackhammer. She must imagine she has a marble hymen.

Now she can't get him out of her mind. She rides around on her horse, imagining Howard and his drill while she's being jostled in the saddle. At one point she rides up to him and slashes him across the face with a riding crop, which makes him grin, and the unforgettable final shot of the film is her riding up over 100 stories in an outdoor elevator (No elevator can go that far. It takes three to get to the top of the Empire State Building.) to where Howard is standing, on top of his not-yet-finished "Tallest building in the world." The shot tracks in on his crotch as he stands astride his masterpiece, the world's-biggest-phallic symbol.

. . .

When Ayn learned that some slight cuts had been made to her speech, she squawked and hollered, but she did not blow up Warner Brothers, nor set fire to the negative and all prints, nor even beat Jack Warner into paste with a poker (Damn!), which makes her a raging hypocrite. It's what Howard Roarke would have done. It's what Bette Davis would have done.

. . .

Ayn died the day after John Belushi died...

I wonder if the consistent misspelling of Roark's name as Roarke is intentional. I bet it is not, since nothing snarky came of it.

I admit I feel a bit guilty for finding some of this stuff funny, but DAYAAMM!

If you gotta let it out, might as well do it all at once...

Michael

EDIT: Incidentally, Tallulah Morehead is fictional (I think). Here is her blog: The Morehead the Merrier.

[Michelle]

Heh. I thought the film version of The Fountainhead was awful (take, for instance, the fact that the first 200 or so pages of the book are roughly explained away in five minutes in an opening sequence so condensed and baffling that even I was having a hard time following it, and I'd just finished the damned novel for the second time), but her complaints are more with the plot, almost all of which could be applied to the novel (although Wynand doesn't kill himself in the novel). At least the film version didn't really include the rape scene. Can you imagine how much more squawking (to use a word she applied to Rand) she'd have done if it had been included?

"He's found innocent, and the jury and the whole courtroom erupts into applause at this horrific miscarriage of justice. He has admitted committing the crime on the stand. His defense was that he has way better taste than the pigs who paid for it, so he should be able to blow it up. The jury buys this idiocy. The movie paints him as a hero."

This does touch on a problem I had with the novel, though (putting aside the rape, which is less disturbing still than Rand's justification of it, and seemed to amount to nothing more than a verbose way of saying 'she was asking for it'). While Roark could have sought legal action against Keating for the way his building ended up, there was nothing that justified him legally in blowing up Cortlandt. In Rand's use of the courtroom as a philosophical court, she neglected, I believe, the fact that Roark was being tried for violating the laws of a society. Plenty of people believe that their use of violence and destruction is philosophically appropriate, but even if they were right, this would not afford them protection from laws they violated in the process.

[kiaer.ts]

Incidentally, Tallulah Morehead is fictional (I think).

Duh, "more head"? Tallulah is a drag queen, and obvious an illiterate as well. Michael, why do you keep giving these attacks on Rand and Objectivism so much air time? And linking to them even. Stuff like this is about as funny as listening to a child make a scene at a department store, and you are encouraging it.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Ted,

It all depends on your jargon. You could also say I am not evading it.

I don't like faking reality. Did that once and got hurt. Bad.

Before you insinuate my motives, you should take a hard look at yours.

Michael

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Michelle,

There is a DVD of an interview with Henry Mark Holzer (and Erika) with Duncan Scott. (Holzer was Rand's attorney during the "Collective" years and for a time after.) He talked about the end of the draft in the Nixon era and how people involved with Objectivism at that time helped end it. They actually helped Nixon make up his mind.

But he also discussed a case he defended where the defendant wanted to do the court scene like Rand portrayed in her books. He described, smiling and almost tenderly, how the kid started by claiming before the judge that he did not recognize the right of the court to try him. And then went on with the entire spiel.

Of course the kid got creamed.

There is a huge difference between fiction and reality and it needs to be remembered when dealing with reality. (Interestingly enough, this is due to the nature of communication, not the message communicated.)

Michael

[kiaer.ts]

Ted,

It all depends on your jargon. You could also say I am not evading it.

I don't like faking reality. Did that once and got hurt. Bad.

Before you insinuate my motives, you should take a hard look at yours.

Michael

Not evading reality doesn't require us to photograph and then share pictures of our feces.

I did not insinuate your motives, I questioned the wisdom of your policy. If I suspected your motives (I don't know what insinuating someone's motives means ) I would not have bothered. And Tallulah is a drag queen.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Ted,

I have gotten to a point in life where I admire Rand, say it to the 4 winds, and do not need to keep a chip on my shoulder about it.

I look at this stuff and chuckle or laugh it off. (Some of it is very clever.) It does not threaten me in the slightest, nor does it change my mind.

If this bothers you, just skip the threads where it appears.

btw - I have no idea how I didn't catch the "more head" thing. I muse be getting slow.

Time to take some vitamins or something...

Michael

[kiaer.ts]

Ted,

I have gotten to a point in life where I admire Rand, say it to the 4 winds, and do not need to keep a chip on my shoulder about it.

I look at this stuff and chuckle or laugh it off. (Some of it is very clever.) It does not threaten me in the slightest, nor does it change my mind.

If this bothers you, just skip the threads where it appears.

btw - I have no idea how I didn't catch the "more head" thing. I muse be getting slow.

Time to take some vitamins or something...

Michael

I like the RoR banter option, where if you do want to insinuate attention to this sort of crap at least you aren't giving them free advertising. Tallulah Bankhead and Agnes Moorehead are big favorites of drag queens.

[kiaer.ts]

Ted,

I have gotten to a point in life where I admire Rand, say it to the 4 winds, and do not need to keep a chip on my shoulder about it.

I look at this stuff and chuckle or laugh it off. (Some of it is very clever.) It does not threaten me in the slightest, nor does it change my mind.

If this bothers you, just skip the threads where it appears.

btw - I have no idea how I didn't catch the "more head" thing. I muse be getting slow.

Time to take some vitamins or something...

Michael

I like the RoR banter option, where if you do want to insinuate attention to this sort of crap at least you aren't giving them free advertising. Tallulah Bankhead and Agnes Moorehead are big favorites of drag queens.

Oh, and Roarke's (sic) defense was redress of breach of contract, not superior taste.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Ted,

You can go through the whole thing and shoot holes in it. Accuracy of details like that is not what makes it funny.

You really do provide Ms. T. Morehead more credit than she deserves when you take her seriously. You raise the clown to the status of the sage.

That doesn't say very much about the clown. It never has, either...

People "defend Rand's honor" and all that other tribal jargon on other Objectivist forums, which, from what I have been able to perceive, have not defended anything at all. People have established small communities where they tell each other what they can say or not about Rand. They call each other names. The Rand-image influence of these places does not extend beyond that. So what honor of whom is defended?

I think you, Ted, defend Rand much better with that marvelous blog you do than by trying to convince others to not look at what is in the mainstream press, or worse, what their "proper" manner of reacting to it should be. I happen to laugh. I will continue to do so.

You produce well. That's the part of you I really like.

Michael

[Michelle]

Michelle,

There is a DVD of an interview with Henry Mark Holzer (and Erika) with Duncan Scott. (Holzer was Rand's attorney during the "Collective" years and for a time after.) He talked about the end of the draft in the Nixon era and how people involved with Objectivism at that time helped end it. They actually helped Nixon make up his mind.

But he also discussed a case he defended where the defendant wanted to do the court scene like Rand portrayed in her books. He described, smiling and almost tenderly, how the kid started by claiming before the judge that he did not recognize the right of the court to try him. And then went on with the entire spiel.

Of course the kid got creamed.

There is a huge difference between fiction and reality and it needs to be remembered when dealing with reality. (Interestingly enough, this is due to the nature of communication, not the message communicated.)

Michael

Sad, sad, sad.

I always wondered how the Rearden trial in AS would play out in real life. It sounds like the kid tried something like what Rearden did.

There are too many Objectivists who make life needlessly difficult for themselves by trying to play the tall, dark, and silent Howard Roark kind of role. What usually ends up happening is that their clients/employers tell them where they can shove their pissy attitudes, and they end up driving loved ones away from them and generally ruin their own lives.

Applying Objectivist principles can liberate a person and open the door of life to him. But making a cult out of it can also ruin his life.

The fundamentally ironic thing is how Objectivism attracts people with low self-esteem who think that if they ape Rand's heroes that they'll magically discover self-esteem as well.

Didn't Nathaniel Branden write some books on developing self-esteem? Are they effective?

Edited June 6, 2009 by Michelle R

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

I like the RoR banter option, where if you do want to insinuate attention to this sort of crap at least you aren't giving them free advertising.

Ted,

Did you notice the title of this section, "Objectivism in Dark Places"?

Michael

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Didn't Nathaniel Branden write some books on developing self-esteem? Are they effective?

Michelle,

Yes he did and they are.

Before too long, I am going to be giving a free course on Internet marketing and I will be using NB's works as training products to sell to display the concepts and techniques (and sell a few books while I'm at it—but I'm really late—this was supposed to start in January).

Part of that training will be presenting and emphasizing the benefits and features of NB's ideas.

Michael

[Brant Gaede]

Heh. I thought the film version of The Fountainhead was awful (take, for instance, the fact that the first 200 or so pages of the book are roughly explained away in five minutes in an opening sequence so condensed and baffling that even I was having a hard time following it, and I'd just finished the damned novel for the second time), but her complaints are more with the plot, almost all of which could be applied to the novel (although Wynand doesn't kill himself in the novel). At least the film version didn't really include the rape scene. Can you imagine how much more squawking (to use a word she applied to Rand) she'd have done if it had been included?

"He's found innocent, and the jury and the whole courtroom erupts into applause at this horrific miscarriage of justice. He has admitted committing the crime on the stand. His defense was that he has way better taste than the pigs who paid for it, so he should be able to blow it up. The jury buys this idiocy. The movie paints him as a hero."

This does touch on a problem I had with the novel, though (putting aside the rape, which is less disturbing still than Rand's justification of it, and seemed to amount to nothing more than a verbose way of saying 'she was asking for it'). While Roark could have sought legal action against Keating for the way his building ended up, there was nothing that justified him legally in blowing up Cortlandt. In Rand's use of the courtroom as a philosophical court, she neglected, I believe, the fact that Roark was being tried for violating the laws of a society. Plenty of people believe that their use of violence and destruction is philosophically appropriate, but even if they were right, this would not afford them protection from laws they violated in the process.

Rand had to condense the novel into an hour and half screenplay. She ideally wanted a longer one to open it up in the middle for character development. She also had to compensate for Cooper being too old for the part so a lot was cut out from the beginning of the story. I don't think it was depicted as such in the movie, but there is a legal concept called "jury nullification" in which a jury has the absolute power to ignore the charge and evidence regardless of the instructions of the court through a verdict of "Not guilty." This principle was most famously established in the American colonies in the mid-eighteenth century in a famous newspaper trial--the name of which doesn't easily come to mind but begins with a "Z."

By today's standards the "rape" scene in the novel was too rough. It was by "engraved invitation" but they didn't lay in each others' arms afterwards and Dominique behaved like a rape victim dragging herself to the bathroom where she spent the rest of the night. And Roark took it as a one-shot deal getting on a train some days later to go back to the city only wondering why he still thought of Dominique. I think this was to illustrate the value then put on productive work relative to sex and love by the author. In her next novel she beefed up the value of the love part but still left it inferior.

I'm pretty sure that after 9/11 it will be too hard to have an American hero blowing up a housing project and I don't therefore expect to see a remake of the movie in my lifetime.

The whole novel and its conflicts hangs on Roark sanctioning Keating's architectural pretensions. That Roark would engage in a pragmatic fraud to get his design erected was morally indefensible and not compatible with Objectivism. Unfortunately, Rand did the same in her personal life with the disastrous consequences we are living with to this day. We will never know how many highly productive people turned their backs on a public life because of that and because she held her philosophy so close to her vest others had a hard time breathing. She cut 95% of the possibility of political activism right out of the practice of her philosophy effectively saying "goodbye" and "don't come back" to people who first approached her ideas or would have through a more political orientation, the libertarians.

We should remember always, however, how a sea of blood and her two great novels destroyed the moral and intellectual pretensions of collectivism. This is becoming harder and harder to appreciate with the passage of time.

--Brant

edit: the case was John Peter Zenger's, 1735

Edited June 6, 2009 by Brant Gaede

[Jonathan]

Oh, and Roarke's (sic) defense was redress of breach of contract, not superior taste.

Keep in mind that Roark didn't actually have a contract with anyone but his co-conspirator in fraud, Peter Keating. Roark and Keating conspired to hide Roark's involvement in the project from those who were in charge of it, and sought to pass off Roark's work as Keating's.

In a real court case, if one conspirator claimed that he had the right to destroy property owned by others because they didn't abide by a secret agreement that he had had with his fellow conspirator but not with with them, do you thing that any real jury would acquit?

Regardless of what Roark falsely claimed as his defense, he was actually motivated to blow up the building project because of purely aesthetic reasons -- in short, because he believed that his tastes were superior: others had dared to mess with his design.

Anyway, the review that MSK posted is indeed a bit snarky, but nowhere near as snarky, or as unfair, as a lot of Objectivists' reviews of art that I've seen, including some of Rand's views of others' art. What's good for the goose...

J

[Rich Engle]

Don't feel too guilty about it, MSK. It's an accurate review.

Especially the thrusting phallic stuff.

rde

Where do you rent horses and jackhammers in Florida? I wanna get some strange.

[DavidMcK]

"I'm pretty sure that after 9/11 it will be too hard to have an American hero blowing up a housing project and I don't therefore expect to see a remake of the movie in my lifetime."

Not to mention the Oklahoma City bombing.

Edited June 7, 2009 by DavidMcK

[Rich Engle]

There are too many Objectivists who make life needlessly difficult for themselves by trying to play the tall, dark, and silent Howard Roark kind of role. What usually ends up happening is that their clients/employers tell them where they can shove their pissy attitudes, and they end up driving loved ones away from them and generally ruin their own lives.

Agree. Tried it myself.

[Robert Campbell]

I wasn't offended by "Tallulah Morehead"'s piece. Got the Bankhead/Agnes references right away. In all, way too silly to sweat over. I see it ran in the HuffPo, but if La Huffington thinks she's amassing political capital with reviews like this, she'll be duly disappointed.

Besides, I've never warmed to the movie of The Fountainhead, which only worked in fits and starts.

Ayn Rand clearly was appealing to jury nullification at Roark's trial. John Peter Zenger got off because of jury nullification, but so did O. J. Simpson. It's a two-edged sword.

Robert Campbell

[kiaer.ts]

I wasn't offended by "Tallulah Morehead"'s piece. Got the Bankhead/Agnes references right away. In all, way too silly to sweat over. I see it ran in the HuffPo, but if La Huffington thinks she's amassing political capital with reviews like this, she'll be duly disappointed.

Besides, I've never warmed to the movie of The Fountainhead, which only worked in fits and starts.

Ayn Rand clearly was appealing to jury nullification at Roark's trial. John Peter Zenger got off because of jury nullification, but so did O. J. Simpson. It's a two-edged sword.

Robert Campbell

The objection was not to the existence of the drag queen and her "review." She can't help himself. The objection was to the lack of selectivity on the part of the poster providing her with web links and free advertising.

Roark's defense was breach of contract. His hope was jury nullification.

[Brant Gaede]

If anyone wants real life don't read fiction. I read very little and hardly ever examine the new novels on display in bookstores.

--Brant

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

The objection was not to the existence of the drag queen and her "review." She can't help himself. The objection was to the lack of selectivity on the part of the poster providing her with web links and free advertising.

That's strange.

The words said something of that nature, but the message I discerned was "You are an insider, so stick with the program, goddammit. Someone made fun of Ayn Rand. Don't you dare find that anything but offensive."

Michael

[Michelle]

Jury nullification. Right. I'd forgotten that. Stupid me.

[Michelle]

By today's standards the "rape" scene in the novel was too rough. It was by "engraved invitation" but they didn't lay in each others' arms afterwards and Dominique behaved like a rape victim dragging herself to the bathroom where she spent the rest of the night. And Roark took it as a one-shot deal getting on a train some days later to go back to the city only wondering why he still thought of Dominique. I think this was to illustrate the value then put on productive work relative to sex and love by the author. In her next novel she beefed up the value of the love part but still left it inferior.

That engraved invitation thing is just using pretty language to evade the fact that it was rape.

"Engraved invitation" = "She was asking for it"

Rand says so herself in her journals.

"But the fact is that Roark did not actually rape Dominique; she had asked for it, and he knew that she wanted it."

Apparently Rand thinks the definition of rape is 'sex one does not want.' In reality, rape is non-consensual sex. If you don't consent to it, and he does it anyway, it is rape.

The fact is that Dominique clearly fought against his advances. And Roark raped her.

That Dominique enjoyed it and went back to the rapist is irrelevant.

It was rape. And Roark is a rapist.

That whole scene, I think, was only made possible by a mix of Rand's sadomasochistic literary treatment of sex and the view that women belong to the alpha male. You see it with male animals that fight one-another is order to win mating rights with the female. In this case, Roark is strong and masculine, and Dominique is weak and feminine, so, by this logic, it is only proper for Roark to take her, even though she is kicking and clawing in the process. Very tribal, uncivilized logic.

[studiodekadent]

That engraved invitation thing is just using pretty language to evade the fact that it was rape.

"Engraved invitation" = "She was asking for it"

Rand says so herself in her journals.

"But the fact is that Roark did not actually rape Dominique; she had asked for it, and he knew that she wanted it."

Apparently Rand thinks the definition of rape is 'sex one does not want.' In reality, rape is non-consensual sex. If you don't consent to it, and he does it anyway, it is rape.

The fact is that Dominique clearly fought against his advances. And Roark raped her.

That Dominique enjoyed it and went back to the rapist is irrelevant.

It was rape. And Roark is a rapist.

That whole scene, I think, was only made possible by a mix of Rand's sadomasochistic literary treatment of sex and the view that women belong to the alpha male. You see it with male animals that fight one-another is order to win mating rights with the female. In this case, Roark is strong and masculine, and Dominique is weak and feminine, so, by this logic, it is only proper for Roark to take her, even though she is kicking and clawing in the process. Very tribal, uncivilized logic.

Michelle,

Whilst I also dislike (and disagree with) Rand's gender essentialism and violent, combat-of-wills sex scenes, it is by no means established that Roark raped Dominique.

Feminist author Wendy McElroy, for instance, argues it was consensual rough sex in "Looking Through A Paradigm Darkly" (published in "Feminist Interpretations of Ayn Rand").

Also, to be honest, I think when you differentiate between "sex one does not want" and "non-consensual sex" you are assuming that people do not consent to things they want. Which is a position I find rather unintelligible.

A: "Do you, B, wish to perform sex acts C in location D at time E with me, A?"

B: "Yes, I want that"

If B did not consent, they would not want to have C with A at place D and time E. On the other hand, if B wants to have C with A at place D and time E, they will consent.

But the above example is for reality as it is. Rand deliberately writes in a romantic style. She's not attempting to say "this is how ideal sex should in fact proceed in concrete reality." She's trying to stylize certain intellectual values using the common artistic tropes and conventions of her time. And remember that the novels were written in eras with very repressive gender roles.

Finally, I think its known Rand herself had sexual fantasies about being ravished by an overpowering male figure. I don't share Rand's kinks for D/s but the fantasies she was giving voice to are very common amongst both genders (and they often run both ways, its not just male-dom female-sub). Whilst I personally believe that specific fetish is often a result of negative sexual premises and/or conceptions of human nature (of course, this is a very broad statement and there are many fine details that apply in individual cases), we have to give credit where its due. Rand's heroines are not very gender-traditional for their time (again, remember when the books were written), Dagny Taggart being the obvious example.