The fountainhead
I just watched (most of) The Fountainhead: the 1949 film based on the Ayn Rand book of the same name. The story is about a architect who wants to design modern looking buildings and won't compromise with "the masses" who want old-timey greek/gothic facades. The story is inspired by the works of Frank Loyd Wright's ground-breaking work in architecture (but not his philosophy - Wright wasn't a selfish prick).
First thing's first: this was a really bad movie. And not bad in a way incedental to it being an adaptation of an Ayn Rand book - any good book can make a bad movie if poorly executed. No, this film was bad precisley because Ayn Rand's book was bad. (To paraphrase Futurama: Your book's bad and you should feel bad.) The most immediatly striking failure is the dialogue which couldn't sound more lifeless and robotic if it were emmited in a binary series of long and short beeps from a computer's internal speaker. Here's an example:
Before you can do things for people, you must be the kind of man who can get things done. But to get things done, you must love the doing, not the people! Your own work, not any possible object of your charity. I'll be glad if men who need it find a better method of living in the house I built, but that's not the motive of my work, nor my reason, nor my reward! My reward, my purpose, my life, is the work itself - my work done my way! Nothing else matters to me!
The character's are transparent props for Rand to explain her philosophy of selfishness. This maybe wouldn't be a problem if the philosophy was interesting. But it isn't. And I guess that's my main problem with the movie. Take the above quote. The main character is trying to explain why he's so uncompromising. His reward is the love of doing he explains. But he doesn't love doing just anything. He only likes doing things in a specific way. Why? Why does he conform to the constraints imposed by the building material but not to the constraints imposed by the unrefined tastes of the masses?
In the book, as in real life, Moderist architecture is based on the idea of form following function. But one can't judge how well a building functions without taking into account the opinions of the people in it. Indeed, modernist architecture fails precisely when it doesn't account for the aesthetics of "the common man" Ayn Rand so loathed. When it does account for that aesthetic, like in much of Frank Lloyd Wright's work, it's awesome.
The real reason Ayn Rand so dislikes the common man is that her formative years were spent escaping the Bolsheviks with her Russian bourgeois family. It's not clear that her opinions should be of any interest to people that don't share such atypically narrow personal experiences.
