A Film Canon

The Fountainhead advocates artistic individualism to its logical conclusion, imbuing its protagonists with the solipsism of modernist architecture, such that the ultimate impression is of buildings conversing and, more specifically, of the interaction between a fortress (Gary Cooper), a temple (Patricia Neal), and a series of bland bureaucratic structures. In doing so, it explicates modernist architecture's rejection of both functionality and ornament as the hallmark of a sublime so pure that its final aim is to remove all people, and humanity, from the cityscape - at least at street level, which is persistently identified as the end-point of a suicidal trajectory - as if set in a giant art gallery, preoccupied with the individual construction and experience of art, but populated with a cast of entirely blind characters. For this reason, Edward Carrere's magnificent art direction drastically overshadows Ayn Rand's script, which is laughably one-dimensional and, in some ways, unnecessary, given that the one vestige of individuation allowed to (partly) supervene the protagonists' artistic products is their voracious sex drives, which are deflected into a series of tableaux whose primivitism recalls silent cinema, and repeatedly gesture towards the masochistic pleasures of deindividuation, or at least of total identification with an external, inanimate object. This, in turn, undermines Rand's pervasive identification of objectivism and high capitalism, or at least draws a common denominator between the latter and both fascism and communism, that almost requires her propagandistic script to conceal it, as well as Cooper's strained, word-by-word delivery, which also clarifies that his peculiar ability to fuse grace and earthiness into an embodiment of conversion was always an objectivist one, as evinced in his own, brief conversion to objectivism during production.