First The End of the Critic?, then the war over art criticism and journalistic ethics summarized by Ed Winkleman. Cultural criticism is under siege.
So it was refreshing to watch The Fountainhead for the first time the other day and soak up its nostalgic warning: Beware the diabolical and powerful Architecture Critic, or you'll wind up pulling a plow on a collective farm.
O for the days when critics swayed The Masses!
My notes after viewing:
- Ayn Rand was 12 years old when she wrote this, right?
- The setup: A self hating, sexually repressed Gestapo worm is chopped up and comes back as 3 people: the cold and empty, riding-crop wielding heiress Dominique Francon; the heroic, iconoclastic architect Howard Roark (Frank Lloyd Wright meets Albert Speer meets The Unabomber); and tabloid tycoon Gail Wynand, a Rupert Murdoch clone. Then the tabloid's architecture critic, Ellsworth Toohey, conspires to destroy Howard because he is too heroically individualistic.
Still, I was so moved I put together the storyboard below.
The movie starts with a bang: Howard is expelled from architecture school because he will not conform and submit to mediocrity. Then the 3 worms proceed to spout each others' lines to each other, as captured in the subtitles and comments:
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And now, 60 years after the triumph of Ayn's will, with our shared institutions crumbling, we can heroically and individually: vote for our favorite future casino lounge singer on American Idol (owned by Rupert); poison ourselves with the bitter, dead-end politics of The New York Post and Fox News (owned by Rupert); and express ourselves by throwing up gang signs on our MySpace page (owned by Rupert).
Soon we'll have American Idol-style government that changes daily by cell phone vote. (Which might not be a bad idea, but would be... owned by Rupert.)
And soon the last newspaper critic will be sent packing, their wealth of knowledge useless to a world that doesn't really need help choosing between McDonald's and Burger King, or really enjoy the effort it takes to decipher all those words, when pictures will do.
