My greatest shame is that when I was 17 and knew nothing about anything, I was a libertarian. Having never experienced any form of disadvantage in my life, I knew in my heart that the insane ramblings and wooden prose of Ayn Rand were 100% correct. So infatuated was I with a personal philosophy that allows you to divest yourself of any sort of social responsibility that I willingly powered through the completely unnecessary 561,996 words that comprise Atlas Shrugged more than once. Multiple times between re-readings, I got stuck into The Fountainhead. It was a bad time in my life.
It’s difficult to present Ayn Rand’s ideas in a more insufferable way than she did herself, but it appears that Zack Snyder is going to give it a crack. According to Deadline, Snyder answered a question from a fan on Vero about what his next project is going to be, answering simply “Fountainhead“. Snyder told the Hollywood Reporter in 2016 that he was working on The Fountainhead and that he views it as “a thesis on the creative process and what it is to create something“, adding that Warner Bros. currently owns the rights to the screenplay that Rand wrote herself (which was made into the 1949 movie with Gary Cooper).
The book, written in 1943, is a heavy-handed morality tale about a ruthlessly individualist architect fighting off the disapproval of the common man in a fictional world where every single person in New York City gets passionately angry about the everyday goings on of the architecture world. It’s strange.
Like all her work, the book is a very thinly-veiled lecture on Objectivism, her pet philosophy that championed selfishness and capitalism over the evils of socialism and collectivism. How exactly Zack Snyder – whose forte is having people do punches in slow motion – will tackle this incredibly dry text and its deeply uncomfortable sexual politics is anyone’s guess. It’s at least guaranteed to be better than the three-film adaptation of Atlas Shrugged, which I guess I must have watched all of because I hate myself.
In an interview in 2016, Trump said that he identified strongly with the book’s protagonist and was a massive fan of the book, which gives you something of an idea of the sort of people that love this garbage (*cough* wealthy conservatives *cough*).
Regardless, this is great news for the people in the middle of the Venn diagram of ‘people with “Why so serious?” posters on their walls’ and ‘people with Richard Dawkins posters on their walls’.
