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USA on the Rand

Ayn Rand's extreme individualistic utopia has long since become a reality in the United States, with Donald Trump and Rex Tillerson in the driver's seat. Her cult figure, Howard Roark, is the ideological example of key members of the Trump administration and many of the other American political leaders.




(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)

What is trumpismeculture? What best characterizes the rhetoric, actions, and personality of a character so dazzlingly imaginative, so pathologically self-in love, and so politically inept that he has shocked many of us into paralyzed disbelief? As roles change in the president's administration, we begin to get a clearer impression. Last year, in an interview with Trump for USA Today, columnist Kirsten Powers writes:

"Trump described himself as a fan of Ayn Rand. About Rand's novel The source of the source (The Fountainhead) he said: 'It's about business [and] beauty [and] life and inner feelings (sic). That book is about 'everything.' He identified with Howard Roark, the novel's idealistic protagonist who draws skyscrapers and races against the establishment. When I pointed out that The source of the source in a way about the tyranny of group thinking, Trump sat up and said, "That's what's going on here." "

Republican Philosopher. It comes as no surprise that Ayn Rand's ideological cult figure permeates the cultural performances of key members of the Trump administration and many of the leaders of the House of Representatives and the Senate, both of whom are Republican-controlled. Foreign Minister Rex Tillerson has said that Rand's latest novel Those who move the world (Atlas Shrugged) is his favorite book. It is understandable that the former chief of ExxonMobil identifies with the coalition of industrialists in Rand's dystopian novel who fights against government regulation and defends a laissez-faire-capitalism. CIA Director Mike Pompeo is also excited about the book: "one of the first serious books I read that really did something to me". Andrew Puzder, who for a while was the prime minister, claims that he reads Rand's novels over and over. The head of CKE Restaurants, which is opposed to raising the minimum wage, named the chain's parent company "Roark Capital Group" in honor of the main character in The source of the source, and encourage their children to read Rand's novels.

When Paul Ryan struggled to become the Republican vice presidential candidate during Mitt Romney in 2012, he moderated his former enthusiasm for Ayn Rand, but the House Speaker had previously stated that if he was to give one thinker the honor of joining politics, it would have to be Ayn Rand: "This is a fight for individualism against collectivism." Ryan has provided copies of Atlas Shrugged as Christmas presents, and Rand's novels are compulsory reading for his staff members.

Put the movie. Rand's influence on the imaginary world of conservative Americans has deep roots. Adam Curtis' documentary series All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (2011) traces the expansion of neoliberal economics back to Alan Greenspan's participation in reading groups that belonged to Rand's objectivism movement in the 1950s. But Trump's recognition of Rand is not part of the neoliberal, quasi-philosophical endeavors of the Greenspan generation. What is disturbing, instead, is that Trump identifies himself with The source of the sources Howard Roark. Whether Rand once again emerged as an ideological authority in the White House is in all likelihood linked to Trump's unstoppable vanity. In fact, it is unlikely that Trump, who has never been known to anyone, has been through as much as one of the more than 700 pages of the novel; he is far more likely to know the work because he has seen the movie version.

The source of the source is a key to understanding the culture of Trumpism: An outsider hung with skyscrapers rages against the public will and "mainstream media".

Only for that reason is it worthwhile to take a closer look at the loyal adaptation of the Warner Bros. production of 1949 to help define the characteristic of the culture of Trumpism. The source of the source is more than a valuable glimpse into the romantic inner life of American conservatism; The film is both a fantasy and a roadmap that convincingly draws the contours of not only what is this government's aspirations, but also how they were chosen and which path led them here.

Full control. Warner Bros. was given an option on the rights to The source of the source in 1943, the same year that the novel came out, but not until Rand had ensured that she herself would both write the film script and have full editorial control over the process. With the usual disturbing efficiency, Rand compressed the 754-page novel into a fine-tuned screenplay in a few weeks, and in the summer of 1944, Mervyn LeRoy was chosen as director. Following pressure from the War Board propaganda institution (Rand's literary production was inappropriately anti-Soviet for the last months of World War II, but suitably anti-communist immediately afterwards), the project was postponed to 1948, now with King Vidor in the lead instead of LeRoy. Rand Gary Cooper then got Howard Roark in place as his architect, with the studio's blessing. The resurrection of the project may have had something to do with Cooper's and Rand's membership in The Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals. The week after Cooper signed the contract with Warner Bros., he traveled to Washington DC to be a kind-hearted witness on The House on Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). A relatively unknown theatrical actress, Patricia Neal, was selected for the female lead, and the footage began when Cooper returned from Washington.

Misunderstood genius. The film is a quirky, unmanageable patchwork of drama without emotion, ideological propaganda and unintentional humor. It is apparently a melodrama, but offers a disappointing quartet of one-dimensional main characters. At the center stands Howard Roark – a visionary modernist, uncompromising individualist, squeezed out of the establishment – and his struggle for recognition in what seems to be a collectivist American society in the 1920s and 1930s. Roark stands in the way of Peter Keating (Kent Smith), a weak, uncompromising populist architect, and Roark's nemesis Ellsworth Toohey (Robert Douglas), the "socialist" reviewer of the popular tabloid newspaper The Banner. Toohey is a taste judge and the individual's enemy – the obstacle to Roark's career advancement – played by Douglas in a high-pitched way. Patricia Neal plays Dominique Francon, another architecture reviewer who also works for The Banner, and Roarks defender and subject to his warm feelings. Next to Francon is Gail Wynand (Raymond Massey), the self-made the multimillionaire owner of The Bannon. He is Rand’s example of a failed individualist, and serves as the film’s tragic hero.

The source of the source opens with a lengthy montage in which Roark's modernist plans are ridiculed by the collectivists: he is thrown out of the school of architecture and is denied major assignments by faceless bureaucrats who scorn him for his aesthetically divergent opinions. This is a situation that is quite inelegantly repeated throughout. Unable to get assignments, partly because Toohey's harsh criticism has driven him out of the market, Roark becomes a quarry worker rather than drawing buildings that appeal to the vulgar taste. The quarry, owned by Dominique Francon's father, is the place where Roark and Francon begin their romantic entanglements (mirrored by a offset- a deal between Cooper and Neal). From the depths of the quarry and after his quarrels with Francon, he is suddenly commissioned to build a high-rise building. Thus begins Roark's journey towards Randian greatness as an unstoppable artist: "I do not build to get customers, I have clients to build!" Roark thunders to the collectivists.

Lloyd Wright. It's easy to see why The source of the source can be seen as a key text for understanding the culture of Trumpism. An outsider devoted to building skyscrapers is celebrated because he rages against the public will and "mainstream media" Rand clearly stated that Roark is a slightly disguised tribute to Frank Lloyd Wright. In his intense preparations for writing the novel, Rand conducted research in the architecture industry and developed a lifelong admiration for the profession. She was a trainee at the office of Ely Jacques Kahn for four months, and in 1937 started an exchange of letters with Lloyd Wright, which with some interruptions lasted for 20 years. Her cultivation of America's great modern architect is repeated directly in the film's fierce worship of Howard Roark. When Rand asked to meet Lloyd Wright, she expressed the desire to experience "the inspiration of seeing in front of me a living miracle – for the man I am writing about is a miracle I want to make alive".

This is how The source of the source an almost biographical film sewn into a piece of objectivist propaganda. Roark, like Lloyd Wright, studying during a photo storm, being bullied by his colleagues, getting sued, being ignored by the architectural community for much of his career, and constantly harassed by the press. Wright made numerous reservations about the novel and the intended film, and expressed various political views during his professional life, but nevertheless he told Rand that her novel was "the best display of the principles of democracy that has ever been fictionalized". .

Extraordinary. Rand's influence on The source of the source is unique in the history of literary adaptations in Hollywood. She was on the set every day in production, to make sure Vidor did not depart with a word from her script. Jack Warner joked that he was afraid Rand would blow the studio up in the air if Vidor didn't obey her commands.

To see The source of the source when one knows Rand's role as scriptwriter, co-director and chief ideologist, the experience changes radically. At first glance, it is "classic Hollywood": Gary Cooper's lean figure is dramatically illuminated in striking relief against Manhattan's architecture, while Max Steiner's soundtrack occasionally swells dramatically. But as the characters begin to speak, we discover that Rand is in complete control. Storytelling gives way to bombastic lectures that often force actors to deliver statements faster than the rhythm of the scenes makes it natural. Coopers, Neals and Douglas' characters are over-stylized and superhuman to the absurd, and constitute a static human architecture where they stand as statues and spit out Rand philosophical slogans instead of dialogue replicas. Rand's characters do not represent ordinary people; all of which are bizarre extraordinary and extraordinarily bizarre, tyrannizing each other with grim monologues about the human being.

Imprinting. Rand ensured that all of the 114 minutes the film lasted, a lesson in the embarrassing teachings of her objectivism philosophy was best exemplified when Howard Roark was asked to design a huge housing project on behalf of the talented Keating. It is typical of Rand's hatred of the "mass man" that Roark's design is compromised by Keating making some recent additions on real estate developers' request, to Roark's total disgust. Roark acts like a man with his stratospheric self-esteem: He sneaks into the construction site and blows the whole project into the air. We reach the climax of the film as Roark is brought to trial.

As if there were not enough admonitions about the individual's needs for the previous hour and a half, Rand made sure that the film's highlights include a six-minute talk about human nature. This was, in 1949, the longest monologue in Hollywood history. Roark's defense speech ends like this: “I came here to say that I do not recognize anyone's right to a single minute of my life. Neither to any of my energy, nor to any of what I have achieved. No matter who makes such a claim, how many they are or how great their needs are. The world is undergoing an orgy of self-sacrifice. I came here to be heard, in the name of every independent man who still exists in the world. I wanted to determine my terms. I don't care about working or living after someone else. My conditions are a man's right to exist for his own part. "

Extreme individualism. For Rand, a Russian-Jewish emigrant who came to the United States in 1926 and had lost everything when his father's business was taken by the Bolshevik state, this was as much an attempt to reclaim his past as an outline of a philosophy. Nevertheless, it is fascinating that the essence of such an influential ideology on the American right is at the center of film history. It's not just the stark peculiarity of Rand's outlook on life (the only sentence in Roark's defense speech that didn't appear in the finished film – "I Wanted to Come Here and Say I'm a Man That Doesn't Exist Others" – was deleted because was considered to be overdue). It is a vision of male individualism that – as Adam Curtis has documented – formed the basis of the social vision of followers used by Ted Turner and Alan Greenspan when they created a policy for business and economics. Greenspan noted that Rand taught him about "people, their values, how they work, what they do and why they do it." This is an interesting perspective in light of Roar's defense speech. If nothing else, then establish The source of the source the staging of US monetary policy after the war.

Sexual energy. The violent sexual energy that controls Cooper and Neal's relationship is also evident in the film. It culminates one evening Roark enters her room, throws her to the floor, and commits what Rand himself called "rape after engraved invitation".

Rand's portrayal of sexual relations is underlined by authenticity in Cooper's and Neal's affair in real life. Cooper was 47 years old, Neal 22, and a real attraction is manifested in this scene. Otherwise, the Randian image of sex is based solely on submission – a self-degrading but necessary action, a self-capitulation. Later in the film, Francon and Roark meet again in a company, where they tacitly return to what happened. Francon declares: “I wish I had never seen your building. It is the things we admire or desire that enslave us, and I do not find it easy to submit. " To which Roark replies: "It depends on the strength of your opponent, Miss Francon."

False images continue throughout The source of the source. The film's final scene shows Roark, now acquitted for his act of terror, building the tallest skyscraper in Manhattan – his own Trump Tower. Francon, who has become Mrs. Roark, comes up with the construction elevator and sees Roark standing proudly at the top of her creation. A Randian world is a world that serves men, and in this world Roark is a strident erection.

Failure. The critics' reception of the film was worse than the studio had expected; it received mixed but largely negative reviews. Cue Magazine stated that The source of the source was "a hysterical mixture of madness and deception – of convulsive seriousness and insidious cynicism […] Some of the scenes are memorable, many are ridiculous". Bosley Crowther of The New York Times described the film as "wordy, intricate and pretentious […] a strange amount of costly nonsense we have not seen in a long time".

The source of the source disappointed in the ticket booths too, and the party after the first show was like a grave beer. The creative imbalance in film production made no one happy when it was released. Rand believed that art director Edward Carrere's buildings and designs were "terribly wrong" and that the aesthetics were "disgracefully bad." Her portrayal of architecture – which she regarded as a holistic union between art and social design – failed because the film's buildings were immediately heavily criticized. Designer George Nelson called them "the dumbest parody of modern architecture that has so far found its way to the film" and pointed out that several of the film's buildings were engineering engineering impossibilities. A more serious objection was the image of the architect as a socially irresponsible individual, willing to destroy planned projects after a creative whim.

Basic questions arise when watching the film: Why should a collectivist society have Manhattan's capitalist skyscraper skyline as its backdrop? Why should it house Gail Wynand, the profit-hungry demagogue who runs a tabloid newspaper? These are characteristics of Rand's own philosophy, not of a society governed by group decisions. Why is the brilliant architecture of objectivism so similar to that of Communist Le Corbusier?

The source of the source is no warning of a possible political reality based on ultra-individualism but on nostalgia.   

Underdog-narrative. According to the Internet Movie Database, the current US president has appeared in twelve films, ten television series and three Playboy videos. In eleven of these, Donald Trump has emerged as himself: the charismatic, self-proclaimed billionaire. This is a strikingly different role in the public sphere than actor politicians such as Ronald Reagan and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Trump's personality has no distinction between reality, fiction and pornography. Trump thrives on his ambiguity, as it causes every single statement on his part to be cited.

But is Trump a supporter of Ayn Rand? No. Jennifer Burns, Rand's newest cinema, refuses it. Trump is a hybrid, unstable and fundamentally vague libertarian. as today he rides on an extremely right-wing wave. But is The source of the source trumpistisk? Like most things Trump turns his brief attention to, exists The source of the source somewhere in between camp and tyranny, both unintentionally funny and creepy. As self-absorbed world builders, both Roark and Trump flourish in the right-wing underdog narrative. "We made it! Thanks to all my great supporters, we just won the election officially (despite all the twisted and inaccurate media), ”Trump tweeted immediately after the election victory. This is the individualist's narrative: Victory is always a victory against all odds, and they never realize that in reality er The Establishment. (For more on this: The British documentaries You've been Trumped (2011) and A dangerous game (2014) shows the power of Trump's development team where Trump, in the spirit of the underdog, is trying to ravage villages in Scotland and Croatia to accommodate his more of his luxury hotels.)

Vision and reality. The source of the source gives us an unfiltered insight into the main political imagination of American conservatists. The film shows a vision it is important that we become familiar with, in order to confront a political language that uses fiction – especially on screen and canvas – more than ever before. Think about the words of the late Mark Fisher, as in Capitalist Realism. Is There No Alternative? (2009) warns its readers against the blindness we have to the present: «It is worth remembering that what is today called realistic, even once was 'impossible'… And conversely, what was once absolutely possible, becomes now condemned as unrealistic. " This is just such a logic that is at play in The source of the source.

Rand's world is not a dystopian vision of individualism that we are in danger of slipping into. The lasting impact of the film is far more daunting – the slow and cold realization that this universe has been acquired for a long time. The source of the sources ideals have taken their place in history, and Rand's script is a desperate desire for a world as it has become today. The film is not a warning of a possible political reality based on ultra-individualism, but on nostalgia, written and produced in a time when global ideologies were at war with each other. In our days is The source of the source Become an ideological commodity conservatives gently look at and give away as Christmas presents. Rand's story is set in a universe where there are political alternatives, and it should worry anyone who sees the film that Howard Roark's narrow world can quickly expand into a far more comprehensive political landscape than we currently live in.

The article was previously printed in English Cineaste.

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