The Fountainhead of Words and Images

I drew some of the more interesting implied questions from my presentation, and realized that in succession they read like headlines from Wynand’s The Banner:

Is Howard Roark a hero, a rapist, or both? Are uncompromising egoists really sociopaths? Does Roark have a secret male lover?

These questions inevitably crop up because The Fountainhead is an imagined battleground upon which Rand (and arguably King Vidor) tries to redefine many literary and cinematic symbols. The most obvious is the skyscraper. To Rand, the skyscraper is the big, in-your-face capital “I” (Schleier, 2002) inherent in Rand’s various “isms”. It reaches beyond the depraved “us” of the Cortlandt Homes, which Roark destroys in a decided act of ego-terrorism.

The skyscraper’s phallic symbolism is also worth mentioning, with its connotations of virility, dominance, masculinity, passion, romance, life, ego, etc. Rand is being self-referential when she has Wynand tell Roark that he uses “words in such strange ways”. By using the skyscraper as a symbol for all of these things and more, she counters what she sees as a hegemonic, socialist discourse that employ it as a metaphor for corruption, superfluity and sterility. In the same way, the irony of Roark’s nickname – “red” – is diminished as Rand equates it with passion, strength and vitality rather than communism.

But the ideological warfare underpinning Western discourse penetrates deeper than the capitalist/communist dichotomy. For instance, Rand uses contrasting structural symbols and characterizations often associated with taxonomies of queer discourse (Sedgwick, 1990). Keating’s buildings, for instance, reflect stereotypes often associated (then) with homosexuality. They are ornamental, superficial, artificial, lacking in integrity. Likewise, Keating is hysterical and impotent, while in the novel, Toohey is feminine, sickly, unnatural and somewhat camp.

Sedgwick’s analysis holds that “many of the major nodes of thought and knowledge in twentieth-century Western culture as a whole are structured – indeed, fractured – by a chronic, not endemic crisis of homo/heterosexual definition.”  In my presentation I also alluded to Eve Sedgwick’s “Axiomatic” in reference to the plutonic yet somehow also homoerotic tension between Roark and Wynand, and Melissa touched on the concept of homosociality.

Gladstein and Sciabarra (1999) write that “to maintain the value of the homosocial, she [Rand] finds it necessary to exclude homosexuality, while at the same time the similarity between the relation and an erotic relation is unmistakable.” Thus, we have the “triangulation of desire”, whereby Roark and Wynand desire each other in every respect except sexually, in which case their urges are displaced onto Dominique, who can barely contain her jealousy. It makes further sense that sexual desire would be displaced like this in a world where love is treated like capital. Howard Roark, like Hank Rearden in Atlas Shrugged, is “a trader” in all aspects of life, including love.

These elements are toned down in Vidor’s film, but Rand’s cinematic writing links the image and the word in a way partly envisaged by Astruc’s camera stylo concept. However, it’s ironic that such a visual writer could ignore the particularities of the film medium by producing such a flat screenplay, saved only by Vidor’s impressive and expressive images. I’ll leave it at that.