FOR THE EXACT REASONS The Fountainhead is pure dogshit to read—the crazy confidence; the characters who pass for human the way a plastic packet of ketchup passes for dinner; the schoolyard penchant for bigness and toughness; the insistence on triple-underlining every step of the case for selfishness; and, in spite of this, the failure to make that case coherently—the 1949 film adaptation is pure dopamine to watch.
Coherence, not to get all Jacques Derrida straight away, is overrated. Under the right circumstances, watching art knock against itself can be more fun than watching the pieces obligingly come together, and the Warner Bros. Fountainhead gets this as very few works of art ever do. It is a picture most acquainted with noisy, jagged action—in the first half hour alone glass shatters, marble cracks, somebody gets slapped hard enough to break the skin, and somebody else dies. In these moments of destruction, weirdly, the filmmakers are at their most creative and seem to intuit something about the ecstasy of creation: Real art needs stuff to lash out at, or it’s …
