I’m happy Michael Piantini was willing to brave charges of pedantry to express his good-faith gripes with my work. But I wish he’d expressed them more clearly. Someone has meandered, and it’s not poor Monsieur Moullet.
If I’m reading my critic right, he thinks that I’ve overpraised The Fountainhead, but also that I’ve failed to celebrate The Fountainhead “on its own merits” sufficiently, but also that I’ve wasted too many words examining the role of architecture in this quintessential architecture film. I’m not sure how the same essay could be guilty of all three offenses.
One of my goals in writing “At Last, No Shrugs,” in any case, was to defend Vidor’s picture from the libertarians who see it as cut-and-dry propaganda as well as the cinephiles who see it as lovably nutty and nothing more. The Fountainhead may be incoherent, but this doesn’t mean it lacks ideas, or at least impassioned positions. For one, I argued, the film ends up taking more of an interest in the figure of the raw, rude, destructive, asshole-ish artist than in finished works of art.
Is it possibl…
