Fountainhead Cameo

Scott Hughes — Wed, 07 Jun 2006 12:35:00 -0700

I watched the trailer for the upcoming film A Scanner Darkly and a brief cameo of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead caught my eye. It looks like an interesting movie. I kind of like the art style, where real actors are colored over. I’m not sure if it’ll get old after a few minutes, but I’m willing to give it a shot.

The character shown holding the book is not the best advocate for Ayn Rand’s novels. The scene leading up to this one showed him screaming about something in his hair (the government?), then he’s staring down the barrel of a weapon held by a guy in a suit who has a head with a hundred eyes. There are obvious dystopian overtones here, which makes me wonder why he wasn’t reading Atlas Shrugged.

Update: Figured out why he’s holding a copy of The Fountainhead… From the pages of A Scanner Darkly:

He spent several days deciding on the artifacts. Much longer than he had spent deciding to kill himself, and approximately the same time required to get that many reds. He would be found lying on his back, on his bed, with a copy of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead (which would prove he had been a misunderstood superman rejected by the masses and so, in a sense, murdered by their scorn) and an unfinished letter to Exxon protesting the cancellation of his gas credit card. That way he would indict the system and achieve something by his death, over and above what the death itself achieved.

Ugh… What an awful interpretation of the book. Roark rejected the “masses” (or rather the idea that society was more important than the individual); he didn’t give a damn if society at large did likewise to him.

Global Reset: Fountainhead Cameo

Fountainhead Cameo