Tag: Ayn Rand

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Brutal Brutalist

Not overly impressed by “The Brutalist”.

One reason: it’s based on Ayn Rand’s “The Fountainhead”, which I thought was a really bad novel.   So “The Brutalist” starts in a cesspool.

Second reason: Brody’s acting seems showy and broad, and obviously pitched for awards. Emoting, emoting, and emoting.

Third: it’s written by the director (from the school of James Cameron of “who needs a writer? Can’t be that hard. I’ll do it myself.”)  Director Brady Corbet’s previous experience is almost solely as an actor.  His co-writer– sometimes, a director writing his own movie will smartly bring in a real writer to help– is his girl friend, Mona Fastvold.

Fourthly: it is permeated with pernicious method acting (I am SO intensely into this character that actual articulated sounds fail me).

Fifthly: overuse of jerky, hand-held camera.  I’ll concede that there are rare occasions in which jerky hand-held camera works (like in, “Dr. Strangelove”, during the attack on the base).  But today it is mostly used to substitute incoherence for trajectory, movement for action, and evasion for composition.   It has become universal, like autotune in music recording, for artists who have realized that the vast swath of audiences don’t care about real artistic quality any more.

It all reminds me another incoherent film, “Megalopolis”.   In fact, there are too many similarities to dismiss the idea that they are alluding to the same source material, “The Fountainhead” by Ayn Rand.

I’ll be rooting for Chalamet to win best actor over Brody, but Brody has two things working in his favor: “Brutalist” is a Holocaust film, and he plays a character with an accent. Bonus points for playing an architect (Hollywood loves films that evoke tastefulness).

Watch the scene where Laszlo is reunited with his wife.   The most obvious thing about it is that it’s a dud, it falls flat.  Why?  There’s nothing about the long time they have been apart that shows up here.  They act as if they had just seen each other minutes ago at rehearsal.

What Brody does looks like great acting the same way the Mormon Tabernacle Choir looks like good music.  It’s size and quantity, rather than quality.  Brody can be very good– he was great in “The Pianist”– and he’s not really terrible in “The Brutalist”; just too much, and untuned dramatically and tonally discordant.  He’s committed and passionate but he’s trapped in a narrative so obtuse and clumsy that it just feels self-indulgent.  He’s a catalogue of moments that do not add up to a character.

There’s a big difference between a great actor directed by a great director and a great actor directed badly.

 

 

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It was Always Really About the Oil

In a rather stunning disclosure, Alan Greenspan, former head of the federal reserve, admits that he urged Bush to depose Saddam Hussein for the simplest of all possible reasons: the oil.

Greenspan insists that nobody in the Bush administration agreed: they were only concerned about WMDs and democracy and human rights. But they also told him that nobody here talks about the oil. They knew that if there was the slightest suspicion of it, the other Arab countries, and the rest of the world, would go ballistic. It is quite possible that they never talked about the oil because they didn’t need to. Everyone understood it absolutely perfectly. Except George Bush who, to this day, seems to believe that it was about democracy and the safety of American citizens.

Keep in mind that America doesn’t have to actually hold deed to the oil to take possession of it. They merely have to ensure that whoever controls the oil is friendly to American dollars and technology, like Saudi Arabia.

In Greenspan’s eyes, it is right and good that the U.S. should take oil from where ever it can be found and use it to generate prosperity and a high standard of living for America and Americans. He is a former (?) disciple of Ayn Rand. America must be strong. It must do whatever serves its own interests. It can take the oil. If you’re too weak to take the oil away from America, then that’s just tough.

There is a pretty kind of logic to this spirit of individualism. It is very, very pretty. It is elegant and slim, because strategic decisions are unfettered by moral or ethical considerations, and should be guided strictly by questions of efficiency. How soon can we get rich? How many bodies do we step over to obtain our goals?

To believe in the myths of individualism and capitalism, you have to believe in “finders-keepers”, for there is no way to justify the possession of oil or air or water on any basis other than “might makes right”.

Or you can believe that we are all in this world together and nobody in particular has any kind of magical title to the world’s resources.

Or, like George Bush, you can believe your own spin: God commanded us to destroy Iraq because Saddam Hussein was a great sinner.

The disadvantage of Ayn Rand’s brand of individualism is that eventually someone stronger comes along and knocks you off the pony and takes it away. And you really have no moral grounds upon which to complain. You can only hope to make yourself strong enough so that you can take it back. And to make yourself strong is to make yourself cruel. The suicide bomber is Ayn Rand’s ultimate legacy: not strong enough to take the oil back, but fully comprehending that the world is really about raw power, individual fanatics are easily convinced that there is meaning in flailing against the machine. In George’s Bush’s gentle dreams– which are not Ayn Rand’s dreams– there can be no comprehension of individuals who give up the possibility of enjoying the fruits of raw power. The only explanation is the lamest one: they must be jealous of our affluence and prosperity and freedom.

Patriotism, in the case of Iraq, is an attempt to convince most people– who do believe we are in this together to a great extent– that the war on Iraq is a moral cause. It is a lie. It can’t be anything but a lie because the war on Iraq is about nothing more than “finder’s keepers”. We found your oil. Now it’s ours. Just try to take it from us.

Ayn Rand had nothing but contempt for religion.  Which is odd, because most of Evangelical America believes in Alan Greenspan.

 

The bizarre thing about Ayn Rand’s philosophy, and those backroom fascists who believe in it, is that even the most hard-core capitalist doesn’t practice it when it comes to neighborhoods and families and churches and schools. Everyone knows how long a family would last, or what a neighborhood would look like, or how children at school would behave, if we all actually practiced Ayn Rand’s version of enlightened self-interest. There would be no need to do chores, or clean up your garbage, or keep it quiet after 11:00 at night, or do your homework– if the world works better if I only do what is in my own self-interest.

She is consistent in one respect: there is no need of a god in her scheme of things either. We are quite enough.