Howard Roark & Sully Sullenberger: The Individual over the Collective

Just watched The Fountainhead, and although the filmed meeting scene between Dominique and Howard posted about earlier has as much power, it can never say the same specific words as the book.

We’d quote the big Gary Cooper courtroom speech, transferred form the book verbatim,  as a Money Quote but someone else has already posted it here, as a life lesson, with which we would heartily agree. I’ll just pluck out some good parts :

  “The ‘common good’ of a collective—a race, a class, a state—was the claim and justification of every tyranny ever established over men. Every major horror of history was committed in the name of an altruistic motive. Has any act of selfishness ever equaled the carnage perpetrated by disciples of altruism?

***

 “The only good which men can do to one another and the only statement of their proper relationship is—Hands off!
     “Now observe the results of a society built on the principle of individualism. This, our country. The noblest country in the history of men. The country of greatest achievement, greatest prosperity, greatest freedom. This country was not based on selfless service, sacrifice, renunciation or any precept of altruism. It was based on a man’s right to the pursuit of happiness. His own happiness. Not anyone else’s. A private, personal, selfish motive. Look at he results. Look into your own conscience.”

***

     ”I came here to say that I do not recognize anyone’s right to one minute of my life. Nor to any part of my energy. Nor to any achievement of mine. No matter who makes the claim, how large their number or how great their need.
     “I wished to come here and say that I am a man who does not exist for others.
     “It had to be said. The world is perishing from an orgy of self-sacrificing.”

The pilot of this plane was the indiividual with his hand on the controls and the throttle. He decided the pitch of the nose and where in the river to steer to. There was nothing collective about the saving of these lives. And yet they were saved. Would they have been of the choices he made were made buy a committee?

It is people like thi spilot to whom the writer referred with the speech spoken by Gary Cooper’s Howard Roark. And he has a name right out of one of Rand’s books, Captain Chesley B. Sullenberger.

The Fountainhead: The Money Quote – Dominique lays eyes on Howard

I’ll get back to reading Ayn Rand’s The Fountainheadand had to put it down a while back. It flattens out some and gets a bit anti-climactic after Howard meets Dominique. This just happens also to be the most memorable scene in the film as well. But while Gary Cooper is better than good as Howard (he’s still Gary Cooper) Patricia Neal isDominique Francon. 

The episode is also one of the most intense and exquisitely written passages in the book. The liquid cool sado-masochist Dominique gets a brief glimpse of hell, and looking up at her is an unyielding man like none she has ever met:

Because the sun was too hot, that morning, and she knew it would be hotter at the granite quarry, because she wanted to see no one and knew she would face a gang of workers, Dominique walked to the quarry. The thought of seeing it on that blazing day was revolting; she enjoyed the prospect.

 

When she came out of the woods to the edge of the great stone bowl, she felt as if she were thrust into an execution chamber filled with scalding steam. The heat did not come. from the sun, but from that broken cut in the earth, from the reflectors of flat ridges. Her shoulders, her head, her back, exposed to the sky, seemed cool while she felt the hot breath of the stone rising up her legs to her chin, to her nostrils. The air shimmered below, sparks of fire shot through the granite; she thought the stone was stirring, melting, running in white trickles of lava. Drills and hammers cracked the still weight of the air. It was obscene to see men on the shelves of the furnace. They did not look like workers, they looked like a chain gang serving an unspeakable sentence for some unspeakable crime. She could not turn away.

 

She stood, as an insult to the place below. Her dress—the color of water, a pale green-blue, too simple and expensive., its pleats exact like edges of glass—her thin heels planted wide apart on the boulders, the smooth helmet of her hair, the exaggerated fragility of her body against the sky—flaunted the fastidious coolness of the gardens and drawing rooms from which she came.

 

She looked down. Her eyes stopped on the orange hair of man who raised his head and looked at her.

 

She stood very still, because her first perception was not of sight, but of touch: the consciousness, not of a visual presence, but of a slap in the face. She held one hand awkwardly away from her body, the fingers spread wide in the air, as against a wall. She knew that she could not move until he permitted her to.

 

She saw his mouth and the silent contempt in the shape of his mouth; the planes of his gaunt hollow cheeks; the cold, pure brilliance of the eyes that had no trace of pity. She knew it was the most beautiful face she would ever see, because it was the abstraction of strength made visible. She felt a convulsion of an­ger, of protest, of resistance—and of pleasure. He stood looking up at her; it was not a glance, but an act of ownership. She thought she must let her face give him the answer he deserved. But she was looking instead, at the stone dust on his burned arms, the wet shirt clinging to his ribs, the lines of his long legs. She was thinking of those statues of men she had always sought; she was wondering what he would look like naked. She saw him looking at her as if he knew that. She thought she had found an aim in life—a sudden, sweeping hatred for that man.

 

So if we ever find ourselves in consultation with a cosmetic surgeon and they ask what kind of face we want, we’ll ask for that “abstraction of strength made visible” one. Yah.