And then the blurb:
“The Fountainhead is one of the greatest books of its time. In it you will meet, head-on, the brilliant young architect Howard Roark. You will witness the beauty, desirability and dangerous ambition of Dominique Francon. You will reel, stunned, like the millions of other readers who have assured this book a place in the century’s history, at the meeting and mating of these two most powerful creatures in modern America.”Wow. I found myself ‘reeling, stunned’ at the trashy hyperbole of our audacious blurb-writer.
But I enjoyed Rand’s novel, and King Vidor’s 1949 film adaptation too. And despite its heady theatricality – actually, probably because of it – the blurb had more to say than I’d thought. In promising a “head-on”, ‘stunning’ encounter, it ascribes to reading a heightened affective engagement that is the particular freight of Vidor’s bold, stylised film. Also, its declarative “you will witness” foregrounds the novel and the film’s common orientation towards ‘witnessing’, a kind of visceral preoccupation with surfaces.
Rand’s characters are painterly studies, their appearance and actions invested with an absurdly heightened profundity. They are nose-deep in meaning, vessels bubbling over with showy symbolism. But this isn’t to say that they’re particularly complicated. Instead, they’re emblems, stereotypes – but stereotypes filled out and up and over-the-top. This is especially true of Dominique Francon:
“A young woman stood before the railing…Her slender body seemed out of all scale in relation to a normal human body; its lines were so long, so fragile, so exaggerated that she looked like a stylized drawing of a woman and made the correct proportions of a normal being appear heavy and awkward beside her…She had grey eyes that were not ovals, but two long, rectangular cuts edged by parallel lines of lashes; she had an air of cold serenity and an exquisitely vicious mouth. Her face, her pale-gold hair, her suit seemed to have no colour, but only a hint, just on the verge of the reality of colour, making the full reality seem vulgar.”Dominique is ‘catalogued’ within a stubbornly visual, even pictorial frame. She is reduced to the surfaces, lines, shapes, colours of her body and face, her extra-ordinary beauty explicitly equated with a “stylized drawing”. She’s “out of scale” with humanity, more human than human: her aesthetic presence makes other figures “appear heavy and awkward” and full colours “seem vulgar”. Peter Keating perceives her as a vision, a spectacle, and inserts her into the tradition of (inanimate) paintings and sculptures. Frozen by a supposed ‘revelation’ of “what it was that artists spoke about when they spoke of beauty”, Keating’s unmoving body parodies his and the narrator’s open objectification of Dominique’s form – the observer mimicking the observed.
I don’t usually get any definite picture of a character in my head when I’m reading a novel. It’s more like a vague, unbridled ‘feeling’ or concept of a character, which tends to spiral out from textual descriptions of their appearance while also abstractly conflating aspects of their physicality and personality. The luxury of this nebulous ‘idea’ of character is denied in film, which contains characters in actors’ bodies, crystallising them into discrete physicalities. So for me, the Dominique of Vidor’s film isn’t ‘perfect’ enough (this isn't anything against Patricia Neal in particular - no actress would be, given the impossible beauty bequeathed Dominique by Rand), and I found the film’s Gail Wynand to be oddly sort of comical. These subjective judgements reveal the limits of film’s visual and aural surfaces when placed in tandem with the free-for-all of the imagination.
Yet Rand’s The Fountainhead is exceptionally suited to on-screen adaptation. Her description of Dominique’s ‘monumental’, scale-shifting womanhood is strikingly cinematic, and in Vidor’s film Dominique and Howard are twinned aesthetic objects, connected through the high glamour of the sustained close-ups of their faces at the quarry. This is the transition from novel to film: from sexual tension given form in words in orderly lines across Rand’s 650+ pages and housed in the head of the reader, to sexual tension shown in facial expressions, gestures, movements and observed by the viewer. Rand’s privileging of philosophical positioning over psychological phenomena, through her representative characters, reflects her preoccupation with surface over depth. This fits with cinema: since the camera eye can’t invade the heads of characters, feelings and thoughts must be articulated visually or aurally; the internal must be externalised and brought to light, or more literally, brought under the lights of the movie set. Such is Vidor’s task. So, to display Howard Roark’s ‘haunting’ of Dominique, Vidor superimposes Roark’s face – ghostly, disembodied – onto the right side of the mirror into which Dominique gazes, isolating the area as psychic space.
Of course, the novel’s very subject matter is intensely visual. Film is able to ‘picture’ Roark’s architectural career, giving visual shape to both the (paper) designs and (physical) structures of his gas station, his residential homes, the Enright Building – and to the disfigurement of Cortland Homes. The buildings rise on screen; they are shown, not told.
The Fountainhead is a cinematic novel, then. I thinkthis is most obvious in Rand’s ending, a soaring depiction of Roark as the conquering modern hero – the impudent achievement of a Tower of Babel-esque fantasy. It’s such a cinematic moment. As follows, I found it to be the most affecting scene of Vidor’s film – the exhilarated dizziness it elicited reminded me of what the viewers of the first actuality films must have felt (for example James White's 1900 depiction of the Eiffel Tower). But the relation isn't one way, because Vidor's The Fountainhead is a decidedly novelistic film. Performed within a stilted, non-naturalistic, sometimes ponderous dialectic mode, Vidor’s film is very much about words. It bears fidelity not only to Rand’s words but to the novelistic form itself, because characters seem to be there to speak – and to speak written words.
So there’s another way in which the blurb to my edition of The Fountainhead is surprisingly illuminating. What it terms the “meeting and mating” of Howard and Dominique sums up the remediative hybridity of Rand’s and Vidor’s The Fountainhead: the meeting and mating of the novelistic and filmic mediums.
