When Paul Krugman won the Nobel Prize for Economics a couple of months ago, I said it’s time to leave Milton Friedman behind. Now somebody at Newsweek is wondering the same thing I am about Ayn Rand. Can her ideas survive the economic crisis?
Ayn Rand, full of her fetishes and obsessions, sure wrote some strained and stilted dialogue in her screenplay for The Fountainhead, which was expertly directed and photographed, yet is anything but a typical 40’s Hollywood movie.
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Here is an excerpt from the novel, taken from the scene where Dominque follows Howard to his room:
He asked: “What do you want?”
She answered: “You know what I want,” her voice heavy and flat.
“Yes, but I want to hear you say it. All of it.”
“If you wish.” Her voice had the sound of efficiency, obeying an order with metallic precision. “I want to sleep with you. Now, tonight, and at any time you may care to call me. I want your naked body, your skin, your mouth, your hands. I want you — like this — not hysterical with desire — but coldly and consciously — without dignity and without regrets — I want you — I have no self-respect to bargain with me and divide me — I want you — I want you like an animal, or a cat on a fence, or a whore.”
Hey, that’s quite an offer. The free market at work! Ayn Rand wrote a couple of great trashy novels, with literary and political pretensions. College boys ate it up, and somehow her aspirations were legitimized beyond Hollywood. I say embrace Rand as the romance novelist she was, who obsessively painted portraits of her idealized leading man, and stop giving credit for her work being anything more than that.
