The Modernism Post

I submit that one of the ways that postmodernity can be distinguished from modernity is by recognising a shift in the attitude towards materialism. The modern world, enamoured of its own grandeur and ingenuity after achieving industrialisation and then mass production, adopted consumerism as a guiding principle for socio-economic organisation and personal fulfilment. But after witnessing the environmental and spiritual damage that it leads to, many postmodernists came to eschew excessive consumption. Certainly there is an existential cost in defining our lives around the imperative of "keeping up with the Joneses", and more recently we have been reminded of the economic cost of living beyond one's means in order to fulfil this. But we may, in our hesitant embrace of post-materialism (and the latest rage, "enoughism"), be neglecting any potential for appreciating beauty in material possession.

Angst-ridden teens and angry arts students alike often enjoy criticising the establishment via reference to nicely packaged Chuck Palahniuk quotes like "the things you own end up owning you." This always reminds me of Tom Robbins' novel Still Life With Woodpecker, which says almost exactly the same thing but with a far more romantic flavour: "As any half-awake materialist well knows, that which you hold also holds you" (p169).


I was originally going to write a blog comparing the latter novel to The Fountainhead, since both are about rebellious, red-headed dynamiters who recognise vitality and integrity in the inanimate (anyone who's read Still Life will know that the red hair connection is not a trivial one). But this same attitude is more directly realised by Charles and Ray Eames’ films, which venerate private, domestic objects rather than public, monumental ones, since these are more conducive to the sort of object-person intimacy that Robbins talks about (not to be confused with objectophilia).

The title House: After Five Years of Living seems ambiguous. Although its occupants had been living in the Eames House for five years, we might say that the house itself had been 'living' for as long. As such, this cinematic celebration of a couple's creation reminds me of a home movie (the term carried to its logical conclusion) about a child before its first day of school or something. It starts out by showing us an animation of the house's prenatal development - more the process of conceptualisation than the physical construction - and after the skeleton is established we are treated to a collage of its various organs. Rather than depicting the house as an indivisible whole through mid or long shots, each minute ornament is displayed individually in series, every actor getting its close up. The 'still life' of the house is therefore revealed atomically, this sublime singularity organically manifesting the house's sublime collectivity.

Kaleidoscope Jazz Chair aims for a similar sense of material sublimity by portraying a single object multiplied across a range of colours and formations. Assaulting us with this catalogue of chairs, the film's advertisement-y feel first struck me as a tasteless romanticisation of the mindless uniformity and reiteration of mass consumption; but I eventually came to see it as a sort of Cubist attempt to heighten our appreciation of the chair by observing it in cross-dimensional simultaneity. Even indulging the chance that Charles and Ray Eames are celebrating the consumerist monotony that we seem to both embrace and revile increasingly, I suppose that I can applaud their efforts to infuse a bit of soul into something often seen as soul-crushing.

I admired the book most for its structural ingenuity – each character and action being crafted in a way that best articulates the story’s philosophy – but a film calls for a different structure that Vidor does not deliver. This unwillingness to fit content to form runs contrary to Howard Roark’s many spiels about the importance of artistic integrity and that “what can be done with one substance must never be done with another”. However, some of you essayists looking at “cinematic writing” may justifiably disagree, and say that the film completes what the novel compromises.

Certainly, many of the cinematic cues in the novel were transferred beautifully to the film through lighting, costume, and other mise en scènery; but it was The Fountainhead’s characters that posed an interesting challenge. The novel had this interesting (at first, then annoying) habit of describing the volumes of information communicated by facial expressions and stances. The film version puts these countless Romantic elevations of what can be perceived in seemingly banal gestures to the test, and as it turns out, Roark’s gaze does not “ma[k]e people feel as if they did not exist” (p9); nor does Toohey's smile “[mock] himself and his boss, but with a delicate sense of balance, sixty percent of the mockery directed at himself” (p344).

Gary Cooper, not quite convincing me that I don't exist.

I do not mean to deride the cast’s talent (since gestures of existential impugnment or just-asymmetrical mockery are pretty demanding directions for any actor), but the notion that the body is transparent of the ego. Of “the style of the soul”, Rand tells us that “years of studying a man won’t show it to you. His face will. You’d have to write volumes to describe a person. Think of his face. You need nothing else” (p229). And yet Vidor et al fail to uphold this when verbal descriptions of faces are substituted by the faces themselves. Hence, if I were to judge the medium by this film alone, I’d say that cinema is better suited to Realism than Romanticism.

This is what I meant when I initially said that much of The Fountainhead’s potential for sublimity lies in its extremities: the written word, which obeys no laws of temporality, is permitted all the elaboration of detail and spitshine of the doors of perception that it wants. Tedious but transcendent guys like Melville and Milton were expert in amplifying banality into sublimity in this way. Achieving the same effect cinematically requires patience in storytelling, allowing the details time to breathe and develop – usually at the expense of their number. To wit: a Romantic film must have more zoom and less pan.

Oh well, let’s just see how the adaptation of Rand’s 'titanic' magnum opus turns out.