Zack Snyder’s ‘The Fountainhead’ Has Been a Long Time Coming

The director’s career has been paved with Ayn Rand’s toxic ideology.

This week, firebrand director Zack Snyder announced his next project, an adaptation of Ayn Rand’s formidable objectivist tome “The Fountainhead.” The news was met with a chorus of bewildered moans from film twitter (as well as, somewhat confusingly, “The Force” author Don Winslow). For most, it was a baffling decision: A director coming off of a series of controversial financial bombs deciding to adapt the work of an equally controversial author, best known in Hollywood for a trilogy of increasingly poorly-received Atlas Shrugged movies that recast its leads after every entry.

But Snyder has long been hinting at the idea of a film based on Rand’s seminal work. Back in 2016, in the wake of disappointing box office returns for his Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, Snyder told The Hollywood Reporter that he was working on a new adaptation of the book, almost 70 years after King Vidor tried his hand at the notoriously unwieldy text. “I’ve always felt like ‘The Fountainhead’ was such a thesis on the creative process and what it is to create something,” Snyder said at the time.

He’s not entirely wrong: “The Fountainhead” is indeed a thesis on the creative process. It’s also one of the most toxic works of fiction of the 20th century and the exact wrong piece of art for this political moment. It’s a work of fiction that has its hero casually rape its female lead, a violent assault that causes her to develop a romantic fixation with him, ultimately leading to their marriage. It’s hard to explain “The Fountainhead” to someone who hasn’t read it. It’s even harder to explain why anyone finds it powerful or arresting in any way.

But all that aside, Objectivism has continued to play an increasingly large role in Snyder’s films over the course of his career. This isn’t a hit piece; I think Snyder is a genuinely interesting filmmaker, and I find a confusing mess like Man of Steel far more interesting than a paint-by-numbers home run like Avengers: Infinity War. But the announcement of Snyder’s Fountainhead throws a large portion of his work into sharp relief, totally re-contextualizing movies like Watchmen or Batman v Superman. 

Objectivism, for those who are unfamiliar with the term, is Ayn Rand’s philosophical system, conceived under the belief that the most powerful and moral purpose of human life is to pursue one’s own happiness above all else, with frequent disregard for the wants and needs of others. There is a reason it remains relatively obscure; most serious philosophical voices totally dismiss Objectivism as a system of thought. It is poorly thought out, openly selfish, and frequently toxic. Yet a certain sect of American political thinking (including our current Speaker of the House, Paul Ryan) worships at the feet of Ayn Rand, largely because her ideology gives them the perfect excuse to casually dismiss the concerns of the impoverished in favor of constantly enriching themselves and those like them.

This is the ideology that Snyder seems to subscribe to, and without making any moral judgments on the man himself, it is an ideology that has totally infected his filmmaking. Just look at a scene like this one in Man of Steel, in which Kevin Costner’s Pa Kent tells his adopted alien son Clark that his powers must be kept secret, even potentially at the cost of others’ lives.

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