The Safety of Objectivism: Corbet Unleashes the Survival Instinct of Rational Egoism
“The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident which everybody has decided not to see,” so says the heroic protagonist of Ayn Rand’s sensational 1943 novel The Fountainhead, an individualist archetype she intended as “the man that man should be…above all—the man who lives for himself.” It was a tome in which Rand began to craft her controversial theory of Objectivism, which, among its tenets, suggests morality is wholly independent of human knowledge. Filmmaker Brady Corbet, with his third feature, the masterful saga The Brutalist, finds himself, along with co-writer and partner Mona Fastvold, freely inspired by Rand’s iconic novel (and no, their achievement is certainly not akin to the output of ‘second-rater’ mentality skewered by Rand, those collective gatekeepers who squash genius in their contradictory crusade to uphold the greater good).… Read the rest
