Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life
Primary Colors
By Jonathan Rosenbaum
But such criticism is secondary. Part of my reflexive scoffing at Rand is intellectual and part is political; but a third part is emotional. I suspect that this part is closely allied with the reasons that many Americans scoff at Jerry Lewis: like Rand, he’s come to stand for a stage in our adolescence that we’d rather forget. Rand’s vibrant appeal to adolescents, including me when I was in high school, is profoundly sexual: she provokes a sense of exalted fantasy tied up with raging hormones and resolves the vexing need to reconcile self-interest with social and ethical duties. Rand’s message that selfishness is empowering and self-sacrifice is destructive can cut through teenage confusion like a piercing yet comforting ray of light, as penetrating as Rand’s own gaze, and make one’s blood race in the bargain.
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Indeed, the sexiness of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged is an integral part of their utopianism, making them blood sisters of Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will and Olympia in their kitschy splendor and sexual lift (if not in their political programs). “It seems that erotic verve is indissociable from contempt for all community, from frantic exaltation of individuality in the furtherance of traditional social and moral principles,” Luc Moullet wrote in Cahiers du Cinema in 1958, citing Jet Pilot and The Fountainhead as the two summits of right-wing eroticism.
Given Rand’s monstrous behavior when she unleashed the fury of a woman scorned, it’s understandable that Paxton leapfrogs over this pivotal episode and omits the painful story of Leo. But the crushing irony of Paxton’s massive act of repression–made in deference to Rand and her own self-representations after her bitter break with the Brandens–is how close it comes to the historical elisions of Stalinism. This is a paradox to reckon with, because it’s difficult to think of a 20th-century writer who hated communism in general and Stalinism in particular more than Rand did. But even if this movie dutifully, eloquently articulates that hatred while it simultaneously (and probably unconsciously) enacts a Freudian return of the repressed, the history of the cold war was full of such unnerving mirror effects–like the ideological boomerang that turned this country and the Soviet Union into grotesque twins at the height of their mutual opposition.
The testing of idealism is the key subject of Primary Colors as well, played out in various convergences of politics and sex. But the most important idealism being tested isn’t that of Bill Clinton–called Governor Jack Stanton in the movie, and very amiably played by John Travolta. It’s that of Henry Burton (Adrian Lester), a young black political strategist who decides to go to work for Stanton in the opening sequence. Henry’s less compromising black-activist girlfriend–played by real-life activist Rebecca Walker–dumps him in disgust early on because of this decision, which is the signal to hard-core radicals in the audience to take their leave as well. Whatever else it may or may not be, Primary Colors is first and last a mainstream Hollywood entertainment, a Mike Nichols movie–not an Elaine May movie, even though she’s credited with the script. And that means that viewers looking for engagement with political issues are bound to be disappointed.
