Howard Roark, the protagonist of Rand’s book, is an idealistic young architect who chooses to struggle in obscurity rather than compromise his artistic and personal vision by conforming to the needs and demands of the community. In contrast, George Bailey, the hero of Capra’s film, is an idealistic young would-be architect who struggles in obscurity because he has chosen to conform to the needs and demands of the community rather than fulfill his artistic and personal vision. Howard Roark is essentially what George Bailey might have become had he left for college rather than stayed in his hometown of Bedford Falls.
***
It’s true that Roark “refuses to subordinate his self-centered ego to the demands of the community society [sic?]”
But that’s mostly because those demands are puerile and idiotic, such as sticking Roman columns on a modernist building.
Besides, in that instance, the demands aren’t coming from “the community society” but from individuals who claim to speak for it in matters of taste. I’m pretty sure the average person walking past the resulting monstrosity would’ve thought, “Wow, what idiot came up with that idea?”
So yeah: George should’ve told his family and his boring hometown to go to hell. (PS: why don’t you just fix the stupid knob on the stupid staircase, Mr. Fancy Architect?)
Also? I liked Scrooge better before.
And when I remake the highly overrated and frankly unwatchable A Christmas Story, Ralphie gets a real gun…
UPDATE: bwa ha…
I hope that Objectivists and large-L libertarians won’t mind if I laugh at this story, discovered courtesy of Alex Knapp of Outside the Beltway, about Founders College: an institution of higher learning designed for followers of Ayn Rand that went out of business because, in part, it could not pay its bills, could not attract enough students, and couldn’t get federal funding in the form of taxpayer-backed student loans:
