‘Mean Girl’ Says to Thank Ayn Rand

Think We Live in Cruel and Ruthless Times? ‘Mean Girl’ Says to Thank Ayn Rand

By Jennifer Szalai NY Times

Ayn Rand liked to see herself as an ardent custodian of truth, but in her own life she had a hard time abiding too much reality. The critical recognition she craved mostly eluded her — her best-selling novels “The Fountainhead” (1943) and “Atlas Shrugged” (1957) were lurid, melodramatic, full of implausible characters and turgid harangues — and as her fame and notoriety grew, she retreated to the safe harbor of her acolytes.

Or presumably safe. As Lisa Duggan explains in “Mean Girl: Ayn Rand and the Culture of Greed,” when Rand’s affair with a much younger disciple soured in the late 1960s, her Objectivist movement — which venerated a single, knowable reality, rationally apprehended by gloriously self-interested individuals — seemed on the brink of collapse. “Emotion,” Duggan writes, “had brought down the house of reason.”

It’s the kind of strange, glaring paradox that makes Rand a useful emblem for our topsy-turvy moment, Duggan says. Rand’s simplistic reversals — selfishness is a virtue, altruism is a sin, capitalism is a deeply moral system that allows human freedom to flourish — have given her work a patina of transgression, making her beloved by those who consider themselves bold, anti-establishment truth tellers even while they cling to the prevailing hierarchical order. Not for nothing does her enormous fan base include Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, Tea Partiers, President Trump and innumerable adolescents.

But then her ideas are too rigid to be neatly amenable to any real-world programs. Duggan’s short book includes a long section on neoliberalism that seems, for a while, to lose sight of Rand. Despite her mentorship of Alan Greenspan, who would eventually become the chairman of the Federal Reserve, Rand was “not exactly a neoliberal herself,” Duggan writes. She also refused to support the election of Ronald Reagan, deriding him for succumbing to “the God, family, tradition swamp.” She was an atheist and a fierce advocate for abortion rights.

Now, almost four decades after Rand’s death in 1982, right-wing nationalism and evangelical Christianity are ascendant at the same time as economic globalization and the erosion of the welfare state. Is there anything that ties this turbulence together? Yes, Duggan says, but it isn’t the vaunted rationality that Rand fetishized as much as it is the feelings she validated. “The unifying threads are meanness and greed,” Duggan writes of the current moment, “and the spirit of the whole hodgepodge is Ayn Rand.”

Rand wasn’t an especially sophisticated thinker who delved into primary texts to elaborate her philosophical system; she did, however, have a flair for the dramatic. One of her first jobs after emigrating from the Soviet Union to the United States in 1926 was as a scriptwriter for Cecil B. DeMille. She brought that theatrical sensibility to novels like “The Fountainhead,” which, in Duggan’s astute appraisal, offers “numerous plot twists but no real surprises.” In both “The Fountainhead” and “Atlas Shrugged,” Rand strenuously played to the aspirations and desires of her readers. “Ayn Rand made acquisitive capitalists sexy,” Duggan writes. The novels “are conversion machines that run on lust.”

As befitting machines, the novels seem less literary than en

gineered. The Randian heroine is a Mean Girl — tall, svelte, severe. The Randian hero is a Mean Boy — tall, muscular, severe. Her villains are short and doughy, cursed with receding chins and dandruff. The undeserving weak exploit the worthy and the strong. The United States she depicts is ahistoric and sanitized for her readers’ consumption — “a clean slate for pure capitalist freedom, with no indigenous people, no slaves, no exploited immigrants or workers in sight,” Duggan writes. In “The Fountainhead” and “Atlas Shrugged” there’s certainly sex but no pregnancies; nothing that might interfere with all the creative destruction her characters have to do.

Duggan, a professor of social and cultural analysis at New York University and the author of previous books about gender, sexuality and cultural politics, says that her “weird obsession with Ayn Rand began many years ago.” She calls “Atlas Shrugged” “heavy-handed, hectoring, relentless,” but allows that it is “also iconoclastic, sometimes surprising and even occasionally funny.”

What seems to fascinate Duggan most is how Rand — with her unyielding worldview, her extreme, sweeping statements and her intolerance of dissent — has somehow managed to be reclaimed by those she so cruelly deplored. Rand described homosexuality as “immoral” and “disgusting,” yet her “rages against the strictures of family, church and state appeal to many L.G.B.T.Q. readers.” The younger generation of libertarians who approvingly cite Rand today might be surprised to learn that she derided their forebears as “hippies” and, with typical hyperbole, “a monstrous, disgusting bunch of people.

But this is what happens when you devise a philosophical system in which every human relationship is transactional: Before you know it, you’ll get co-opted and commodified too.

Duggan paints Rand as cynical and shrewd in some ways, and hapless and naïve in others. In 1947, Rand volunteered to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee as a friendly witness, delivering histrionic testimony that managed to alienate everyone, suggesting that she “never fully grasped” how Hollywood worked, or how government worked, or how the balance of power worked between the two. She liked to affect a steely, imperious persona, but she was deeply insecure and easily wounded. She developed a debilitating amphetamine habit. Her fictional heroes marched forth and conquered life, but real life kept throwing her for a loop.

Rand was most successful as a fantasist and “propagandist,” Duggan writes, who provided “templates, plot lines and characters” that gave selfishness an alluring sheen. In Rand’s universe, capitalism was glamorous and liberating, with none of the mundane concerns — haggling over health insurance, paying off student loans, scrambling for child care, managing precarious employment — that consume so much of everyday American experience.

Reading Duggan on Rand’s current fans made me think of the 1946 preface to Rand’s early novel “Anthem,” in which she railed against “the people who support plans specifically designed to achieve serfdom, but hide behind the empty assertion that they are lovers of freedom.” Surveying the wreckage, such people expect “to escape moral responsibility by wailing: ‘But I didn’t mean this!’”

A Hip Sex Goddess

Doris Day: A Hip Sex Goddess Disguised as the Girl Next Door

By A.O. Scott The New York Times

The Hollywood Reporter obituary for Doris Day describes her in the headline as “Hollywood’s Favorite Girl Next Door,” which is reasonable enough, if not terribly imaginative. Day, who was 97 when she died on Monday, broke through as a singer in the mid-1940s and crossed over into movie stardom in the next decade. She’s still often remembered as an avatar of the postwar, pre-counterculture pop culture mainstream: wholesome, friendly, sexless. Accordingly, the first adjective applied to her in that article’s summary is “virginal.”

That word evokes a leering one-liner attributed to the musician and wit Oscar Levant, who said he “knew Doris Day before she was a virgin.” Levant’s joke depends on a category mistake, confusing the persona of a star with her person (Day was married three times), even as it misses the joke tucked into the persona itself. The v-word applied to Day signals the acceptance of an alibi that was never meant to be believed in the first place, the literal-minded gloss on a text that was only there to beckon us toward the subtext.

The truth, hidden in plain sight in so many of her movies and musical performances, is that Doris Day was a sex goddess. That’s not a term we use much anymore (for good reason), and in its heyday it was generally applied to actresses who wielded their erotic energies more nakedly, so to speak.

Day wasn’t a glamorous blond enigma like Grace Kelly or Kim Novak — though she did, like both of them, work with Alfred Hitchcock. She was not a Hollywood bombshell in the manner of Marilyn Monroe (or Mamie Van Doren, with whom she competed for Clark Gable’s attention in the 1958 comedy “Teacher’s Pet”). And she certainly didn’t work in the same erogenous zone as European actresses like Brigitte Bardot and Sophia Loren, who promised sophisticated American moviegoers a glimpse of freedom from Puritanical inhibition, and sometimes also from clothes.

But it’s too easy to say that Day was simply the opposite — the prim, prudish, all-American avatar of Eisenhower-era repression, with her hair in a neat chignon and her figure sheathed in a soberly tailored suit. To see her that way is to take at face value an archetype that she did everything in her formidable power to subvert.

Really, though, the whole virgin thing doesn’t even rise to the level of archetype. It’s an artifact of a movie censorship system that was, in the years after the Kinsey Report, rapidly losing touch with the realities of American behavior, and with the rest of popular culture as well.

In the canonical romantic comedies she made with Rock Hudson — “Pillow Talk” and “Lover Come Back” two years later — Day, in her late 30s, played unmarried New York career women.

Jan Morrow in “Pillow Talk” is an interior designer with a thriving, if hectic, business. Her counterpart in “Lover Come Back,” Carol Templeton, is a high-ranking executive in a Manhattan advertising firm. They are (implicitly) virgins by fiat of the production code, but really it’s up to the audience to decide how credible it is that neither one has managed to sleep with anyone until Hudson shows up. (When Hudson and Day reunited for “Send Me No Flowers” in 1964, they were playing husband and wife, and it wasn’t as much fun.)

The simple, sexist premise of these movies — and also of“Teacher’s Pet,” in which Day’s uptight professor is seduced by Gable, her most unlikely student — is that Day needs a raffish he-man to come along and ruffle her feathers with his sheer masculine irresistibility, getting her into bed with the benefit of clergy. But that pursuit is played out by means of a plot that relishes its own ridiculousness. The color schemes and production designs in the Hudson-Day comedies pulsate with whimsy. The atmosphere is pure camp, of the zany rather than the melodramatic variety. Every line sounds like a double-entendre. Every encounter is full of implication and innuendo, every character a collection of mixed signals.

These movies are naughty beyond imagining, and as clean as a whistle. In “Pillow Talk” — in effect the first movie about the pleasures and consequences of phone sex — Hudson and Day take a bath together. It’s a split-screen shot, but still.

The plot of “Lover Come Back” turns on the mass marketing of a powerful, possibly hallucinogenic drug. Heterosexual courtship under the mandate of matrimony has rarely looked so kinky. We’re not even talking about what it means that Rock Hudson is the male lead. The ambiguity is ambient. The deniability is perfect, and perfectly preposterous.

Day is the key to it all, because her presence simultaneously upholds the pretense of virtuous normality and utterly transgresses it. She is a walking semiotic riot with a pert nose and a winning smile, keeper and scrambler of a whole book of social norms and cultural codes.

To see what I mean, consider a scene from “Pillow Talk” in which Jan takes Brad Allen (Hudson’s playboy classical-music composer) to a nightclub. It’s maybe daring for his square sensibilities, which is to say that the music is being performed by black people. (The clientele is all white.) It turns out that his date is familiar with the musicians, and the music. Midway through a song called “Roly Poly,” the pianist and singer (Perry Blackwell) invites Jan to take a verse — “come on Miss Morrow, you know this one” — and pretty soon Brad is clapping along. By the chorus, he and Jan are playing patty cake, and pretty soon the whole joint is singing about the satisfactions of a lover who is built for comfort rather than for speed.

It’s impossible not to interpret this number as a cringe-inducing spectacle of cultural appropriation, pushed to and past the point of parody. The sexual and racial undercurrents eddy and swirl under a surface of pure silliness. In old Hollywood movies, African-American music is a complicated signifier, not least for the white characters who appreciate it. In not-so-old movies, too. When, for example, Ryan Gosling takes Emma Stone to listen to jazz in “La La Land,” he is telling her, and us, something about the kind of guy he is. He’s claiming access to, and a share of, what the music represents. Passion. Authenticity. Sex, too, of course.

In 1959, one name for this transaction — which might look from one angle like a gesture of respect, from another like an act of brazen existential plunder — was “hip.” It was a noun as much as an adjective, and it was not a word that anyone would have thought to apply to Doris Day. Partly because she was too canny to take it seriously, notwithstanding her serious interest in African-American music.

In “Love Me or Leave Me,” a show-business biopic from 1955, she performs a version of Irving Berlin’s “Shaking the Blues Away,” wearing a low-cut bright-blue gown slit up to her thigh. The lyric’s absurd evocation of religious revivals “way down South” gives way to a stage full of male chorines in top hats and tails, as Day belts out a paean to dancing that is a rollicking celebration of … something else. She’s singing the language of rock ’n’ roll at the moment of rock ’n’ roll’s emergence, but what she’s doing is … something else. She’s messing with all our categories. Which was her great and underappreciated gift.