Mountainhead

Not a review

I’ll start with an admission, my pledge to myself to drastically reduce the amount of American media I am exposed to has failed. I think I have reduced it a bit, I am reading non American books, anything that doesn’t refer to Amerrica in any way.

That’s quite easy, but movies, TV, the torrent of social media feeds.

American to the core.

Last night I watched an American movie made by an American streaming channel. Okay, the TV was made in China but you get my drift.

To explain my tiny connection to the topic of the film, I have to refer back to 2009. Los Angeles. USA.

Between 2008 to 2010, I made a YouTube series called Carpool. I did aboutn n90% of this show on my own, the booking, trhe shooting, the post production and the distribution.

It was that experience that led to The Fully Charged/Everything Electric show I still work on to this day.

I had spent a long time living and working in Los Angeles in the noughties, and one common feature is the carpool lane on the cities insane and massive highway network. You can use the carpool lane if there is more than one person in your 3 to 5 ton SUV.

This was one of the many, incredibly minor interventions into people’s ‘freedom’ that the Californian government introduced in the 1980’s and 90’s which of course, drove pre-trumpy republicans into incandescent rages.

Hence the name Carpool for my micro-TV experimental channel. Of course Carpool meant nothing in the UK other than drug crazed rock drummers driving their Rolls Royces into swimming pools. (Yes, they did that kind of thing in the 1970. Isn’t that lovely.)

We were later rewarded with a Carpool series with a much bigger budget, instead of a Toyota Prius, the car I used, this Carpool was recorded inside a Range Rover Sport. Carpool Karaoke had a massive audience, my little Carpool series was hyper micro niche, but then again I can’t sing to save my life.

There was also ‘Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee’ which came many years after my teeny tiny carpool micro YouTube series, but this update really isn’t about all that nonsense.

I was first, okay, that’s all I’m saying.

The idea behind Carpool the original YouTube series was simple. I would give someone a lift, to work, to the shops, to the hairdresser, to their agents office (I did all of those) and we would talk.

I would mount three fairly discreet cameras in the car and we’d just chat.

One of the people I gave a lift to in 2009 was a gentleman by the name of Jason Calacanis. Very few people outside the ultra nerdy world of serial entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley or Los Angeles would have heard of this man back in 2009. He was an early investor in Tesla, long time friend of Elon Musk, Calacanis owned one of the very first Tesla Roadster sports cars the company ever made.

Jason Calacanis and his driver, on the way to his office in Santa Monica, 2009

It was a fascinating conversation looking back from the present day. I’ll post a link to the episode should you wish to view it, as you can see from the screenshot above, it was all a bit low-res back in 2009.

More people have heard of Mr Calacanis now, he hosts a popular podcast called ‘All In’ where he and a small collection of billionaires josh and pontificate from, well, I’ll be generous, an ultra conservative ultra male position.

The podcast caught my eye, or maybe ear, because I’d met Mr Calacanis, and for sure, the four main contributors to the podcast are extremely intelligent, well connected and well informed. They are all very fierce defenders of the ability for a very select group of men to award themselves truly staggering amounts of money, and tease and compete about their eye watering wealth in a jocular and obstreperous manner.

I have no concrete evidence of this, but I cannot help thinking that a British screenwriter, Jesse Armstrong, who wrote the truly exquisite ‘Succession’ series has at least listened to one of two episode of the All In podcast.

The latest offering from his keyboard is a recently released HBO movie I watched on NOW TV in the UK. It’s called Mountainhead and sadly I can’t say it was very good. The premise however, is very interesting. Four stupidly wealthy men in their 40’s and 50’s meet at one of their unspeakably ugly, inconsiderate and vile ‘homes’ built on top of a mountain in Utah, USA.

One of them, portrayed as the richest, has recently upgraded his brain rotting social media outlet with the ability to generate 100% convincing computer generated video. I’m not going to use the current term ‘Artificial Intelligence’ because there is clearly zero intelligence involved.

The result of his amazing brave groundbreaking accelerationist software is horrific. As these 4 tragic tossers jostle and preen themselves in the vile house in the mountain, we see through their phones and massive TV screens the utter, devastating chaos their completely unfettered software has unleashed around the world.

The total breakdown of societies which, always, repeat always negatively affects the poorest people on the planet and always, again repeat always benefits the tiny 0.001% of these offensive, deluded little jerks.

Wait, am I talking about them men who pontificate on the All In podcast or the very talented actors portraying very similar types in this less that perfect Mountainhead movie.

I’m really not sure. It’s very hard to tell the difference.

I did manage to watch Mountainhead all the way through, although I think it lost its way a little in the last third of the movie. The title is a play on words from the 1943 novel ‘The Fountainhead’ by crypto fascist Russian author, Ayn Rand.

This vile book, so beloved of the disturbed freaks who created the popular ‘social media’ apps that dominate our lives, has rather a lot to answer for.

Yes, I have read it, back in the 1970’s. I thought it was reactionary tripe then and I haven’t changed my mind.

What Jesse Armstrong does capture and the actors portray so beautifully is the language, and the thought processes of a very small number of men, mostly but not exclusively white. Their rampant hatred of any form of government, their belief in so called ‘post human existence, their weird, grubby fantasies about what they can achieve if they can only get rid of things like laws, any for of tax and official oversite.

The brilliant cast of the less than brilliant Mountainhead

The only women in this film are abused servants of sycophantic personal assistants. The world Mountainhead portrays is truly ugly, their bullish misogyny just under the surface, their ridiculous fears slash desire to witness the end of human existence. These people need our maximum disdain and denial, they are currently in the ascendant and they are in control of more and more of our lives but I think it now incumbent on any remaining intelligent people to do everything we can to reduce that influence, to decry and belittle this tiny handful of tragic men.

I’m not going to name names, I don’t need tro. The true tragedy is, we all know who they all are, and we shouldn’t have heard of any of them.