Book: What Art Is: The Esthetic Theory of Ayn Rand by Louis Torres and Michelle Marder Kamh
Monumental undertaking brought down by inexcusable misunderstandings of its subject
The authors of "What Art Is: The Esthetic Theory of Ayn Rand" indicate early on that when confronting Ayn Rand's book "The Romantic Manifesto" — the primary subject of Torres and Kamhi's work here — "the reader is apt to be somewhat baffled." (pg. 25) That sometimes seems to describe the authors here, for although they've put together over 300 pages evaluating a book considerably shorter than that, they sometimes don't seem to understand how Ayn Rand is using words.
The authors quote Ayn Rand within a passage of their own argument that, "Rand's initial focus on the concept of value-orientation as a defining characteristic of Romanticism is particularly confusing in the context of her theory of art. As she argues elsewhere, all art (not just Romantic art), necessarily involves values: 'It is inconceivable to have an art divorced from values. ... Values cannot be separated from any human activity. ... It is impossible ... to write a book [for example] without some kind of selectivity. ... Every time a man has to exercise a choice, he is directed by some kind of values, conscious or not.'" (pg. 31)
Here, the authors don't seem to understand the difference between unadulturated values and diluted values, for they write, "As Rand herself argued in another context, the only way the principle of volition can be fully and clearly objectified is through the presentation of characters engaged in the choice and pursuit of values over time; that is, through their purposeful, on-going actions to gain and or keep their values in the face of obstacles or conflicts, whether internal or external." (pg. 32) Ayn Rand held that writing must be purposeful but that it's possible for characters not to be. This is not her ideal, for such writing does not inspire as it might, yet the authors seem intent in trying to show that Ayn Rand is asking for an impossibility when she merely has made a point of using words to refer to their referents in their fullest sense except in instances where she indicates by a qualifier such as "some" that she is not using the word that way that time.
Discussing Ayn Rand's theory that "visual art is an intrinsic part of films" and a film "has to be a stylized visual composition in motion" (though "literature is the ruler and term-setter" as "the play provides the end, to which all the rest is the means"), the authors debate Rand without justification: "If the art of film were essentially visual, the story could be told primarily through pictures. But as anyone who has ever tried to watch a film without the sound knows how difficult it is to follow the sense of the action without benefit of the dialogue, whereas one could readily grasp the gist of the story by listening to the sound track alone." (pg. 253) First off, have the authors tried to follow an episode of the "Mission: Impossible" TV series with the picture off? It's impossible. The authors further argue: "Even in silent films a verbal scenario was necessary to establish the story for the actors and directors; and title cards were interspersed with the visual images in the finished film to clarify the action for the audience." D.W. Griffith famously produced and directed major films with the plan only in his head. As for title cards, the famous "The Last Laugh" (dir: Murnau, Germany, 1925) has just one title card, it appearing about 70 minutes into its approximately 85 minutes, and that title is unnecessary to understand the story, it indicating the attitude of the writers, reporting only that they took pity on the lead character so that his life wouldn't take the turn it would in life. (Shortly thereafter the film has an insert of text from a newspaper. The information provided therein is vital — but only for the final scene, not for understanding what preceded it.) Still more examples: an American film noir called "The Thief" (1952) and a well-regarded Japanese drama called "The Island" (1961) are both feature-length films which tell their stories without a word spoken.
Worse than the authors not looking for counterexamples that disprove their own ideas is that they ignored the part of Ayn Rand's point that established her context: her theory addresses the best potential of film, not its muddled average. Here is what Rand wrote: "Potentially, motion pictures are a great art, but that potential has not as yet been actualized, except in single instances and random moments." Why then did Torres and Kamhi not incorporate this key piece of context into their analysis? Instead, they provide as their wrap-up to this subject the lessons they took away from a then-recent book about screenwriting: "Robin Russin and William Missouri Downs (both of whom are successful screenwriters) argue, in their superb new guide Screenplay: Writing the Picture, that 'all good movies depend upon well-structured screenplays.' (89)" (pg. 254) Given that Rand had written that, in movies "the play provides the end, to which all the rest is the means," Torres and Kamhi don't have a case to make. They thereby went further from the full context of what Ayn Rand had to say, even as they pretend to be answering her. Likewise, two pages later, the authors let the argument of Phillip Lopate dominate, he having written about it being desirable to limit speeches in film scripts because film has to be visual. (I contend that speeches are short in films because they are generally written before actors are cast in them; speeches can be emotional and gripping, but a prerequisite to that is that the actor be carefully chosen.)
In the above passages, in place of maintaining and understanding the original author's context, Torres and Kamhi engage in appeal to authority. That sums up what I found wrong with this whole book.
This review is one of several by me originally posted on Amazon.
I reviewed several books related to Ayn Rand.
To read the others, go to this page.