It isn't obvious to me
Why does he destroy the machine?
Marianne
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MovieChat Forums > The Man They Could Not Hang (1939) Discussion > It isn't obvious to me
One possible explanation is in the speech he gives to Janet about people taking "everything we [scientists] have given them and perverting it." Airplanes used to level cities . . . broadcasting to preach hatred . . . pain-relieving drugs to enslave addicts and enrich the pushers. He may feel, given that track record, that nothing good can come of giving people the power to revive the dead.
shareMy favorite of Dr. Savaard's speech.
"Eye of the beholder"
In it, the main character is an architect who is mad because the evil government who was building the public housing he designed changed the plans to benefit the tenants, and to punish them he destroys that housing. One way in which Rand has managed to inject her tentacles into impressionable young people is to play on the "the world does not understand", "the stupid, unthinking world" and so on who does not understand them and their own brilliance, and hates progress and science in general. I find this movie explores these themes far better and without the political agenda of creating hell on earth that the former Ms. Rosenbaum espoused.
shareAlthough there are superficial similarities, the two stories are basically different and bringing "The Fountainhead" into this discussion is irrelevant unless it's to illustrate those differences.
Howard Roark did not destroy the Cortlandt Homes project "to punish" anyone. And those who changed the project from its original design did not do so "to benefit the tenants". They did it because they wanted to glom onto the brilliant design of Roark, to extract their portions of celebrity by being attached to the project despite the fact that they didn't understand the design or even care to try to understand it. Roark was trying to give the tenants something that would inspire them, to elevate their "souls". Those who amended the design belittled the future "common" tenants of the project by asserting that they couldn't possibly benefit from Roark's lofty intentions. As Ellsworth said, "Your poor unwashed tenants won't be able to appreciate the finer points of architectural art." Gordon Prescott says, "We want to express our individuality, too." This from a man without a shred of individuality. He (and they) believed it takes a committee to design a building.
By the way, there are plenty of fans of Rand who are neither impressionable nor young people.
Miss Rand's conception of hell on earth certainly was something close to Soviet Russia, which she left.