The unnatural heroism of Gary Cooper

Michael Blowhard has been making movie lists again, this one being of New York movies that portray the “arts scene” there. Here’s one that a lot of Samizdata readers will know all about:

The Fountainhead. Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal, from the Ayn Rand philosophical potboiler, lovingly over-directed by King Vidor. Way-over-the-top bliss about a my-way-or-the-highway architect who’s loved and hated by a real woman. Wait till you see Neal get excited about the way Coop handles a jackhammer.

I always felt that Cooper was miscast in this. Cooper’s “manliness” seems to me to have been of the unnatural, aspirational kind. Fighting the good fight, facing down the bad guys, is not something that the Cooper character ever did because he enjoyed it, or because it came naturally to him. It’s the lips, I think. So female and “sensitive”.

On the contrary, Cooper embodies heroism precisely because he is actually something of a girlie boy, who’d rather be indoors. It’s not that he lacks the physique to do the manly stuff, nor is he stupid. The problem is that his mind is not the heroic sort of mind. He’s not naturally quick and decisive. His natural metier would be something like academia, where he would have time merely to think about things, without scary deadlines. He wouldn’t win any Nobel Prizes, but he’d make a comfortably, unstressed living. But High Noon, or whatever, looms, and he must deal with it. And he doesn’t funk it, no matter how much he is tempted to.

The Cooper character typically says little because he hasn’t yet worked out what on earth to say. Other more obviously manly stars – I’m thinking of someone like Clark Gable – say little because, although they could say a lot and occasionally do under pressure, what’s the point? Talk is cheap. Action is what counts, and Mr Real Man has already decided what he’ll do.

Cooper spends The Fountainhead communicating to me not intellectual certainty, but bewilderment and confusion that any man could possible be this confident about anything. He says all the Howard Roark words and goes through all the Howard Roark motions not because he believes in it, but because he can’t think of anything else to say or do. That can’t be right.

But then again, maybe it is. Maybe Howard Roark can’t think of anything else to say or do either. If so, that can’t be right either, but that’s a different argument.