If you couldn't immediately tell that Mountainhead, the name of the new direct-to-HBO movie from Succession creator Jesse Armstrong, was poking fun at Ayn Rand, the movie is there to remind you, with not one but two Rand puns in the first 20 minutes. The film is set largely inside the confines of a snowbound mansion retreat called Mountainhead, which, as one character notes, sounds like Rand's novel The Fountainhead. The charmlessly expensive but characterless interiors of the luxury villa prompt a further snarky remark about how the owner must have hired an interior designer named Ayn Bland.
Mountainhead, if you haven't guessed, is a satire of tech billionaires. More specifically, it is a satire of their philosophies, from transhumanism to post-Democratic capitalism to AI Singularity Utopianism. It attempts, like Succession, to present a scathing comic portrait of the vapidity and soullessness of the rich and powerful—the ways in which they are overmatched by human events and careless about the forces they are unleashing on the world. Like the show, the movie is powered by quippy dialogue, clever puns, and tangles of buzzwords, all stitched together with artful vulgarity. There are times when the relentless volley of zingers lands a hit, or at least a chuckle. But the movie's unceasing smugness is its undoing: Mountainhead wants to be a movie about how tech billionaires don't understand ordinary people. Instead, it's a movie that doesn't understand billionaires.
Armstrong's previous project for HBO, the niche-hit Succession, was a sort of black comic contemporary take on Game of Thrones, with an aging, Rupert Murdoch–like media titan on his way out and a gang of hapless kids vying to inherit his empire. That show was also punctuated with strung-together buzzwords, meaningless business jargon, and zippy profanity. But the show's rat-a-tat dialogue was layered over something like real empathy for its characters, or at the very least a sense that they were in some way human, with all the sadness and longing and confusion that entails. Those characters used empty, zeitgeisty chatter to hide their fears and insecurities and incompetence, to shield themselves from emotional transparency and intelligent scrutiny. They were tragic, almost Shakespearean figures: a towering father-king, a bunch of nincompoop kids, and the aging monarch's weasel-like advisers, all vying for wealth, power, and control while trying to avoid taking real risks to get it. Their verbosity and profanity masked a lonely inner humanity.
