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The Man in the White Suit

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whig

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Has anyone else here seen The Man in the White Suit, and what do you make of it from an individualist perspective?

Here's the plot, and I won't bother with spoiler tags, as it's not as such the type of film that lives or dies on plot, but if you get a bit through my description and don't want to read the ending, fair enough. It's set in the linen mills of industrial England, and a lone scientist, Sidney Stratton, moves from factory to factory working on the perfect fibre, that repels dirt and doesn't break. In each factory, he works on his project without telling anyone else, and is fired when they realize how much money he's spending. Like Roark, after being rejected a few times, he doesn't mind working in a job of lower skill than he should, working as a labourer in a factory, as Roark did in the quarry, in Stratton's case so that he can work without any authorization in the laboratory. Eventually, one factory owner takes a chance on him and it works. When the other industrialists and the factory labourers hear about the invention respectively, they rise up against it, as they fear that it will damage their livelihoods, the head industrialist assuring the unions that "capital and labor are hand in hand in this". Stratton, at great risk to himself, refuses to surrender the patent, allowing it to be suppressed, and escapes from them with the help of the daughter of his current employer. She's a bit of a Randian heroine, who leaves her Keatingesque fiancé for Stratton. Eventually, however, as a conclusion, it turns out the fabric is not as long-lasting as it first seemed. In the final scene, tho, there is hope, as he looks in his notebook and thinks he know what he did wrong.

I liked this film before I was particularly interested in political philosophy, but even then saw that everyone bar him was standing in the way of progress. I asked Yaron Brook what he thought of it, and he said that it was mostly good, but that had Rand written it, it wouldn't have failed in the end, and she would have explained that the absence of the linen industry would have opened up a whole new avenue of industry, increasing the country's overall output. But I think that overall it is quite in line with the individualism extolled by Ayn Rand.

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