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The Fountainhead on Lost

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The character Sawyer was seen reading The Fountainhead on tonight's episode of Lost. On a shallow level, his character seems to "value" property rights and a barter system. However, his character is hardly a Capitalist. He was a con artist who used deception to swindle people out of their money before he got stranded on the island. Furthermore, he has also used some despicable tactics to acquire material possessions while on the island.

I suppose any publicity on a major prime-time series is good as long as people do not mistake this character for a fairly consistent follower of Ayn Rand's philosophy. I doubt that the latter is likely.

Edited by DarkWaters
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Tonights episode of Lost feature the character Sawyer reading the Fountainhead

Hardly a glowing endorsement, is it? Reminds me of the same in an episode of Andromeda, where there is a lingering shot of Tyr Anasazi (a Nietzschean brute) reading it with interest.

Btw, the guys at Catallarchy.net reckon the writers are making the stuff up as they go along and that there's no real arc to Lost. I agree. Sooner or later the show is going to collapse in a heap under the weight of the garbage they've raised and forgotten (eg the Island's powers and own will, The Great Beast, the chain-machine that tried to drag Locke underground, etc etc). It's pulp.

JJM

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Perhaps the two threads should be merged.

Sawyer has read a lot of things on the island. I doubt anyone will take this one and a half second appearance as any sort of statement, provided they even notice it in the first place.

Incidentally, Sawyer's copy looked a lot like mine. I wonder if there was tape holding his copy's the spine together.

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My hope is that they find some way to tie up the loose ends soon and end the story.

And do so sometime soon.

The first season was great in setting up all the premises. The second season though was pretty much all fluff, barely progressing the storyline at all. I'm waiting for the third season to come out on DVD, although my expectations are pretty low..

I hope it doesn't end up like X-Files, where a show's popularity and commercial success ended up being its own undoing.

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And do so sometime soon.

The first season was great in setting up all the premises. The second season though was pretty much all fluff, barely progressing the storyline at all. I'm waiting for the third season to come out on DVD, although my expectations are pretty low..

I hope it doesn't end up like X-Files, where a show's popularity and commercial success ended up being its own undoing.

This is funny, I posted a snarky reply to this yesterday (Nobody puts Sawyer in the corner), not even realizing how apt the reference was. It seems to be the same kind of smear used in Dirty Dancing and I'm sure in other places (I heard AS figured similarly into A Scanner Darkly) to sully Rand's fiction by associating it with the arrogant and narcissistic (in stark contrast to Rand's confident and selfish characters).

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To be fair though it's not so much a "stark contrast" but rather a fine line between arrogant and narcissistic, and confident and selfish.

You could easily argue that Sawyer is a confident and selfish individual.

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To be fair though it's not so much a "stark contrast" but rather a fine line between arrogant and narcissistic, and confident and selfish.

You could easily argue that Sawyer is a confident and selfish individual.

I was using this quote:

...On a shallow level, his character seems to "value" property rights and a barter system. However, his character is hardly a Capitalist. He was a con artist who used deception to swindle people out of their money before he got stranded on the island. Furthermore, he has also used some despicable tactics to acquire material possessions while on the island.

As the basis for my comment.

I don't actually watch Lost as I sensed early on that there was no real vision there, or at least the vision seemed to be saying "life is just one continuous disaster- even if you survive a plane crash and manage to eke out your existence with a bunch of outlandishly hot people on a deserted island, you won't be safe because weird monsters and quasi-ghosts will come after you". Pah-leeze. Well, maybe the hot people on the island are the last known rational thinkers.. and the monsters represent the looters and parasites that are constantly preying on them.. mmmm, OK, maybe not.

I do think there is an appreciable difference between arrogance/narcissism and confidence/selfishness. In the former, a healthy, rational sense of self is overblown to what I would call a neurotic proportion and in fact tends to betray an actual lack of self-esteem. I think there's a very good reason why such characters are always associated with Rand and it's that the writers whose scripts reference Rand don't make that distinction, they believe that selfishness, confidence, arrogance, narcissism, greed, etc. are all inseparable when it comes to personality defects.

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I think Sawyers character is evolving. He started out a selfish and unethical (con artist). But lately he's been doing things that prove he is changing, he is becoming selfish and ethical. The book to me signifies that.

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I think Sawyers character is evolving. He started out a selfish and unethical (con artist). But lately he's been doing things that prove he is changing, he is becoming selfish and ethical. The book to me signifies that.

Let's hope that the writers are using the book to symbolize this as well. The best case scenario I can forsee is that Sawyer becomes a serious Objectivist and starts quoting Ayn Rand when settling debates on reason versus faith or justice.

Of course, if he becomes a better person and speaks favorably of the book, that would be good too.

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I think Sawyers character is evolving. He started out a selfish and unethical (con artist). But lately he's been doing things that prove he is changing, he is becoming selfish and ethical. The book to me signifies that.

Hey that's actually a pretty good interpretation!

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  • 2 weeks later...
  • 3 years later...

Let me be the second person to suggest here that perhaps they just picked a popular classic, at random, for Sawyer to read, and that's all.

Or maybe everything that happens here, happens for a reason.

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Or not...

Well, wasn't that the point of the show? Everything that happened, happened. The rational view of existence, that we live in an existent world where things really happen and can't unhappen even through time travel or other weirdness. They were living with the consequences of 'everything that happened'.

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