The Power Mountain
Late this past weekend I took a look at HBO’s new film Mountainhead. It’s gotten a lot of mainstream attention in the last few weeks, including about the $65 million house where the movie is set.1 Mostly, I found the movie to be a quite literal and unlikeable presentation of a few widely circulated criticisms of the tech industry. Like Succession, also written and directed by Jesse Armstrong, it seems to draw a lot of its appeal from the voyeuristic curiosity of its audience. Mountainhead watchers must wonder about what type of house you vacation at when you are young-ish and among the richest people in the world. What does entertainment, friendship, work-play look like at this level?
This is one of those films that only makes sense if it comes with a claim to show “how it really is.” And yet, given the exclusivity of the subject matter, how would the audience know if the movie had gotten it right? One answer is that the film brings an obscure, elite situation down to the level of gossip–to the eminently comprehensible. These men, who claim to rule by means of their extraordinary talents and intelligence, must be disarmed, so that their fate unspools itself only through their basic qualities (honesty, courage, loyalty, ruthlessnes etc.). We may not be able to judge if the opulent setting is credible, but we can judge a character that is confronted with a situation.
What is distinctive about the setting of this movie is that it strips these men of their power. To buy this place at the top of the mountain and associate with one another, they had to fight to the top of the metaphorical pinnacle, conquering or creating entire industries. But all of the planes and motorcades and massive corporate armies that they command are removed from the situation. It’s a “poker weekend,” time off the clock, a chance to revel in ordinary time. And the film shows us leaders whose discomfort with power is almost paradoxical. What they seem to want is supremacy over one another: to be richer, more successful than the next person in the treehouse.2
As news of geopolitical chaos plays out on their many TVs and phones, the film implies that their companies and products are responsible. But these men don’t want this kind of power. They don’t understand it. Their heavy-handed, clueless, jousting dialogue makes clear that they don’t have the mental or moral tools to understand it. They simply don’t want to look directly at power, to get involved with it tout court. They just want to “win,” to be the best in their anti-charistmatic world, bracketing out everything else. We have people who have built totalitarian products ("software eats the world") that only want to use people as counters on their abacus, user counts that signal attention, beating the game. Power: that would imply a desire to dominate people. They don’t want people. The avatar representation on the screen is good enough. On the horizon, the much-foreshadowed AI apocalypse might be their big break at replacing people with something more tractable.
Mountainhead was reportedly written and filmed in haste over just a few months. It was supposed to ride this historical moment in which Big Tech makes itself a servant of right-wing politics. Watching this, I found myself thinking that a group so ill at ease with its own power would make the perfect handmaiden to the real totalitarian characters of this world: those who really do want to invade and dominate every corner of human life, who still revel in power with a human face.
The house’s design, furnishings, and symbols make up another shadow character–perhaps a more subtle and attention-worthy one than the actors themselves. ↩︎
Status is primarily quantitative. Net worth is of course the opposite of something concrete and real: for these people it is tied to speculative asset valuations. In a scene, they hike to the top of a nearby peak, bare their chests to the winter cold, and write their net worth on themselves in lipstick. As if to illustrate the instability of the measuring stick, one of the men corrects that because of recent events, he is now worth not thirty-nine billion but fifty-nine billion. ↩︎