Mountainhead Is a Shallow Satire of Tech Billionaires
A zippy script can't make up for a lack of insight.
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.
Mountainhead, in contrast, can't find the humanity in its megalomaniacal billionaire fools.
The film follows a quartet of billionaire tech bros—OK, technically three billionaires and one who is merely worth a few hundred million, and feels quite anxious about it. After one of them releases new deepfake tools on a Facebook-like social media platform called Tram, they watch on their phones, fantastically expensive whiskeys in hand, as foreign violence breaks out. They engage in absurd fantasies about what they can do to solve this problem, and perhaps fix the world: Buy a country? Stage a coup in America? Eventually the president calls to discuss the situation, and they take it in stride. After all, they say, he's just an "arrangement of carbon" like everyone else. The point, in all of it, is to take these larger-than-life figures and cut them down to size.
But Armstrong's script barely treats its billionaires as anything more than arrangements of carbon themselves. Yes, it's revealed at the beginning that Steve Carell's character, an older investor who made his fortune as an early backer of Tram, has a fatal form of cancer, giving him just years to live. And Tram founder Ven (Corey Michael Smith) has an infant son who appears late in the film, in a brief attempt to humanize him.
But by and large, the script sticks to surface-level verbal tics—giving each character the same sort of shallow, tech-jargon-laced vulgar patois. There's no psychology here, no real insight beyond the premise that these people are supremely arrogant and totally overmatched. They mix and match buzzwords and heady philosophical concepts they barely understand in hopes of sounding sophisticated. But really, the film seems to say, they're just self-centered nerds who hit the tech-biz jackpot.
Listen to an interview with one of the real-life tech billionaires who seemed to inspire Mountainhead's characters, and you'll find someone with far more philosophical conviction and depth—a depth of unsettling weirdness, one might argue, and one that's probably ripe for satire. But a more successful satire would need to be more willing to wrestle with both the philosophical strangeness and the intense personal convictions behind it as well as the particular reasons and circumstances behind how these specific people got rich.
Armstrong writes sharp, caustic, often funny dialogue, but Mountainhead never really moves beyond the limited and not particularly interesting idea that these guys are just dorks who got lucky and wealthy, then concluded they were gods. As an insight into the worldview and philosophy of the billionaire class, well—it might as well have been generated by Ayn Bland.
