Film Review: "Mountainhead"
This satire is as bleak and black as they come, exposing the arrogance of techbro oligarchs for the shallow and fragile facade that it's always been.
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Warning: Full spoilers for the film follow.
Mountainhead is one of those films that I’ve been waiting to see ever since I saw that it was a.) written and directed by Jesse Armstrong (best-known for creating Succession) and b.) was a ruthless skewering of techbros and their entire toxic and addle-brained way of looking at the world. Overall, I quite enjoyed the film, which managed to be ruthlessly skeptical of techbros and their titanic egos while also bitingly funny. It’s the perfect film for our time, in which we could all use a reminder of just how fragile the tech oligarchy really is and how the supposed “supermen” behind it are as vapid and foolish as any of those that they believe to be beneath them.
When the film begins, the world is on fire thanks in no small part to the new content creation tools unleashed by social media giant Traam, which has allowed deepfakes and false news reports to emerge all over the world, inflaming various sectarian tensions. Four techbros gather at a mountain chalet owned by one of their number to strategize how to respond to the unfolding crises. The senior statesman is Steve Carell’s Randall Garrett, who is in denial about his terminal cancer diagnosis. Cory Michael Smith is the Elon Musk-like Venis “Ven” Parish, the CEO of Tramm, while Ramy Youssef’s Jeffrey “Jeff” Abredazi is a supposedly more humanitarian-minded techbro whose new AI could solve Ven’s problems. Rounding out the quarter is Jason Schwartzman’s Hugo “Souper” Van Yalk, who owns the chalet despite being the poorest of the group. As the evening unfolds, their fragile egos and bonds begin to strain and buckle, leading to an attempted murder and exposing just how ridiculous they all really are.
Part of what makes Mountainhead so chilling is just how much it tracks with what we know about techbros and their behaviors and outlooks. These men, like their real-world counterparts, believe that their genius is such that it entitles them to do and behave however they like, whether it’s unleashing a brownout across Belgium or scheming to take over various nations. They do all of this while spouting off quotations from Plato and Kant and Hegel (there’s even an evocation of the Catiline Conspiracy), all of which are the sort of quasi-academic and pseudo-intellectual puffery that one is quite used to hearing people like Elon Musk proclaim on Twitter as if they’re Jesus delivering the Sermon on the Mount. Mountainhead–with its ironic title, a take on Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead–leaves us in no doubt that these people are so high on their own fumes that there’s no hope for them. They might take themselves seriously, but we in the audience are quite aware that these posturing emperors have no clothes.
For me, Carell gives the most unsettling performance of the four leads. As he has so often of late–see also: The Morning Show–he gives us a character who seems, on the surface, to be warm and charismatic and even a little kind, at least if he considers you to be his intellectual equal. Yet beneath that affability there lurks a much darker and more sinister personality, one that emerges whenever any of his three companions dares to challenge him or to allude to his physical frailty. In part this is driven by his refusal to accept that he’s dying of cancer, but one gets the sense that this has always been who he is. He’s drunk the Nietzschean Kool-Aid, and he seems to view himself as equal parts oracle and despot-in-waiting. Despite his self-assurance, however, he can never quite paper over the fact that he’s a frail and fallible human just like everyone else, for all of his belief that Ven and his company will somehow be able to upload his consciousness into the grid and help him avoid the inevitability of mortality.
The other members of this quartet are, in their own ways, even more tragic. Smith is delightfully deranged as Ven, his eyes radiating a certain deadness of spirit behind all of the exuberance and manic behavior. Schwartzman is more than a little hangdog, his desperate desire to impress the others taking various forms, including pathetic flattery, while Youssef is somewhat soulful as Jeff, with his doe-like eyes conveying the a certain depth of feeling that is notably lacking among the other characters (more on that, in a minute). While they have all clearly been friends for a long time, it’s just as clear that they bring out the worst in one another and that, beneath their camaraderie there are some mutual antipathies that can be papered over but never entirely dispensed with altogether. Moreover, they are each convinced that they have the right to play God and that no one–not the President of the United States, not the European Union, and certainly not the masses of people who are killing themselves in the world below–has any right or ability to curtail their power.
And yet, for all that these four oligarchs think that it’s within their purview to rule the world as they see fit–they are also hopelessly inept. Garrett tries to boil an egg, only to be reminded that he’s doing so without water, which in turn reveals that there is no water. Nothing reveals their bumbling idiocy, however, like their ill-fated attempt to murder Jeff, which leads to not one, not two, but at least three separate incidents where Souper, Randall, and Ven reveal just how silly and frankly idiotic they are. Their big talk about their superhuman powers is really, when it comes down to it, so much sound and fury, signifying nothing.
In their defense, Jeff was threatening to lead an attack against Ven and had even dared to utter the heretical belief that they might be able to work with the government rather than destroy it and remake it in their own image. What other choice did these three Übermensches have, then, other than to cut down the decelerationist and government collaborator in their midst? He was clearly too far gone and, in Randall’s mind at least (he’s the one who first proposed killing him), he’s too much of a danger to his own potential immortality.
Lest we find ourselves sympathizing too much with Jeff, it’s worth pointing out that he’s essentially as morally bankrupt as the rest of them. Oh, sure, he makes some mealy-mouthed protests against the greed of the others but, when it comes down to it, his boyishly handsome face and soulful brown eyes are just the outward disguise of a man who is just as corrupt and greedy as the rest of them. Right up until the end he is scheming and trying to make sure that his largely-absentee girlfriend Hester is right where he wants her to be. Mountainhead reminds us that even nice techbros are still, all too often, pretty terrible people.
Now, I will say that the ending left me a little cold, but only because I really wanted to see the techbros get their comeuppance. At the same time, we’re also left in no doubt that these men are going to continue their scheming ways, even as the world around them burns to the ground. They might have been at the top of the world for a time, but it won’t be long before they’re caught up in the conflagration, too glued to their phones and their simulated realities to realize that it’s already too late for them. Whether by disease or by their own hubris, they will fall.
All of this leaves us with the question: will reality imitate art?