Later, Baby discovers that Johnny’s dance partner Penny Johnson (Cynthia Rhodes) is distraught over being pregnant by Robbie Gould (Max Cantor), the womanizing waiter who is dating and cheating on Lisa, Baby’s sister. Baby learns that Robbie plans to do nothing about the pregnancy as he says “Some people count, some people don’t,”
From the Fountainhead Wikipedia article…
In the 1987 film Dirty Dancing, waiter and future medical student, Robbie Gould, uses the book to excuse his behavior toward the resort dance instructor, Penny Johnson, and his responsibility for getting her pregnant. He tells resort guest Frances “Baby” Houseman, that “some people count and some people don’t.” (This is not an actual quote from the novel.) As he says this he pulls out a tattered paperback copy of The Fountainhead from his pocket, suggesting she read it. But he wants it back because he’s written many notes in the margins.
I haven’t read Fountainhead yet. Anyone care to comment on the applicability or lack thereof of the philosophy of the book to Gould’s behavior in the movie?
I’ve read The Fountainhead and don’t recall that quote being anywhere in the book.
With that said, I can see how one could extrapolate such a statement from it. After all, Ayn Rand’s philosophy (as expounded in her works) strikes a lot of people as being elitist. Her emphasis on what she alleges as the relatively few creative individuals implies that the rest of us, being uncreative, are therefore less important. One could paraphrase that as “Some people count, some people don’t”.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t slog my way through that novel–I only finished about 2/5 of it. Atlas Shrugged, on the other hand, was awesome.
From what I did read of The Fountainhead, though, I am certain that there was no talk of abandoning one’s offspring or shirking one’s responsibilities. Like Rand generally, there was strong moral advocacy of self-reliant individualism, although–of course–there was snobbery toward parasites and aesthetic mush-minded softies. Sounds like this is another case of Rand being mischaracterized as a promoter of immoral no-holds-barred greed. There is elitism, certainly, in the novel, but nothing that would lead one to disregard one’s own children. If anything, a diehard believer of The Fountainhead would only sleep with others that embody one’s values (this was Rand’s moral stance on sexuality).
i’ve read the Fountainhead and I think that its probably hard to reconcile the protagonist of the book with the Robbie Gould character. I think the book’s message was to seek one’s own values instead of worrying about the crowd. In that context it seems contradictory to the book that Robbie Gould would be both a randian and a womanizer; after all, Howard Roark was a randian and I think because of that, he was introverted and stoic -just as happy to flip burgers or work for an architectual firm just as long as it furthered his mission to reproduce his vision of artwork.
I’ve never read it, but curiously, I know a couple of people who did, said it was excellent and highly recommended it, but seem clueless about individualism and are actually quite statist in my opinion. How do you figure that?
I think that is why Atlas Shrugged is so much more popular. It’s better fiction. The characters are obviously heroic. Good and bad are thoughtlessly polarized.
The Fountainhead asks us to think. It exposes us to complex personalities. In Atlas Shrugged, the only character which develops is Dagny Taggart. In the Fountainhead, the only character who does not is Roark.
