Batman v. Superman: The Dawn of Justice will be Zack Snyder’s seventh directorial project. He has two more in production, and one announced just last week, The Fountainhead. Of those ten films, nine are or will be adaptations (Sucker Punch is his only original story). This tendency toward adaptation has made it difficult to draw conclusions about Snyder’s artistic and political worldview: no matter what philosophical or political themes his film might consist of, they can always be accounted for by looking to the source material.

Artists need not always reveal themselves in their work. But frequently, they can’t help it. If you watch the work a director, across a decade or more, audiences build a confident sense of the director’s identity, even if they’re making adaptations. Stanley Kubrick comes to mind. He adapted the work of others without concern for consistency from novel to screen, and what Kubrick chose to put on screen, or leave off, said something about the man behind the camera. Kubrick’s obsessions were present whether he was making Nabokov’s Lolita or Stephen King’s The Shining.

But that’s just not been the case with Snyder.

Snyder adapts with great loyalty. His cinematic voice is one of style and technique, not, on the surface at least, a vision of thematic obsessions or the conveyance of an overt worldview. The Watchmen is quite political-criticizing Thatcher / Reagan era politics of responsibility and power-but nothing in Snyder’s film is sourced outside Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon’s graphic novel. Such is the case as well with 300, the violence rich, intelligence poor story based on Frank Miller’s comics.

Watching 300 and The Watchmen, Snyder’s presence is always recognizable, but that is almost entirely a result of his hyper-stylized filmmaking. Snyder’s use of color and camera mark his work. But when you strip visual style from these films, one might wonder what they have in common.

The answer is, here and across Snyder’s work, heroes. Sometimes superheroes, but always heroic stories of individuals engaged in epic battles against a greater power. Walk through the Snyder canon and you see it. Humans in a losing fight against zombies in the Romero remake Dawn of the Dead. The Watchmen against a world who has rejected them, and a world afraid of powers they don’t understand, in The Watchmen. The three hundred Spartan soldiers at the Battle of Thermopylaee, battling the 10,000 strong Persian army in 300. Superman, the lonely alien tasked with protecting humans who don’t want him against his own kinsmen who want to kill those same humans. Batman, the vigilante tasked with protecting the world from an all powerful vigilante.

But the Snyder-power-struggle is never stronger than in Snyder’s one original story, Sucker Punch, in which a group of institutionalized young women take to their dreams to exact revenge against the men who rape and abuse them. These women are victims without agency in the ‘real world’, being prepped for lobotomies, but in their minds they remain individuals, and heroes. Lonely champions fighting a losing battle against an unstoppable corrupt power. The Sucker Punch battle takes place in the imagination, where the brutish, misogynistic violence is not suffered but revenged.

As a cinematic vision, Sucker Punch is as close as audiences have come to finding Snyder’s conception of the artist as a hero: a lonely suffering individual, creating in the face of adversity. As a narrative and thematic overlay to Snyder’s work, this worldview of the individual at odds with the world comports well with a philosophy known as objectivism, Any Rand’s philosophy of radical self-interest.

Which brings us to The Fountainhead. Snyder announced this week he would be adapting Ayn Rand’s novel for the screen. The Fountainthead ia Rand’s 1943 novel that first presented objectivism to the world (though the word objectivism would come later).

The Fountainhead is the story of Howard Roarke, the individualistic, idealistic architect who toils in anonymity for a lifetime because he is unwilling to deviate from his principled stance about What Architecture Means. The book circles Roarke as a hero on page one, and never deviates, even as the people, and eventually the entire nation around him, learn to despise what he stands for. Roarke is a constant speech-maker, and the dramatic conclusion-as was the case with many mid-century American novels- finds Roarke monologuing for pages on end, this time in court, laying out his (and Rand’s) worldview based on the individual ego.

That Zack Snyder is making The Fountainhead tells us something about Snyder. The world isn’t clamoring for more Ayn Rand on the big screen (the two part film Atlas Shrugged barely penetrated conservative news circles), and Snyder’s commitments to the DC Universe span the next half decade. But Ayn Rand is a special case for many, many Americans (mostly, in my experience, American males). The Fountainhead is the kind of story that lends itself only to those who value the meat found inside. It’s why Mel Gibson would make The Passion of Christ. There are plenty of sacrificial stories of violence that one could make, choosing Christ says something about the artist.

So it is with The Fountainhead. If Snyder’s work in comic book adaptations has provided glimpses into his thinking about power and the individual in society, adding The Fountainhead to his body work snaps the Snyder vision into place.

A few years ago, in reaction to criticism about Sucker Punch, Snyder said this about his movies: “I always believe the movies I’ve made are smarter than the way they are perceived by sort of mass culture and by the critics. We set out to make smarter movies than what they’re perceived to be, do you know what I mean?”

I did not know what he meant, at the time. But now I think I do know what he means. He means that his artistic vision is built on objectivism, and ego. That the artist toils in a story and when that story is given to the world, they misunderstand. When Zack Snyder announced his work on The Fountainhead, he said this: “I have been working on The Fountainhead. I’ve always felt like The Fountainhead was such a thesis on the creative process and what it is to create something.” The creative process of Roarke matches perfectly with Snyder’s comments about critics and mass culture not realizing how smart his movies really are.

I don’t personally like the work of Zack Snyder. I find his films visual striking, and his action scenes brilliantly composed, but his treatment of moral and intellectual content is always underwhelming. Frankly, I think his movies are dumb. Beyond that, I find the philosophy of Ayn Rand repugnant. I grasp Rand’s appeal to the mind, but I think it’s something that needs to be outgrown in adulthood.

Obviously, Snyder doesn’t agree. And the job of the artist is not to make movies that about philosophical positions I personally agree with. So I’m glad about the prospect of a Zack Snyder adaptation of The Fountainhead. What do we want of our artists but to tell stories that matter to them, as artists?

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