The Brutalist, Trauma, and the Making of Beauty
A Spoiler Free Analysis of The Brutalist
When immigrants and refugees come to the United States, they are not so much seeking the American Dream as they are looking for a place to work out their trauma. This is the vision of the film The Brutalist. What follows is a spoiler-free analysis of the film.
“Brutalism” derives its name from the French phrase béton brut, meaning “raw concrete.” The term was often used to describe the nature of using concrete in a way that is unadorned and raw. My immediate affection for it comes from the fact that I live in a concrete home and love the look. I’m a minimalist in this way—I find the appearance of freshly poured concrete attractive, while some might consider it cold and ugly. Museums and other structures in post-war Europe embraced this approach. Brutalism is blocky, pronounced, minimal, and monumental.
The film is beautiful in this way: it takes the experiences of being a refugee, surviving war, caring for a sick spouse, and the passion of an artist, and makes them into something transcendent. The direction is contemplative and piercing. It is an attempt to create a structure that time cannot take away, no matter the wear and tear.
László Tóth (Adrien Brody) is a Jewish-Hungarian architect who flees his country because of Nazi persecution. He tells a wealthy industrialist about his art process:
Nothing is of its own explanation. Is there a better description of a cube than that of its construction? There was a war on. And yet it is my understanding that many of the sites of my projects have survived. They remain there still in the city. When the terrible recollections of what happened in Europe cease to humiliate us, I expect for them to serve instead as a political stimulus, sparking the upheavals that so frequently occur in the cycles of peoplehood.
What I’ve come to learn about suffering—and the wound that comes from it—is that we can leverage it, make of it something that cannot be robbed. This is where art comes from: not the suffering itself, but the transformation of the suffering.
In The Brutalist, we see Tóth’s life as one where the pouring of concrete—forming piers, beams, walls, foundations—is a way to gird a life laid in ruin by the Holocaust. He is separated from his wife, his country, his career, and most importantly, himself. His wife and niece also work out their own traumas in the film, and I wished more time had been devoted to tracing their suffering. Nevertheless, they show resilience in ways that even surpass László’s own struggles.
Tóth first attempts to work at his cousin’s furniture store, applying his Bauhaus design aesthetics to the business. In every attempt to apply his sense of design, he is met with misunderstanding and resistance. This causes him to live between poverty and moments of exciting success. These fluctuations mirror the lives of many people who are highly skilled and intelligent but are forced into menial jobs because of a lack of credentials or language barriers.
Throughout the film, director Brady Corbet brings a sense of both the grandeur of the American East Coast and the weight of colonizing and fascist powers. The title of the film serves in this secondary way. The brutality is felt in how power is used and abused, especially on those marginalized by society. László never feels a sense of belonging, even though he contributes to the beauty and culture of his new country. He is never fully appreciated by others and continues to be viewed as a foreigner.
The opening scene of an upside-down Statue of Liberty is striking and speaks volumes about the state of the U.S. today. The sonnet on the base, The New Colossus by Emma Lazarus, is something every citizen should learn by heart, but for many, this beautiful poem only applies to their ancestors—not to others fleeing persecution, violence, abuse, and other forms of suffering.
Several years ago, I was invited to be part of a book project to translate The New Colossus into Vietnamese, but I didn’t have enough time to finish the text. At the time, the weight of being the Vietnamese translator for something so epic nearly broke me, and I had to say no. But the weight of this kind of responsibility feels different now. Perhaps I could carry it differently.
The Brutalist could have easily been a film solely about the survival of Jewish refugees in America, but it becomes much more than that. As I discussed above, the style of brutalism and Bauhaus becomes a metaphor for the weight of trauma upon immigrants seeking to be concretized into something more. It is also a description of the harsh realities imposed upon them on these “teeming shores.”
How does one create life of beauty given the trauma experienced due to war, suffering, abuse, poverty, and racism?
“The New Colossus” by Emma Lazarus
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”1
https://ajhs.org/exhibitions-programs/emma-lazarus-project/emma-lazarus-trans-lation-project/