We are at a turning point in cinema where the classics seem as though they may never be made ever again. But we are trying.
This is a phenomena strewn throughout all art forms at the moment; but particularly in any mainstream product that is admitted within the Overton window.
Homage, emulation and amalgamation - mostly nostalgia - have become the taste by which many of the studios have banked on, and thus much of the current storytelling has become; this association with and partaking of the familiar.
These habituated experiences have become the thing that has supplanted the will of an audience to simply walk into a "pure" or "singular" experience. However, increasingly we are starting to see a hunger around the periphery that a small number of studios are attempting to satiate so long as it fits their model.
The films that are attempting to conform to this model, let's call them, “The ironic classics,” are as such attempting to harness the energy of what came before it, banking on its audience to understand the language of yesteryear.
Of course, this is not unprecedented, and is admittedly something of a tradition itself within film - borrowing and stealing - used by filmmakers of all kinds, perhaps all filmmakers, and all artists for that matter.
But a new sort of tradition emerges. From the tradition of films that purposefully deviate the norm, we now find films follow the rule of breaking the “rules,” in an attempt to set itself apart in such distinction as to be considered a classic, in this newfound ironic sense.
These films, merely because they are not conforming to model of the past decade and a half - utilizing the actors and actresses whose Instagram following allows the broadest marketing platform, from which they can broadcast behind the scenes material (something that used to be a post-production bonus), and showcase their performance-enhanced bodies well lit and airbrushed in front of walls of blue and green, ostensibly saving imaginary cities from phantom aliens whose tesseracts have open up the MuLtIvErSe (Bro, do you even read Deutsch) and threaten to obliterate all of mankind under a set of different game theories - are under these conditions beginning to receive reviews and scores from audiences the likes of which we’ve only previously seen from the New Hollywood era, and perhaps a few stragglers from there to here.
The Brutalist is one such film that fits this new model. Of course, it itself cannot be blamed for coming forth from and into such a world, but does itself seem to be a product of it.
In this turning point of ours, what used to be industry secrets, have now been placed front and center, a way to sell the movie as a sort of “bespoke” experience to those whose taste is slightly elevated above those whose precious is spent on the new opiate of the masses - the TikTok model, sporting events, or cooking show reruns. This lot would not be lured into an IMAX screening because a film was shot with a 1:90:1 ratio on 70mm film.
But it’s the alleged crowd who “care” about cinema that is attracted to these ironic classics, and I think that they do.
But too much is said about these ironic classics before they’re even given the time to breathe, to come to life and to stand on their own two feet.
"It's giving x," "It uses the x format/ratio," "It's shot on x." These are among the many cases discussed why a work, typically of a highbrow or arthouse nature, such as The Brutalist, should exist. All having nothing to do with the intrinsic merits of its story - the basis for its existence - but all ways in which these works are now ironically themselves seemingly and inevitably informed; instilled with a sense of irony.
It used to be that many classics wouldn’t even be recognized as such until many years later when their prints were dusted off of shelves or experienced a home video resurrection and DVD revival.
These new merits are becoming the face of the movie to justify its existence in lieu of the flimsy faith of those who espouse to care about cinema but who will, at the end of the day, just like those hoi polloi, watch what they’re told and like what they’re supposed to.
I suppose this is still not entirely new, as the model has always been that of calculated risk; to work within the framework and those films that slip through cracks and shine above their peers are the exception to the rule. But in this new meritocracy, studios are now constructing elaborate explanations as to why something that was once industry standard is now something unique and special, such as shooting on celluloid.
These practices now come with a troubling reverence as they treat the piece as an enshrined article, not only before it has proved its own merits, but as an experience that is billed as an endangered rarity and not the forced scarcity that it is. As if we are already making the case that humans should still be allowed to make films at all and not yet taken away and given over to artificial generation.
Does the bravery (or rather, generosity) of the audience match the bravery of the artist? Do the artists have the bravery to give the audience an unadulterated experience, or merely nostalgic simulacra? And do the studios, and the industry at large, have the courage to stand up for humanity, not only within the stories it tells, but within the machinations by which it tells those stories.
These, I believe are the current questions paramount amidst this emerging “post-Marvel” cinema landscape.
So it is that the bar for The Brutalist has been set quite high.
It is both a film of cinematic and cultural historical importance. It exercises the immemorial ghosts of our nation's past, stirring the melting pot to check the current temperature, while attempting to conjure whatever relevant haunts of arthouse revivalism are able to find their way into the conversations being had from walls of social feeds to the red carpets that are laid out for those who stumble their way, like delirious triathlon participants, at the end of awards show campaign trails.
Not one to pass on this our current valued experience, I dutifully purchased an IMAX ticket for $20+ fees. Not bad. In fact, I'm happy to pay. I have to travel about 45 minutes to and from the nearest IMAX theater which, with an hour and a half round trip in my Jeep, puts us about that much in gas expense.
So that I don't have my car broken into (the contents of which that could be stolen - soccer balls, and jumper cables - would not begin to approach the approximately $350 for a front left window [I currently supplement income from remote auto glass sales while studying and writing my screenplays so I know the market]), or be ticketed, towed, or become subject to any other acts of God, I use the hotel parking garage adjacent to the theater that comes out to $26.
So all told, we are talking about approximately a $70 movie. A dollar a millimeter.
It's an abomination. It’s almost as expensive and rare an experience as buying eggs. And in the downtown city which shall not be named, probably more dangerous. But I'm excited. This is a unique experience. Whatever its reasons, what remains to be true is that this is something that happens very rarely, and therefore does hold sacred value.
It shouldn't be this way, but it is.
I am also elated that, after years of proselytizing that intermissions make their way back into the theater experience (because Hollywood heard me above the roar of all 7 of my followers on Letterboxd), that the experience is finally here and I can watch a movie confidently and accommodatingly.
So we are underway.
Unless you've been living a life of pure ignorance, it would be impossible to watch this film without a string tethered to your consciousness as you journey into the labyrinth of this beast; especially if you are an American.
If you are an immigrant, or the recent child of immigrants, or even from a poor working class background this film hits you like a lead brick.
I've been on very precarious footing lately. The fast four to six years kind of lately. Finally healthy enough to even begin thinking about living above the status quo, I am beginning to plan the leap into the unknown and into an unknown destination soon.
I've been having doubts about my ability and my resources - a constant worry and fear that wherever I land will not be on solid ground.
I've blamed myself for this. I haven't made good with myself in the first decade of adulthood (plus some). I've worked hard, sure. I've clocked more hours than the average of my peers; certainly have sweated more. But short order cooks, hard as they work, do not make scalable income.
And the (artistic) risks during that time, the thousands of dollars of (personal) investment of which were put forth into creating music and film to construct a vision from which I could buil a career have, so far, led to nothing.
I've come from a working/lower class background. My Father was a tradesman and union member. My brother and I were reminiscing just recently about how we used to love feigning sickness so that we could accompany our Mother, who worked as a house cleaner, to an enormous house in Tiburon, CA; a city which boasts some of the highest median housing costs in the entire world. On those treasured days we would retrieve Juice Squeeze from the enormous stainless steel refrigerators doors, eat fruit snacks out of the walk-in pantry, and with these delights in hand watch Honey I Shrunk the Kids from the gargantuan flat screen TV’s, the size of small vehicles, from the plush white leather couches from Ethan Allen. I even remember thinking Sophie’s (the poodle) dog-jerky smelled appetizing in this imaginarium.
From these relatively humble origins, I've often privately (wrongly) held grievances against my upbringing. When money is tightly allocated, not so much paycheck to paycheck as day to day, you aren't exactly planning for the future so much as truly living in the moment. As a child this can be a precarious existence. But in that "volatile" environment it can also be quite exciting.
In my experience, the first ten moves for a child are merely new places to explore and stoke a curiosity within a new domain of play in which a voyeur like myself can observe the world again and again. This is, of course, a far cry from the relative experience as an adult when this kind of stress only allows you to see a few feet in front of you at a time.
So it was that in my later years, coming from this stressed environment, that I lamented why I was never shown things like basic finance, much less understanding on how to get through college, starting a career and navigating debt; don’t even bother thinking of discussions about starting a business or wealth creation.
In the process of trying to understand where I have come from I have discovered that not much is clear about the history of, or the immigration process of my family, other than some tidbits on my father's side. His father's family changed their Scottish surname from “Canady” to the Irish spelling of “Kennedy,” in order to assimilate within the local population here in America. My grandmother, on my father's side, is the daughter of immigrants from Aarlborg and Copenhagen, Denmark, and who settled in Minnesota, ultimately finding their way to Oakland, California where they had found work during the War. From here it was not far away that I was born and raised.
Nearly nothing has been spoken of from my mothers side, the "Smiths," who, from what little remains of them, are over 90% British in origin. They became farmers in the valley and it was after a move to Napa that my parents met. Though there are stories of a great-grandfather who was a Policeman and high ranking Mason member (in the 30’s of degrees) who was curiously struck not once, but twice, the second time fatally, by a drunk driver. None of the progeny are Mason-affiliated.
I've pondered this probably more than most in my family - our origins. I've always, as many of us do in the United States, struggled with belonging - to friend groups, social circles, "scenes."
Perhaps the fetishization of identity, in the 21st century, is precisely because none of us feel as though we have properly inherited one. Many are being awakened to the startling realization that we are infants, or adolescents at best - generationally - within the United States, or even as members of a newly emerging global scene. We are finding that our Dasein has been uprooted and forced to begin again in a new sort of mirror stage, metamorphosing into an unprecedented unknown. Now untethered and free to roam we are temporally trapped nonetheless within the wilderness of belonging. And adhering to whatever evolutionary behavioral manifestations, as Narcissus, we owe our allegiance to, and are unable to break our infatuation with, the illusion of whatever new type of Being we are meant to inhabit and defend, while simultaneously being utterly dissatisfied and disillusioned with this reflection staring back at us. We are beginning to find a new form of discrimination wherein we no longer possess a vitriol towards each other for our differences. Rather, we hate what the other reminds us of: ourselves, or the absence thereof, as we become increasingly homogenized under the umbrella of globally serialized mass goods and services.
Not wanting part of this new landscape, but hopelessly entangled as we inevitably are, I believe I have always intuitively postured myself as an outsider, a wearer of an array of hats, attempting to move between worlds, not ever wanting to graft to any one place, people, or ideological affiliation.
I'd like to say it originally derived from a place of individualism - the same narcissism inflicting everyone else in our time - but in actuality it is much deeper rooted in agoraphobia; of being trapped in situations in which I cannot escape. Belonging in the modern world is no longer an exercise in the common good as it is to consent to be a peripheral character within someone else’s plans.
Not to be confused with claustrophobia, the agoraphobia I have become accustomed to relates to a deep-seated fear of being a part of these other people's plans, of social pressures, of mass movements; the herd. More troubling, I've never been able to commit to a life-plan, a career, and perhaps more troubling, relationships.
Deeper still, I've come to learn that much of this (other than having lived in three cities in 13 houses in as many years as a child and many more into adulthood) is because, like all Americans, I've never felt that I've truly belonged anywhere, to anyone, or to anything either, despite being told that my race and gender has decidedly affirmed this for me a priori.
This great experiment of ours, while well-rooted by now, has never created an environment conducive to truly working in cooperation with one another. We are, despite our foundations, or perhaps because of them, still skeptical of all authority in one way or another. And even in our collaborative efforts we find ways in which to become cynical of those who may find themselves usurping power and control of the group, and have thus fought hard to suppress any ideology that has a whiff of the collective lest it run amok into authoritarian structures.
Because we have no unifying mechanism, other than the vague definitions, or rather understanding, of "individualism" and "liberty," the lofty goals that we are taught will fill our lives - that we can “do anything and be anything” - are seen as individual missions to self-actualize by bettering ourselves through conquering careers and and personal achievements ascending our own private Mt. Everest.
But it is on this journey that we discover our feats are more often than not on the backs of others, and the trail littered with the oxygen tanks from struggling to keep pace in this rarified air, and whose lonely and isolated journey, that seeks to at all times suffocate us, demands of us to pay no mind to corpses that failed to reach their destination, and who now find their final resting spot, not smiling in a selfie with those who spent their fortune to look over the rest of the world, but pushed aside and stuffed into some solipsistic crevasse along the way. This metaphor is of course inaccurate as many more who ascend the literal Everest will have made it to the top safely and securely.
So it is in amongst these common goals that make up the traditions of our society that we find ourselves as cultural bastards. Yes, even the apparent antagonists of this film - and in the eyes of many in our geo-political temporality today - the WASP's, are perhaps precisely so maligned because they are the eldest our immigrant brethren, and thus the most untethered to any one place of lineal identity, and who, in their "burden," most identify with the frivolous nature of alienated and material motives, such as money and power; dominion; the so-called “Machiavellian” ethics.
So it is with this, with all these thoughts in mind, that I approached this film.
And as the film opens, and we find characters teeming with anxiety and fears, hopes and expectations, it is with this sensibility that I could not help but cry desperate tears when the overture reveals that land by which so many struggle and strive to reach out and touch to this very day in order to maybe, just maybe, make it.
A land that has come to mean something new to every generation. That even in its much maligned state still stands as a place of refuge, even through its crumbling fortitude does it stand as a beacon of what could be if we tried; a bastion of good will if only we want it to.
And this could have very well been the best moment of the film as The Brutalist goes on to make the case that we do not want it to.
And who is to say that it is wrong in doing so?
The casting of God into oblivion over the course of the past few centuries has revealed to us what we truly believe in. Where once we believed in divine providence - that no matter what happens we would always, at the end of all things, be offered salvation - we now believe that is only us and a thin blue atmosphere between life and the void.
We are all that stands between us and the infinite night.
As a global community, we've largely ignored this existential leap into the yawning abyss, into a black from which the light cast from the eyes of God may still bend but have not yet proven to have escaped the past few centuries wherein we find ourselves well beyond the chasm of darkness.
At this current moment in time, as if in a purgatory, we find ourselves in a lucid dream, in the eye of a storm, waiting for the winds of change to stir us once more from our somnambulism. But more likely it is from this drunken-slumber that it will be revealed that we are as Fortunato already chained, buried deep and irretrievable inside layers of wall within the catacombs.
"We are as parasites making tombs of the very carcass that we have destroyed."
We have already given up on ourselves, on our cultures, on our civilization and instead have turned to cheap amenities allocated by petty tyrants. We have indeed retreated within our homes, within our solipsistic lives, to become petty tyrants ourselves within our petty paradigms.
We have, in a few short generations, become professionals of working against each other rather than with and for each other.
And so it is, with our institutions and public works in decay, we have allowed these petty tyrants, these rat kings both of politics and industry, to capture our angst and turn us against one another and to convince us in our cynicism that indeed it all "is fucked;" unfixable. That only "they" can fix it.
As writer and historian Tom Holland has said, because we no longer believe in God, we also no longer believe in Satan, but Hitler. We no longer believe in Hell, but Auschwitz. We've abandoned the notion that it can always get worse, that there are always deeper levels to the Inferno, and we associate this evil to figures who represent the worst in others, but never ourselves. We don't imagine evil as something that moves to and fro the earth seeking to devour through seduction because, "We could never be Nazis, They are the Nazis."
And then there are those who, being aware of this, believe they have “integrated their shadow,” as a valid recusal to their participation in any future potentialities, as if it is a personal choice in a post-ironic world, and not some perennially unfurling reality of the collective unconscious haunting our best intentions for millenia wherein it becomes a decision between the lives of your sons and daughters and the alignment of emerging dictatorial morals that aren’t really so bad because, “At least they get things done.” And it is at this point we see that we find ourselves slipping back into a dark age, either ignorant of the matter, or simply numb to the fact and no longer caring.
In this contorted state, we have come to reject the divine or any notions of salvation. In an act of defiance, or perhaps in spite of its absence, we rail against notions of good and evil as we have attempted to defy beauty and to strip life of its unconscious meaning.
We have become Brutalists.
We have sought minimalism to wipe out the face of God, to remove his visage from our midst, to return ourselves to some blank slate from which we can imagine no heaven or hell; only a limbo between, wherein we drown out our intuitions with the white noise of blind-logic, pseudo-rationality, and weakly-borrowed and watered-down spirituality’s homogenized from their globalism spin cycle.
All this meant to serve us in our disbelief rather than place a concerted effort towards convictions of good faith.
Functionalism, utilitarianism, brutalism. These are the wellsprings of our dismal imaginations of a future rid of the stench of God, or even the gods and rituals of our ancestors for that matter, however severe the rubber band may come roaring back; springing from the collective unconscious again and again.
In this self-effacement, whatever vestigial remnants linger, their proper functions now long forgotten, are then inevitably dug up from the unmarked graves, their lifeless cadavers propped up for an array of ironic postmodern purposes, in an attempt to revivify the very bodies we once cursed as superstitious, and are now seeking to simulate and claim as our own creations within a paradoxical ceremony of necromancy.
Before this paradox was discovered (is unconsciously being discovered in real-time) the most prescient and immediate manifestation of our culture - architecture - began to reflect this notion of ours that we could do away with decorum.
The architects who designed the UN building (seen in The Brutalist) were obsessed with these notions that the decorative serves no function in the modern world; a reflection of our modern soul in the very building meant to serve as "uniting" the nations.
Its co-creator, architect, influential and leading member of the modern art movement, Le Corbusier, was also creator of the functionalist concept Ville Radieuse (or Radiant City). The actualization of this concept would produce what we now term as "housing projects.” Corbusier stated that styles were a “lie,” that houses were a "machine to live in," that "Decorative Art, as opposed to the machine phenomenon, is the final twitch of the old manual modes, a dying thing." And finally, "The religion of beautiful materials is in its final death agony."
One way we may be able to define the transcendent, through mediums of expression, could be defined as: Humanity’s longing to reach into his soul and pull out the unseen beauty of the divine to make manifest what is found therein.
If this is the case then such revulsion displayed by the modernists towards this innate human drive towards the transcendent can only be seen as a conscious defiance of our most intuitive consensus’; the ignoramus defying our instinctual proclivity towards the beautiful.
However, It would be unfair to charge the modernists and postmodernists with having wholesale dispensed with beauty within the arts entirely as is evident of our still feeling something from their works. But it has been in many ways the disillusioned response by our civilization ever since in reaction to this schizophrenic blank slatism; each of us unconsciously attempting to make sense of sixty multimillion dollar ink-blots, balloon dogs that sit in corporate structures, baby cribs, or toys in dog kennels without irony, and concrete structures whose utilitarian functions would bring a smile to Le Corbusier's ghost as its face haunts the cloned facades of prison structures, shopping centers and schools alike.
The Brutalist seems to suggest that its protagonist, in medias res to these stirrings, is moving in no particular direction other than working as an artist and human in a sort of intimate ecstasy in reaction and reflection to his surroundings. His mirror is one of brutalism, filtering the barren waste of his situation. A perfectly fine and justifiable representation of the reality of many, as even within its stark exteriors one can often find something truly, and uniquely revealing, and whose obstructions offer a much needed interruption to a monotonous skyline.
But in retrospect, these duplicitously reductionist forms have ultimately come to have been repeated ad nauseam until they, and their postmodern eventualities, now inescapably make up our most common vernacular across our countries landscape.
Because for decades now we have fallen for and followed this line of philosophy in our cultural blueprints, it is in this doubt, this doom, this fatalism and nihilism, we were, and continue to be, provided with two paths.
So far, we have chosen one that leads to these decisions wherein we derive no inherent meaning other than the purpose of something is to serve as a function, no more, no less.
In fact, the creed by which we have lived, where we have lacked convictions, is expressly stated by these architects, both literally and philosophically by Mies van der Rohe's: "Less is more."
So how has it been working?
Does it work for this film? Does it work for it aesthetically? Does it work for its thesis? Does it work as a marketing technique?
It may continue to work for Architectural Digest for decades running, or the swaths of “artists” who believe they have “seen it all,” and who confuse their “inspiration” for laziness, who return to these blank canvases as some sort of “revelatory” response to the noise of the past, and whose contempt for traditional beauty has been unconsciously instilled in them by bitter, and perhaps traumatized, post-War creators who have deafened the soul and blinded the vision of their successors of any alternative future.
Fortunately, we do have an alternative.
As the anthropologist David Graeber had said, “The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently."
As powerfully palpable as this film presents itself, so powerful that it caused a plunge so deep into my psyche that I could taste the other side, I think I reject the thesis of this film, if there even is one.
Although manically hopeful and with slivers of joy, as a whole The Brutalist seems so mired in its own depravity that it nearly doesn't have thesis or a general point. And does it need one? Well, apparently not as it seems to have registered well with the model of accolades and peer recognition.
But this is really the only conversation I’ve heard surrounding this picture. Nearly nothing seems to be made of what it is other than its stark facade. Though its emotions run generations deep, it does ultimately seem to resort to a resounding diatribe of those who would espouse that "everything is fucked."
As sad and in filth as this world can indeed be, and no matter how much I am myself convinced and sympathetic to this line of thinking at times, I know that, in accumulated analysis, this isn't close to being true, is it?
I often wonder if the arch of history has (apparently) bent towards the overall good despite our more base instincts that we act upon on any given day or if it is the millions of silent individuals who in spite of their more base instincts find a way to carry that arch on their backs one day at a time and we have found ourselves stumbling into the age we find ourselves now - questioning the intentions of all of those who have come before us.
I am starting to give our ancestors the benefit of the doubt. Because if they weren’t up for it how will we ever wish or hope or pretend to be?
Perhaps there are only miraculous things in existence today, for our benefit, that are owed to the fact that it is exactly because of those who, slowly but surely, resisted to fail prey to these everyday temptations, and who ensured that our world would follow the trends of the best of our ability, of our “nature,” of our Being.
Perhaps these people have always been among us. Perhaps for many ages they were even a minority, but owing to the minority principle, they eventually became the best of us who lived in defiance of this despair and saw to it that the lives we live would cater to their demands for a better world.
It is these types of humans that I find myself choosing to believe created the foundational vision for the United States, despite their relative hypocrisy. They would go one to be the ones to manifest this best nature in the building of the country and whose arm has held aloft that torch of immemorial light ever since. No matter how it may seem that it is lost to those tyrants in whom we mistakably concede defeat, it is worth keeping in mind that all those tyrants who came before have, so far, been outlasted by the preservation of this country's flame.
The arch of history is long and bends in the direction of the bold. Historically, these bold may have been indeed been bestial, depraved, demonic.
But as evident of our best of success, and growing affluence, they have also been decent, good, and becoming. And if this guiding light is to carry on we must be the strength which upholds its integrity.
If we are to follow the foibles of our country's worst characteristics, we are to commit a terrible disservice to all those who have tirelessly worked in the direction of our enlightenment. Forward, not into regressive parochialism, but into the time honored preservation of the traditions of our enlightenment. Not an enlightenment-blindness subjected to its own light, but in the light of faith, in one another, and in the best of our beliefs and institutions that, under constant and careful scrutiny, have, can and will have served us well - if only we want them to.
The film is then many things, great and terrible. It leaves the impression of a truly singular attempt at expressing other foreboding ideas that seem to lie deep within our country's collective unconscious, but are seen simmering day by day across its surface. It is a veritable microscopic study of this American essence; perhaps all of those souls whose spirit has been forgotten by the American Dream.
It does remind one of other (better) works before it. At its best, it is a stunning work of aesthetics and emotions. It is, in many ways, a film about getting art into the world (though it is, philosophically, not nearly as interesting or stimulating, not to mention “fun,” on this "meta" level as the architect metaphor of The House that Jack Built).
In some sense, it nails the truth of the worst; the most ugly American visage. But even in this sense, it is in some ways the poor man's There Will Be Blood. As palpably heavy and viscerally oppressive as it may be, it does not construct itself nearly as concisely or effortlessly as Paul Thomas Anderson’s American opus, nor its follow-up, another master stroke, and in many ways There Will Be Blood’s companion and equal in The Master. Each of which interact with many spirits while The Brutalist seems to really only engage with the one within its title.
What is omitted from this film then - though perhaps acknowledged at a glance - are the masses of individuals, the swaths of those who have given themselves to uphold the creed of the United States of America; whose lives inspired Emma Lazarus to invoke the very feelings that Laszlo felt when he arrived in America; a true feeling that we have seemed to stop believing, and only refer to in spite, or to justify populist revolt, or anarchic angst, or cynical disbelief.
The Brutalist seems to concede into this territory, the territory of the damned who abandoned hope upon entering, who see our country’s spirit as having gone to the wolves. It would be fine if it were to be an artistic statement unto itself. But within the context of this wholesale boast, within its spirit, its marketing, its subtext - its essence - it renders itself subject to wholesale refutal. I don’t wholesale reject the film, but it is hard to empathize with its demands that we wholesale accept it, as many seem to lazily comply.
I say no to those fatalists as I say no to those who think that our country's greatness is found in some parochial harkening of “greatness.” I say, what of those who would embrace this country with defiant hope against pessimism and with provocative joy against those who claim this country belongs to a tyrannical few. I say that that we each belong, each of us outcast without our consent, from lands to which we no longer belong, to find ourselves lost and confused, but found in our diversity in this, our foreign home:
"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!”
Two trailers played before this film that offer its viewers a fantasy of our past and where we find ourselves in the present.
One was the latest Superman, another sign indicative of our abandonment of the idea of God in reality, but nevertheless admit we are in need of its equal in our fictions - a savior to free us from existential threat. The other was a forthcoming picture by Ryan Coogler, which seems to promise the same service that Jordan Peele's Get Out did, which is primarily some sort of horror metaphor for the sins of America.
Both forthcoming films (as of the time of this writing), are presumably (I'm willing to stand corrected) fantasies constructed to deal with a complex reality that we are seemingly admitting is too hard to solve.
The Brutalist is ultimately not much different. It's like a Howard Zinn wet dream, imagining our past as brutal and indifferent, punctuated by small moments of glory under struggle, but ultimately never vindicated. I believe the first and second parts are true, but as is said, all we have to decide is what to do with the time given to us.
The film's resolution is then a decision into the baseless and erratic, as the only thing not rooted in its imagining, like Get Out, and ostensibly the forthcoming Sinners, are the very real effects of our emotional history. But even in The Brutalist, or "A People's History of the United States of America," we often see characters and people acting towards something else, against the nature of brutality and indifference.
And so I found myself pondering through that vapidly plotted epilogue, whose conclusion was as disappointing and unfulfilling as its Brutalism, somewhat stunned by my own reaction to it that this is not the idea America needs right now, nor is it very accurate.
It is perhaps vapid to even state that America is in need of a vision. And the one that it has: to Make America "Great" Again is often misconstrued by both its advocates and critics.
Its advocates would say that we have lost our way and that it, our country, ought to be restored to former glory: economically, morally, at its core. Its critics would say that it was never great, that these calls are merely harkenings towards a new type of populist facism, and that it has in actuality been quite awful for most of us, especially minorities, and that our greatness was merely an illusion of American exceptionalism.
What many are confusing, and even what the statement seems to be confusing, is that the slogan is suggesting that we should make America "Good" again. America wasn't always great or good, per se.
Those who plotted its course always oscillated between this “Greatness” and “Goodness,” and the end result plots us pretty accurately where we stand today. As these idealist visions began to burgeon the line of practice and preaching has always maintained a steady balance of both heavy criticism and praise. During that time we were indeed becoming great and have since then become the greatest country this world has ever seen.
But were we ever good?
The answer is obviously: not always. But as expressly stated and decidedly revealed so in our progress: Yes.
Always striving to better ourselves we have set the tone for the entire world this progress, slow and steady, and it has indeed shown through. We have, in a grand mess of a fashion, taken heed those words of Lazarus as the voice of our conscience as we have plotted ever so slightly towards the light.
So no, we ought not make America something it once was in the sense of a regression into past parochial political or industrial effort. This would be a great error in which many more people would needlessly suffer.
But in principle, in our moral guidance, we ought to restore America towards its core idea that we are at all times striving towards the greater good; a bold and progressive plight of its people into a dark and unknown future, carrying forth before us the torch of liberalism that we ensure that, for all who will uphold it, will see to it that its flame does not die out.
No, I am not advocating for propaganda. And I think this film may have indeed on some level been "necessary."
But on its own two feet it falls painfully short, it does not see the forest for the trees, and it seems to rely merely on the fact that it feels itself to be a work of art first, and a vague statement only as a weakly constructed, and contorted, afterthought. The latter of which, in its seeming recusal, is inspired by Corbet's Art House roots which have given him flimsy philosophical inspiration to cast towards concepts that, while each on their own may have worked, together have proved too bold and large for him to conduct.
When lost, he offers lewd acts in an already ugly picture to mask the fact that no real philosophical point has been posited and is banking that, in this confusion, audiences and critics alike will call it greatness.
He has decided to intermarry sparks of ideas with topics of real-world consequence that we see gloriously explored in PART 1, begin to fumble in PART 2, and ultimately face-plant magnificently; not offering the wrong thing, but offering nothing in conclusion.
However, Corbet’s ultimate vision may one day come true when his film finally finds its proper place: amongst so many other parallel pictures, confused and lost by their goals, and waiting to be discovered by some poor brain-dead actor who is fooled by its being there in the Criterion Closet, but nevertheless find themselves making its presence obligatory in the heavy tote they that carry like a burden back to their multimillion-dollar mid-century modern home in Los Angeles where it will remain unwatched until taken to a Goodwill by an undocumented maid during the estate sale.
This of course after the actor has decided that living in a Brownstone in New York City, with half the square footage, is a more romantic way to spend their life.
Beauty may yet win in the end.