A friend of mine found the film The Brutalist to be ‘epic, beautiful, disturbing’. It was but I’d like to look into what ends these attributes serve. Its effects are contrived – like all art – but I would suggest that this movie is weirdly self-conscious in its contrivances, and that this distancing itself serves a Zionist-imperialist political end.
The first hint of this (unironic) detachment is the retro-style VistaVision logo, which we see at the start. This is not just a film which represents an era. It seeks to be somehow exemplary of that era, including the recuperation of the era’s cinematic technology. We are asked to suspend disbelief not just in a fictional representation of a story set in the mid-twentieth century, but also to momentarily forget our own present moment: why not believe we are watching a current film which was somehow made 80 years ago?
This sleight of hand serves the Zionist aims of The Brutalist. It wants to tell a story about Israel and America as though Israel’s crimes hadn’t yet been discovered. This is important because the only justification for continuing to enable Israel to murder and ethnically cleanse Palestinians is that one didn’t know about it. Of course, not knowing became impossible some decades ago for anyone who pays attention, and most recently has become impossible again for everyone else.
Holocaust backdrop
The holocaust forms the immediate background to the story. The film begins with a real recording of David Ben-Gurion’s announcement of the UN decision to found the state of Israel, played over scenes of the protagonist arriving in Ellis Island in 1947. The characters struggle against anti-Semitism in America throughout. In this case the anti-Semitism is conflated with artistic compromise. Architect László Toth, modelled on Ayn Rand’s Howard Roark, hero of her Nietzschean epic The Fountainhead, battles heroically against mediocrity and public opinion, and finally enjoys a triumph of single-mindedness against the odds. Toth is assisted in realising his vision by a brutal American capitalist (played by Guy Pearce) who – and I’m going to do you a favour and start giving the plot away – rapes him along the way (don’t ask).
Jewish solidarity is available but always precarious. Toth’s religiously uncommitted cousin first professionally helps but, when the going gets tough, abandons him, having already married a Catholic. His niece, who may also have been raped, in this case by the capitalist’s son, emigrates to Israel. The holocaust had literally rendered her speechless, but she recovers her voice and the first words we hear are her announcement of the decision to make Aliyah (Jewish settlement of Palestine and a basic tenet of Zionism).
She reappears later to deliver the last line of the film, at a retrospective of her now-famous uncle’s work at the 1980 Venice Biennale: ‘Despite what they say, it’s the destination, not the journey, that’s important’. The end of the Promised Land, in other words, justifies the means. Establishing this teleology of Israel is the aim of The Brutalist.
How do its formal characteristics and content work to that end?
The following report of a meeting in New York with the lead performer Adrian Brody contains a clue: ‘Brody said during the interview that his own Hungarian grandfather provided major inspiration for his voicework as the fictional Toth. Fans of the film have praised Brody’s commitment to his role, despite media controversies in recent weeks that director Brady Corbet used artificial intelligence to tweak Brody’s accent in post-production.
The grainy cinematography, opening credits typography, the use of archival footage, and architectural references all go to create the effect of a film which was made in the 1940’s or 50’s. But artificial intelligence allows the film both to take things further in its commitment to authenticity, and at the same time to radically foreclose the possibility of actual authenticity.
To begin with, the 70mm cinematography isn’t used as it might’ve been originally, to extend spatial depth. In fact, the non-archival establishing shots have a strangely two-dimensional flatness, like animated Edward Hopper paintings, and much of the dialogue is shot in extreme close-up.
Fake lifelikeness
But even more revealing is the biographical material. The director Corbet closely modelled the fictional architect’s struggle to build his masterwork on that of the real Jewish-Hungarian architect Marcel Breuer, who designed a church for Benedictine monks in America in the early 1950s. Anyone not acquainted with Breuer’s story might accept the conflation of heroic archetype with real-life character and events. But, as with Brody’s accent, at root the lifelikeness is radically fake. Corbet has cited an insider account of the Breuer church as a source for the film, despite describing it as ‘a pretty dry account of the struggles Breuer went through’. As Oliver Wainwright in The Guardian put it: ‘The reality clearly wasn’t spicy enough for his melodramatic intentions. Breuer wasn’t a heroin addict, and the monks didn’t rape him in a quarry. Nor did the real-life architect really lose his temper much, beyond the occasional politely worded letter’.
Even the set is fake> Shot usually from below at mid-distance, it reminds us of the monumentalism of King Vidor’s 1949 film of The Fountainhead. Yet when we get up close, concrete columns spring implausibly out of the ground without any evidence of foundations having been laid, with diminutive reinforcement steel bars poking out of the top. What’s important is not that the director has failed to create a believable image of something (after all, probably only people with experience of construction sites like your present reviewer would notice the fake concrete columns). The point is that this film is based on its realistic effects and yet does so with complete fakery.
‘Depthlessness’
All together this seems to have the characteristics which the late Frederic Jameson associated with postmodernism: radical ‘depthlessness’, pastiche instead of parody, or Plato’s theory of the simulacrum (a copy without an original). In this sense, the use of AI to get Brody’s accent right is the perfect ‘original copy’. Only Hungarians would notice if the accent was slightly off, and with due regard to Hungarians (and from the point of view of someone who’s cringed his way through countless ‘Irish’ accents over the years), this might have been an acceptable fudge.
By way of comparison, the award-winning sound engineer of Jonathan Glazer’s Zone of Interest took sound realism very seriously. He wasn’t content to make a copy of a 1940s motorbike, but searched far and wide to find an original, in order to reproduce the noise of the engine. But in that case, we hear an actual 1940s motorbike, so the film of it is a copy of an original. The ‘large language model’ used to tweak Brody’s accent is presumably a giant database of sounds, all disaggregated from their contexts and reassembled with Brody’s voice to make a ‘perfect’ Hungarian accent. Here the director’s commitment to authenticity serves radically inauthentic purposes. This may be how Brody would sound with a perfectly Hungarian accent, but what we hear is some sort of robot, not Adrian Brody.
‘Israel as the refuge of Jews’ is radically inauthentic in exactly this way. It is made up of real historical events (the holocaust, anti-Semitism), assembled according to a certain logic (‘people have a right to defend themselves’), but it wasn’t a refuge for Jews. Israel may have been partly conceived as such by its original advocate Theodor Herzl, but from the start it was planned by him and others as something else altogether, namely a European settler colony. Such a project was only ever violent and murderous, and required racism and ethnonationalism to sustain its ideology.
Metaphor
More to the point, European settler colonies in this sense have always been imperialist to the core: they can only survive with massive military force. It is not stretching too far to suggest that this is represented by the Guy Pearce character in The Brutalist. Let me propose therefore that we consider the ‘temple on the hill’ which forms the centrepiece of The Brutalist as a metaphor for Israel itself.
Here’s how it works: the story told by this film is one of an attempt to construct a beautiful multi-purpose building on a hill with a mystical religious space at its core. The story shows how this was only possible thanks to a Faustian pact with a violent American gentile capitalism which, despite all its compromises and violence, was justified in the end, because the result is a ‘Great Work of Architecture’. The site of the building is the empty frontier, free of people, and merely in need of a little ‘culture’, which the European émigré will dutifully provide (together with some pure Carrara marble from the Old World).
The dis- and re-assembly of all these tropes is what makes The Brutalist both ‘hyper-real’ and pure propaganda. It’s an epic which steps up to the mark in 2025 to try to resuscitate an ailing Zionist-imperialist ideology, at a moment of peril, when Americans and Europeans are once again in danger of waking up to the Real of Israel (and maybe by extension, to that of the US Empire itself). This is of course why Trump, like Reagan in 1982, prevailed upon the Israelis to take their violence out of public view for the time being. Perhaps the ‘epic, beautiful, disturbing’ effects are really nothing other than symptoms of the hubris of this tragic enterprise?
Mark Price is an architect working in Dublin. He is member of the Irish Anti-War Movement, IPSC and Irish Neutrality League.
