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The Brutalist is a “visually arresting”[1] mash-up of purloined identities whose only coherence comes from the Jewish revolutionary spirit, which is the film’s hidden grammar. Revolution results in a world turned upside-down, which is what happened to America after World War II, largely because of the Jewish immigrants who arrived as refugees from the Holocaust. The visual representation of that revolutionary spirit is epitomized by the film’s edgy cinematography, which portrays the main character (played by Adrian Brody) Laszlo Toth’s arrival in America symbolically by treating us to an upside-down shot of the Statue of Liberty.
Toth is a Jewish immigrant and Holocaust refugee who comes to New York for a better life. He is also an accomplished architect who learned his trade under Walter Gropius at Bauhaus Dessau. A common experience among immigrants of that generation, Jewish or otherwise, is that America did not recognize their old-world credentials, setting the stage for a classic immigrant drama that is as old as Benjamin Franklin, who arrived in Philadelphia penniless from Boston and proceeded to become the classic American success story. Among his many accomplishments, Franklin created the United States of America. Jewish immigrants after World War II turned that country upside down. According to the New York Times, the newspaper which helped Jews accomplish that feat:
One of the first images in “The Brutalist” is an upside-down shot of the Statue of Liberty, a disorienting, topsy-turvy angle that conveys László’s literal point of view as he emerges from the darkened depths of the ship that has carried him to America. The statue is already heavily freighted with complex, contradictory meaning that László embodies and is a harbinger of his destabilized story. It’s also an emblem of [Director Brady] Corbet’s ambitions.[2]
Precisely. Brady Corbet can now chime in with Kate Winslet, who said “now I’ve done my fucking Holocaust movie” after winning that year’s obligatory Holocaust Oscar for playing a child molester in The Reader. When it comes to ambitious young directors like Brady Corbet, the surest way to garner an Oscar nomination is by directing a Holocaust film. But as last year’s edgy film Zone of Interest proved, without showing one scene from Auschwitz, the Holocaust can only be shown obliquely after Steven Spielberg had hot water come out of the showerheads instead of poison gas in Schindler’s List. The Brutalist takes this desire to evoke what no one dare examine any more, i.e., what actually happened in the concentration camps, one step further by removing the mise en scene to America in the years following World War II.
After turning the Statue of Liberty, the symbol of the immigration story, upside down, Corbet upends the moral order by making Toth’s first stop after getting of the boat a whore house. The viewer is then treated to the first of a number of increasingly graphic sex scenes, including clips of actual 1940s-era pornography which disfigure this film. The scene also introduces the viewer to the sexual double standard which renders the film incoherent. Sex is a sign of revolutionary commitment when Toth gets a blow job from a whore, but it is a sign of repugnant terminal decadence when the scion of the Presbyterian industrialist who is Toth’s patron sits down by a stream next to Toth’s niece. Toth projects his own sexual decadence onto the culture which welcomed him as a justification for Jewish resentment and sotto voce condemnations of America as a horrible place, which finds vindication at the end of the film in a bizarre turn of the plot whose only explanation is Jewish resentment seeking a cause for its existence. But more on that later.
The sex scenes in The Brutalist were so disorienting that they spawned an entire thread on Reddit trying to make sense of them. Odd Emotion5 concludes:
Ultimately, the sexuality in The Brutalist feels like an ambitious but clumsy way to explore identity, displacement, and the cracks in the American Dream. It’s meant to unsettle, and it clearly does, but whether it succeeds in enriching the narrative or simply derailing it is up for debate. Your frustration with how these scenes inject themselves into the story is valid because they often feel like they’re vying for attention rather than organically developing the themes.[3]
Another blogger cited the conversation which takes place between Laszlo and his wife Erzsebet after they have been united in American thanks to the generosity of Laszlo’s patron and the acumen of his lawyer. Instead of expressing gratitude, Mrs. Toth whispers about visions of Toth’s infidelities, but they immediately get projected onto the WASP industrialist as examples of how horrible America is. According to Odd Emotion, the brothel scene expresses Toth’s “disconnect from intimacy and his inability to feel grounded, even in America, the land of his supposed dreams.” Anyone whose thought was grounded in a psychology rooted in an understanding of the moral law would have said that the cause Toth’s inability to feel “grounded” in America was his violation of the moral law. Sin causes alienation, not liberation as the revolutionary Jews still tell us. The guilt which invariably accompanies that alienation then gets projected onto the host country as anti-Semitism, which then justifies more subversive activity, which eventually creates genuine animosity against the group which tried to help the Jews escape from Hitler. This vicious circle explains the hidden grammar of The Brutalist and why the viewer feels so dissatisfied with a plot that needs a deus ex machina to resolve its internal contradictions.
The Brutalist is a Holocaust film, apres la lettre. It is about what happened to America after a war which became synonymous with Jewish suffering in concentration camps, largely because Hollywood created the Holocaust genre over the last 80 years to secure control over American culture. In case you missed the Senate hearings, every time Senator Josh Hawley caught a Jew in the Biden administration with his hand in the till or his pants down in flagrant dereliction of his duty, that Jew invariably replied, “I have relatives who died in the Holocaust” as a way of deflecting any further criticism.
In confecting The Brutalist, Director Brady Corbet has taken a number of narratives surrounding immigration to America and turned them upside down by integrating all of them into the Jewish revolutionary spirit as the lens which unites them. Revolution turns the world upside down. Corbet documents that inversion in his bid to get as many Holocaust-reserved Oscars on a miniscule $10 million budget by describing what Jews like the fictional Laszlo Toth did to the country which gave them asylum from the Nazis. The Brutalist seethes with Jewish hatred of America, as manifested by the troubled relationship between Protestants, Catholics, and Jews, America’s three main ethnic groups after World War II.
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