The Brutalists
American Samizdat: It's them or us
It was from the start my intention that American Samizdat not offer simply conventional political commentary in resistance, that it represent the human and artistic spirit that arises and creates in opposition to oppressive domination — and to brutalism. Thank you to all who support me in this endeavor by subscribing. Special thanks to those who feel able to support me with a paid subscription, and that includes my latest paid subscribers , , and , who has actually been paid for some time, though I didn’t realize it. Thank you, Brew! Thank you to the multiple paid subscribers who reupped their subscriptions over the past couple of months. Profound thanks to my founding subscribers, all of whom have renewed their founding support as recently as this month.
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One way of talking about brutalism — what prompts me now — is by talking about Brady Corbet’s film The Brutalist. It’s protagonist, László Tóth, a Hungarian Holocaust survivor and new postwar immigrant to the United States, is an architect. He works — or worked — in the style of Brutalism, a style “characterized by raw, exposed concrete and bold geometric forms.”
Brutalist architecture is a style of building design developed in the 1950s in the United Kingdom following World War II. With an emphasis on construction and raw materials, the aesthetic evolved as reconstruction efforts were underway in the post-war era. “If modernism is about architecture being honest, Brutalist design is about architecture being brutally honest. Forms are as simple as can be and materials are stripped to be as bare and raw as possible.”
The origin of the label is often said to be the French beton brut, meaning raw concrete: “During the 1950s, they began to use the term to describe their approach to modernism which rejected nostalgia for earlier architectural styles and tendencies to embellish structure.”
The building I’ve most hated in my life, the old Whitney Museum, on Madison Avenue in New York, exemplifies Brutalism. (The new Whitney, in the Manhattan’s old Meat Packing District, on the other hand, oh, yes.) If it wasn’t literally Brutalist, and certainly less brutally imaginative, the socially and soul-crushing utilitarian structures of the Soviet era certainly could serve in oppressive dystopian effect, especially en masse.
I found my way into thinking more deeply about Corbet’s film by contemplating why its brief, ending “Epilogue” falls so flat. As Dana Stevens of Slate points out, along with so many others, the film is a formal powerhouse. Innovative would be going too far, but what vision, what dynamic energy. One could argue without too much effort that the film speaks in its own raw, viscerally direct and honest, Brutalist style. It’s epic in sensory scope and impact, a flat board to the brow ridge of any who watch it, though with a graphic beauty beyond any available from the architecture.
The film’s early, upside-down, then sideways Statute of Liberty on Tóth’s arrival from Europe takes its place now among the iconic images of the culture, and what a time for it to enter the culture. But it isn’t just that static image.
The whole opening sequence, so close up at times that visually it’s even merely plastic, then graphic — just light, dark, texture, and movement — before only marginally emerging into narrative effect before Tóth’s own emergence into the light and that upside down, sideways view of the Statue. The sequence isn’t so much claustrophobic or simply subjective as instead vitally expressive of all of Tóth’s immediate recent, personal, overwhelming experience of the war. It substitutes in effect for what would have been in a different film his tortured backstory of suffering through the whole war, so that when the camera — Tóth — emerges into the light under Daniel Blumberg’s resounding four-note French Horn theme, with its dramatic bombast, we can feel the immeasurable energy of Tóth’s emotional release.
What we see isn’t the usual long shot of a ship entering New York Harbor, followed by a full shot of refugees standing at the rails staring up at Liberty, with, then, a following close up of tender deliverance upon an arriving face — what my father and all of my grandparents would have experienced. It’s upside down. It’s all upside down, and when Tóth, soon enough, reunites with his cousin Attila in Philadelphia, the overwhelming emotional reunion is so affecting, it feels it might be coming at the end of a three-and-a-half-hour film rather than at its start. Yes, there’s joy. But there’s pain. A lot of pain.
The film is a story of that pain: a story of pain, brutally delivered over and over.
Stevens rightly observes that despite the film’s formal dynamism, its refugee story during the film’s pre-intermission first half is largely conventional, though superbly rendered and captivating. The film takes a different turn in the second half. The formal beauty remains. (The sequence in which Tóth’s synagogue observance with wealthy American Jewish benefactors segues into a slow, birds eye, increasingly cloud-covered and culminating, fiery train crash simply stuns.) But the story becomes, now, very particular, less clearly universal. I won’t discuss how. And the pain, delivered and experienced by almost all, only increases — continuing pain from the past, newly experienced pain.
Where is it all going?
Then comes the epilogue, years into the future, and so much of the film’s dramatic conflict is left unresolved, in not fully completed narrative or character arcs. Potentially cathartic confrontations have ended miserably and without clarity, with exact fates left unrevealed. We learn of destinies in unexplanatory ways that provide characters and viewers no satisfactory sense of resolution.
What we can know from the ending is that there has been no end to the pain — yet there has been, nonetheless, for Tóth, artistic achievement. A war-traumatized character who for most of the film does not speak offers the last voice we hear, and that voice turns around the reassuring cliché (truism, to be kinder) that it isn’t the destination; it’s the journey that counts.
The voice says in reference to Tóth, on the contrary, It isn’t the journey, it's the destination.
It is what, in the end, is left behind. Balanced against the pain.
What to make of this in our self-comforting age, the age of “the Gift,” as I have called it?
Seek detachment from the world’s woe, we are told, we tell ourselves and others — do yoga, meditate, be a stoic, focus on what love we still have and on the creative process, not the results we can’t control. In post-World War II America, so long, so well protected from the ills of the wider world (the gift), one can do that. Everyone is after it — their best life.
But The Brutalist seems to say, No, one can’t detach. There’s no escape from the pain. There may be periodic respite from suffering — Tóth gets some — but after all, the Buddhists didn’t pull the First Noble Truth out of a hat.
What counts is what you made of it in the end. In a brief epilogue, a final verbal statement, Corbett offers no idea of how to measure that achievement, no criteria of evaluation — for an artist, for a life — though for an artist it begins, to be sure, with work accomplished. What you made of it — life, the pain, the suffering, which you couldn’t control — through the work you could and did.
Tóth is a Brutalist architect, but he is, at his worst, in his ego and monomaniacal artistic drive, a brutalist as a person. A far greater brutalist is his wealthy American benefactor, Harrison Lee Van Buren. Unfettered American capitalism and oligarchic wealth function, in the film and in the world, brutally. The Nazis ruled, conquered, and devastated all around them, in reality and forever in our imaginations, as a brutalitarian regime. Donald Trump, I said the very first time I wrote about him, in 2016, is “a brute in a suit.”
Early in Trump’s first presidency, the Atlantic’s Adam Serwer analyzed the defining characteristic of Trumpist brutalism in a simple statement that remains now permanently with us: “the cruelty is the point.”
Trumpism is brutalism. The worldwide reactionary movement sweeping the democratic and the already authoritarian worlds is a brutalitarian movement. What is brutalitarianism? What is brutalitarianism reacting against?
The Renaissance, the scientific revolution, the Enlightenment, the modern humanism that emerged from them all, the entire profound, evolutionary transformation of Western Civilization from the 14th-18th century still changing our world. The forces of brutalitarianism — might-makes-right domination and conquest — had ruled for most of tribal human history. With the Roman adoption, at last, of Christianity as the state religion, there appeared a taming effect, but, in truth, in acceding to Christian theology, Empire had really just donned a divine cover for conquest, and the Church employed the brutalism of Empire to further its own expansionism, in a spiritual imperialism of the faith. We see the same in Islam in its sphere: Muhammed was a warrior general. The Pope – God’s bureaucrat-in-chief – rather employed others as his generals, from among the faithful of the nations.
Imperialism is brutalism with a ruling ideological face, a rationale disseminated among the populace to comfort, sustain, and justify. Notions of national singularity and greatness are the mate de coca, the khat of the citizenry, sedating it against the brutalism. By the mid-19th century, the idea had begun to spread, as Matthew Arnold, put it, of the “melancholy, long withdrawing roar” of the “Sea of Faith.” But “sea,” intended or not, was a synonym for hegemony, and “faith” was the complex of brutalism and theology that had ruled for centuries.
Brutalism, in apparent retreat, had nonetheless persisted to contend, and it will reassert itself, as it does now.
Colonialism is a brutalism. The slave trade and institutionalized national slavery, obviously, are brutalism. Lebensraum, by any name or action at any time — aimed at Austria, Czechoslovakia, Ukraine, Canada, or Greenland — is a brutalism. Blood and soil, Völkisch nationalism, party or theological dictatorships, illiberal, so-called “Christian” democracies, and every form of autocracy are brutalisms.
People who think themselves civilized may nonetheless behave as brutalists. The late-stage British Empire provides the example, with elevated conceptions of refined domestic culture buttressing the barbarisms of imperial expansion and colonial rule. Writes Nuzhat Amin, quoting Patrick Brantlinger,
It goes without saying that empires would put a certain emphasis on their own value systems. Brantlinger points out that even though the Empire works through military conquests and economic exploitation — it embodies at the same time a “highly idealistic but nonetheless authoritarian scheme of cultural domination.” The chivalry of romances came to be neatly tied in with the chauvinism of political domination and cultural hegemony of the Empire. The domestic front played a part in fostering ‘conservative political values’ as much as it enabled the spurring of “missionary zeal”, humanitarian duty and a “service ideal.”
Brutalism had, yes, persisted, but to many in the late 19th century Empire, it appeared in retreat before a soft and expanding humanism. During this time, G.W. Steevens became in his short 30 years the leading and emblematic war correspondent of his time, publishing many accounts and multiple books, such as With Kitchener to Khartum. Amin quotes Brandlinger again — quoting Steevens:
Toward the end of the century, the war correspondent George W. Stevens [sic] found that he had to talk down “the new humanitarianism” and defend “brutality” as the only course of action: “we became an imperial race by dealing necessary pain to other men…Civilisation is making it too easy to live… A wiser humanitarianism would make it easy for the lower quality of life to die. It sounds brutal, but why not? We have let brutality die out too much.” [Emphasis added]
So preposterous did it all seem to the well-known humanitarian reformer of his time Henry S. Salt, pacifist friend to and influence on Mahatma Gandhi, that he produced a satirical pamphlet, The Brutalitarian, subtitled “A Journal for the Sane and the Strong.” Its motto quoted from Steevens: “We have let brutality die out too much.”
But others conceived of brutalism entirely without satire. The extraordinarily wide-ranging and peculiar international career of the Nietzsche-influenced, New Zealand-born Arthur Desmond, writing under the pseudonym Ragnar Redbeard now resonates within the Trumpist alt-right. Desmond-Redbeard’s lasting contribution comes to us in his 1896 book Might Is Right or The Survival of the Fittest:
This book is a reasoned negation of the Ten Commandments—the Golden Rule–the Sermon on the Mount—Republican Principles—Christian Principles—and "Principles" in general. It proclaims upon scientific evolutionary grounds, the unlimited absolutism of Might, and asserts that cut-and-dried moral codes are crude and immoral inventions, promotive of vice and vassalage.
And more,
“The natural world is a world of war; the natural man is a warrior; the natural law is tooth and claw. All else is error.”
“Women and children BELONG to man; who must hunt for them as well as for himself. He is their lord and master, in theory and in fact.”
“The African, Mongolian, Semite, or Negro breeds are all fundamentally different in formation, constituents, and character; from men of Aryan descent. … Some men ARE born better, born nobler, born braver than others.”
Gilroy Garlic Festival gunman referred to 'Might is Right' manifesto before shooting
Fear, division, dehumanization, demonization, cruelty, persecution, domination.
Brutalism since the beginning.
Regimes that rule according to these drives are brutalitarian regimes. We dreamed after the monstrous and cataclysmic brutalitarian resurgences of the mid-20th century that we had gained control over the brutalist urge in the tribal human psyche, but we were wrong.
“Performative masculinity” is a puffed chest with a self-conscious, self-affirming story to tell instead of a land to pillage, a Visigoth wielding a mirror instead of a battle axe. But afforded the opportunity, the performative masculinity of might-is-right domination will fulfill itself. It courses through Trumpism. It now governs the United States as the ethos — fully embraced or blindly acceded to — of its electorate.
The proper analysis of our situation will not be found in the implicated political journalist’s intramural perceptions of more effective Democratic messaging and strategy. What we are experiencing — on a scale, through the world-power United States, never before seen — is the latest upsurge in a long historical struggle to shape human destiny and the ends of civilization.
The voice at the end of The Brutalist says, It isn’t the journey, it's the destination. However much or little we choose to assent to that full declaration, it reminds us nonetheless that ends count — what we achieve and what the human endeavor on the earth will amount to.
Soon after I saw The Brutalist, I watched the end of one of Lawrence O’Donnell’s MSNBC programs. He was telling a story of NBA-great and O’Donnell friend Bill Russell and the question, according to Russell’s daughter Karen, her father always asked new NBA players about the opportunity they’d been given, the question Karen asked O’Donnell, he told us, when he began his, then, new show fourteen years ago.
A question that might be asked of anyone of us who has lived in the fortunate beneficence of The Gift these seventy-five years post-World War II.
“What are you going to do with it?”
AJA
Poet. Storyteller. Dramatist. Essayist. Artificer.
How interesting the turn from the brutality of architecture to the film. I have never seen the movie, but it sounds intriguing. I don't remember any brutalist-style buildings in Soviet Russia. MB., because they used old buildings of 19century to cover up their brutality, so to speak. However, the brutalist style was explained more by the modernists' understanding of the necessity, as the Russian Constructivist architecture was banned by Communists later in 1940.
Art and Trump: Jay, you managed to put the paradox together and write another amazing essay about how we must choose the former and fight the latter.