Listening to The Brutalist

Nothing is of its own explanation

Last night I saw The Brutalist at the Music Box; it was supposed to be a 70mm projection (in VistaVision, no less), but they were having projector troubles and we had to settle for digital projection instead. It was nonetheless a remarkable experience. Cinematically breathtaking and audacious (especially in the first half), with towering performances by Adrien Brody, Felicity Jones, and an indelibly malevolent Guy Pearce, this story of a misunderstood Jewish architect rhymes in peculiar ways with the equally audacious, though far less successful Megalapolis. László Tóth does not invite us to plow the riches of his Emersonian mind; he is far too damaged for that. His primary trauma—surviving Buchenwald—is reactivated by his inability to assimilate into a triumphal postwar America in which, as the villain’s smirking failson puts it, “We tolerate you.” As is so often the case when artists are depicted on screen, we are asked to take the hero’s genius for granted, but Brody embodies the anguish of Tóth’s consciousness with total conviction. He is an altogether more plausible and tragic human than Adam Driver’s Cesar Catilina, if a lot less memeable.

Even before the film I was haunted by its soundtrack. The trailer does an incredible job of setting up the world of the film with Daniel Blumberg’s hypnotically menacing yet lyrical score. If Charles Ives had been asked to score a Steven Spielberg movie, it might have sounded like this:

I’m really just talking about the first thirty seconds, when all we see is the credits, then the chaos of the ship bringing Lászlo Tóth to America, and then that incredible upside-down shot of the Statue of Liberty. A little on the nose, you might say, just like one of the later plot developments that I won’t spoil. But Brady Corbet, the movie’s 36-year-old director, isn’t particularly interested in subtlety—except maybe in the film’s handling of the Holocaust.

The Brutalist does not depict the Holocaust directly: there are no guard towers, no striped pajamas, no crematoria. The nearest glimpse we get is in the opening scene, when a young woman, Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy), Lászlo’s niece, sits down trembling in a chair in an unadorned room, wearing the nunlike headscarf and plain gray dress of a concentration camp prisoner, to be interrogated by offscreen voices about her connection to Lászlo’s wife Erzsébet. Zsófia doesn’t speak; she has been rendered mute by her trauma. Only much later in the (very long) film, as a grown married woman does she speak, announcing to her aunt and uncle her intention to make aliyah to Israel, as though the prospect of being de-deracinated has restored her voice to her. Her silence up to that point, like Lászlo’s inability to respond to the naive question, “What was the war like?”, surrounds and deepens the depths of this film’s response to the Shoah.

All this struck me with personal force, for the film’s principal characters are Hungarian Jews (and the movie, though set principally in Pennsylvania, was mostly filmed in Hungary) and survivors of the extermination camps, just like my mother and her parents. Judit Montag was much younger than Zsófia and did not herself experience the camps, but my grandparents’ silence about what they’d experienced, and the two years of her young life she’d been separated from them, yawned like a gulf inside of her, a gulf that I later put my ear to like a seashell, listening for the roar. The sound of the Hungarian spoken in the film (Brody and Jones do a great job of sounding like native speakers of a famously difficult language) is a sound I remember from my childhood, drifting in snatches from the Queens kitchen where my step-grandmother Sophia and her friends, all fellow survivors, gossiped and smoked. Whatever they were talking about, it was surely not the camps.

I have not yet seen The Zone of Interest, though I wish I had seen it when it was in theaters, when it would have been possible to be as immersed in its soundtrack as I was in that of The Brutalist. Much more explicitly a Holocaust film, The Zone of Interest, as I understand it, depicts Auschwitz by not depicting it: we see instead the idyllic household of the camp’s commandant and his family, while in the distance industrial sounds, screams, and the occasional gunshot make what is not shown all the more palpable, dreadful, and real. Not the thing, but the suppression of the thing, as a good actor will not “act” grief but instead do all they can to repress it, doing as little as possible. The action, as I understand it, is in the tension between sound and image, where what we see is the opposite of what we can imagine.

The Brutalist has a similar logic when it comes to the Holocaust: you don’t need to be shown it or hear the characters talk about their trauma because, as in the Palmolive commericals of old, you’re soaking in it. One of the more remarkable moments comes in a scene in which we see the Tóth family in synagogue on Yom Kippur, praying the Vidui: the confession of sins, including those we’ve never acknowledged or don’t even remember having committed. The a-capella sing-song of the prayer, punctuated by a ritual knock with the right fist on the heart, is gradually overtaken by the signature metallic knocks and mournful horns of Blumberg’s score. Piano strings hiss and skitter as the voices become more abstract, straying into animal-like cries and distant screams. These are people more sinned against than sinning, but their sins are no less real for that.

At the movie’s end—not to spoil anything—a very old Lászlo Tóth, who like his wife now uses a wheelchair and like his niece has lost the power of speech—attends the 1980 Venice Biennale, at which his now fortysomething niece makes a speech about Tóth’s brutalist aesthetic, explaining that, like Wallace Stevens’ Snow Man, his buildings have nothing to express beyond themselves: nothing that is not there and the nothing that is. Yet she also suggests that the Institute he devoted so much of his life to building, with its floating virtual cross projected by sunlight on an altar of Carrara marble, was inspired by his experience of the camps, as though he were compelled by his trauma to recreate the architecture of genocide.¹ It’s something of a Rosebud moment, yet it has less explanatory power—than what Blumberg has embedded in his soundtrack, or the silent face of the younger Zsófia.

Guy Pearce’s evil industrialist, having regaled his guest with a disturbing story about how he took revenge on his estranged grandparents, asks Tóth to explain his work. Here is his reply—you can listen to the whole thing on the soundtrack album on the track “Monologue”:

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’s 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 the world. I already anticpate the communal rhetoric of anger and fear. A whole river of such frivolities may flow undammed. But my buildings were devised to endure such erosion of the Danube shoreline.

A cube is a container; the unsettlingly beautiful soundtrack of The Brutalist contains all the brutality that the film refuses to show. We experience it, instead.

1. I am reminded of another recent Holocaust movie—Jesse Eisenberg’s A Real Pain, which only comes into palpable contact with its subject when the characters visit Majdanek in Poland—the only fully intact extermination camp. This movie doesn’t seem to have much reason for existing, other than to watch Kieran Culkin do his patented charming tormented asshole routine, but the glimpses of those fields and structures, and the actors’ shocked faces, offer viewers a kernel of the real.