The Brutalist: Adrien Brody; Art; Psychology; Psychoanalysis; Film; Movie; Bauhaus
Jonathan Rosen’s Memoir, The Best Minds, helped me
articulate something that I have known without the ability to describe for some
time. The artist who works in a physical
medium (the sculptor, painter, potter, weaver, etc. – as opposed to the
literary artist) works with things as they are, not as we represent them. Yes, the physical artist is often representing
something else, but the medium of expression is not words, which represent
objects, but objects themselves – stone, bronze, paint, clay, or cloth. The artist is (usually quite literally)
getting their hands dirty to create what we see and experience.
In The Brutalist, Adrien Brody plays László
Tóth, a fictional Hungarian born Jewish, German concentration camp surviving architect
who washes up on US shores penniless and with a shattered sense of himself. His wife and niece are still in Europe, but
in the east – perhaps being persecuted by the Russians, and the restrictive
immigration laws are not likely to let them immigrate. He is taken in by a cousin – a furniture salesman and interior decorator – and he exhibits some of his Bauhaus styled furniture in the very mid century lower
middle traditional show room in a somewhat seedy section of town.
The cousin is approached by the son of a wealthy man to
revamp the wealthy man’s library as a surprise birthday gift on a very tight time schedule while the father is
out of town. Tóth leads a crew in redesigning the man’s dark and ornate refuge
into a modern, spare room. They are
interrupted as they are finishing the design by the return of the father who is
incensed that there are workers in his house doing work that he hasn’t authorized,
and he kicks them out of the house. The
son, wounded by his father’s rejection of the present, refuses to pay for the
work, and the cousin kicks Tóth out of the shop and onto the streets to fend for himself, which he does by
picking up labor work and staying in a rooming house.
This is the skeleton of the story to this point, but there
is flesh on those bones. The flesh is
subtle though. This is a three-and-a-half-hour
film. I ran into a friend at the
intermission, and we talked about the pace as being Hitchcockian. He was
concerned that younger viewers would not stick with the film, though his two
twenty something kids had recommended it to him. I took the view that binge watching season
long shows in 4-, 6- or 8-hour intervals was training our kids to hang onto
more complicated material over longer periods of attention. While that is true, I agree that the subtlety
of what we are asked to attend to here is of a different order.
We observe that Tóth, a man of few words and
somewhat wild and unkempt appearance, is highly polished in his social
interactions. He uses his words politely. He cares about the people he comes in contact
with – not just his relatives, but also the homeless who are waiting in line
for bread with him. He is both not of
the class of people that he has been thrust in with, but also not above
them. If he is to be a Brutalist – the title
tells us he will – he is certainly also a humanist. And the room he creates, despite the
objections of the owner, is beautiful, subtle, and elegant – and he figures out
how to protect the books from the damaging effects of light while allowing the reader
to bathe in the glow of natural lighting, getting rid of the black out curtains that turned the library into a dark and uninviting den..
So, the room that Tóth created catches the attention of the media and it is featured in Look magazine and the owner seeks out the architect and hires him to create a community center – a gathering place that will include a library (of course), a religious chapel, gymnasium, and a concert hall. The owner has done his homework and knows that Tóth is a renowned European Bauhaus architect. He invites him to live on the grounds of his home and to oversee the work that will take place on part of his land. He also empowers his attorney, who is Jewish, to try to get Tóth’s wife and niece into the country.
Again, there is flesh on these bones. The owner is rich, but boorish. His two children, a son and a daughter, seem
to have some weird sexual chemistry between them. Tóth, unbeknownst to the owner, has become a
heroin addict and a porn user, despite his discomfort with going to a brothel
when he landed in the States. The person
he helped in the bread line was someone he worked with as a laborer and he has
now brought him on to help manage the construction project. There is a lot going on under the surface of
this very comfortable, slowly paced film and here, where the intermission
occurs, we are left wondering how all of the loose ends and undercurrents will
come together into a coherent package.
The first part of the film, the part of the film I have just
described, is titled The Enigma of Arrival.
The second part of the film is titled The Hard Core of Beauty. Then there is an epilogue: The First Architecture
Biennale. I am, for the moment, going to let it suffice that the second part delivers on much of what is promised in the
first. I will refer back to it, a bit,
from the epilogue, but I will focus on the epilogue because I think it is the most true to my
experience of the physical arts and artists.
In the epilogue, we move forward in time twenty years from the events of the first two parts.
We discover that, after the dramatic complications that led to the
completion of Tóth’s first major project in the United States – the building that
emerges out of the Hard Core of Beauty – Toth goes on to have a very successful
career, building multiple Bauhaus structures that have become iconic in their imprint
on the world and on the field of architecture.
What takes place at the Biennale is that a narrative is given to describe
the works – the work that we saw being constructed is the centerpiece, and
there is a narrative that describes how that work anticipates and lives on in
the other works that Tóth creates and are being celebrated.
The critical component of this speech, though; the piece of
it that seems most true to life for me, is that Tóth does not deliver it. What he has accomplished is articulated both in
pictures – the speaker has slides – but also in her words. She – his niece – provides the narrative of
the work that Tóth has created. The pictorially presented backstory for this is that Tóth is now quite old and feeble. He is being taken through the exhibit and
listens to the talk from a wheelchair. He
does not speak a line in this section of the movie. Perhaps he has had a stroke and can no longer
speak? Though the authors have provided a likely a backstory,
I think this leads to a brilliant articulation of the importance of the physical in
the expressive repertoire of some artists.
These artists are not dealing with the meaning of things, but with things as they
actually are.
Now you might think that Tóth is a poor speaker – or that he
can’t articulate what he is thinking or feeling. This is not the case – he is quite good at
arguing for the project to be completed as he has designed it. He is very good at expressing his disdain for
those who would alter it in order to save a penny here or there. He explains the model of the building to the citizens of
Bucks County, PA, and the reasons for constructing in the manner that he does
so that they will be able to use it in the ways that the owner of the land
intends. But this is not what is
described by the niece in the epilogue.
What we learn from the niece is not how and why Tóth built if for the
people, but how and why he built it for himself. What it was that the building
symbolized. But the symbol requires
translation. Though we have followed him
through the steps – and though we think we know him and something of his background,
and the struggles that he has connecting with a new land – and with a wife whom
he feared he would never see again; we have not understood the architecture of what
all that means to him. He has not
created (I don’t think) a symbol – but instead the thing itself. He might be able to explain it – at some
point he must have told the niece this story so that she can now tell it to us. But that is not the vehicle that he uses to
express what he feels in his bones. He
doesn’t describe his feelings, he makes them come to life in the buildings he
creates.
Though physical artists represent their thoughts and feelings by creating representational objects – I think this is a basic human
function. We are built to express
ourselves through action. We have been
selected by millions of years of evolution because we can change the
environment we live in – we can manipulate and move it. We are not just thinkers, but doers. One might even say that our thinking is a way
of interrupting - or, psychoanalytically, inhibiting and preventing our doing. As my
youngest daughter says to me with some regularity, “Use your words,” when I
have engaged in some impulsive action intended to fix a problem – like assuaging
my own hunger by taking something off of her plate that she would have been
happy to share if only I had asked.
Am I saying that art is primitive? Yes.
But does that mean we should abandon it?
Absolutely not. First, art requires
forethought. A supervisee treating a
patient in the state hospital talked about his “art” of nailing dead birds to
board. I disagreed with considering this
art. The “artist” was not preserving the
animals. He was not engaged in creating them
as a display – but simply tacking them in place. For the artists who work to get something
just right, they may or may not have a verbal concept that they are trying to
articulate. Is Michelangelo’s David a
representation of the divine in human form?
Perhaps – but it is certainly a representation of something that
Michelangelo felt in his bones needed to be expressed, and we have resonated
with that expression in a variety of ways – including, perhaps, feeling that it
is an expression of the divine in human form; the ways in which we can
approach something godlike in our human form and expression – including in our
expressing what we think and feel through art.
Tóth is brutal. He is
also brutalized. Both of these characterological aspects
of him are expressed in the creation of the work and in its meaning as
explained by his niece. As verbally
articulate as he is – and this actor, whose work was honored with an Oscar for
best actor – portrays Tóth as not just verbally but also physically and
facially expressive - Tóth’s ultimate expression is in the building. And the building is – to my eye – ugly. I think that many Bauhaus/Brutalist buildings are. They are austere – inhuman – clunky. In a word, brutal. And isn’t brutality part of the beauty of
human functioning? Don’t we achieve the
divine in spite of our earthly and complicated psychologies that include both love
and disdain? Or, maybe we achieve that beauty precisely because of our mapping ourselves closely to the world that we live in
– a world that the wealthy denizens of Bucks County alter to make it look like
we live in a more perfect world – and Tóth’s vision helps them achieve the
semblance of that, while not letting them forget the foundation – the deep and
complex foundation – that allows their lives of ease, worship, study and
communal activity to take place.
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