The Iron Law of What Happened

Magic, art, the dreamworld of history and The Brutalist.

I recently watched The Brutalist. It was a cinematic experience that I needed. Maybe it wasn’t a perfect movie, but I’ll skip the nit-picking. Anyone who says they could’ve done it better is usually someone who never could’ve done it at all.

The patron

In the film, a fictional architect played by Adrien Brody designs and builds what seems to be a rec center in suburban Pennsylvania in the 1950s. He’s obsessed and uncompromising, aided and hindered at every step by a wealthy patron.

The patron has need of magic, but can’t articulate what he wants or why he wants it. And the architect can’t explain what he wants to do, or he wouldn’t be allowed to do it. The architect can only build what he needs to build by disguising his aims, and giving the patron more than the patron asked for.

And when the architect delivers, the patron is as amazed as he is ashamed, as grateful as he is resentful. Their relationship ends badly.

The cost of magic

The film isn’t really about brutalism, but about the need for - and the incredible difficulty - of magic in the real world.

In the middle of the film, the architect tells his wife that he’s agreed to take a pay cut to cover the cost of making the ceilings of the rec center higher. At the time, the couple is living in a tiny apartment. She just nods, silent and understanding.

The scene may strike a 21st-century audience as madness. Money is always tight, and non-financial values can be hard to find. For the audience, maybe it can be explained by trauma. Or it’s that stock character in the artist fantasy - a dutiful spouse who shares the artist’s faith, if not their vision, even in the depths of poverty and social marginalization.

The function of magic

But the architect’s wife understands more than the audience at that point. She understands what he’s doing, and how intensely it matters. What he’s doing isn’t simply a personal obsession. It’s a peculiar form of magic that the film hints at in its final scenes.