The Brutalist is Not About the American Dream

This was originally going to be a real review, but it is now what it is instead

Obviously this review contains spoilers. You should watch the film before you read it (it’s good).

Everything I read about the Brutalist says its a subversion of the American dream, I think this is basically wrong. The American dream, as people who say this sort of thing would have it, is where you come from Europe, where people have been trying to kill you, and through hard work and ingenuity you work your way up, see your hard work and talent recognised and eventually you become a successful fella with a penthouse apartment in New York etc etc. The trajectory of The Brutalist is not really like this at all, in fact the character who really demonstrates the success of the American Dream is Van Buren Sr., the bastard son of a single mother whose innovative new ship building methods helped America win the war and won him immense wealth. Once he has achieved this dream, Van Buren’s reward is a giant country house that wouldn’t look too out of place as a National Trust property.

We can see more evidence that Lazlo (the main character if you ignored my instructions to watch the film) is not setting out to achieve the American Dream. His first move on entering the USA is to find his cousin who runs a furniture shop. His cousin has changed his name to Miller, married a Catholic girl and runs a shop selling furniture to American tastes, a great first effort at achieving success in America. Lazlo constructs some more modernist pieces of furniture, and when he is given the task of renovating VB’s library, he reimagines it in stark modernist terms. This is not a guy seeking to fit in and achieve and American Dream — this is a guy who had been broken by his experiences in the Holocaust and who is seeking to create an artistic output that accords with that experience. When Van Buren shows him pictures of his works as a Bauhaus architect in Europe, we can see a sunny side to Lazlo that his initial library project and more importantly his community centre or whatever it’s called are missing, clearly something has happened between the two and it’s not that he got a taste for New York apartments (he even quits his job as an architect in New York to go back to creating the Van Buren building).

Fundamentally, the Brutalist is not about the failure of the American Dream, nor is it about the general experiences of immigrants or refugees. It’s about the specific experience of living your life as a comfortable middle class intellectual on a civilised continent and finding that all of a sudden your neighbours would like to murder you and that your stable life is gone forever. This is not a typical experience, and we can see that throughout the film in Lazlo’s interactions with Gordon, his black friend. Lazlo and Gordon are both “outs” in the society they live in, and this initially gives them a connection with Gordon helping Lazlo find a place to stay after he is kicked out by his cousin and Lazlo helping Gordon find work (they also do drugs together). But when Gordon comes between Lazlo and his architecture, the architecture comes first. Lazlo is therefore not a ruthless careerist, willing to sacrifice his artistic vision to achieve the American Dream, nor is he a general friend of the downtrodden. He is a guy who has been ripped from a homeland he thought was his own and who wants to make this experience abundantly clear to the Americans he now lives amongst.

I recently watched Nightcrawler, a film about a guy who is a bit of a psycho who gets into recording crimes, car crashes and the like. This guy is defined by the fact that he has spend a lot of time taking business courses on the internet, he’s constantly quoting ideas from these courses and follows them as a means to get ahead. This is a satire of the American Dream, here is a guy who will do anything to get ahead, he’s happy to see his employee die, he’s fine with not reporting murderers to the police if he thinks he can report them later to get some better footage. All of this is intended to please the American public. Here is a guy who is following the Dream of American capitalism. Clearly this is the opposite of what the Brutalist is trying toachieve.