The Brutalized

How do we talk about sexual violence and symbolism in film?

About halfway through the second act of Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist, the architect László Toth and his controlling patron, Harrison Lee Van Buren, travel to Italy to purchase marble for their joint undertaking, a community centre in Pennsylvania named the Van Buren Institute. After a night of drinking and dancing, Harrison pushes László down in an alleyway and rapes him. He rambles about László’s people, how they make themselves such easy targets, how they leech off society. In his ear, he whispers: “Who do you think you are? You think you’re special? You think you float directly above everyone you encounter because you are beautiful? Because you are educated? You’re a tramp. You’re a lady of the night.”

I am not particularly interested in talking about the rest of this film (I like it, I think it’s compelling and looks gorgeous!). This was the moment that affected me most, that I thought about while I drifted out of the theatre. It was something I hadn’t seen much of before. In most of the films I’ve seen that portray racialized or antisemitic violence, they refrain from explicitly depicting sexual elements of that violence, let alone rape. (Let alone sexual violence done to a man.) It is obviously a horrifying moment, one that is painful to bear witness to. But the film concerns a horrifying subject, antisemitism in America and the trauma of the Holocaust— so though it was affecting, it was not, frankly, shocking.

Then I made my first mistake: Logging On. Then I made my second mistake: Getting Annoyed At Other People’s Opinions. Then I made my third mistake: Writing A Dumb Newsletter Post About It.

What I found when sorting through discussions of the film was a strange and disquieting callousness in how audiences and critics reacted to this scene in which László is sexually assaulted. It is often obliquely referenced as “the twist” of the film, the “dark turn” of the second act. People don’t seem to want to put it into words (…though this may be to avoid spoilers). There seems to be a collective unease with the inclusion of the scene, many calling it cheap, overwrought, too brazen a metaphor. In The Atlantic, an otherwise positive review describes it as “one obvious hammer blow too many”. In The Guardian: “Corbet fumbles a pivotal and heavy-handedly symbolic scene in which, let’s just say, the brutalist is brutalized.” A popular Substack review describes the moment as “a rape scene in front of a literal hundred-ton symbol of what the rape represents while the rapist whispers in voiceover that the symbol is, in fact, a metaphor.”

I admit I think it’s a bit silly to read a few tweets and Letterboxd reviews you disagree with and conclude that this is a serious horrible problem that needs to be addressed, or even that they are a reflection of the opinions of the majority. People generally liked this movie. And it’s fine if they didn’t— I understand many of the critiques and agree with some of them. I understand the critiques about this very plotline— the way it wraps up is a little awkward, and it could’ve benefited from further exploration. But that common dismissive response, that disconnect with the so-called “twist” in act two, and the way it has been spoken about, still rankles me a bit. So I wanted to discuss why that scene does work for me.

Straight out the gate, I’m not attempting to be objective here. Interpretation is a personal thing, each viewer’s own dig for meaning. Trying to be “objective” is inherently a paranoid reading, narrowing down what can be meaningful to try and find some iron truth. That’s not my vibe. I’m a bit of an author-killer— and Corbet himself has said some interesting things about how he may or may not have intended the film to be read. There’s an interview where he implies that to some extent it can function as a metaphor for his own filmmaking process.

When a director says something like that, reviewers tend to run with it, which makes sense. But that’s diluted discussion of this film quite a bit. Obviously disagreeing with a director about the meaning of his own film is something of a strange exercise. Not for me though! I’m gonna do my own thing, thanks! I think authorial comments can provide interesting perspectives on a film that I may not have considered, but I don’t need their direction to find that film meaningful. And to be frank I don’t find his interpretation here meaningful. I don’t really care about struggles to find funding and I think there’s a lot more meat on this bone. What he thinks is kind of irrelevant. I saw what I saw! (Also, he’s not the sole writing credit on the film!) But it might explain a lot of unease about the inclusion of this scene. If it’s all just a theme machine about Hollywood blues, expressing that via a rape scene might seem superficial and even irresponsible. (Good news: movies are not theme machines, especially not this one!)

Look, if we completely separate it from an auterist lens, from a movie-as-metaphor-for-making-a-movie lens, if we block out all of Corbet’s ambiguous comments on how ambiguous it’s all supposed to be, what actually happens in this scene that is so outrageously ridiculous, such a harrowing plot twist, such an obvious, overwrought metaphor? It is a hate crime by way of sexual assault. Van Buren rapes László while saying antisemitic things to him to get himself off, as a sexual expression of a power dynamic both are well enough aware of. (Its obviousness, its gauche and overbearing self-awareness, is precisely the point. Van Buren knows he’s saying the most stereotypical things possible, and László can do nothing to stop him. That’s exactly where he gets his rocks off.)

First of all, must every subject of a film be filtered into a symbol? These interpretations of The Brutalist abound: László is decided to be representative of a larger whole, as “the immigrant”, as “the artist”, “the filmmaker”; with Van Buren as “America”, as “corporatization”, as “movie producers that are sooo mean to me!” A thought: can they not be… well.. László and Van Buren? Two characters in a story who are a product of their specific time and the way their lives shaped them, reflecting a possibility, not a whole people, like so much fiction— “imagine that this could have been real” is a basic request of most film. It’s clearly not trying for Brechtianism. The film is long for a reason; it’s filled with scenes of its characters simply living, going to temple, emptying interesting rooms, waiting in food lines, going to clubs. These are characters who could have existed, and could have experienced these things. At least, that’s what the film asks you to consider.

It feels strange to impose such a hardline symbolic reading on a work that is trying so hard to be sprawling and novelistic, and it is a double standard that perplexes me. Like, when watching a war movie, are its characters nothing but metaphors for war and violence? The logical throughpoint of such a reading would be: the violence done to these characters is a symbol of the violence done during World War Two. When the movie shows war, that’s when you know it’s symbolic of war! Well, no. That’s not how it works. Because… it’s historical fiction, there’s a specificity here, it’s a reflection of a potentially true experience, a representation— the film may highlight certain things about violence, about that experience, but a thing cannot be a symbol of itself, right? Not to contradict László himself, but surely the journey is what matters here, and not the destination, not some mystical story math which must divide itself into single-sentence themes.

When labelling the sexual assault of László “a metaphor”, one implies there is something extraordinary about it, something that separates it from other biographical details within the story, which are taken for granted and understood easily. Those aspects all follow what we “expect” for a character who is a Holocaust victim, and they act as character background, even scenery. Scars on his back, yes, that makes sense— not a metaphor. That’s a thing that happened to people in real life and could have happened to him. His actions and circumstances are natural and accepted as potentially true in our minds. But rape— no, that’s exclusively relegated to metaphor… why, because it is something that did not happen in this era, in these circumstances? Because a man like Van Buren surely could not actually think like that, could not be that nakedly evil? Because it happens to a man? Because it could not happen to a man like László?

The rape must be a metaphor for the violent extractive nature of the characters’ relationships. Or more broadly, the bloodsucking extractions of capitalism. For how financiers “creatively rape” artists and their visions. For how immigrants face violence trying to integrate. For how America exploits and subjugates its population. For how America inflicts imperialism on the world. For all billionaires everwhere. For cultural appropriation. For how Brady Corbet feels about his own filmmaking, because that is the most important thing somehow.

Why is “the power imbalance is represented by rape” easier to swallow (and then deride as overwrought) for so many viewers than “a power imbalance such as this could easily lead to rape”? Is it so hard to believe?

It doesn’t help that audiences struggle to contend with rape scenes in cinema in general. Either the entire movie has to be about it, or it’s totally unnecessary, unjustified, gauche. If it isn’t presented “correctly” we should throw the whole movie away. Some might have the attitude that there should be no rape scenes portrayed in media, or even no sex scenes at all— I won’t conflate the responses to The Brutalist with that. Because it is hard to wrestle with rape. Of course it is. Of course we might seek to package it up as something else. Every audience member will have had a different experience with it and a different reaction to seeing it depicted onscreen. But there does seem to be an outsized trend of interpreting these scenes as straightforwardly symbolic, somehow different than other narrative events. It has to mean something, it has to represent some other abstract structure— the depiction of rape cannot be about rape.

This has happened in discourses surrounding other films as well. Readings that suggest the prescence or implication of sexual violence in films that lack any explicit portrayal of it are few and sometimes derided (I’m right about the psychosexual subtext of Gangs of New York, cowards!). Even when sexual violence is textual it is ignored. Michael Mann’s Thief is a landmark cinematic achievement, but searching through reviews and takes you’d be hard pressed to find any mention that its protagonist is a rape victim, or that his primary relationship in the film is formed by shared experiences with sexual assault and victimization. It is almost exclusively talked about as a film “about capitalism”, which, okay. Sure. But how is that its viewers’ only lens? It is a deeply moving film, especially in regards to the futility its protagonist feels in trying to become a Real Person. He makes pitiful scrapbook postcards of what a real man might be, what he wants to be, but that has been taken from him somewhere along the way. It cannot only be capital that depersonalizes him this way. What was the loss?

Even Nosferatu, a film with explicit onscreen depictions of rape, is often sidestepped in this manner and flattened into metaphor devoid of the context of what textually occurs. I’ve seen it described as a polemic about how puritan society represses women’s desires, and frames Nosferatu’s predation of Ellen as somehow radical and empowering— as if it cannot be about both sexual repression and sexual violence at once. In fact it explicitly depicts how the discouragement and disgust aimed at Ellen’s desires are the very things that have made her so susceptible to abuse from such a monstrously violent figure. But yeah, girlboss! Slay! Monsterfucking!

So when the rape scene in The Brutalist was similarly discarded and chopped up into metaphor food, I was disappointed but not surprised. Especially in light of its cultural and historical specificity. It is difficult to gather data about sexual violence; shame and fear often prevents victims from speaking up. It’s only within the last twenty years or so that reports have come out detailing the experiences of sexual violence against men during the Holocaust.

Like all ethnic or racial hatreds, antisemitism has always had a sexual element to it. For literal millennia the Jewish body has been cast as an exoticized sexual Other. Jewish men have been caricatured as feminine, weak, less virile, deficient in masculinity. Certain folk myths claimed Jewish men menstruated. Even as they were effeminized they were additionally viewed as sexually insatiable and lecherous, given to the rape and ruination of good Christian women— simultaneously sexually inferior and more overtly sexual, easily dominated by the sexual prowess and normality of the Aryan man. Maludjusted, depraved, perverted, queer. These ideals were not isolated to Nazi Germany and to an extent persist today. Sexual violence, against both women and men, has always been practiced as a weapon of genocide.

You’re a tramp, says Van Buren. You’re a lady of the night.

In this way I felt immensely affected by seeing this dynamic portrayed on screen in The Brutalist— a truth so often unspoken. Because this has happened. At one time or another, people have experienced this. That is what historical fiction can illuminate. That is the point.

But none of this can be explored when a scene such as this is dismissed as just a metaphor for how it’s really hard to direct a movie, or as exclusively relating to capitalist extraction. Can’t we, genuinely, treat these things with sincerity, let them exist as they exist? Why should we flatten history into symbols, abstracting it into pretentious nothingness? Can’t the depiction of something, a historical truth, be an end in itself? But then there has always been a tendency to universalize Jewish suffering. Holocaust movies and literature are somehow prevailingly about “the human condition”, removed from their material history. Our oppressions are bent to be representative of all human hardships. Symbols. Too huge, too in your face. Too obvious. This is not a new phenomenon. It’s just frustrating that it still continues.

We need to stop thinking of every piece of plot as a symbol that can be entered into the calculation of what a film “says”. Movies are not messages. They can be lots of things, including reflections of lived experience.

(Even the accusations of the film’s supposed Zionism fall into this trap, imo— there is no denying that global attitudes of antisemitism and a traumatic response to the Holocaust are what caused many 20th century Jews to seek to flee to Israel, EVEN THOUGH that obviously does not excuse its existence. It is not wrong to simply acknowledge that as a motivating factor. Can’t a movie be historically honest about a group’s motivations and experiences even when those experiences have led to such boundless cruelties?)

Look, The Brutalist isnt good because theres a rape scene in it, but that scene is thoughtfully included and vital to our understanding of the film and its characters. It is a loss, then, to paper over it and boil it down to something it’s not.

The Van Buren Institute is slowly built over the course of the film, in stops and starts. László is given a concept and a set of parameters by Van Buren, and has to work within them. At least initially, he agrees to the work solely because he is in poverty and desperately needs the money— not just for himself, but because Van Buren can help him speed his wife’s immigration process. He creates beautiful designs within those parameters, which are then further reviewed and altered by the surrounding community, and changed again due to logistical issues, by contractors and surveyors and budget and doubt.

What does the building ‘mean’? This is the question that is asked at the end of the film. Zsofia has her interpretation— it is a reflection of László’s traumatic memories of the Holocaust. She says this definitively, as if it is the only answer

But is she right? We see the Institute being built and we see all the things that shaped it. Materials have to be replaced due to a train derailment. The community demands it include a chapel against László’s wishes. His singular masterpiece has to have a fucking cross on top of it. His contractors make choices he disagrees with. Hell, Van Buren had the original idea himself. So how can it be flattened into one symbol, anyway? It’s the product of a hundred thousand decisions made by dozens of people. Are László’s structures about the Holocaust? Perhaps. They may be a lot of things. They may be about his rape. They may be about his marriage, his poverty, his addiction, political views he might have— and crucially, they are also just things. They are products of labor he needed to perform to survive, within parameters he did not suggest and with his touted vision curbed by countless logistical processes.

Buildings, art, films— these artifacts are not singular, pure symbology. They are a lot of things at once. They can be expressions of a million viewpoints, or none at all. They are real, they exist in the world. There is a substance to them, a weight, a historical reality. A building made from metaphors will collapse.

Is there a better description of a cube than that of its construction?