“200 people in that room, each one wants me to be somebody else. I wish they’d just let me be.”
“Let you be what?”
“Whatever it is they don’t want me to be.”
This rips, but nobody writes the line “he not busy being born,” then takes that long to think up “is busy dying.”
László Tóth arrives at Ellis Island seeking the promise of liberty, only to be immediately funneled into a softer rebrand of the same meat-grinder of exploitation, control, and cultural erasure that he fled in Europe. In tripping the traumatic pipeline from fascism to capitalism, The Brutalist explodes America's fundamental fantasy of self-reinvention.
Hella trauma. The film understands trauma as something that stamps itself deep onto bodies, landscapes, structures, psyches, and everything we create. It's a meditation on the concrete manifestations…
Because the news had given up reporting them as political struggles, it meant there was now no way to understand why these terrible events were happening.
And instead, political conflicts around the world — from Darfur to Gaza — are now portrayed to us as simple illustrations of the mindless cruelty of the human race, about which nothing can be done… and to which the only response is ‘Oh Dear’.
It’s like living in the mind of a depressed hippie.
