The Brutalist is a “visually arresting”[1]https://www.theguardian.com/film/2025/jan/26/the-bru...-brody mash-up of purloined identities whose only coherence comes from the Jewish revolutionary spirit, which is the film’s hidden grammar. Revolution results in a world turned upside-down, which is what happened to America after World War II, largely because of the Jewish immigrants who arrived as refugees from the Holocaust. The visual representation of that revolutionary spirit is epitomized by the film’s edgy cinematography, which portrays the main character (played by Adrian Brody) Laszlo Toth’s arrival in America symbolically by treating us to an upside-down shot of the Statue of Liberty.

Toth is a Jewish immigrant and Holocaust refugee who comes to New York for a better life. He is also an accomplished architect who learned his trade under Walter Gropius at Bauhaus Dessau. A common experience among immigrants of that generation, Jewish or otherwise, is that America did not recognize their old-world credentials, setting the stage for a classic immigrant drama that is as old as Benjamin Franklin, who arrived in Philadelphia penniless from Boston and proceeded to become the classic American success story. Among his many accomplishments, Franklin created the United States of America. Jewish immigrants after World War II turned that country upside down. According to the New York Times, the newspaper which helped Jews accomplish that feat:

One of the first images in “The Brutalist” is an upside-down shot of the Statue of Liberty, a disorienting, topsy-turvy angle that conveys László’s literal point of view as he emerges from the darkened depths of the ship that has carried him to America. The statue is already heavily freighted with complex, contradictory meaning that László embodies and is a harbinger of his destabilized story. It’s also an emblem of [Director Brady] Corbet’s ambitions.[2]https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/19/movies/the-brutal...w.html

Precisely. Brady Corbet can now chime in with Kate Winslet, who said “now I’ve done my fucking Holocaust movie” after winning that year’s obligatory Holocaust Oscar for playing a child molester in The Reader. When it comes to ambitious young directors like Brady Corbet, the surest way to garner an Oscar nomination is by directing a Holocaust film. But as last year’s edgy film Zone of Interest proved, without showing one scene from Auschwitz, the Holocaust can only be shown obliquely after Steven Spielberg had hot water come out of the showerheads instead of poison gas in Schindler’s List. The Brutalist takes this desire to evoke what no one dare examine any more, i.e., what actually happened in the concentration camps, one step further by removing the mise en scene to America in the years following World War II.

After turning the Statue of Liberty, the symbol of the immigration story, upside down, Corbet upends the moral order by making Toth’s first stop after getting of the boat a whore house. The viewer is then treated to the first of a number of increasingly graphic sex scenes, including clips of actual 1940s-era pornography which disfigure this film. The scene also introduces the viewer to the sexual double standard which renders the film incoherent. Sex is a sign of revolutionary commitment when Toth gets a blow job from a whore, but it is a sign of repugnant terminal decadence when the scion of the Presbyterian industrialist who is Toth’s patron sits down by a stream next to Toth’s niece. Toth projects his own sexual decadence onto the culture which welcomed him as a justification for Jewish resentment and sotto voce condemnations of America as a horrible place, which finds vindication at the end of the film in a bizarre turn of the plot whose only explanation is Jewish resentment seeking a cause for its existence. But more on that later.

The sex scenes in The Brutalist were so disorienting that they spawned an entire thread on Reddit trying to make sense of them. Odd Emotion5 concludes:

Ultimately, the sexuality in The Brutalist feels like an ambitious but clumsy way to explore identity, displacement, and the cracks in the American Dream. It’s meant to unsettle, and it clearly does, but whether it succeeds in enriching the narrative or simply derailing it is up for debate. Your frustration with how these scenes inject themselves into the story is valid because they often feel like they’re vying for attention rather than organically developing the themes.[3]https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueFilm/comments/1i3cqid/w...in_the

Another blogger cited the conversation which takes place between Laszlo and his wife Erzsebet after they have been united in American thanks to the generosity of Laszlo’s patron and the acumen of his lawyer. Instead of expressing gratitude, Mrs. Toth whispers about visions of Toth’s infidelities, but they immediately get projected onto the WASP industrialist as examples of how horrible America is. According to Odd Emotion, the brothel scene expresses Toth’s “disconnect from intimacy and his inability to feel grounded, even in America, the land of his supposed dreams.” Anyone whose thought was grounded in a psychology rooted in an understanding of the moral law would have said that the cause Toth’s inability to feel “grounded” in America was his violation of the moral law. Sin causes alienation, not liberation as the revolutionary Jews still tell us. The guilt which invariably accompanies that alienation then gets projected onto the host country as anti-Semitism, which then justifies more subversive activity, which eventually creates genuine animosity against the group which tried to help the Jews escape from Hitler. This vicious circle explains the hidden grammar of The Brutalist and why the viewer feels so dissatisfied with a plot that needs a deus ex machina to resolve its internal contradictions.

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The Brutalist is a Holocaust film, apres la lettre. It is about what happened to America after a war which became synonymous with Jewish suffering in concentration camps, largely because Hollywood created the Holocaust genre over the last 80 years to secure control over American culture. In case you missed the Senate hearings, every time Senator Josh Hawley caught a Jew in the Biden administration with his hand in the till or his pants down in flagrant dereliction of his duty, that Jew invariably replied, “I have relatives who died in the Holocaust” as a way of deflecting any further criticism.

In confecting The Brutalist, Director Brady Corbet has taken a number of narratives surrounding immigration to America and turned them upside down by integrating all of them into the Jewish revolutionary spirit as the lens which unites them. Revolution turns the world upside down. Corbet documents that inversion in his bid to get as many Holocaust-reserved Oscars on a miniscule $10 million budget by describing what Jews like the fictional Laszlo Toth did to the country which gave them asylum from the Nazis. The Brutalist seethes with Jewish hatred of America, as manifested by the troubled relationship between Protestants, Catholics, and Jews, America’s three main ethnic groups after World War II.

Laszlo Toth, portrayed by Adrian Brody, the paradigm of sensitive Jewish artistic suffering victimhood in The Pianist, is welcomed to America by his cousin and his beautiful wife, whom he describes disparagingly as a “shiksa” only to find that his cousin has changed his name from Attila Molnar to Attila Miller, his firm’s name to Miller and Sons, even though he has no children, and his religion from Judaism to Catholicism. Miller sells tacky American furniture, but he wants Toth to up his game by bringing that furniture into the 20^th century, which means lots of chrome tubing, which makes his kitchen table and chairs reminiscent of a bicycle because Toth has studied design at Bauhaus Dessau, where Walter Gropius promoted entartete Kunst until the Nazis ran him out of town.

In their initial foray into modern architecture, Toth and Attila make contact with the son of a wealthy Presbyterian industrialist who wants to surprise his father by renovating his library. The big birthday surprise is that the father hates modernism, which has replaced a comfortable room in the English country manor style with an empty space surrounding a single chrome tubular and flimsy mesh chaise lounge of the sort one might take to the beach in Wildwood, New Jersey, a resort town not far from Philadelphia which became famous as the birthplace of Doo-Wop Architecture.[4]https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/doo-wop-...85606/

After the wealthy industrialist Harrison refuses to pay for the vandalization of his reading room, his cousin kicks Toth out of his spare room after accusing him of making a pass at his shiksa wife, and our hero descends into the Negro demimonde, where he shoots heroin by night and shovels coal by day, until a flattering article on his vandalization of Harrison’s library appears in Life magazine, and Harrison the Presbyterian decides that Toth is really a Jewish genius, who needs to build a brutalist monstrosity community center on a hill outside Doylestown, Pennsylvania.

Because the Jewish revolutionary spirit is essentially an antinarrative, Corbet has to cobble both plot and character together from mash-ups of existing figures and stories. Harkening back to the venerable Hollywood tradition established by films like Abbott and Costello meet Frankenstein, Corbet turned The Brutalist into a mash-up of The Pianist, which established Adrian Brody as the go-to face for Jewish suffering, and The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand’s fictional portrayal of Frank Lloyd Wright, the most famous American artist of the 20^th century. In The Fountainhead, Wright became Howard Roark, a Jewish revolutionary masquerading as an architect who proved his revolutionary but not architectural bona fides by blowing up one of his own buildings. Wright hated Bauhaus architecture, which paved the way for Brutalism. He famously rephrased Mies van der Rohe description of the architectural theory behind his glass box houses as “beinahe nichts” or almost nothing into the satirical phrase “much ado about almost nothing.”[5]https://smallhouselab.com/blogs/convergences/the-far...s-more

Something similar happened to Gary Cooper when Ayn Rand insisted that he play the role of Howard Roark in the film adaptation of The Fountainhead. Twenty years after his debut in The Virginian had established him as the archetypal American cowboy, Ayn Rand attempted to turned him into a Russian Jew’s version of Frank Lloyd Wright, who corresponded to Rand’s conception of the ideal American.

Rand was born in Russia in 1905. After graduating from the University of Leningrad, Rand arrived in America in 1926. Within 20 years she had total control of the Hollywood rendition of her novel The Fountainhead, which one critic described as a “long and turgid book, published in 1943 . . . written in a bodice-ripping, hothouse style.”[6]Meyers, Gary Cooper: American Hero, p. 214. In that film Dominique Francon, played by Patricia Neal, reverberates with sexual chills as she catches sight of Howard Roark, played by Cooper, drilling stone in a quarry:

She saw his mouth and the silent contempt in the shape of his mouth; the planes of his gaunt, hollow cheeks; the cold, pure brilliance of the eyes that had no trace of pity. She knew it was the most beautiful face she would ever see…. She felt a convulsion of anger, of protest, of resistance—and of pleasure…. She was wondering what he would look like naked.”[7]Meyers, Gary Cooper: American Hero, p. 214.

Rand drained all of the subtlety out of classic American figures like Wright and replaced that subtlety with a Russian Jew’s parody of American identity which “glorifies selfish individualism”[8]Meyers, Gary Cooper: American Hero, p. 214. of the sort that Rand would later make famous in the quasi-religious sect known as Objectivism, which during its heyday attracted fellow Jews like Federal Reserve head Alan Greenspan to join with Rand in celebrating “selfish individualism” as something uniquely American. Rand created a parody of Frank Lloyd Wright and his uniquely American form of architecture by turning him into:

a blend of romantic hero and a stern intellectual. He believes “the world is perishing from an orgy of self-sacrificing” and tells his astonished patrons: “I don’t work with collectives, I don’t consult, I don’t cooperate, I don’t collaborate. .. . My work’s done my way. A private, personal, selfish, egotistical motive. That’s the only way I function.”[9]Meyers, Gary Cooper: American Hero, p. 214.

By turning Roark into a Russian Jew’s parody of the American, Ayn Rand engaged in an early form of identity theft, abetted by the equally Jewish Warner Brothers studio, which paid her $50,000 for the movie rights and another $13,000 for her screenplay, while ensuring that she had “complete control of the script and final approval of all changes.”[10]Meyers, Gary Cooper: American Hero, p. 214. Rand insisted that Frank Lloyd Wright, “and only Frank Lloyd Wright,” should design the buildings for the picture. When Wright insisted on a fee of $250,000 for his services, the studio finally stood up to Rand, even though she threatened to blow up Warner Brothers’ studio “if it altered one word of her work.”[11]Meyers, Gary Cooper: American Hero, p. 214.

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Before long, it became obvious that the Hollywood Jews had overplayed their hand. The Hollywood Jews had hijacked American identity in such a crude way that everyone ended up hating the film. The cowboy had many objectionable traits when viewed from the perspective of the east, but the alien ideology of ruthless selfishness which lay at the heart of Rand’s objectivism was not one of them. The film hit a false note which not even Gary Cooper’s handsome face could save. Frank Lloyd Wright was one of the first Americans to protest, calling The Fountainhead “a grossly abusive caricature of his work,” as well as “an architectural (and cinematic) disaster.”[12]Meyers, Gary Cooper: American Hero, p. 214.

Unlike Howard Roark, who is a parody of Frank Lloyd Wright, Laszlo Toth is a mash-up of a number of Jewish architects, all of whom fled the Holocaust, and most of whom came to America, most notably Louis I. Kahn, who became famous in Philadelphia, where the film is set. Louis Kahn, the first Jewish architect taken seriously by Americans rich enough to commission buildings, was born in Estonia as Itze-Leib Schmuilowsky in 1901. Five years later Kahn’s family emigrated to America.

After working for several firms in Philadelphia, Kahn founded his own atelier in 1935. In 1942 he created a partnership with German-born architect Oscar Stonorow, and together they worked on projects for the Philadelphia Housing Authority. One of the most notorious examples of public housing was the Schuylkill Falls Housing Project. In a report prepared for the Office of Historic Preservation in June of 1983, a Mr. G. Thomas wrote that:

“The Schuylkill Falls housing project is a landmark in modern design by one of the important early theoreticians of the modern movement. Their size, dominant position on the hillside, and the over scaled elements of their facades marks them as the most prominent buildings of the region. Of greatest importance is the fact that the main buildings have been abandoned.”[13]Report prepared by G. Thomas, 6/27/83 https://www.phmc.state.pa.us/portal/communities/pa-s...58.pdf

The Schuylkill Falls project was worse than all of the other PHA elevator buildings in the rest of the city because of the peculiarities of its design. In 1986, thirty-three years after Schuylkill Falls opened its doors, Philadelphia magazine did an article on their by­ then-vacant twin towers. Schuylkill Falls “was considered both architecturally and socially innovative” when built because of the long common balconies, “streets in the sky,” on each floor of the apartment buildings and series of individual elevators that provided access to three or four apartments on each floor and eliminated long internal corridors.” As the projects gradually came to be occupied more and more by weakened and vulnerable one-parent families, the lack of privacy that the “streets in the sky” made mandatory soon proved fatal, first to family life and then to life in general. The weakened family was always losing its children to peer pressure and gangs. The design of the building simply accelerated this process by depriving those families of whatever control over the domestic sphere the rowhouse provided. “The concept of high-rise housing projects,” Philadelphia magazine continues, “eventually proved to be flawed and Schuylkill Falls was one of the first in the city to be closed down, most because its design innovations exacerbated the crime and vandalism problems: The many elevators and open balconies could not be controlled or secured.”

The PHA could have avoided this problem if they had listened to the consultants they had assigned to evaluate the project’s design. In July of 1951, Lancelot F. Sims, Jr., an architect called in to evaluate the situation, mentioned the lack of cross-ventilation in the low-rise rowhouses as a source of potential problem, but felt “this deficiency can be ameliorated by planting sufficient trees to shade the western face of all row house units.” Not so simple were the problems which Stonorov’s design of the twin high-rise towers caused. “I told Mr. Stonorov,” Sims wrote, “that I was very worried about privacy for the living rooms facing on the outside balconies. I suggest that he move the stairs on either end of the building in toward the end so that each stair would have two dwelling units on one side of it. This arrangement will greatly decrease traffic passing in front of the living room windows.”

Stonorov ignored Sims’s suggestion, with predictable results. Decent people found the lack of privacy unbearable and fled the building. Soon the indecent people fled as well. By 1976, the two high-rise towers at Schuylkill Falls were 100 percent vacant, although the rowhouses on Ridge Avenue continued to be occupied.

The verdict of failure which got handed down on Bauhaus-design based social engineering was not limited to Schuylkill Falls, which was perceived as the worst-case scenario because of its design peculiarities. “The saga of Schuylkill Falls,” Philadelphia magazine continued, “will probably be repeated with every high rise housing project in the city, as a sad story of an outdated social concept and the ‘haunted’ buildings left behind.”[14]E. Michael Jones, The Slaughter of Cities: Urban Renewal as Ethnic Cleansing (South Bend, IN: Fidelity Press, ),p. 228-30.

In 1957, after a stint at Yale, Kahn returned to Philadelphia, where he was appointed professor of architecture at the School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania. Kahn became famous at Penn, where he taught until his death in 1974, but in 1959, Philadelphia Jews did not take Jewish architects seriously; Beth Shalom Synagogue in the Philadelphia suburb of Elkins Park was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.

Bauhaus, as I pointed out in Living Machines, was a sexual ideology, which masqueraded as urban planning, whose most notable achievement was the destruction of family life. Like Laszlo Toth, Louis Kahn was a sexual revolutionary who had three children with three different women.[15]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Kahn Kahn came from Estonia, but Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Erno Goldfinger, the other parts of Toth’s mash-up identity, were Hungarian Jews; both had to flee their native countries when Hungary fell to Hitler’s Wehrmacht. Moholy-Nagy, we are told, “was a partial inspiration for the character of László Tóth in Brady Corbet‘s film The Brutalist.”[16]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A1szl%C3%B3_Moholy-Nagy

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Both Moholy-Nagy and Goldfinger were influenced by Bauhaus, which became a symbol of decadent art—entartete Kunst—after 1933. Goldfinger, who lent his name unwillingly to a James Bond novel after Ian Fleming met his cousin on a golf course, was the only Brutalist architect out of the many identities which went into the creation of Laszlo Toth. Goldfinger, who is now remembered as the creator of Trellick Tower in Kensal town, “was known as a humourless man given to notorious rages. He sometimes fired his assistants if they were inappropriately jocular, and once forcibly ejected two prospective clients for imposing restrictions on his design.”[17]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ern%C5%91_Goldfinger

Aside from Goldfinger’s Trellick Tower and other abominations high on the list of buildings Englishmen want torn down, Brutalism is not a particularly Jewish phenomenon. Brutalism was the preferred style for government buildings in the 1970s. I. M. Pei’s Dallas City Hall is a good example. Pei is Chinese and a student of Walter Gropius. Another classic example of Brutalism was Boston’s city hall, designed by the architecture firms Kallmann McKinnell & Knowles and Campbell, Aldrich & Nulty.

Brutalism, however, led to the Deconstructionism of Frank Gehry, which is the movement that allowed Jewish architects to transgress the rigid parameters of Bauhaus, at a time when everyone found Bauhaus boring. Gehry, another Jewish immigrant, was born Ephraim Owen Goldberg in Toronto but became a naturalized U.S. citizen after his family moved to Los Angeles in 1947 when he was a teenager, Gehry became famous for buildings like the Jimi Hendrix museum in Seattle, a structure which resembles three different colored trash bags waiting to be picked up on trash day.

The Brutalist ends oddly in Venice at the Biennale of 1980 with no explanation of what happened to Toth’s wealthy Presbyterian patron. The Biennale of 1980 was significant because it announced the death of Bauhaus and its replacement with Catholic and Jewish options. More specifically it a faceoff between Frank Gehry’s deconstructionism and the late Thomas Gordon Smith return to Vitruvius and the classical tradition. Smith was a Catholic who restored the practice of classical architecture at Notre Dame University. As a Catholic, Smith had to content himself with designing a seminary in Lincoln, Nebraska and a Benedictine monastery in Clear Creek, Oklahoma. His disciple Duncan Stroik designed the chapels at Thomas Aquinas College in Ojai, California and at Hillsdale College in Michigan, but by this point in time only Jews got to design signature, identity-confirming public buildings like Daniel Liebeskind’s Holocaust Museum in Berlin and its accompanying memorial of transgressive tomb-like concrete boxes.

Corbet portrays Toth’s battle over the construction of his Brutalist community center outside of Doylestown as a matter of artistic integrity in defense of beauty, but he makes the mistake of showing the building’s interiors, which have the charm and warmth of a pumping station in lower Manhattan, complete with water on the floor. Sensing the need to bring beauty to the center’s dank underground chapel, Toth and his patron fly to Carrara to buy a marble altar. Toth gets drunk, and Harrison rapes him, leaving the viewer totally bewildered because nothing in the plot prepared the way for this brutal act.

In the film’s climactic scene, Toth’s wife confronts the Presbyterian industrialist and accuses him of rape at a dinner party with Harrison’s friends and family in attendance. Mortified by the accusation, Harrison disappears into Toth’s unfinished community center, never to be seen again.

The meandering plot suddenly erupts with Harrison’s homosexual rape of Toth. This totally unanticipated act is the classic example of the deus ex machina, because it appears out of nowhere. It does not flow from the plot or the characters, which means that it was imposed from without by the hidden grammar of the film, which is the Holocaust narrative and uncritical acceptance of that narrative’s portrayal of Jewish suffering.

More importantly, the homosexual rape collides with both the moral order and the Zeitgeist. To begin with, all decent people find homosexual rape repugnant because the moral law of human sexuality is written on the heart of all human beings by their creator. But if that is the case, how is Toth any different that the man who violated him? Corbet established his character as a whoremonger in the early moments of the film.

The real lesson of this film is that Jews are a superior race who stand above the moral law. The moral of this film is that there is no such thing as a moral law which is binding on all mankind. The same action is morally different depending on whether a Jew or a gentile performs it. In this regard, The Brutalist is a justification not only of the Jewish bombing of Gaza but also of the brutal tactics the Israelis have used to subdue the Palestinians. According to the moral logic of this film, homosexual rape is bad when Presbyterians rape sensitive artistic Jews like Laszlo Toth. It is so bad, in fact, that it becomes a justification for Jewish resentment, which the Jew can now express by his transgressive behavior in architecture and other areas of American culture. But at this point the moral of the film collides with the Zeitgeist. The lesson we learned from the genocide in Gaza is that homosexual rape is only bad when done by Presbyterians. It’s okay when Israeli soldiers rape Palestinian prisoners. We know this because numerous rabbis have said so. By the end of this three-and-a-half-hour long film, The Brutalist collapses into the rubble of its own moral incoherence whose fitting symbol is not the examples of brutalist architecture still standing but the ruins to which Gaza has been reduced by Israeli aggression.

Notes

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/film/2025/jan/26/the-brutalist-brady-corbet-review-colossal-architecture-drama-adrien-brody

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/19/movies/the-brutalist-review.html

[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueFilm/comments/1i3cqid/what_is_the_point_of_all_the_sexuality_in_the

[4] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/doo-wop-by-the-sea-83085606/

[5] https://smallhouselab.com/blogs/convergences/the-farnsworth-house-part-1-whose-less-is-more

[6] Meyers, Gary Cooper: American Hero, p. 214.

[7] Meyers, Gary Cooper: American Hero, p. 214.

[8] Meyers, Gary Cooper: American Hero, p. 214.

[9] Meyers, Gary Cooper: American Hero, p. 214.

[10] Meyers, Gary Cooper: American Hero, p. 214.

[11] Meyers, Gary Cooper: American Hero, p. 214.

[12] Meyers, Gary Cooper: American Hero, p. 214.

[13] Report prepared by G. Thomas, 6/27/83 https://www.phmc.state.pa.us/portal/communities/pa-suburbs/files/Phila_Schuylkill_Falls_Housing_105658.pdf

[14] E. Michael Jones, The Slaughter of Cities: Urban Renewal as Ethnic Cleansing (South Bend, IN: Fidelity Press, ),p. 228-30.

[15] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Kahn

[16] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A1szl%C3%B3_Moholy-Nagy

[17] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ern%C5%91_Goldfinger