Careless People - Asides (VXII)

‘They were careless people, Tom and Daisy - they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness.’ (F. Scott Fitzgerald, ‘The Great Gatsby’)

*

 

The weekend of the Oscars is almost upon us, and I’m pondering what would be my choice for Best Picture. Except, I’ve only seen five out of the ten films nominated. Three I can immediately discard: I enjoyed the second Dune film, was left frustrated by A Complete Unknown, and thought Emilia Pérez was strange, silly, and fun. So, that leaves Conclave and The Brutalist. On exiting the cinema after both of these films, Conclave was the one that left me feeling most satisfied. I couldn’t take my eyes off it - a film that is set largely inside a recreation of The Sistine Chapel would almost be expected to do that - and I found myself fascinated by the dramatic process of choosing a new pope. The Brutalist, on the other hand, left me unsettled and edgy. Despite being bracketed squarely in the centre of the twentieth-century, it had much of the present state of the world about it.

An image for our times

It is the story of László Tóth, a fictional Hungarian architect and survivor of the Holocaust, and his travails in his adopted home of the United States. It’s an ambitious and difficult film that is about architecture and not about architecture. It is also a film about the entirety of the immigrant experience in the USA (and by entirety, I mean in its total historical breadth). And because the film chimes with what is currently going on in that country, it resonates in ways that a film about choosing a new pope - entertainment for the secular, delicate and divisive for the religious - cannot compete with. That’s why I feel that The Brutalist is the better film.

Leaving the cinema, and searching for footholds, it was a quote from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby that waylaid me. In particular, the wealthy industrialist Van Buren and his flaky, cruel and abusive treatment of László (and by extension all recent arrivals in the USA) brought to mind the novel’s precise skewering of Tom and Daisy Buchanan.

‘They were careless people, Tom and Daisy - they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness.’

László’s wife Erzsébet, arriving in the US halfway through the film, has a similar measure of Van Buren and his like. “Your huge life project which requires rare talent is just a kitchen remodel to him.” 

A library, not a kitchen

A careless person indeed. That’s the word that has always stayed with me from that quote - and the novel as a whole - and perhaps this has caused me to miss the even more consequential word in the sentence: ‘retreated’. Like Tom and Daisy, Van Buren retreats from his architectural prescriptions and desires and doesn’t care about the consequences. ‘Things and creatures’, and people, are simply - sometimes accidentally, more often than not deliberately - smashed up. And that thought cannot but help lead to where we are now, with a president and his henchmen doing just that. But this time it’s a whole country, and by extension the world. Moreover, Trump and Musk and the other pandering billionaires, with all their hideous wealthy, may not need to retreat. For what it’s worth - and in the grand scheme of things, it’s barely worth a fig - these resonances might just lead to it swinging the Best Picture. 

 

*

Postscript: 

Lest we’re mistaken, The Brualist is an astonishingly beautiful film. Aesthetically, you’d think that the Sistine Chapel would be unmatched. However, a scene involving the selection of the perfect piece of marble from the quarry at Carrara says more about art than a replica Michelangelo ever could. As an aside, have all the architects who have complained about the lack of architectural theory in the film, become overly obsessed with the end product? Either way, it’s an extraordinary powerful fifteen minutes in a film that has a running length of over three and a half hours. See it just for that, and the way that marble reacts to water being poured onto it. Mesmerising.