The Brutalist

Manifestly speaking, The Brutalist (Corbet, 2024), written by Brady Corbet and Mona Fastvold, and directed by Corbet, has little relevance to psychoanalysis. Yet it is a film that prompts multiple associations for psychoanalysts interested in the place that money occupies within the psychoanalytic profession. My associations regarding money's place in psychoanalysis are presented in the second section of this review.

The third section explores the contrast between artists and architects, who engage in contributing to and shaping culture, and psychoanalysts, who play no public roles in shaping culture but rather live their lives in the seclusion of their offices, essentially touching the lives of no more than 150–200 patients.

The first section, directly below, offers a brief sketch of the manifest film. A fuller sketch can be found in virtually any other review, such as Justin Chang's “Art of Stone,” published in The New Yorker on December 20, 2024.

In 1947, the immigrant Laszlo Toth (Adrien Brody), a fictional character in a fictional film, enters the New York harbor to glimpse the Statue of Liberty upside down. This is his view as well as the view the audience sees on the screen. Corbet's cinematographic metaphor contains the movie's thesis: the American dream has gone askew. Laszlo is a survivor of Buchenwald, an artist and architect well known in Budapest but not yet known in America. He settles in Pennsylvania, where he is approached by the son of a wealthy industrialist to redesign his father's library as a surprise. Laszlo's artistic vision and architectural skills are evident in this redesign. However, the father, Harrison Van Buren (Guy Pearce) is enraged at the intrusion as well as the design. He bursts onto the scene with a commanding presence that foreshadows the partnership and conflict between Laszlo and Harrison, the artist and the industrialist, art

and capitalism. Harrison eventually apologizes to Laszlo for being dismissive of his work, but