Rabbit Rabbit #24: Beauty Disciplines
Embodying Entelechy in Corbet’s The Brutalist
Adrien Brody in The Brutalist
There is an essay I adore by Marilynne Robinson that I have been reading repeatedly for years. In the essay, titled “Grace and Beauty,” Robinson states that “beauty disciplines.” She admits her awareness that readers will not initially understand what she means by this phrase, and so hopes to unspool her thoughts in real time so that she may earn both its meaning and merit. Robinson goes on to excavate her personal history and practice as a fiction writer, remarking things like, “For me, the impetus behind [her bestselling novel Gilead] was that it was simply in my mind. I have never written a novel for any other reason.” She theorizes that by paying attention to her own aesthetic impulses, at times even recognizing the mind as a separate entity from the self – “the dichotomy sometimes feels this absolute” – she is then able to uncover the voices, people, and stories that percolate inside of it. They are already inside, she argues, and it is the calling of the art maker to realize their full potential, the achievement of which Robinson identifies as entelechy: “the active principle of wholeness or completion in an individual thing.” Entelechy is the thing that makes you believe in a piece of fiction, or consider an art object seriously. It is an apparition of teleology, the indescribable feeling of, it was always meant to be this way.
I like this essay because it makes complete sense to me. I read it and think, “Exactly!” It’s one of the only writing-about-writing pieces I’ve encountered that A) does not appear contrived or braggadocious and B) approaches its subject with the same shade of curiosity that a diligent reader would approach a piece of fiction– ready to believe, eager for immersion. Robinson is as bewildered as the rest of us when people (herself included) make stuff up and then that stuff resembles the truth. “It is easy to forget what an anomaly we are,” she writes.
Though Robinson’s arguments deal namely with novel writing, her most reknown mode of creative expression, I see them as applicable to various forms of artmaking. On my recent perusal of “Grace and Beauty,” I thought immediately of Brady Corbet’s epic period drama film The Brutalist, which came out in December and has taken the film world by storm. With a polarizing 3.5-hour runtime cushioned by a fifteen-minute intermission, the film is a massive standout and an awards season frontrunner; it received ten nominations for the 2025 Oscars and took home the award for Best Picture at the Golden Globes. Made on a budget of $10 million and shot in 30 days, the movie presents two mediums– film (the object) and architecture (its subject), in direct conversation with one another, raising crucial questions about the intersections of art and commerce, truth and beauty, mind and body.
Spanning the postwar years 1947 to 1980, The Brutalist follows László Toth (Adrien Brody), a Hungarian-Jewish architect who survives the Buchenwald concentration camp and flees to America, where he takes up residence and a job at his cousin Attila’s furniture shop in Philadelphia. László learns from Attila that his wife, Erzsebét (Felicity Jones) and niece, Zsófia, are still alive, but stuck at a camp in Hungary. Refuge at the shop proves complicated, and László winds up homeless and addicted to opiates, shoveling coal as a day laborer. When Harrison Lee Van Buren Sr. (Guy Pearce), a wealthy client of the shop, takes an interest in László and his formal training at Germany’s Bauhaus as well as a hefty resume of architectural feats in Budapest, he hires him to construct a multi-functional community center. László agrees to live on the Van Buren estate in Doylestown, Pennsylvania and sets out to design and build the masterpiece, which will combine a gymnasium, library, auditorium, and chapel. As tensions arise among key players, the project grows increasingly challenging, threatening to tear apart László’s new life and career in America.
I should mention that the above summary is insufficient. I left out supporting characters and important plot lines, but a more thorough summary would demand pages. Accurately pinpointed by Manohla Darhis as “a bursting-at-the-seams saga of bold men and their equally outsized visions,” the film is simply too vast in scale and scope to analyze altogether. Therefore, I resort to Robinson in an attempt to mine it for evidence of discipline and entelechy as part of the artistic process.
Early on in the film, László and Attila stand inside the Van Buren mansion, having been commissioned by Harrison Lee Jr., Van Buren’s sleazy and frugal son, to transform his father’s musty study into a regal library. “It depends on the materials,” László replies to Harrison Jr.’s request for a cost estimate, drawing out each syllable of the word in his legato Hungarian accent, rendering it nearly foreign to American ears. This verbal focus is deliberate; László’s preferred architectural style, brutalism (a continuation of the Bauhaus movement and its principles), is marked by an attention to and appreciation for high-quality materials. He wants to use good, natural wood for the bookshelves, which he notices contain hundreds of first-edition books. When Harrison Jr. scoffs at his father’s perpetually closed curtains in the study, László immediately says, “It’s to protect the books,” noting the sun’s rays that spill inside and risk damage. László’s attention drifts toward the natural world down to its elements and abides by the rules of nature in his contributions to the built world. The renovation will cost $2,000 which is about $27,000 in 2025.
A few days later, László and Attila stand in the library alone, stripped bare of its curtains and clutter, to unveil the result of their work. The scene is overwhelmingly moving– László has designed floor-to-ceiling panels of vertical louver cabinetry angled at 45 degrees to protect the books while also brightening up the room. On the count of three, the cousins open up the cabinets to reveal the shelves, shifting the light ever so slightly. As they do so, the piano variation of the film’s sweeping score by Daniel Blumberg tinkles in like sweet, soft rain. It’s magical; László cannot contain his joy. He does a little victory dance, clapping and slapping his thigh, hugging Attila. After Attila exits the frame, László lingers. He drags a Bauhaus-style lounger directly into the pool of light, delicately placing a book in its holder. I’ve done it, his actions say.
The library reveal is the first glimpse Corbet gives us into László’s deep well of talent and sensitivity to the marriage between beauty and functionality in architecture. This marriage harkens to a satisfaction that, in literature, Robinson would deem the “precise order of words." In her novel Housekeeping, she elucidates it as a sense of “here and not there, thus and not otherwise.” This is how László thinks. He is unable to describe his process but knows innately when things work and when they don’t. Regarding the precise order of things, Robinson writes: “The ways in which they are satisfying– to the ear, to the senses, to cultural memory– fill them with meaning. So, beauty disciplines. It recommends a best word in a best place and makes the difference palpable between aesthetic right and wrong. And it does this freely, within the limits it finds– cultural, material, generic.”
Here, Robinson highlights the freedom that dwells in limitations. When an artist faces constraints –for example, a fictional character and the world they inhabit– they are inversely rendered more free to make decisions that abide by a set of rules or boundaries. A skilled novel writer, for example, will develop a “repertory of behavior” by which a character can first be identified and expected to behave (the goal being to then convincingly subvert these expectations.) “A word, even a punctuation mark, can be out of character,” she writes, citing Dickens and his Victorian works as a prime model for this required scrupulousness. Thus, the boundaries laid by artists form the building blocks for entire artistic movements and styles.
As more challenges arise, László becomes a belligerent, insufferable leader. One rainy afternoon, a group of third-party supervisors tours the foundation of the community center to evaluate its progress. When a disgruntled contractor expresses concern for the project’s exorbitant costs, László beckons him over and whispers, “Everything that is ugly, cruel, stupid –but, most importantly, ugly— is your fault.” On the surface, this aside reads as humorous, but upon reflection, the idea that ugliness might be someone’s fault is profound. All art, the movie reminds us, is in some way impacted by the prospect and/or necessity of commerce. László’s hyper-fixation on completing things exactly as blueprinted serves as evidence for his moral disagreement with this fact. His emphasis on the looming threat of ugliness –the antithesis of beauty– becomes his modus operandi. Asked by Harrison Sr. why he chose a career in architecture, László replies, “Is there a better definition of a cube than that of its construction?” His greatest interest is in the entelechy inherent in any manmade object.
The Brutalist is a nuanced film because it does not merely paint László and his work as a byproduct of the atrocities of the Holocaust. Of course, he is haunted and traumatized after surviving Buchenwald. He misses his wife and niece, and upon their arrival to America, he finds them much changed. All of these factors affect László’s work (and his abysmal mental state), but guiding him most strongly –and saving him from total self-destruction– is an astute aesthetic intuition.
There’s also the film itself. It’s the first American feature since 1961 to be shot almost exclusively in VistaVision, which is a high-resolution widescreen shooting format (think hotdog versus hamburger orientation) that is simultaneously cumbersome and aspirational for contemporary filmmakers. When The Brutalist premiered, the general reaction among critics and the film community at large was surprise. That it even got made is nothing short of a miracle, something Corbet underscored in interviews. He has spoken at length about the difficulties he faced during the grueling fundraising and development periods, which lasted about seven years, replete with countless false starts and a tightening budget. It’s mind-boggling to watch it and remember that it was made for only $10 million. (In comparison, Francis Ford Coppola’s 2024 grand-scale flop Megalopolis was made for $120 million.) These logistical constraints allowed for Robinson’s concept of beauty, that trusty disciplinarian, to swoop in for admonishments and readjustments, chiseling a visually stunning film as sculpture from stone. The Brutalist would not look the way it does without its constraints, yet it’s impossible to imagine it another way. It’s the embodiment of entelechy.
The film’s epilogue, a jolting jump in time to 1980, features a retrospective of László’s work hosted at the 39th Venice Biennale. His niece, now an adult, gives a speech. We find out that the community center remained incomplete until 1973, nearly twenty-five years after its outset. She quotes her uncle: “‘No matter what others try and sell you, it is the destination, not the journey.’”
This line, while consistent with László’s experiences, extends to Corbet speaking directly to audiences. It’s a miracle anything gets made, he seems to say. It can take years, and discipline is always required. But there is solace to be found in it, that tuning in to the mind’s relentless impulses against the gradient of external pressures. We soon find we are never truly alone when we create. It’s a realization that’s as beautiful as it is brutal.
