Brady Corbet is a Fan

...of the short story

Any fan (or foe) of Ayn Rand will immediately detect strong notes of The Fountainhead in The Brutalist, Brady Corbet’s latest release. The film emits similarly luscious cues around a man and his architectural vision: 1940s America, patronage and capitalism, the quarry and the raw materials. In both cases we are rooting for the misunderstood anti-hero hoping for his triumph, in the book this is anchored in Rand’s accompanying theory of objectivism – which existed really only in relation to her own work and very much outside of the philosophical canon.

But there is another literary angle to the work of Corbet; a much vaguer thread that joins Corbet’s earlier film Childhood of a Leader (2016) and the current Oscar-worthy Brutalist. This thread is the short story. Corbet’s first film Childhood of a Leader is inspired and evolved – with great license- from Sartre’s short story/novella of the same name published in 1939, while The Brutalist references Borges’ Library of Babel.

Having recently watched The Brutalist, I was reminded that Corbet, in both films, seems to have trouble with the denouement. Something out of the sync with the beginning and middle. By taking a closer look at these source stories, is it possible to illicit a different reading of Corbet’s two films? His films tend to garner a divided reception amongst the reviewers, some comparing him to Orson Welles others refer to his latest endeavour as empty of ambition despite taking on weighty themes. Ouch!

Childhood of a Leader

In his directorial debut, Corbet decides to focus on Lucien as the subject and the problem child, a future fascist dictator, and is set during the end of the Great War slightly earlier than the novella. Corbet, in a Vice interview talks about his fascination with the Treaty of Versailles and what he borrows from Satre’s text is the “childhood experiences of a would-be fascist”. The audience is then poised to look for these signals in Lucien. The film melds these two things together and is stylised as a horror rendering Lucien as a Damien-type from The Omen.

In comparison to the film, the appeal of Sartre’s story is that it is told from the perspective of Lucien, who carries the question of his existence with him as he navigates life as a child and then an adolescent. His discovery of his ‘disorder’ or existential angst is the organising principle of the narrative and is carried through by the comedy of his bumbling and constant rumination. The comedic effect also comes from the innocence of Lucien and his need to understand these feelings through his peers.

“Just like me,” said Berliac, “we both have terrific complexes!” They got the habit of interpreting their dreams and their slightest gestures; Berliac always had so many stories to tell that Lucien suspected him of inventing them, or at least enlarging them. But they got along well and approached the most delicate subjects with objectivity; they confessed to each other that they wore a mask of gaiety to deceive their associates but at heart were terribly tormented.

Lucien through Berliac, his friend to whom he confesses his thoughts, discover Freud and then become fascinated with psychoanalysis until they become bored and move on to the next thing. Sartre is probably too heavy-handed with his personal critique of Freud here.

However, all this is lost in the film as the focus is on the bad Lucien and the even badder adults. Corbet does well in sticking to one period, focusing on a pivotal time in Lucien’s childhood against the political backdrop and the cacophony of adults who are involved in his care and discipline and ultimately fail him. There is the mother, the nursemaid, the parents, the visitor (who turns out to be his real father), the priest at the school, the teacher. In Sartre’s version, the character of Lucien is too big and outflanks the family; they are the cursory backdrop of his nascent identity rather than the antagonists of the film.

In both the film and the story there is an overpowering threat of something sexual occurring, in the story the homosexuality, or as Lucien calls it ‘pederasty’, is also seen as a phase while the film it is Lucien’s curiosity with the teacher played by Stacy Martin (who was featured in Lars Von Triers Nymphomaniac- very on brand!) that is disconcerting.

The path to dictatorship in Sartre’s story is caused by Lucien taking an easy route and joining a right-wing political group the young Camelots, he gets swept up by a mob mentality where his existential grief is presented with a magic bullet. The trajectory takes a dark turn as Lucien opts to accept a ready-made set of ideas and beliefs of this group to escape ‘the inexhaustible gossip of his conscience’ and his curiosity about existence. He then plays to the galley more than most on the antisemitism.

Lucien was captivated by the camaraderies of the young Camelots; they gave him a cordial, simple welcome and he immediately felt at ease in their midst. …But it was their good humour which especially captured Lucien: nothing pedantic or austere; little talk of politics. They laughed and sang, that was all; they shouted or beat the tables in honour of the student youth.

If you watch the Vice interview with Corbet, the interviewer, summons with all her might the point of ‘nature versus nature’. Oh dear. What seems more fitting is to apply Sartre’s ‘bad faith’ theorem to Lucien. I don’t pretend to have read everything by Sartre, but of his main themes, it could be that Lucien’s passage to fascism is because he is not being authentic to himself. Or did Sartre mean for Lucien to be triumphant in his authenticity but making the point that one’s authenticity need not be good, it can equally be bad. Sartre wrote his short story collection The Wall – in which The Childhood of a Leader appears - just after Nausea and before Being and Nothingness and so the existentialism and related concepts could still have been in conception phase. In the film we jump abruptly from Lucien still being a brat to him decades later as a fascist dictator, in full garb and faceless, with crowds cheering him on.

I guess its hard to be too enterprising with the plot if the title explains it all anyway.

The Brutalist

The building of the library is the entry point for László, Corbet’s Hungarian protagonist. Newly arrived from Europe and surviving the Holocaust, he is grateful to be in gainful employment by a cousin who owns a furniture store. The son of the future patron commissions the redesigning of a library which László executes in the Bauhaus style. And so, the arc of the story begins. After a rocky start, he is recognised as a talent to be nurtured. The mention of Borges story comes from an onlooking guest when the library is debuted by Van Buren senior, in which he calls it the ‘never-ending library’ before the commission of a civic centre is put to László.

For many short story enthusiasts, the Library of Babel, has a long-standing cult status of its own and at a first glance, as with the story, Corbet plays with the idea of length through the running time of the film and the symbolism of the brutal concrete and László’s intransigence over the height of the walls. At this point we are very much with László, we sit close to him. We see his expressions, his turmoil and like a good audience we want him to make it. There is a generous level of depth to this part of the story and the length makes sense. Similarly, the narrator in Borges story builds a universe of the library that spins on the axis of its own rules and lore. We are told about the vastness of the library where others have perished in its staircases, the reader along with the narrator is trying to understand the DNA of this library. Borges creates a never-ending puzzle in the form of a concept, killing the one-dimensional idea of learning as the noble path to wisdom.

The library is a sphere whose exact centre is anyone of its hexagons and whose circumference is inaccessible.

Borges’ mastery over the short form is philosophical –most of all it is enticing but remains, like the parameter of the library inaccessible. But trust the internet to spot the obvious: one X user pointed out that the Library of Babel, although published in 1941, was not translated into English until 1960.

The length of the film is rendered unjustifiable as the story jumps in all different directions. The audience thinks they understand the pacing and style of the narrative, but the story ends abruptly after László’s wife confronts the Van Burens about the rape at the quarry in Carrera. The film then swiftly goes into an explanatory epilogue where László (at this point wheelchair bound) is celebrated at the Venice Biennale and his architectural choices are explained. The film ends.

Err what?

A lot happens in the second half of the movie, but Corbet, intentionally I take it, makes very little effort to connect the dots. Tóth’s Jewishness is signaled but not interpreted; the same goes for his heroin addiction and his fits of bad temper…The general effect may create in us a nostalgia for the edgy coherence of the first part. (Michael Wood, LRB, Volume 47 number 2, 6 February 2025)

For Wood, the commonality between Corbet’s two films seems to be that they are films that are “in love with the ugly idea of chance”. Or could it be the dark side or brutality of chance? I think the problem lies in the nostalgia, the audience is made to feel nostalgic for a person who never existed. László is too made-up and composite to have a complete story. The former may also be the genius of the film but also the downfall.

Short stories are about the mastery of big things in a succinct form. The best ones, you have to appreciate them afar in a state of awe. Using them for other artistic endeavours can be a hazard.

In both films there seems to be more for us to say when something is off kilter.