what is porn?

the brutalist spoilers ahead

In the most basic of senses, porn is an image (moving or still) whose contents are subservient to their effects on the viewer. The actors make up for the lack of imagination of the writers, lapses in logic, and sometimes even full breaks with reality via their performances. The characters’ backstories and motivations aren’t constructed but signaled toward: a tool belt around a waist, a pair of glasses, a comment about a husband or girlfriend. And if the image is moving, any moving it’s doing is only for the purposes of getting to the end. 

This is the experience of watching The Brutalist, a movie that gives its characters such little substance that their actions often come as a surprise (and, as a result, carry not-much by way of appreciable consequence). We are meant, for example, to intuit that László’s cousin and his wife are bigots from a few passing remarks, but the exploitative relationship he has with Van Buren has to be consummated in the most graphic, and banal, way possible. Corbet insists on victimizing and humiliating László, his wife Erzsébet, and their niece Zsófia, to the point of absurdity, saddling them with one symbolically tragic feature after another to forcibly wring out sympathy and heartache from the audience. Zsófia, in addition to being mute from trauma, is raped by Van Buren’s son. László is addicted to heroin. Erzsébet is wheelchair-bound from starvation-induced osteoporosis and despite being a foreign affairs journalist has to settle for working at a ladies’ magazine. Corbet has Van Buren rape László because he doesn’t trust his audience to understand that his patron is weak and abusive and wants to own him, and then he has Erzsébet barge into Van Buren’s house to call him an “evil rapist” just so he can then have her kicked to the ground and dragged out by her hair. It’s the girl in the porn yelling “fuck me harder!!” just to make sure you feel the way you’re meant to. Just so you get to the end. 

The use of AI in making this parade of bullshit surprises me not at all. The Brutalist is not a movie that was made with any kind of concern for the content matching its form; the only thing that matters is the effect of the form on the viewer. In its own words: “it’s not the journey; it’s the destination.”