Brussels, circa 2004

On the Intoxication of Youth and Fleeting Infinities

We sowed in youth a mustard seed,/ We cut an almond rod;/ We are now grown up to riper age:/ Are they withered in the sod?/ Are they blighted, failed and faded,/ Are they mouldered back to clay? (the Brontës)

A few luminous sequences in a film can cast a glow over the whole, transforming what might have left us indifferent into something distinct. In A Complete Unknown, within the shoebox dimensions of Dylan’s apartment – especially in those scenes circling the Cuban Missile Crisis – the dust and daylight conspire just so, sending me skidding down a wormhole to Brussels, around 2004, a time suspended in the aftermath of the great alter-globalization and anti-war protests, a moment that, in hindsight, rhymes more with 1962 than with anything that followed (specially after 2008, where everything started to go awry at an accelerated pace).

No television (no one seemed to take notice that it even existed), no internet (or barely: we checked our emails once or twice a week, at a call center, keeping online surfing to a minimum; it cost 50 cents per half-hour, money we’d rather spend on things that actually mattered), a phone, sure, portable in theory but mostly inert (with no cameras in hand, people seldom attempted to capture the living strand: pin-down a butterfly, and its wings forget the sky...).

Nobody seemed to really work. Money, when it appeared, vanished in an instant, funneled into booze & books. But somehow, that precarious edge of existence made everything shimmer. Reading like a beatnik, writing in a fever, making love to girls with names like forgotten poems, slipping in and out of second-hand bookstores where the yellowed pages carried the magical scent of new discoveries, the cinémathèque screening Tarkovsky, Fassbinder, or some New Wave deep cut, a jazz jam veering toward the sublime before collapsing into utter chaos, a friend’s apartment swelling nightly with bodies, bottles, and smoke, surrounded by a sea of possibility, moving beyond isolation through bright, bouncing synths, in the wild, surreal glam of moonage daydreams, the city itself, lights that never go out, unfolding in endless late-night conversations, each a whispered conspiracy against whatever dawn might bring...

Life had this lazy, unhurried rhythm, like it was stretching out, inhaling deep. We sprawled across the Grand Place like it was a secret we’d discovered, cheap beers sweating in our hands, the guilds catching the final rays of sunlight, shimmering in a way that felt like a half-remembered dream from some old Flemish painter, no panic about the passage of time, just this quiet, unspoken certainty that this moment, this exact moment, was infinite. 

Our Brussels was a polyphonic mestizo city where the notion of race held no dominion; a fleeting glimpse of a democratic oasis unsullied by commerce or greed (to borrow a phrase from Greil Marcus’ Invisible Republic), drawing wandering souls from across the globe: Angola, Argentina, Brazil, Cyprus, France, Germany, Ghana, Morocco, Martinique, Syria, Vietnam... In the many vernissages, encounters that felt like verses coming to life, fragments of poetry walking, speaking, unfolding in gestures, in glances that lingered just long enough to suggest entire unwritten stories. In the squats, their boots barely leaving the floor, pretty punkettes danced as if channeling some ancient, forgotten ritual. The music then – a collision of intensity, longing, rebellion, and transcendence – sounded like the emotional landscape of life-altering years, a soundtrack of raw desire, poetic defiance, dreamy evasion, pulling at something – an electric current – just beneath the surface of the night. And for a while, we believed – we knew – that we were perched at the edge of something vast, unnamed, vital. A threshold. A signal just beyond reach. Was the belief – that knowledge – the thing itself?

The countless difficult morning-afters, naturally, would perform their usual alchemy, softening the edges, thinning the thing out like smoke drifting on a breeze that never manages to touch the earth. But come nightfall, it would creep back, murmuring it hadn’t gone anywhere, one of those subterranean moods, lurking in the unseen places, waiting, unreadable, to be stumbled upon when the time was ripe, a time that never quite came, always just out of reach, like a horizon that keeps retreating the closer you get, until at last it simply flickered, wavered, and dissolved like a mirage. 

I’m not sure I’d go so far as to call Brussels back then, like Fitzgerald with his lost city, my lost city, but looking at it today – overcrowded with tourists, armed forces patrolling with machine guns, the homeless growing exponentially in number, gunfights almost weekly, violent flare-ups between rival soccer supporters on a regular basis, young minds too busy scrolling to imagine a life beyond the screen – it’s hard not to feel a stir, some quiet ache. I don’t mean to veer into deceptive nostalgia, the siren song of better days that never fully were, but damn, when everything’s unraveled into the gigantic quagmire we’re stuck in today, you start to think maybe looking back to times like that isn’t the worst instinct; if nothing else, that half-remembered dream of the possibility of another world – back then still in the air – may whisper of other paths, half-lit and long overgrown, yes, but never fully gone...

The Hard Core of a Visionary Failure

On The Brutalist, or: A Blueprint for a Better Film

I decided to give The Brutalist a go the other night, despite the scathing reviews and overenthusiastic praise I had been reading, neither of which inspired confidence.

It wouldn’t be hard to explain why I didn’t like it. It’s riddled with loose ends, drags unnecessarily (I have no issue with long films, if the runtime is justified), and is overcooked in its ambition (I welcome ambition, as long as it delivers). It’s also annoyingly over-explanatory, to the point of patronizing the viewer. Do we really need an upside-down Statue of Liberty in the opening scene to foreshadow the downside of the American Dream? Do we need a verbal explanation that opium is addictive to grasp the protagonist’s struggles with the slaving habit?

But rather than listing its many flaws, I’d rather critique The Brutalist from the ruins of the good film it could have been.

Much has been said about The Brutalist’s use of VistaVision, but I can’t help but see it as fundamentally at odds with both the aesthetics and politics of Brutalism. Brady Corbet justifies the choice by saying that using a 1950s-engineered format helps immerse the viewer in that era, a valid argument if the goal were mere nostalgia. Yet Brutalism wasn’t about looking backward, quite the contrary.

Brutalism was raw, functional, and unvarnished, marked by exposed concrete, heavy massing, modular spaces, and an absence of decorative flourishes. VistaVision, on the other hand, is the complete opposite: a highly polished, immersive, hyperreal format designed to enhance visual clarity and depth, often used to capture grand, sweeping beauty with rich color and a sense of sumptuousness. It smooths out the rough edges, makes everything tonic, expansive, and like a painting.

Brutalism wasn’t about classical compositions and aesthetic perfection; it was about mass, social contradictions, and dynamic human experience. But The Brutalist turns it into a historical postcard, sanitizing its radicality. Instead of embracing Brutalism’s stark, defiant materiality, the film aestheticizes it into something detached from its political function. Soviet Constructivist cinematography – drawing from Dziga Vertov or Sergei Eisenstein – would have been a bolder choice, with its low angles, deep shadows, and exaggerated perspectives, better suited to capturing the architecture’s weight and presence rather than reducing it to an inert backdrop.

The film shows a flicker of awareness in its use of 16mm for documentary-style footage and Digital Betacam for the epilogue’s TV segment, but it never fully commits. Had it been shot in grainy, tactile, imperfect textures, it might have created a visual language that felt more like Brutalist concrete, rather than Hollywood grandeur.

Brutalism has long suffered from being misrepresented as cold, authoritarian, and oppressive, when it was the opposite: a radical response to capitalism’s failures, designed for public good, committed to communal experience and social equality. Beyond providing efficient and equitable housing with available resources, it aspired to a form of communal luxury.

As Owen Hatherley writes in Militant Modernism, British New Brutalists, like the ‘angry young’ Smithsons, working with raw materials at hand, aimed at creating architectural solutions that would unashamedly house the poor and at the same time be glamorous, ‘an architecture both of austerity and abundance, in line with the contradictions of the post-1945 melange of Socialism and Capitalism that created the post-war boom’. The Brutalist completely misunderstands this, tying Brutalism to personal trauma and aestheticized suffering, collapsing it into a story of individual grief rather than radical collective possibility.

Nowhere is this misreading more unsettling than in Tóth’s decision to model the Van Buren Institute on the Nazi concentration camp of Buchenwald, a place designed to dehumanize and exterminate millions of human beings. Even if it were meant as a deliberate provocation, a way of forcing people to confront the painful past, it would still be unfit (to say the least) for the purposes of a community center, typically a space of refuge and social connection. Furthermore, it undermines Brutalism’s core principles, which had nothing whatsoever to do with memorializing trauma, but rather with breaking from oppressive structures and envisioning new ones. Tóth’s project isn’t an architectural response to human needs; it’s a haunted echo of past horrors, reinforcing their weight rather than transcending them.

In the final take, Brutalism is presented as a relic, displayed at the Venice Biennale, an exclusionary setting deeply embedded in the parallel universe of high-art, where architecture is preserved as spectacle rather than integrated into daily life. By the time the epilogue takes place, in the beginning of the neoliberal era, Modernist solutions in general, and Brutalism in particular, were far from being celebrated (just ask Tom Wolfe!), they were being demolished, the whole social project actively dismantled – through neglect, privatization, and political shifts away from public investment in housing and infrastructure.

If anything, the ending should have led us to ask: ‘What did we lose by abandoning these ideals? By giving up collective solutions?’ Instead, it sounds like the film just shrugs and says: ‘That’s all, folks!’

Ironically, the only scene that seems to embody Brutalist ideals isn’t about architecture at all; it’s the jazz jam session.

Among other things, Brutalism was about creating spaces for diverse communities to coexist and interact: massive residential complexes built for working-class people, communal spaces integrated into the structure itself. It embraced imperfection, roughness, and stark contrasts. It was experimental, and anti-bourgeois. Jazz, at its best, would be in a way the musical equivalent: improvisational, innovative, intense, constantly bending sonic structures, breaking through social barriers. As Jacques Attali has pointed out in Noise, by rejecting conformity to the repetitive patterns dominating the post-war cultural landscape, jazz in the late '50s and '60s paved the way for a new mode of musical production. 

The jam session scene, where marginalized communities – Black musicians, Jewish émigrés, sex workers, and drug users – come together in a liberated space, mirrors somehow the social utopian design that most Brutalist architecture aspired to. It’s beautifully raw and alive, a radically democratic realm, where differences are sublated in unfettered collective creation.

Under the spell of a Mingus-like sound, it’s the one moment where the film’s world feels alive, where people aren’t just suffering in beautifully framed shots but actually living in defiance of the oppressive structures around them. The jazz scene succeeds where the rest of the movie fails; it shows what Brutalist spaces were meant to foster, rather than mourning their supposed blunder.

The otherworldly Carrara marble quarry sequence – filmed with such craft, with the Italian partigiano’s story being told in the background – echoes the jazz scene in its poetic and political intensity, creating a moment of solidarity between the wretched – the Jewish architect and the anti-fascist anarchist artisan – both negatively shaped by the experience of the war. The quarry, already a site heavy with symbolism (extraction, exploitation, brutal labor conditions), becomes for a minute almost an allegory of an alter world. The scene suggests a possible counterpoint to the film’s broader narrative of manipulation and sorrow; a moment in which creation, resistance, and lived experience align in an act of shared defiance and beauty.

But then, this is bluntly shattered by an act of sexual abuse, a narrative misstep that weakens the film’s own critique. If we think about its storyline economy, what each scene contributes to the whole, the scene feels gratuitous rather than revelatory. If the goal was to show Tóth’s breaking point, hadn’t his years of psychological and economic subjugation under the patronage of Van Buren already established that? Instead of letting the political weight of the scene breathe, the film forces a moral collapse, as if it didn’t trust us to grasp Tóth’s suffering unless it’s pushed to the extreme.

The free-association between the ideas of Brutalism and brutality was already advanced and explored – way more successful if I may add – more than 50 years ago in Stanley Kubrick’s Clockwork Orange, filmed partially at the Southmere Estate in Thamesmead. In The Brutalist, however, it doesn’t add depth but reduces the complexity of power and coercion to another victimization trope.

The film had already built an effective critique of how power operates subtly, through favor, economic dependence, and artistic compromise in a capitalist society, but by inserting this sudden physical brutality, it shifts focus away from those more insidious, systemic forces.

Had the director trusted the strength of scenes like the jazz jam and the quarry sequence to carry their own weight, it could have provided a radical counterpoint to Van Buren’s world – the world of privilege, narcissism, and exceptionalism of the ultra-rich – a glimpse of what art, labor, and solidarity might look like outside the logic of profit and exploitation. Instead, the intrusion of sexual violence collapses those possibilities, reducing moments of potential dissent into yet another iteration of victimhood and suffering.

Even worse: instead of confronting the master, the offended, tellingly, turns against his fellow exploited, including Gordon, the Black co-worker he befriended at the start of his American journey, and who vanishes from the screen just as inexplicably as Van Buren at the end.

At its best, The Brutalist had the potential to explore the tension between artistic vision and capitalist patronage, between radical architecture and its later misinterpretation. But instead of engaging with these contradictions, it romanticizes, aestheticizes, and ultimately misunderstands its own subject, painting Brutalism as mere historical relic, in lieu of a political statement, a vision of the future that never came to be. The movie doesn't challenge the neoliberal erasure of that alternative future; it accepts it rather, as if it were inevitable. And that, more than anything, is its greatest failure.  

Reveries of a Lonely Robot

Post-Apocalyptic Humanity and Utopian Longing in WALL-E

For Andreas, petit camarade

Ideology is never merely ideological. Walter Benjamin saw in Walt Disney’s early animated films a subversive potential, a touch of the surreal that prefigured a utopian vision of a deregulated world where anything could happen. In Mickey Mouse, he identified both a radical renunciation of experience and the libertarian fantasy of complete self-sufficiency. For Benjamin, Disney’s animation functioned as a kind of psychological immunization, shielding spectators from the spontaneous emergence of collective psychoses – those latent, repressed drives within the masses that bourgeois civilization had long sought to suppress.

 

Adorno disagreed with his friend on this point. For him, when the proletarianized masses went to the movie theater, they did not come to recognize their power over the reality that oppressed them; on the contrary, they merely sought compensation for their real powerlessness. Later, during the war, a few years after Benjamin’s tragic death, Adorno would be even more explicit: Disney cartoons did more than accustom the senses to the rhythms and shocks of the new technological society; they did something far worse. They hammered into the minds of modern image consumers the old lesson that life in society is nothing but relentless wear and tear, crushing all individual resistance. Donald Duck, for example, takes his share of blows so that viewers grow accustomed to the ones they endure daily. And since nothing – absolutely nothing – escapes our attention, the ultimate paradox is that instead of relaxing with these distractions, we leave the theater even more anxious and exhausted.

 

For the Frankfurtian, there seemed to be no room for criticism or independent judgment in cultural products that were pre-digested and pre-designed as consumer goods, as they did nothing but reaffirm life as it is. However, he conceded that, occasionally, something of genuine quality might emerge from the mass of cultural waste that contemporary production had become, suggesting that it was not entirely degraded or homogeneous as hardcore Adornians today might tend to think. In such rare cases, he argued, reification and alienation would be transmuted into a fleeting appearance of humanity and closeness.

 

Building on this idea, later critics emphasized the paradox of a new form of manipulation at work even in the most degraded mass cultural products. Alongside their role as ideological tools, these works would also contain a utopian or transcendent potential, since, according to Fredric Jameson, ‘they cannot manipulate unless they offer some genuine shred of content as a fantasy bribe to the public about to be so manipulated’ (‘Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture’). Even though the meanings, symbols, and images they convey are entirely shaped by corporate intentions, it is, as Andreas Huyssen puts it, precisely because the culture industry ‘articulates social contradictions in order to homogenize them’ that this very process ‘can become the field of contest and struggle’ (‘Adorno in Reverse’).

 

Despite being a Pixar/Disney animation, and although it doesn’t stray from broadly approved aesthetic idioms, WALL-E (2008) is surprisingly sensitive in its critique of cultural homogenization under brand fetishism, unbridled consumerism, and technological alienation (without slipping into technophobia, which is rare). Set around the year 2700, the film depicts a future in which humanity – after Earth has been rendered uninhabitable by the ubiquitous Buy n Large Corporation, a multinational technology conglomerate  – now resides aboard the Axiom, a colossal luxury spaceship at the fringes of the Solar System. There, society functions as a fully automated welfare state – seemingly without outcasts, hierarchy, or exploitation – a bizarre form of capitalism, without classes or money, yet where commodity reigns supreme.

 

For this very reason, although there is no labor in this society of pure consumption, alienation is brutal. The denial of sensibility and the body, the destruction of living experience, and the erasure of historical memory are absolute. A kind of general intellect exists – not so much in service of humanity as in command of it – while humans remain utterly unconscious of themselves. Human relationships are mediated, in part, by objects (goods and machines) whereas robots exhibit human traits: they are sensitive, possess character, firmness of purpose and memory capacity, fall in love, feel anger, fear, even go mad.

 

Of course, the main point is implicit, but not entirely concealed: what remains of humanity is almost nothing, a population so small it wouldn’t fill a soccer stadium. This suggests that the final class war on Earth was vicious, with a handful of the ‘fortunate’ managing to escape at the last moment on ‘missions’ backed by some Elon Musk-like figure. Though much remains unexplained, one of the film’s most striking elements is the persistence of fetishism and blind automatism, even in the absence of property, class antagonism, and labor. It presents a society at once freed from the burden of alienated work and yet utterly alienated; a dystopian utopia, where suffering and violence seem absent, yet so is any life worthy of the name, leaving only a comfortable, high-tech bovine existence.

 

At times, the film almost feels as if it were written by Marxist screenwriters. At one point, a revolt erupts among dysfunctional robots – their defects making them open to purposes beyond their programmed functions – against the forces of order, which are themselves robotized. This uprising leads to an alliance between these ‘useless’ insurgent machines and humans who have broken free from their own alienated condition, joining forces in a collective struggle against the automated subject (Marx’s name for capital) embodied by the robot Auto. This struggle becomes the precondition for humans and machines to rebuild civilization together on the ruins of the old Earth.

 

That said, there is an undeniable ease – perhaps too much – in how the humans’ de-alienation (and their resulting shift in perception) unfolds, despite having previously seemed like mere automatons. Even so, it is significant that the breakdown of reification coincides with – and is partly driven by – the resistance of the dysfunctional. A dynamic rarely seen in films for adults, let alone those made for children.

 

The ease of transformation is precisely what Mark Fisher found troubling about WALL-E’s hopeful ending. The return of humans to rebuild Earth, he argues, feels unearned, as the capitalist system that caused the catastrophe is never truly questioned, only softened. Though WALL-E appears to critique consumer culture, its resolution, according to him, ultimately neutralizes that critique. The infantilized, immobilized humans aboard the Axiom embody capitalism’s endpoint: passive consumers entirely dependent on the system. Yet rather than envisioning a genuine rupture with capitalism, the film offers a nostalgic redemption arc, reinforcing the status quo instead of challenging it. For Fisher, WALL-E exemplifies how late capitalism co-opts dissent, repackaging critique within emotionally satisfying but ultimately conservative narratives.

 

And yet, for all its limitations, there is something in WALL-E that resists easy recuperation. Nowhere is this more apparent than in its opening act, which could almost stand alone as a separate film (as Fisher himself highlighted): a devastated Earth, devoid of life – human or otherwise (except for a little cockroach, and an unlikely new vine sprouting inside an old boot – and a lonely, Benjaminian little robot wandering through the ruins, collecting remnants of a civilization that has self-destructed. Through these traces, he reconstructs fragments of the world-thing that led to the telluric catastrophe – yet perhaps in a way that also reveals the utopian spark latent in what blind historical tendencies have condemned to oblivion. Forgetfulness itself, along with the disappearance of all language, is thus recorded, albeit obliquely. This may be why the melancholy pervading these scenes is not purely melancholic; it does not simply fold into itself. It lingers, but rather than merely mourning what is lost, it gestures toward something other.

 

In contrast to a society that subsumes all that is spiritual under the logic of consumption and accelerated disposal, the world recreated by the little robot makes room for everything – except, tellingly, a shiny ring, which he discards without the slightest hesitation. Here, each object finds its place, even a child's hybrid cutlery – half fork, half spoon, neither one thing nor the other: ‘Irreplaceable is only that which serves no purpose’ (Adorno). WALL-E’s shelter, a sort of Benjaminian dreamworld, is a fragile yet defiant stronghold of what, in the words of Ernst Bloch, ‘has not yet been fully realized anywhere, but which, as an event worthy of the human being, is imminent and reveals itself as the mission to be accomplished’. And in this fragile persistence of the useless, in that which refuses to be discarded, perhaps lies the glimmer of a world still worth building.

 

P.S.: The first draft of this text was written in the spring of 2020, in the early days of the pandemic, when I watched WALL-E multiple times with my then five-year-old son. At the time, so much about the virus remained unknown, and the looming prospect of a decimated humanity cast an eerily realistic shadow over the film – a feeling which hasn’t left me since.