There's something darkly poetic about watching The Brutalist in 2025, as AI companies scramble to convince us that creativity can be reduced to prompt engineering and Silicon Valley bros try to replace artists with algorithms. This three-and-a-half-hour epic about a Hungarian architect battling his wealthy patron's growing resentment feels less like period drama and more like a warning shot across the bow of our current techno-cultural moment.

Last week, I finally got the chance to see Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist when it arrived in my city. I went in skeptical of the latest darling of film-bro veneration, but I was thoroughly awed by the experience of watching it. Beyond being a monumental technical achievement, shot on VistaVision cameras and released in gorgeous 70mm, The Brutalist is also just a really entertaining movie that never drags over its prodigious runtime. More importantly, it offers a prescient meditation on the eternal pissing match between authentic artistic expression and wealth-driven control.

While the film builds a metaphorical landscape that is about as subtle as a brutalist concrete facade, it is quite successful in that it allows the viewer to ascribe meaning to a multitude of topics found within: immigration, anti-Semitism, Zionism, architecture, class, and the vacuity of the American Dream itself. But what I've found myself obsessing over is the relationship between art and commerce that plays out between Hungarian architect László Tóth (Adrien Brody) and wealthy industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce)—a dynamic that feels particularly relevant to today's billionaire overlords and their attempts to buy artistic legitimacy in increasingly pathetic ways.

This archetypal conflict—the perennial struggle of wealth attempting to commandeer creative legitimacy—represents a time-honored social pathology. The most affluent individuals invariably discover that artistic authenticity cannot be purchased, no matter how obscene their financial arsenal. Witness Mark Zuckerberg's beyond-cringe collaboration with T-Pain on an acoustic cover of the Lil Jon & the East Side Boyz classic, “Get Low” (Zuckerberg’s auto-tuned delivery of the line, “can I play with your panty line” alone could halt a thousand orgies) or Knicks owner James Dolan's decades-long quest for boomer blues-rock legitimacy with his vanity project, JD & The Straight Shot—a band that Mr. Dolan himself couldn't pay me to see. (Actually, that's a lie. Call me, James, let's talk numbers or MSG floor seats.)

The underlying psychology here is pathetic, fascinating, and a little tragic. These guys will always be left out of the cool creatives club, and somewhere in their coddled psyches, they know it. Their resultant resentment becomes a weaponized instrument, and they attempt to destroy the artists they envy through constantly evolving methods of subjugation.

In The Brutalist, Harrison's resentment toward László follows this playbook with, dare I say, algorithmic precision. We first meet Harrison as he's forcibly ejecting László and his construction crew from his palatial country estate, having discovered them there after his son Harry Jr. (Joe Alwyn, doing his best "privileged failson") secretly hired them to remodel daddy's library. But when the unauthorized redesign is lauded in Look Magazine as proof of Harrison's cultural bona fides, he tracks down László and ingratiates him into his high-society circle to cement that prestige. Soon, László is living (presumably) rent free inside the Van Buren's guest house and hard at work on a grand commission—a massive community center that will serve as a tribute to Harrison's recently deceased mother.

As the project progresses, Harrison's desire to bask in László's clout increasingly clashes with his indignation at being forced to live in the architect's shadow. Playing Harrison, Pearce's nuanced portrayal telegraphs the character's resentment in subtle physical articulation, the envy practically seeping from his pores like expensive cologne. It finally erupts in words when he meets László's wife, Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), newly arrived from Europe:

"As persons of unique privilege, I have always thought that it is our duty to nurture the defining talents of our epoch. I possess no such talent whatsoever! Truth be told, I am terribly emulous of individuals like him."

By the film's final act, Harrison's resentment has metastasized into physical abuse that has all but destroyed László.

Like Harrison Van Buren, today's tech leaders represent those who, haven chosen financial power over creative fulfillment, seek to destroy what they cannot possess. The rush of AI companies stealing the labor of thousands of artists—musicians, visual artists, writers—to create tools that distill the joy of creation into a few clicks represents the latest manifestation of this destructive impulse.

Take Mikey Shulman, CEO of Suno, a generative AI music creator, who recently displayed some world-class projection on a podcast when he claimed, "It's not really enjoyable to make music now [...] It takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of practice, you need to get really good at an instrument or really good at a piece of production software. I think the majority of people don't enjoy the majority of the time they spend making music." My brother in Christ, that's literally the point. Here Shulman displays such a profound misunderstanding of the artistic process that you have to wonder if it stems from some deep psychological wound—like the lingering trauma of never mastering “Wonderwall” well enough on acoustic guitar to impress any of the girls in his freshman dorm. But whatever personal frustrations might fuel this mindset, the end result is that he and his ilk are making it infinitely harder for actual creatives to make a living.

This destructive tendency mirrors Harrison Van Buren's literal violence. Just as Harrison physically takes without asking in the film's most harrowing scene, tech companies scrape data and train AI to churn out "art" without artists' consent. It represents a calculated strategy of cultural expropriation, wherein technological platforms systematically deconstruct and reconstruct artistic production without meaningful consent or compensation.

The parallel may seem a bit hyperbolic—and I'm not necessarily claiming otherwise—but the destructive impulses of wealthy men who possess everything material yet remain unfulfilled should be evident to anyone who's spent ten seconds on Elon Musk's X account. Now with a similarly bitter and petty grifter back in the White House, tech barons like Zuckerberg, Musk, and Jeff Bezos find themselves more empowered than ever to marginalize artistic communities. But ultimately, that will never be enough for them. Like Harrison Van Buren, the hunger derived from their emotional voids is insatiable. These guys could be using AI to solve climate change or cure diseases, but instead they’re determined to dilute art into an algorithmic transaction, poison the human experience, and infect us with their own deep dissatisfaction and unquenchable materialistic desire.

In the interim since I began writing this, it came out that The Brutalist used AI in post-production to smooth out the Hungarian accents of Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones. The film's editor, Dávid Jancsó, revealed that the 18-month-long post-production process included the usage of Ukrainian artificial intelligence-driven speech synthesis software Respeecher. "It is controversial in the industry to talk about AI, but it shouldn't be," Jancsó said. "We should be having a very open discussion about what tools AI can provide us with. There's nothing in the film using AI that hasn't been done before. It just makes the process a lot faster. We use AI to create these tiny little details that we didn't have the money or the time to shoot."

While I don't think this revelation undercuts the film's exploration of the tension between art and commerce, the use of generative AI on a project ostensibly lauded as a triumph of old-school filmmaking certainly raises questions. The precedent has been set now to use AI in the making of a prestige film. However, for a director like Corbet trying to make maximalist art on a minimal budget, the decision is understandable, and I do worry that focusing too much on this fact erroneously overestimates the current capabilities of AI—a narrative simultaneously inflated by profit-thirsty investors and doom-scrolling tech critiques.

If we are to take Jancsó's words at face value, the use of AI in The Brutalist enhanced the film's artistic integrity. But just as László battles to maintain his artistic integrity under Harrison's increasingly predatory patronage, we’re going to have to fight like hell in the coming years as AI companies and tech barons seek to erode creative agency, commodify, and ultimately nullify the creative process.

In both cases, the fundamental truth remains the same: genuine artistic expression cannot be bought, controlled, or artificially replicated. Our collective resistance lies in maintaining a critical awareness—rejecting the seductive illusion that artistic competency can be instantaneously generated through algorithmic intervention. As long as we remember this, no matter how many billions the tech barons throw at the problem, true artistic legitimacy will remain gloriously, frustratingly out of their reach.