For those of us who have deep concern, and on some days panic, over the results of the recent election and the continuation of democracy in the U.S. – and that should be everyone even though it is clearly not – 2024 was a traumatizing year.

Or retraumatizing, if you’re like me and most of my friends.

But not one without hope.

Counterintuitive, though those two thoughts might be.

Trauma has gotten a knee jerk eye roll response in recent years.  As if an emotional response to a distressing event that causes you to feel unsafe, frightened or overwhelmed is an unreasonable one, or means a person is weak.

Or, heaven forbid, too woke.

It is neither.  All it means is that you’ve had a personal reaction to a personal experience.  Not everyone is traumatized in the same way or by the same thing.  We might be able to agree on basic rules of extreme awfulness, nee trauma, that might occur but there can never be exact common ground on the effects it has on any one individual in its aftermath.

Similar as the human experience may be, we are ALL different.  For me, the key has always been to accept the differences and try to find common ground in our shared humanness.

Easier said than done for me these days.

And most especially during the last two closing months of this year.

Ironically, this is where hope comes in.  

And NO, not the Pollyanna/Kumbaya false hope you get from a random catch phrase on a social media post or Notesfromachair blog  (Note: Though I suppose that could be a springboard to something…or even anything…positive). But the endurance, survival and likeminded human perseverance, and in turn victories, of those who have travelled this road before. 

On Friday night I watched two end of the year Oscar contender films – A Real Pain and The Brutalist.  Yes, it was a double feature of Holocaust-themed movie screeners this weekend because that’s the kind of gay, nice Jewish boy at heart type of guy living in 2024 that I am.

One of my dearest friends in the world, whose death several years ago still tears at my soul, grew up with Holocaust survivor parents and at one time shared with me that the thing about the Holocaust is that you can never compete with it.  Meaning, to be a descendent of that traumatic tribe meant that it was likely not a thing, an event, or even moment in your life can ever be possibly as bad as what those people experienced.

That’s one of the reasons the subject comes up over and over and over again in art, in politics, in random discussions and, generally, in life.  It’s a benchmark for evil, for badness and for the worst.  

But the flip side of that is that it’s also an example of the best, the brightest, the strongest, the most clever and, when all else fails, the luckiest.  A version of what can happen when rational thought makes one believe everything is stacked against you and there is NO winning.

Even survival could not be winning.  

Except, of course, when it is.

A Real Pain poses the question of what parts and kinds of lives the descendants owe to the survivors.  No spoilers at all ahead but the basic, deceptively simple story is of two male cousins – played to perfection by Kieran Culkin and Jesse Eisenberg, the latter of whom wrote and directed — who go to Poland to visit the home of their recently-deceased survivor grandmother.  They grew up together but these days couldn’t be more drastically different.  Yet, like so many of us, they are surprisingly, and very humanly, similar.  It’s just that they’ve processed their lives, responsibilities and individual DNA leanings quite differently.

The film is funny, uncomfortable, a bit off and unceasingly, perhaps even a bit dis-satisfyingly, true.  Which is what gives one hope while watching it.  Somehow you get the idea that those existential questions that have periodically crept into your psyche and haunted you, equally do so to others who are similarly just getting by in those moments.  

And you don’t need to have any familial relation to the BIG trauma to grab onto the small shards of hope offered to anyone trying to see some small rays of possibilities into 2025.  Everyone is always grasping for straws through the big, the small and everywhere in between.  We all are.  And many of us manage to get through it, albeit in our own ways and with our costs.

I so wish my dear friend were here to see.  And discuss.

As for The Brutalist, it is a more sweeping, epic look at a survivor’s life in America, a brilliant and very flawed architect and how he makes his way, and his mark, through the 1940s, 1950s and beyond as an unsavory yet revered, othered yet in-demand, disrespected yet, at times, surface-ly respected, IMMIGRANT. 

Stating its “sweepiness” and “epic-ocity” is technically true but in all honesty it is equally false.  It is, in fact, quite familiar a story of today in terms of tolerance, fame, trauma, American exceptionalism/non-exceptionalism and, most of all, love.  Of many kinds.

But more than anything of oneself and why that particular emotion is so difficult for any one of us given our varied sets of experiences, nee traumas.

Let’s not say anything more than that except to marvel both at Adrien Brody’s key central performance and how a film can simultaneously be so obtuse and yet so ultimately crystal clear all at the same time.  With his famed and boldly prominent nose (Note: The ONLY stereotypical Jewish calling card I happened not to get), not to mention his thick European accent and intense intellectual swagger, this character’s “otherness” in that period of time enters the room practically before he does. 

What would make him charismatic and riveting today are merely passing social oddities in the United States during the time that he lived.  Much in the way particular features today define people as exotic others within their individual ethnicities in 2024.  As I joked with one of my trans students privately (Note: Who would not mind me sharing this), it’s the luck of the draw who gets THE golden ticket of otherness every five years. 

Too often in America, Black people had it, only to drop to the #2 spot, and then get it tossed back to them.  Gay men had it for a while in the 80s.  Non-white skinned immigrants had it from 2016-2020, only to drop down a tad and get it back again during election season.  Though this year the Trans community seems to have captured the top spot beside them, for however long that lasts. Hopefully not four years.

None of it means anything, except that it means everything.  

Which explains why in the world of The Brutalist it’s not so much that Mr. Brody’s famed and fictional architect survived the Holocaust but how he lived to make it through America in such an admirably flawed and particularly prominent way, that intrigued me.  

And gave me hope into 2025.   

Though who am I except a gay, Jewish man, of a certain age, with a small nose.  

Happy New Year everyone.

And remember to laugh.

Violet Orlandi – “You Can’t Always Get What You Want”