The Riot Club acknowledges this inconvenient reality, equipping its brutish reprobates with superhuman intellectual skills.
It was a typical New York encounter, brutish, impolite, with both sides questioning each other's motives and thinking the worst.
When she pours her attention into a brutish boy with some intellectual talent, he misreads the gesture as a come-on and very nearly rapes her.
Hollywood morality seeks to soften its film-makers' more brutish ideas with an ending that at least sends away an audience comforted that the wicked have been punished.
This makes Schadenfreude a solemn counterpart to humor, at once expressing a forbidden sentiment while affirming the social order, cloaking a brutish truth with the aura of manners.
Brutish décor, with a ceiling of mirrored light boxes, makes it the place for a bite after the punk show at the Metropolitan Museum: 65 Rivington Street (Allen Street), (646) 559-1210, millersnearandfar.com.
Apart from the odd ghost, "A Prophet" runs on brutish naturalism, with Audiard forsaking the sly wit of his earlier films like "A Self-Made Hero" and getting straight into the faces of his characters.
And the climax is more palatable than in Saturday, where the god-like doctor defeated his brutish enemy with the aid of poetry, and then saved his life too – which really did seem like having it all ways.
A bare-chested prisoner, suspended upside down from a rope tied to his ankles, is pushed back and forth by brutish guards with clubs as if he were a human piñata.
Sea of Madness has been somewhat overshadowed by anthemic single Wasted Years and perennial live favourite Heaven Can Wait, but this is one of the great unsung gems in the Maiden catalogue: a dark, brooding and brutish song with an impossibly grandiose chorus, it could easily have added to the band's impressive list of top 10 singles.
