A lot has been said about Tár, including that a lot has been said about Tár, including an extremely annoying Film Comment podcast that pitted one favorable critic against three who hated the movie. The conversation was so asinine, so solipsistic, so “Joke’s on them!” that I wanted to hit unsubscribe from the whole podcast.
I loved Tár. I also thought it was an imperfect and, in some ways, confusing movie, but that did not make it any less enjoyable or provocative. And while I could go into my issues with Film Comment editors, I would much rather talk about what it was I loved about Tár.
There are two essential ingredients Tár handles extremely well:
The friction between creativity and creative industry, specifically the classical music industry, and how stardom—the singling out of one talented person—plays into this. As a movie about not just classical music but specifically its business and craft—conducting, collective and solo performance, composing music—I found Tár totally unique. We’ve seen orchestra-related intrigue in Mozart in the Jungle, which was a delightful show, but Tár addresses a very essential component of classical music stardom: that the role of the conductor, a total necessity, is twinned with the mildly concerning possibility of its own obsolescence. In the opening moments of the film, Cate Blanchett (as Lydia Tár) lectures on the origins of the conductor, starting with how the role used to be held by the first violin up until Jean-Baptiste Lully, and then became more relevant with the growing size of orchestras. She leaves out just how much the conductor became an icon during the 20th century—her ellipsis weighing so heavily that I find it almost the entire point of the film—how with Toscanini and Karajan and Bernstein, the conductor made himself (sorry, it was mostly a him) the most marketable, mysterious, and iconic figure of classical music, matched only by the long-dead composer (and not the living one). How relevant would classical music be without these ambassadors? The conductor appears like an esoteric lightning rod, one of the few beings to experience a total unmediated connection to bliss, a fixture of esoteric, inaccessible projection. The excessive inaccessibility of the conductor/magician that Tár herself represents is personified in the movie’s title: precisely that three-letter, single-syllable title containing an accent aigu that is not always easy to quickly produce, marking it as a foreign film (“Bela Tarr!”) to American audiences, read: elitist, out-of-reach. The conductor’s role, not just “keeping time” but a mixture of coaching, translating, and keeping an intrinsically-seeming connection to the music (like a priest, the conductor resides over their knowledge/interpretation of music/scripture), a lot of which is hamminess, is matched so well by this current age that relies so heavily on icons, images, and that afore-mentioned myth of genius—and this again fits perfectly with the great ham that is Cate Blanchett herself. The discussion of the solo artist and the masses that work for them—be they an architect in their studio, or a movie star with their army of agents and assistants, or a film “auteur” with the entire force of their production—is handled with such humor and intense, earnest haplessness (insinuating that while we end up picking one genius out of the many, it is really for nobody’s benefit or fault), and it is really an indictment of our ego-driven, capitalist culture, in which classical music can only be subsidized by live performances of orchestras to blockbusters. Anyone who grieves this, the film seems to say, is very out of touch. I read the beautiful, surreal, and kind of funny final scene of the film as a leveling of “elitist” and “popular” art forms, which is an impulse I would like to see in all art forms, more often.
Desire and creativity, and the symbiosis between the two. Eroticism and Desire are an essential component to growth, learning, and creation, and my favorite stories will always be about the fuel that comes from looking where one is not supposed to look, and wanting what one is not supposed to have. Several great scenes take place in the moments of musical collaboration—between musicians, administrators, technicians, conductor, and her assistants—where we see Tár rely completely on others while she herself, isolated at the top, latches onto the only thing she can: her attraction to a prodigious young cellist. While on the one hand attempting to carve her own unique path (“forget Visconti,” this female Gustav von Aschenbach tells her musicians as they perform the Adagio from Mahler’s 5th) Tár becomes her own trope. In the same way that classical music, depending on who performs it, will always sound a little different while also being more of the same, Tár is trapped in her take on conductors of the past: she for instance cannot help but emulate, subconscious or not, a famous recording of Daniel Barenboim conducting his future wife, Jacqueline du Pré, performing the solo in Elgar’s Cello concerto (Tár’s obvious knowledge of this visual recording is mentioned, but once again this knowledge comes in the form of a clever ellipsis, as if Tár herself is in denial about her self-stylization according to others she admires, right down to their naughty biographies).
I struggle with how heavily critics of the film discussed not the film itself but its endorsement or ambivalence towards its titular character, which many labelled “monstrous.” I struggle with this because I think a titular character is only one part of a film’s DNA, but also that, as a writer I admire put it far more skillfully, I do not believe art exists to provide us with a moral compass, and it exists much less to be moral in itself. As a thought exercise, I try to imagine the inverse of a movie like Tár, in which an antagonistic heroine is punished or redeemed and we all learn a lesson. It sounds like the plot of an Enid Blyton storybook (no offense to Blyton).
My favorite settings will always be about badly-behaving Lesbians, the “bad gays,” like Patricia Highsmith’s alter-egos, or, more recently, Benedetta (2021), which also is not really a Lesbian movie but about how we wish to approach the sublime, and how we function as creative (ie spiritual) people. Like Benedetta, Tár contains both vulnerability and mischief. Not the acceptable, push-your-tongue-out-kind, but the actually taboo: coercion, seduction, transaction, wanting the unwantable—this was why I was partially disappointed by the ending of Tár, which shows Lydia Tár vomiting in the street after accidentally booking a sex-worker (supposedly showing us Tár’s “limits” or “pitfall,” the movie is unclear about whether it is trying to make Tár seem more misguided or sympathetic). But I do think the film avoids labelling Tár a monster, which is something critics accuse the movie doing too much. It’s also made me think of the more wholesome, very Jane-Bowles-esque rendition of this structure in The White Lotus, in which a Hotel Director patronizes the prostitute she’s admonished, and finds herself sexually liberated. I’ll watch any movie about Lesbians (such is my lot in life) but to make things contradictory, I tremendously prefer movies that transcend the basic identity label of Lesbian and manage to strike at the nature of human desire and broaching of constraint. Taken more broadly—music above all art forms being the hardest to articulate— Tár inevitably leads me to thinking about our wish to connect with the sublime, the unmediated, the divine.
Both of these aspect I list here (creativity x industry, creativity x desire) were completely ignored on the Film Comment Podcast (and by many other critics and writers I esteem very highly), which made Tar out to be a “movie about…” –the about-ism is an approach to art that I’d rather reject to begin with, and ironically it’s an approach which, I think, Tár mocks (music after all cannot really “be” about anything, as much as we try). I also find that making Tár out to be “a movie about abuse” is just way too easy—even making Tar out to be “a movie about how we read powerful people” is annoying.
Regardless of what you think Tár is “about,” it is mostly just a pleasurable movie to watch, for its excess, which expresses itself in the particularity of its details, the pencils and matcha lattes and tailored suits, its exaggerated, fetish-y silliness. There’s even a bonkers tie-in CD-set made by Deutsche Grammophon that made me gasp when I first saw it. Garth Greenwell, a writer I admire, called the music-conversations phony (or similar) and while I am not equipped to disagree with him, I think all the phoniness only serves Tár even more. In this way, I found Tár a lot more fun and certainly less pedantic, phony, and misanthropic than Die Klavierspielerin (2001), often cited as Tár’s counter-pendant. I relish how gratuitously Tár aimed at our thwarted yearning for creative expression—little else makes humans look more ridiculous than trying to achieve greatness, transcendence, but also: little else is more lovable about us. In this regard, Tár could be “a movie about humiliation”—humiliation both inflicted and received. It seems significant, then, that the film has proliferated and stirred up endless streams of confessions and tirades about how Tár externalizes the mechanizations of abuse/cancellations, which only makes me pity other writers more. Unlike the demeaning insinuations of these responses, Tár allows the viewer to decide whether their humiliation is received with grief or joy.
NOTES IN THE MARGINS
Links and other Morsels of Lesbian/Queer Culture I Recently Indulged And Would Love to Talk About
Marijane Meaker/Ann Aldrich has died, and with her we lose an icon of Lesbian literature.
Sarah Waters’ amazing Fingersmith celebrated its 20th birthday.
I will try to limit my hate-links, but I just woke up from a nap to this despair-inducing piece at Bright Wall Dark Room—articles that tell you what you should and shouldn’t do are unnecessary enough, but some of these think pieces sound like they are trying to sanitize the Queer canon of anything with a whiff of the problematic and deviant. Why even call yourself Queer if all you want is didactic art?
Edward Mendelson wrote about two new editions of Mrs Dalloway for the New York Review of Books, and for the first time in years I wish to read Mrs Dalloway again, one of my first great loves in literature. Incidentally, I had no idea Woolf had such things to say about James Joyce, and I am delighted.
Also in the New York Review of Books: this quite beautiful essay on Swiss writer Fleur Jaeggy (author of Sweet Days of Discipline, one of the sexiest and most acerbic 100 pages I’ve ever read) by most famous Sad Girl Audrey Wollen.
The Hours at the Metropolitan Opera: I caught the performance a couple Friday nights ago, and part of me still feels like I am reeling from it, as the overall experience was emotionally overwhelming for personal reasons. While I’ve heard a lot of complaining, I found The Hours a lovely opera, succinct and with beautiful, shimmery moments, in particular the Finale. I’d also like to note that women have been kissing on opera stages for hundreds of years, but apart from Alban Berg’s Lulu and certain Berlioz and Mozart productions, it may have been the first time that I saw two women, playing female characters, kissing other women, also playing female characters, on an opera’s stage, and that—especially a moment in which Clarissa Dalloway fantasizes about sex with her florist—really got to me. Naturally I wish it had not been milquetoast The Hours that was the first opera with multiple Lesbian characters—now that the Met is aiming to produce many new pieces, I’d like to petition for a Carol opera, an Aimee &Jaguar opera, or, fuck it, a whole opera about Leontyne Price’s inaugural Aida performance at the Met.