Power, Retribution and Tár
Six Oscar nominations for Tár. Six! I’d have expected one for Blanchett, but damn.
It speaks to how chaotic a year this was for entertainment that a slow, artsy, financially anemic movie like Tár got so much love from the Academy. The fact that Everything, Everywhere All At Once got eleven nominations drives that home. The old studios can’t compete with Netflix in the streaming space, but they’re scared to go back in on theatrical films. The audience for linear TV is collapsing. Nobody buys physical media except rural families and sicko film freaks (*ahem*). Oscar bait used to be easy. You make a center-left social issues drama or some sentimental reminiscence about the magic of movies and wait for the hardware. But the studios whiffed so hard with so many of their awards contenders; She Said, Bardo, Empire of Light, White Noise, Till, Babylon, The Son, Armageddon Time, plus dozens of others, they all failed financially and got little to no recognition during awards season. The old rules are dead, the field is wide open. Let’s nominate the butt plug kung fu movie. Why not? Made me cry.
Anyway, Tár. It wasn’t my favorite movie of 2022, but I loved it and think about it often. After six years of Hollywood trying and failing to say something about the current moment, it took a Cate Blanchett movie about classical music to depict contemporary issues with something approaching nuance. Good for Todd Field.
To briefly summarize, Tár is about Lydia Tár, a world-renowned composer and conductor for the Berlin Philharmonic. She’s an EGOT winner, composer, conductor and esteemed musicologist, a rare figure in classical music who has achieved global notoriety, like Phillip Glass or Leonard Bernstein. She is also a gay woman, though her belief in meritocracy and music’s transcendent, universal qualities makes her downplay that fact to interviewers and students. But rumors abound that Lydia has a bad habit of grooming pupils and young musicians into sex partners, doling out professional favors to women who accept her advances, destroying the careers of those who deny her. Over the course of the movie’s deliberately paced 158 minutes, these accusations slowly destroy her career, her personal life and her sense of self.
The pitch makes you think this'll be like one of those latter David Mamet plays, the ones that are barely-veiled National Review pieces masquerading as drama. "Cate Gets Canceled," streaming exclusively on Daily Wire. But it’s much better than that. Field never shows us hard evidence that Lydia Tár is guilty of sexual misconduct, but he does show Lydia Tár abusing her power every chance she gets. She manages through dictates and intimidation, firing, hiring, promoting and blackballing on whim. She bullies with erudition. She melts when young women give her attention. When she discovers a promising student committed suicide, her reaction is shockingly frigid. In other words, she’s a raging egomaniac, and not one of the charming ones. The audience is asked to come to its own conclusions about Lydia’s guilt. It says something that no one I’ve spoken to about the movie believes she’s wholly innocent.
Plenty of outlets have called Tár the first great movie about cancel culture, but I have a tough time ceding that point. Not because it isn’t great (it is), but because I don’t know what the fuck “cancel culture” means anymore. Do you? Does anyone? Conservatives like to push one specific definition, “Mobs of liberals trying to get you fired after you violate one of their silly shibboleths.” Except sometimes they use the phrase “Cancel Culture” to describe serial sex offenders. Do Andrew Tate and Ellen Degeneres feel like they belong in the same club? I don’t think so. I think more precise language is in order. Or maybe we should get rid of the phrase “cancel culture” altogether. I’d prefer that, but I’m not in charge.
If I can offer something, not a definition, but an adjacent idea; the modern internet has made it easier than ever to publicly accuse someone of wrongdoing, and for news of the accusation to spread within hours. Turns out, that can be good. But sometimes? That’s bad. (Let me know if I’m getting too controversial.) The technology available to make these accusations will not be limited or destroyed any time soon, so “cancel culture” or whatever the fuck is something we’re all going to have to live with for a while, at least until the United States is overrun by flood, fire and famine. Make of that what you will.
As for Tár, it isn’t really interested in dissecting “cancellation” as a phenomenon, much to its credit. It’s interested in power. Many of the articles I linked to above believe the movie has some concern for what’s lost when we demand decency from our geniuses, but I don’t think Todd Field is interested in that. If he wanted us to think Tár was a genius, he would have given us an objective look at her work. We see the trappings of Lydia’s success as a composer, but we never hear any of her finished compositions. We never see her conduct an orchestra for more than a few seconds, though what constitutes “good” conducting would probably be lost on a layman audience. Tár is an EGOT winner, but so is Andrew Lloyd Webber. The world around Lydia is so aged, sclerotic and insular that it’s tough to accept her colleague’s praise on faith. Her talent, if she has any, seems immaterial to her success.
What’s not immaterial is the way she treats people. The profession she occupies, classical music, is a perfect breeding ground for tyrants. Her musicians have devoted most of their life to a hyper-competitive, deeply uncommercial vocation, where steady employment is a long shot and wealth is nearly impossible. Talent may be rare, but opportunity is rarer. The selection process among the qualified is driven by subjective taste, which is another way of saying it’s driven by prejudice and politics. No matter how good you are, someone just as good is always waiting in the wings, desperate for your job. One bad performance, one false rumor, one honest mistake, one strike of any kind can cast a virtuoso musician into a lifetime of irrelevance and poverty. It’s no wonder the people who work for Lydia Tár feel insecure. It’s no wonder Lydia takes advantage of that.
Lots of workplaces have this crabs-in-a-barrel quality; legacy media, digital media, major universities, nonprofit theater and arts organizations, government bureaucracy. Each of these worlds has their bullies and despots, and those despots leave angry, resentful victims in their wake. Smartphones have made it easier than ever for those victims to organize, gather evidence and make a public accusation of wrongdoing. Just as the internet upended politics, culture and business, it upended the nature of abuse. It’s harder, at least these days, to destroy dozens of lives and get away with it scot free. Your victims might start a group chat.
Most importantly to the story, Lydia Tár’s fate doesn’t entirely turn on her sexual misconduct. For much of the film, we assume Tár will fire her assistant conductor and promote her long-suffering assistant, Francesca. But rumors are swirling, and Francesca is a pretty young woman. (Francesca and Lydia might have been lovers once. Again, the story is impressively vague.) When Tár discovers that Francesca neglected to delete incriminating emails from her deceased student, Lydia promotes someone else. Francesca retaliates by quitting and going to the press with all of Lydia’s dirty laundry. Thus the cancellation begins.
If Lydia had promoted Francesca, Tár might have been safe from consequences for many more years, or the rest of her life. But to understand the state of play within the Philharmonic, Tár had to exhibit a little emotional intelligence, or one morsel of humility. You shouldn’t piss off someone who knows where the bodies are buried, that’s the first thing they teach you in Mafia school. Of course, when the walls come down, Tár finds she has no real friends among her compatriots at the Philharmonic, not even her wife. She’s been too callous and calculating, too dictatorial, too transactional. She’s too fucking mean.
That’s the point that’s so often neglected in discussions of “cancel culture”; more of than not, cancel culture is a function of workplace politics, and workplace politics tends to punish virulent assholes. An online mob calling for your head is a vulnerability, not a death sentence, and it never has been. The despised, the resented, the past-their-prime or the wholly disposable, they’re thrown on their ass at the drop of a hat. The well-liked and valuable stay safe, no matter how many dirty accusations get tossed around. Of course, valuable is quite the load-bearing term in the previous sentence. Not many people in this world are truly irreplaceable. That’s part of the problem.
An early, much-clipped, much-memed scene gets at this point in a very sneaky way. During a class at Juilliard, a self-described “BIPOC pangender” student named Max admits a distaste for Bach. Lydia tries to make a case for the composer, but Max replies, “White, cis, male composers just aren’t my thing.” Tár loses her patience. She goes on a long rant about the dangers of reducing artists to their identities and personal lives, all while taking every opportunity to poke at Max’s ignorance and insecurities. Max gets up to leave, grabs a composition book and mutters, “You’re a fucking bitch.”
When I saw the movie, people were laughing excitedly at Lydia’s diatribe. I’ve heard of screenings where people cheer. The giggles made me squirm, but I have to admit I thought a couple of Lydia’s points against Max were correct. But Max is right too. Lydia’s a bitch. A better teacher would understand that Max is a student, and that his blithe dismissal of Bach poses no threat to her. Or she could have dropped it entirely and taught the class something useful.
A heavily-edited video of their exchange surfaces in a later scene, creating a parodical version of your typical “cancel culture” narrative. A nuanced but heated discussion gets twisted into overt bigotry and abuse by some enraged, anonymous party. But a simple fact remains; Lydia’s a bitch, and she doesn’t need to be. That’s undeniable. The movie doesn’t try to impart simple messages, but if it imparts one, it’s this: if you have power, don’t be a bitch about it.
A couple of other thoughts I’ve had over the last month:
—I don’t have anything substantive to say about it, but Skinamarink was the most terrifying experience I’ve ever had in a movie theater. It’s an extremely abstract, literally nightmarish film about two children trapped in their house, all alone, with some violent force stalking them in the darkness. I thought I’d write something about it, but every take I could sling would be some basic-ass analysis about “trauma” and that does no one any good. Skinamarink’s power is beyond language, which is what’s so great about it. Take a look at the trailer. Do you want 100 minutes of that? Then go see Skinamarink!
—I also wanted to write about This Place Rules, an HBO documentary about the 2020 election, produced and starring Andrew Callaghan. The doc is a shameless freak show, gawking at the compulsively violent and mentally ill who happened to make politics their bailiwick. The analysis was very both-sidesy, very college Freshman, blaming that year’s chaos on “Corporate Media,” which, sure, but it’s not just that. I thought it’d be an interesting jumping-off point to talk about American politics in 2023, but then someone accused Andrew Callaghan of sexual misconduct, so my attention turned elsewhere. Bye Andrew!
—It’s just as well, because I don’t have many spicy takes on US politics these days. Well, I guess there’s one; I’m shocked some people are earnestly speculating about presidential nominees in 2024. For both parties! Unless they’re too sick to walk or talk, the nominees for president in 2024 will be Joe Biden and Donald Trump. Get real! You might not want me to be right, but you know I’m right!