Tár: What Does Power Look Like from the Inside?

 Tár, Lydia Tar Movie, Cate Blanchett, Psychoanalysis, Psychology, Narcissism, Cancel Culture, 

Tár – a film about fictional tyrannical maestro Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett) opened just a week or two ago to widespread acclaim, two full page ads in the New York Times Sunday paper, and to fanfare from multiple perspectives claiming it as a possible Oscar contender for best picture and a lock for Best Actress nod.  We were somewhat surprised to find that it was only playing on one screen in our town – at one of the art houses.  We were not surprised when, at first, we couldn’t secure tickets ahead of time – it must be sold out, we thought.  But when we did get tickets and got there, there were only about eight other people in the theater for a 6:00 Saturday showing…

This is a hard movie to watch.  Lydia Tár is a hard character, in every sense.  We observe her very closely.  And she is elusive.  Who is she and what does she want? 

I have commented before that I find film a frustrating medium for understanding the psyche of the protagonist.  Novels seem to be a much better vehicle to experience the consciousness of another.  But this film, with its inability to puncture Tár’s consciousness, mirrors our experience of being with characters like Lydia Tár. 

What is she thinking?  We don’t know.  What is she doing?  Often, we don’t know.

The film is replete with horror film imagery.  Tár goes jogging in foreign cities through graffiti covered underpasses.  She hears a woman screaming in the distance in a park on one run.  Should she intervene?  Will she be at risk if she does?  The scene does not resolve.  We are left with a feeling of being haunted by what might have happened.

Tár shares a luxury apartment with her lover and their child.  Her lover is the first violinist in the Berlin Philharmonic, which she conducts, and the space, while elegant, is also cold.  The architecture is brutalist and the lighting is dim. 

Tár has kept her old apartment in a warm old building and she uses this as a working space to practice, compose, and to meet with the next person she wants to seduce.  The tenant across the hall interrupts her at her work and is the target of her wrath, but when the neighbor needs help caring for her emaciated and filth covered mother who has fallen to the floor, Tár, a germophobe, pitches in and then washes herself off.  When her potential paramour comes in, she does not mention her recent experience.  She does not confide in others, especially about things that have shaken her.  She is always in control.

We observe Tár attack a student at Julliard who states that he will never conduct Bach because of Bach’s morality in birthing 19 or 20 children presumably by different wives and Tár takes him apart in front of his peers, teaching him by mocking him and degrading him.

What the hell is she doing?

Is she justifying her own behavior?  Does she know that she will be cancelled if she is known?  Or is she explaining that art is above and a bit beyond quotidian morality?

And we are conscious of the actress, who is not only acting, but playing Bach and demonstrating the language of the music on the piano and the line between the actress and the part begins to fade.  Is this Lydia or Cate?  Blanchett or Tár?

There is a moment when her crazy world has spun completely out of control and Lydia plays a videotape of her mentor, Leonard Bernstein.  He is explaining to kids on his much beloved show for children what they have just heard: feelings.  Not sharps and flats, not notes, but feelings.  Music articulates feelings in a way that language can’t capture.

Lydia’s world, I think this moment implies, is dominated by powerful feelings and the means that she has available to express them is through music.  Of course, Lydia is being played by a superior actress at the height of her powers who portrays feelings with her face, her body, her voice, her diction – someone who is capable of portraying – and does, in this film – seemingly the entire gambit of human emotional experience – and we observe that from the outside. 

She does not let us in. 

She cannot, according to Bernstein.  There are no words.

Oh, she is articulate.  The movie opens with her engaging in dialogue with Alec Baldwin (playing himself) on his podcast and she eruditely explains the musicology of the Brazilian Rain Forest native’s musical prowess.  She then matches wits onstage with Adam Gopnik (also playing himself) explaining the role and the history of the conductor to an audience summoned by the New Yorker.  She is in command of herself.

She is exquisitely attuned to various mentors and heroes and knows the lore of classical music like nobody’s business, and she is absolutely tone deaf to the impact of her flirtation with a new lover in front of her current lover and the entire orchestra, including one of her allies whom she completely undermines.

She also somehow doesn’t get that her assistant disdains her, and she expects that she will continue to be able to use her after passing the assistant over for a position that the assistant’s servitude has been led to believe would be hers – and somehow can’t see that alienating her assistant (even further) will lead to catastrophic consequences.  Even if she doesn’t know that her assistant is in touch with the last jilted lover whom Tár blackballed, the assistant has the goods on Tár.  Yes, it will be suicide for the assistant to use those goods, but Tár’s revenge would be professionally homicidal if she does not use what she’s got.  Shouldn't she bring down the monster?  Don't we want her to?

We cannot have access to Tár because, I think, she does not have access to herself.  She is a highly talented person entirely at the mercy of the powerful feelings that she cannot name and feels compelled to serve through their expression in the music – but even more so in her life.  She conducts her life as she conducts the orchestra – believing that she can bend it to express what she intends it to, not realizing that, just because she wants an outcome, she cannot necessarily will it into existence.  But this is hard for her to believe; after all, she has always been able to do make the piano play her tune, the orchestra to articulate her feelings, and her lovers to, well, sing.

This film then, asks a very difficult question.  Should we celebrate or cancel this person?  Is her music, both what she records and what she writes, an expression of something deeply, powerfully human or, perhaps even something divine and therefore worthy of reverence and celebration?  And shouldn't she be celebrated?  Shouldn't we recognize that the chaos that follows her around is just part of the deal with the devil that allows her to articulate what we are all feeling but cannot quite express in any medium as clearly as we can in music?

Or is she calculating, shrewd, and, as her lover posits, merely transactional in all of her relationships except the relationship with their daughter?  Does she deserve not our reverence, but our disdain – the attitude that her assistant has towards her?  Should we pull her out like a bad weed and throw her away?

Is Lydia’s sensitivity to sound – to the slightest hum or vibration – a sign of an artistic temperament that is attuned to how things should be, a sign not just of her sensitivity, but of her superior intelligence, or is it an indication of a wish to control her life, to bend things around her to meet her needs regardless of the consequences?

The ambiguity of the film – the way that it haunts at least this viewer – suggests that the answer is neither simple nor known.  Indeed, it may not be articulable.  Like music, it must be experienced.

Indeed, the dreams that she has; brief, vivid, scary enough to wake her and to all but preclude thinking about; do they indicate that she, too, is haunted?  That she is trying to keep her badness out of her own awareness?  After all, aren't we getting access to all that she is?

Perhaps Blanchett – and Todd Field, the writer director who had her in mind for the part – know that the mind of the artist can’t be known; they know (or don’t know) their own minds well enough to know that they are inscrutable and maybe they believe that if they train the camera closely enough on Blanchett/ Tár, perhaps we can come to know just how unknowable she is to those around her, but also, inevitably, to herself.

Why did I do it?  I don’t know.  It wasn’t me that did it.  It just happened. Or, perhaps, I felt it was the right thing to do.  I don't know why.

Perhaps our sensing her power to bend the world to her will is part of why we pull away in horror.  Yes, we would like to be confident enough to believe that we are invincible, too.  We have even felt that we are invincible on occasion.  But we have never had quite enough success at what we do to believe that we really are capable of anything we set our minds to.  We are painfully aware of our limits – but perhaps Tár is not.  Or she is striving to ignore those limits.  Perhaps she has spent enough time with the gods to believe that she is one of them.  Her aging process, though, is betraying that she is mortal, and her increasingly unsheathed attacks on the world are attempts to deny that her omnipotence is illusory.

Are we envious of her?  I suppose so, up to a point.  But at that point we become appalled.  We cannot get inside of Tár’s skin because she, ultimately, doesn’t live there.  She is merely a passenger on her passions.  She is as driven as the hyper-tuned, hyper-fast car she drives.  And we, looking from the outside, feel like her lover, the passenger in the car that is driven faster and faster and we feel, even when she doesn’t, the spin that indicates that she is no longer – and perhaps never was – in control. 

We feel something like the nausea that Tár experiences in the massage parlor when she is allowed to choose amongst the masseurs arrayed as her orchestra was and she makes eye contact with the one in the last cello chair location.  Oh my god, she must think, what have I done?  And she throws up.  But we have been nauseous for a while.

This is a great film.  I think that it explores something about narcissism, a topic that movies have long been very good at exploring, in novel and interesting ways.  I think it is important for us to look at something truly frightening about the human condition – are we not driving ourselves over the brink in regards to the ecosystem while we feel powerless to stop moving forward?  But isn’t this what we most want to overlook?  Don’t we want to avoid feeling that we have spun out of control?  Don’t we prefer to hang on with all that we’ve got?  Don’t we want to be Tár – and don’t we want, at all costs, not to see her as being like us?  Don’t we want to cancel her so that we can deny that part of ourselves that is Tár-like?

Perhaps it should have come as no surprise that we were nearly alone in the theater.  Critics can tell us to go, and I think this movie is well worth seeing, but it is a horror film, and our friends may not recommend it to us for a date night outing – it is far from light entertainment…     

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Hacks: Aren't We All?

  Hacks, HBO, Deborah Vance, Psychoanalysis. Psychology, 

Hacks is a series with two season on HBO Max that stars Jean Smart as the successful but now running-on-autopilot comedienne Deborah Vance, whose long Vegas run has made her wealthy but also irrelevant to all but her aging midwestern fans, and Hannah Einbinder as the young, sassy writer Ava Daniels who gets assigned by their mutual agent to work with Vance, though Vance has no interest in creating new material or having a writer - has always written her own material. 

The thing that sets this series apart is that the two principals are both totally and entirely unlikable.  Vance is vain and magisterial, and Ava is self-indulgent and childish.  What they have in common – and what Deborah appears to admire in Ava – is that they are both intensely focused on getting ahead at any cost and therefore are total jerks to the people around them.  This series is a tough watch through the first few episodes.  We hung in there, partly because the reluctant daughter recommended it, but also partly because we sensed that the characters would become more likable, but it wasn't easy...

What seems to distinguish Deborah and Ava is that Vance is successful and Ava hasn’t, apparently, done much of anything and is at the end of her rope, can’t get work anywhere else, and is therefore desperate, though still proud enough to quit when Vance demeans her.  Very quickly, in the first season, they both become aligned when Vance’s primo gig gets pulled out from under her because she is no longer the draw she once was and, though she could retire on her wealth and her continued ability to sell her line of products on QVC, she will have lost her audience and we discover that Deborah desperately desires to the connection she feels with a devoted audience as much as Ava desperately desires to so something, anything.  Vance is a performer and feels like she is herself when she if performing.  Ava is trying to find herself.

I am a big fan of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, but it has always felt too clean and simple.  Hacks does not feel clean.  It feels gritty and, in a Vegas sort of way, real.  That is, as real as the lives of entertainers who both mock and define what our culture is and should be while doing that from within ersatz replicas of great architectural wonders of the world for people who are in town for conventions and/or to figure out how to get rid of excess wealth through the promise of gaining more wealth can be.

It sounds like I must have hated this show – and a part of me did.  But it was the part of me that I would rather disown.  The part of me that identifies with these characters – and particularly with Vance.  Oh, I have been nowhere near as successful as she has been.  But I, like her, am much closer to the end of my career than I am to the beginning of it.  And I, like her, am beginning to feel less and less relevant.  And I, like her (it turns out) despite having had a reasonable successful career, did not – at least in my own mind, achieve my full potential.

We discover Deborah’s potential when she assigns Ava to review and digitize her collection of jokes, sketches, videotapes, and records of her career.  This scut work has a purpose, of course.  It is not articulated clearly in the series, but if Ava is going to write for Vance she needs to know what works and what does not – she needs to know who this woman is.  But the apparent reason is that Deborah needs this stuff catalogued and it appears that she is treating her employee like clerical staff rather than as a junior colleague.  It feels like she is trying to demean Ava.  

I have been given scut work to educate - and demean  - me, too.  My former, younger self identifies with Ava - the one who wants to belong (and I think Vance both identifies and feels some affection for the part of her younger self that she sees in Ava, though it takes a while for Ava, and the audience, to see and appreciate this.  The scut work feels like part of a hazing process).

In my own life, Ava's and Vance's going through old clips parallels my reviewing my career to make a case for promotion at work.  This is a review I should have done years ago.  But the first time I was up for a promotion was such an embarrassing experience that I haven’t wanted to put myself in the sights of those who would judge me again.  So, I have been, like Ava, reviewing records from years ago and dredging up what I did when.

What Ava discovers is that Vance was in line to the be the first woman to have a late-night talk show (something that still hasn’t actually happened out here in real life), but her life melted down when her husband, who had been her business manager and biggest supporter, had an affair with her sister.  We suddenly have an explanation for Vance’s bitterness and mistrust of anyone who is close to her - anyone that she doesn’t have on her payroll and therefore imagine having complete control over.  And we begin to feel something like empathy for this very prickly character (or at least I do – I, after all, haven’t wanted to put my vulnerabilities out there again for many years).

It is hardest, though, to feel empathy for Deborah Vance in terms of her relationship with her grown daughter, Deborah “DJ” Vance (Kaitlin Olson).  DJ is a loser.  She just isn’t good at anything.  And this appears to be, at least in part, because Deborah (her mother) keeps running her life, so she has very little true autonomy and instead she engages in faux moments of running her life – making truly terrible jewelry that is way too clunky and big – as a failed means of supporting herself, for instance.  Over time, we come to see that this has much deeper roots – Deborah took DJ on the road with her after the divorce from DJ’s father and, though this was intended to be an expression of her maternal caring, Deborah was too wrapped up in her own career and achieving success to be tuned into her daughter.

Of course, I hope that my devotion to my career has not interfered too much with my parenting, but it certainly played a role in marital distress and a failed marriage, as well as a great deal of personal angst and many sleepless nights that left me feeling less than at my best.  So, given a chance to review my career, was it worth it?  Would I do it all over again?

Deborah is proud of her career and married to continuing to do what she does indefinitely.  That said, we can see that in Vegas she is just mailing it in.  We also see, through Ava’s eyes, that she is not relevant to a younger, hipper crowd.  And then the hammer comes down – she is booted by the owner of the casino that has hosted her for many years in an arrangement that has been mutually very enriching.  Angry and embittered, Vance sets out to reinvent herself – with Ava as her devalued muse and co-author.  In spite of ourselves, we come to admire the pluck and verve of these two women who are very hard to like, but somehow easy to identify with.

Just as in Seinfeld, part of what is attractive about this pair, and the rest of the planets in the solar system that revolves around Vance, is that they are part of a community despite their apparent lack of redeeming value.  Perhaps as in Seinfeld, part of the attraction is that, despite Woody Allen’s protestations to the contrary, we actually are looking for a club that could tolerate having us as a member.  And that we could belong not because of the ways that we have made ourselves look good – not because of our shiny resume, as it were – but that we could belong warts and all.  Even though we have a face that only a mother could love, we wish that the world would turn out to be a supportive maternal figure.

So I think that we enjoy this pair and their entourage not because we like them, but because we are like them.  Their flaws are our flaws and, through identifying with them, they become likable (and perhaps teach us something about being able to like ourselves as we learn to like them).  

In the second season, as they are on the road and Vance is trying out her new material on audiences that want to be sympathetic, she keeps falling flat and, while she gets a few laughs, she doesn’t connect with the audience.  Ava has convinced her to be more straightforward and real about the facts of her life.  Vance didn’t actually burn down her house when she found out about her husband’s infidelity – her husband did that and framed her so that he not only torched the house but also her career.  But putting this into her act makes her come across as self-pitying, self-mocking or, worse, she turns, in a few performances, to mocking her audience.

The magic happens when she is able to turn her keen judgement back on herself.  She doesn’t just tell what happened, but recognizes the humor in the ways that her efforts were self-destructive.  She amuses herself – and her audience – by being amused with herself.  She learns to simultaneously take herself very seriously – honestly articulating her experience instead of pretending that things were not so bad – and also to take herself way less seriously – to recognize that, despite the cards being stacked against her, she made her situation even worse by being headstrong and self- important.  And that becomes funny.  She unites with her audience in good-humoredly poking fun at herself, and she and the audience laugh together at the result (not all that differently than what Mrs. Maisel does from the get go).

Perhaps if I can just learn to take myself a little less seriously – while also recognizing just how powerfully attached to the important things in my life I really am – I, too, can connect more genuinely with those around me.  Maybe I, like Deborah and Ava, can become more likeable, while remaining deeply (but hopefully more adorably) flawed.

 

Post script:  In the discussion among the writers after the last show of the second season they hint at doing a third season.  I hope this doesn’t happen.  The second season wraps things up.  Let’s leave it at that.  

 

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