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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