Tár: Missing the Music

The Banality of Culture War

Todd Field’s Tár, starring Cate Blanchett, is an exquisite, haunted, ambiguous film with many suggestive portals. The film is formally an Aristotelian tragedy—it follows the life of an accomplished, yet disturbed composer who loses her grip on reality and falls from veneration to disgrace. Tár starts on the stage of the New Yorker Film Festival, hailed as “the greatest composer of our time” and ends on a stage in the Philippines as a kind of actor, playing a composer before a co-splaying crowd of video-game fanatics. In some dark, twisted way, though, the ending is also comedic: a person who has led such a controlled, rehearsed, and unsurprising life is finally on a new adventure, willing to go to a new low just to maintain some connection to her passion.

By beginning and ending the film with Tár on a stage before an audience, the movie points a finger at us. Are we not like the cosplayers, more interested in the internal politics and intrigue of the orchestra than in the music itself? Are we New Yorker readers not especially shallow, reveling in gossip rather than in sound? The film is not about Lydia Tár per se, but about the impossibility of loving classical music or anything else, for that matter, that is both ontologically sublime and socially rarefied. How can this love survive in an age dominated by ad hominem reasoning and the politics of resentment? How can it survive before the capitalist imperative to fill more seats and the woke imperative to market such seat filling as accreting to the benefit of the marginalized? We say we want to make X more inclusive, but now look at the crowd at the end of the film and see for yourself what inclusion looks like IRL. When does inclusion elevate and when is it a trojan horse? When Mahler becomes the background music of Monster Hunter III is this a success pointing to Mahler’s adaptability or an abomination akin to pigs in the Temple?

In a laughably absurdist scene, a Juilliard student who self-describes as “BIPOC pangender”claims that he can’t appreciate Bach because of Bach’s regressive views. Tár rejoins that he is a robot whose mind has been ruined by social media. But in the end, many of us, and many of the reviewers of the film—including the New Yorker’s own Richard Brody (who calls the film “regressive”)—are much closer to this caricature of a woke student than we would like to admit. Do we like (or dislike) the film because of the music or because we want to feel flattered and self-righteous? Because it agrees or disagrees with our ideology?

Following the Girardian script to a tee, Tár begins as a god and ends up as a pariah, sacrificed as a scapegoat to appease a mob. Yes, she’s a manipulative, self-centered and callous person whom many will be happy to see get her just desserts. But the film does not actually tell us of what she is guilty. Something something something #Metoo. But it’s more Kafka-esque: she is guilty before the law, so to speak, irrespective of her specific infraction. We know that she ruined a woman’s career and that the woman subsequently committed suicide, but we don’t actually know what Tár did to this woman or who is in the wrong. It hardly matters in an age in which, as her mentor quips, “to be accused is to be guilty.” Tár is a kind martar for her art, and the more we treat the film as though it is about culture war, the more we are complicit in Tár’s martyrdom.

Tár is morally guilty, but not legally guilty. She is a kind of variation on Melville’s Christ-like Billy Budd, who breaks the law, and receives a death sentence, despite being of pure heart. In Tár’s case, she breaks no formal law that we can identify, but she is nonetheless a kind of creep. She may be guilty of psychological predation, but the film doesn’t show us any behavior that is egregiously or outwardly corrupt. Tár does promote a young, beautiful cellist to a soloist position, but we can’t say that she does it strictly on the basis of her looks—the members of the orchestra are in unanimity that the cellist is meritorious. Our appraisal of Tár tarnished character turns on whether we think she is a purist who sacrifices others for her idealistic vision or whether she is simply a corrupted and self-aggrandizing person who uses music to justify her power-trip. I find both options available in the film, but tend towards the former. The drama is less compelling if Tár is a fraud. It’s most compelling if she is both a hollow person and an inspired one, as if the two went hand in hand.

Of course, just because millennials and zoomers are entitled brats doesn’t mean they aren’t right to seek Tár’s cancellation—a broken clock can still be right twice a day. And just because Tár is not sexually abusive doesn’t mean she isn’t psychologically abusive. Tár is an imbalanced, deranged, deceitful, and alienating person—but is she intentionally malicious and self-serving? I don’t think so.

In one of the first moments in the film, Tár mispronounces the Hebrew word kavannah meaning “intent” as Kavanaugh (as in the accused Supreme Court justice, Brett Kavanaugh). We don’t know Tár’s intent, but I believe her kavannah is to express herself in music, to seek her intent through conducting, to clarify her own black box through composition—her aim is to find her aim. She damages others in the process, but what makes the tragedy compelling is that they take it personally. They are victims of Tár’s romantic quest for self-expression. The challenge the film poses is whether we can find a middle way to the Scylla that is Tár’s commitment to art for art’s sake (note that tar is an anagram of art) and the robotic, social-media-infused hostility to any art that is not pre-approved by the latest social justice orthodoxy.

An answer to this complicated question is suggested by Tár’s attraction to Mahler, a Jewish convert to Catholicism whose music can be thought of as both a continuation of a Germanic musical tradition and a challenge to it—Mahler’s work was banned during the Nazi period. The moral of Tár is nuanced, but suggests that a nuanced approach to morality and music keeps us from descending into identity politics—the belief that the only thing that matters about a work is who wrote it. But Tár herself is not a compelling spokesperson for this message, and so the film is layered. This is a test. Can we desire to hear music, to reach for the sublime, and to find a way beyond words, in a society fueled by noise and hopped up on moral uproar on all sides? Can we acknowledge Tár’s foibles without turning her into an evil caricature? I believe we can, and I believe music can help us do this. But this is a matter of experience and of faith more than scientific empiricism. Those who know know. Yet such a defense won’t pass before a tribunal that seeks only formal equality and superficial representation. In the age in which to be accused is to be guilty, art is guilty. Thankfully art can do teshuva, which Tár presciently defines in the beginning of the film as “The Talmudic power to reach back in time and transform the significance of one’s past deeds.”

P.S.—I am pleased to share my latest conversation with Girard scholar Cynthia Haven about envy and forgiveness.