Paved with Bad Intentions
In 'Tár,' Cate Blanchett reminds us that roads are built with bulldozers
At one point near the beginning of the new movie Tár, written/directed by Todd Field and starring the magnificent Cate Blanchett, orchestra composer/conductor Lydia Tár is teaching a class at Julliard. We see a young man at the podium, conducting what appears to be some kind of percussive, avant-garde piece of music, when Tár intervenes. She begins asking the nervous student rapid-fire questions, and he can barely finish his answers as she moves on to the next one. There’s a passive-aggressive quality to her asides as she distills what he says—distills him—and gets to the point: what’s wrong with, say, Bach?
What’s wrong, he replies, his leg quivering in an anxious tic as Tár sits beside him, is that Bach was a white cis male composer who simply doesn’t speak to a queer man of color like himself. Leading him to the piano, Tár riffs on Bach (with an amusing tip-of-the-hat to Glenn Gould’s Goldberg Variations). Moving from passive aggression to active demolition, she tells him that he needs to move beyond his narcissism, look past the human foibles of mortal individuals, and be willing to engage the transcendent on its own terms. “You want to dance the masque, you must service the composer,” she says as she ascends a set of stairs. “You’ve got to sublimate yourself, your ego. And yes, your identity.”
It’s a complicated moment. As a not-quite-dead white cis male composer who plays (laptop) keyboards, it was thrilling to see someone—in this case, a self-described “U-Haul lesbian” who we were earlier told spent years studying indigenous music in South America—slice through the cant of our time and not simply tell the truth, but actually show it. On the other hand, it’s hard to ignore Tár’s arrogance as she does so, and not to acknowledge the grit of a scared young man who finally works up the will to call her “a fucking bitch” as he leaves the room. The scene is a synecdoche for the whole movie, whose core objective is to pose the question: To what extent will we allow talent to forgive personal transgressions?
In recent years, the official answer has been clear and emphatic: none. We have been living through what we have collectively understood to be a reckoning, in which the badly behaved have been laid low, stripped of their privilege and collective approval. Many of these people have indeed been deplorable and deserving of punishment, and none could really be said to be irreplaceable (though a number have also clawed their way back onto their perches). But the speed and ferocity of their fall have been unsettling to at least some of us, and have posed ultimately hard-to-avoid questions about mob mentalities and the relationship between equity and mediocrity. Tár engages such questions, and does so in a notably measured way. Lydia Tár—we later learn her name is an act of Nietzchean self-reinvention by an outer-borough working-class girl—faces a reckoning for some very real sins, and pays a very steep price. The question, and it really is a question in a notably fair-minded movie, is whether we’re better off for it.
In the context of the early 2020s, it is important that this question be posed through the vehicle of a white lesbian. Evaluating it would widely be considered impermissible if the protagonist was a heterosexual white man, because some heterosexual white men (and a few queer ones like Kevin Spacey) have been getting away with behaving abominably for far too long. Conversely, if Tár was a person of color, the target audience of this movie would be inclined to cry foul because BIPOCs are usually victims, not perpetrators, of such macro-aggressions. What’s interesting here is that white lesbians are, in effect, considered fair game for this kind of thought experiment. That in itself tells us how much our society has changed—for the better. In any event, the fact remains: neither talent nor hubris knows race, sex, class, or any other marker you’d care to name, and we should be willing to recognize such traits in whoever embodies them. To think otherwise is dehumanizing. Just ask Denzel Washington—or watch his performance in movies like Training Day (2001), American Gangster (2007), and Macbeth (2021), in which he plays against type with riveting not-good guys.
Actually, it wasn’t all that long ago that we were more willing to consider such complexities. There’s a striking parallel to Tár in the 2014 movie Whiplash, written and directed by Damien Chazelle (I’m very much looking forward to his forthcoming Babylon). In our current environment, 2014 already feels like the far side of a cultural divide in which The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, and Mad Men were culturally sanctioned. In Whiplash, J.K. Simmons gives an Oscar-winning turn as Terence Fletcher, a professor at the fictive Shaffer Conservatory in New York who relentlessly drives his pupil, a jazz drummer named Andrew (Miles Teller). Far more than Tár, Fletcher is monstrous, his abusive behavior sometimes crossing the line from mental to physical. And yet, the movie makes an ambiguous suggestion that his punishing discipline really does turn Andrew into a better musician.
Such a notion is deeply troubling to David Sims of The Atlantic, among others. It should be. But a willingness to honestly depict the gap between what is and what should be is in the province of the art (among other realms). We shouldn’t allow pieties, whether sacred or secular, to prevent or corrupt a quest for the truth.