I am, to an embarrassing degree, a fan of Cate Blanchett. And yet, for a long time, I resisted seeing her Oscar-winning performance in Todd Fields' movie Tár because I absorbed the critical consensus on it as a portrait of an artistic genius unfairly brought low by the dreaded and definitely real phenomenon of 'cancel culture'. This has been the consensus about the movie whether or not one agrees with its supposed central theme. For an example of criticism that takes Lydia Tár's side, at least on the hoary old question of 'separating the art from the artist', consider this video from YouTuber The Misfit Pond; for an excoriation of Field for his 'regressive aesthetics' and political views, there is this review of the movie by Richard Brody for The New Yorker. Despite taking very different points of view both of these pieces of criticism have two things in common: firstly, they believe that Field presents Tár as a great artist who is undermined and destroyed by identitarian mediocrities who would rather have a safe space than a challenging encounter with the classical canon; and, more importantly, they are both completely, almost comically, wrong.
In Brody's case, there might be an element of standing up for his employer at play: one of the themes Field actually tackles in the movie is the role of the classical music establishment, and indeed the whole bourgeois culture racket of which it forms a part, in enabling Tár's abuse of her young female protégés, both directly in terms of looking the other way or being intimidated into silence, and indirectly by building up the legend of Lydia Tár. Field presents that legend to us almost at the very beginning of his film, via the device of a fawning interview between Lydia and Brody's New Yorker colleague Adam Gopnik at the New Yorker Festival. This téte-â-téte is intercut with scenes of Tár and her assistant, Francesca, doing the work of constructing the conductor's visual legend (significantly, by having a tailor construct an exact replica of Claudio Abbado's suit from the cover of a previous recording of Mahler's Fifth Symphony, the piece Tár will shortly begin to rehearse with her orchestra).
This sequence establishes two things about the film's protagonist right from the outset: first, that Tár's behaviour towards her younger female colleagues is unambiguously inappropriate (we see her place her own bare foot on top of Francesca's in a gesture of dominating intimacy); and, second, in ways both large and small (she fails to correctly pronounce the word 'Pauline' - as in 'conversion'; her interpretation of Mahler 5 is utterly facile and sentimental) she is, as a popular YouTube thumbnail phrase would put it, a HACK FRAUD. You can almost sympathise with Brody, in a way. If he has any insight at all as a critic he must surely sense, on some level, what this scene is saying: but to admit as much would be to insult one of his colleagues, the magazine he works for and the bien-pensant readers who shell out for tickets to see Gopnik lob softballs to the likes of Epstein associate Malcolm Gladwell.
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| Call me a drama channel if you must, but this liar needs to be taken down |
(Somewhat to his credit, Gopnik seems to have known his role at least a little - in a piece for Esquire he notes that 'the scene was, in a way, a spoof of a certain kind of cultural occasion which I had often been part of'. He also observes that, when he expressed some doubt about Tár's supposedly having been mentored by Leonard Bernstein, 'Todd...gave me a steady opaque non-look, making me realise that this truth must be both germane to the story and crucial not to over-italicise'. Given that he is playing himself in this scene, one is given to wonder what truths germane to the story Gopnik has chosen not to over-italicise in his real life interviews.)
The scene The Misfit Pond chose to base his video on, in which Tár gives a class to Juilliard students whose time she chooses to waste by spending most of it singling out one of them, Max, for humiliation, is one of the more popular clips from the movie on YouTube. It's especially popular among right-wing types who read it at surface-level as an entry in the 'Big Smart Person in Suit OWNS WOKE College Student with FACTS!!! and LOGIC!!!!1!!!' genre because, early in their exchange, the student Lydia spends most of the lesson degrading identifies as a 'queer pangender BIPOC' individual, and expresses a dislike of Bach for what that student perceives as his misogyny. Both Pond and the chuds see Tár in this scene as standing up for an engagement with challenging music against those who would prefer to stay in their safe space.
This reading, however, completely ignores the context: Lydia is pivoting the entire lesson from discussion of the work of contemporary composer Anna Thorvaldsottir to a celebration of Johann Sebastian Bach: a blatantly obvious attempt, having been challenged by the students' choice of music, to force the discussion back into her safe space. Even there, she does a poor job of making the case for Bach: Max may decry the randy old goat as a misogynist, on the grounds of his having sired a massive quantity of offspring, but here is the sum total of what Lydia Tár, classical maestro, tells Max in an effort to defend one of her (and my!) favourite composers from this charge:
1) Albert Schweitzer wrote a book about Bach, which people really like.
2) The conductor Antonia Brico was so taken with Schweitzer's book on Bach that she travelled to Africa to learn from Schweitzer himself.
3) A picture exists of Antonia Brico, presumably on this African odyssey, wearing a pith helmet: Lydia has this picture somewhere in her collection.
As a defence, this is risible. Tár tells us one fact about Albert Schweitzer, one and a half about Antonia Brico, and an amusing detail about her photography collection. She tells us nothing about why we should care about Bach, but she does reveal something of herself, something we see again and again throughout the movie: she is obsessed with gossip and trivia about artists and intellectuals - the kind of stuff that plays well at midcult circle-jerks like the New Yorker Festival, where she dutifully reels off that well-worn Radio 3 nugget about Jean-Baptiste Lully, the first classical conductor, keeping time by banging a staff on the floor and injuring his foot in the process. When her mentor Andris, played by Julian Glover, refers to Schopenhauer in a conversation which threatens to tread too deeply into the question of her sensitivity to noise, Lydia steers the conversation into more comfortable territory (for her) by asking if it's true that the philosopher was once sued for knocking a woman down the stairs.
I don't think Tár invokes Bach in this scene because of any deep connection she feels towards his music: I think she does so because she's casting around for an example of a composer from the canon, and she picks Johann Sebastian because he represents the ne plus ultra of 'music clever people like', an impression only strengthened by her decision to drag poor Max to the piano and play them surely one of the least aesthetically challenging bits of Bach you can pull out of your toolbox, the Prelude in C Major (a piece so clichéd it merits mention in Innuendo Studios' excellent video 'List of Songs that Represent "Smart Music"'). In terms of Blanchett's performance, this is one of the highlights of the film for how heavily she leans into what a narcissistic creep Tár really is, overacting and doing some real fingernails down a chalkboard voicework as part of Lydia's schtick. The actor playing Max, Zethphan D. Smith-Gneist, also deserves praise for the way he conveys how uncomfortable his character feels at being subjected to this performance: at one point Max looks out in desperation at their fellow students, as if begging one of them to come to their rescue. As an artist who occasionally gives workshops myself, I can only hope I've never given any student I've taught any reason to give their classmates such a look.
Perhaps it's out of some fellow feeling for Max that a student later releases an edited clip of Lydia's behaviour that makes her look even worse - or perhaps they do it just because they realise how much of Tár's performance is for her own benefit and not that of the students. Not that she doesn't claim otherwise: in a line which tells us a lot about how shallow her engagement with music really is, the great conductor tells the class she prays that they will 'be spared the embarrassment of standing on a podium with 4'33'' trying to sell a car without an engine' and admonishes them that their time at Juilliard is the time 'to conduct music that actually requires something from you.'
As misunderstandings of 4'33'' go, this is on par with Columbia University Professor John McWhorter's complaint, in the New York Times, that he could not play that piece during a seminar this year because 'the surrounding noise would have been not birds or people walking by in the hallway, but infuriated chanting from protesters outside the building.' The point of John Cage's seminal piece, much derided by those who enjoy the low-hanging fruit of mocking the avant-garde for its supposed pretension, is of course that during any particular performance of it, whatever sounds are heard during the piece are the piece: if you believe that John Cage devised it in order to draw our attention to the soothing sound of birdsong, you are misunderstanding it, and Cage, badly. And you are doing likewise when you dismiss it as something that does not require something from the conductor. In fact, it requires the conductor to get out of the way: to stand still, in silence, and do nothing. We see how difficult Lydia would find that when we finally get to see her conducting: Tár's style is theatrical and overbearing, which, as conductor David Bloom noted when interviewed by Vanity Fair, 'is probably shaped by the way Blanchett sees and plays this character'. As far as Lydia Tár is concerned, she doesn't just start the show, she is the show: that's one reason why the film's ending, in which she plays second fiddle to a screen showing footage from Capcom's Monster Hunter: Worlds for an audience of cosplaying gamers, is such a humiliation for her.
What it is not, of course, is the dreaded 'cancellation'. Or, more accurately, it is a depiction of the reality of what those who write long editorials about the horror of cancellation in magazines like The New Yorker actually mean by that word. Because Lydia Tàr, for all that her career has supposedly been destroyed by the revelations of her history of abusing her assistants and students, is still working as a conductor. Working in circumstances she finds humiliating and, in one memorable scene, vomit-inducing, but working nevertheless. We even see her meet with her new talent agency, who discuss her road back from being exposed as a predator. Field presents cancellation not as an inescapable apocalypse, but a temporary setback, a chastening of the ego perhaps, but an eminently survivable one - as it has proven for figures like the once-cancelled Kevin Spacey, Louis CK, or indeed former Gopnik interviewee Malcolm Gladwell, who parlayed the revelation of his association with Jeffrey Epstein into yet another of his faux-intellectual, glorified self-help books.
What has changed for Tàr after her exposure is that she will never have the kind of unquestioned acclaim she once experienced. She will never finish the Mahler symphony cycle; she will have to dine in restaurants with less expensive linen and less storied histories than she's used to; she will experience pushback far more serious than what she got from Max if she tries to give another celebrity seminar at Juilliard. She may experience the humiliation of seeing students turn their backs on her, en masse, if she tries to give a commencement address. But the same midcult culture racketeers who made her career and enabled her offending will, over time, help her back into some version of the limelight. There will be the opportunity of a 'searing' interview about her experiences, followed by articles, perhaps in journals which lean somewhat more to the right than The New Yorker (maybe The Atlantic will find her more their speed?), followed, in time, by a memoir.
It will never, however, be possible for Lydia Tàr to pretend that she sprang unbidden from the head of Zeus. The mechanisms which keep her in the spotlight will now be a little too visible; it will be a little too obvious that she achieved her position not solely on merit but, as her wife Sharon (Nina Hoss) points out, through astute politicking. And in laying bare the midcult circle-jerk she owes her once-exalted position too, her cancellation risks, in turn, calling into question the status of her accomplices in the culture racket - the Gopniks, the Andrises, the Gladwells, the omniscient gentlemen (of whatever gender) who keep the log happily rolling - and it is that, ultimately, which the forces that enable Tàr's real-life analogues truly fear about the spectre of 'cancellation': not that it might definitively end any one career, but that, in letting in too much daylight on how the con works, it might break the kayfabe they owe those careers to.
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