A while ago on here, I mused about the laughable outdatedness of the vision of the future Elon Musk is trying to sell us. This week I read a novel that constitutes pretty much the definitive refutation of that vision, and it should be no surprise to anyone that said novel is even older than I am. However, where Musk's Noah's Ark in space fantasies have aged like early Grimes records, Joanna Russ' We Who Are About To... has only gotten more relevant to our dumb historical moment.
I'm going to spoil the plot of Russ' novel here, such as it is, but this is not really a novel you read for the plot anyway. It starts with a ship's travel through hyperspace going badly wrong. Russ gives a very simple, matter of fact explanation of how and why this happens, before moving on to deal with its consequences: the ship's eight passengers, three men and five women, wind up stranded on an alien planet with supplies to last them eight months. So far, so Space Family Robinson. Where things start to diverge from that hoary old trope is the presence on board this ship of Russ' narrator, who is frankly having none of this we-can-repopulate-the-planet stuff, and says as much:
' "All right, so you think you have the chance of a snowball in hell. Maybe you do. But I think that some kinds of survival are damned idiotic. Do you want your children to live in the Old Stone Age? Do you want them to forget how to read? Do you want to lose your teeth? Do you want your great-grandchildren to die at thirty? That's obscene." '
The narrator, however, is outvoted by her fellow passengers, who insist that 'just colonizing a little early' is well within their powers. It's worth spending a little time on who exactly these passengers are: we have a rich couple, the Grahams, Valeria and Victor, and their brittle teenage daughter, Lori; a hulking, half-bright rich kid, Alan-Bobby; Nathalie, a woman on her way to army training; John, a bureaucrat of the sort who would rather not explain exactly which bureau he works for (and who spends a significant portion of the novel, until the narrator rumbles him, pretending to be an academic); Cassie, a nightclub dancer with dreams of becoming a mother (dreams which, in the future world Russ sketches lightly in the background, only become possible because of the crash - we'll return to this); and the narrator herself, a former Communist rabble-rouser and religious extremist.
If you're thinking that none of these folks seem cut out to be pioneers, well, exactly. But crucially, with the exception of the narrator, they're all comfortable and confident enough to think otherwise. This is a work of science fiction to which Dunning-Kruger is much more relevant than Einstein-Rosen or Mitchelson-Morley. And so, despite the narrator's insistence that they're all already dead and might as well go about assuming that condition as quickly and painlessly as possible, they instead start setting up their shelter, digging latrine trenches and making playing cards to pass the time. By Day Four, Alan-Bobby discovers that he's big enough to beat up any other individual member of the group, but not all of them at once; and, four days later, in the proceeding the narrator refers to as 'the great womb robbery', the group start working through the practical implications of 'repopulating the planet'. Or, to put it more starkly, deciding which of the women is going to have to sleep with Victor (who, as the oldest, 'has offered to donate his genetic material first').
You can see why this book has me thinking about Rocket Boer, right? We have unbelievably rich bastards fucking up space travel. We have an impossible dream of planetary colonisation. And we have creepy pro-natalist misogyny and an obsession with 'genetic material'! It's like he's in the room. Except, of course, that Russ, and her narrator, are once again having none of it and - after acting as Victor's death doula (it turns out he really was on a clock as far as donating his genetic material went) - she steals the high-tech scouting module they all call a 'broomstick' and flees the settlement to live in a cave. Yeah, did I mention this was originally published in the UK by The Women's Press, by the way?
Unfortunately, the would-be colonists follow her. Unfortunately for them, that is, as she has no intention of going back, skills honed from her years as a political agitator, a concealed gas gun, and a conviction that she would rather die than be forced into their nightmare version of reproductive futurism. And so she winds up killing most of the other passengers in a confrontation at her cave, then heading back to the shelter to kill off the rest.
And yes, that includes Lori, because if you're going to reject reproductive futurism and its investment of meaning in the figure of The Child then you might as well go the whole hog. Besides, it has been established pretty conclusively in the rest of the book that Lori is an extremely hyperallergic child and is likely thereby to have the worst time on the planet of any of the would-be colonists. It's a mercy killing, really.
Not that Lori's mother sees it that way. In what would be the final dramatic confrontation of the novel were it not for the long, remarkable coda which follows the protagonist as she slowly gets ready to die, Valeria Graham gets the drop on the narrator with a hidden revolver and forces her to listen to a self-justifying spiel which starts with you're not coming anywhere near my child and then rapidly expands, as she realises the gun in her hand is what Russ calls 'a compulsory Ear', to an assertion of her place in 'the top one-tenth of the top one percentile' and its superiority to 'grubby little people' like the narrator, as well as the moral superiority of her decision to buy a child as opposed to Cassie's dreams of extraplanetary motherhood:
' "That child cost as much money as a small New England state. Believe it. I don't quarrel with Cass, but to have a baby and call yourself a mother - ! One doesn't say such things, of course. One doesn't quarrel. Not here. But having children...I am the real mother here. That's all I'm going to tell you about myself. I don't think you'd understand the rest." '
In the end, it's Val's desire to maintain her self-image as the perfect mother, by getting the narrator out of Lori's earshot, that creates the opening Russ' protagonist needs to kill her with her own revolver, then shoot her daughter in the head. Now that's dramatic irony.
Val's idea of perfect motherhood, and her belief in the superiority of a child 'bought and paid for' finds a clear echo in a certain contemporary billionaire's own obvious disgust with the messy mechanics of sex, but while the narrator's explicit rejection of the kind of 'natural' motherhood Cassie dreams of (' "Those babies'll love me, not their daddies."') creates the conflict which results in her slaying the others, it's very clear the narrator also despises the Grahams' cosy little domestic set-up. Cassie and Val can argue the toss about which of them counts as 'the real mother here': it's a contest in which the narrator has no interest.
Russ gives us, as our point of view character, a woman who defiantly rejects motherhood whether its acquired in the marketplace or forced on women in a state of (colonising) nature, under the guise of 'preserving genetic material'. I can think of no better protagonist for a time in which we find ourselves besieged by pro-natalist propaganda from the men who consider shackling space their manifest destiny - nor, indeed, can I think of a better book to write about this Mothers' Day.
* You know what it is. We all know what it is. He should do it.
Like a lot of trans people, I'm beginning to wonder why Brianna Ghey's mother seems to be so happy to appear in outlets like The Guardian and the BBC blaming her daughter's death on social media instead of, you know, the institutionalised transphobia of the places that seem so strangely keen to platform her. Especially when the policies she calls for seem almost certain to make it harder for other trans kids to find community online, and will indeed make it harder for abused kids of any gender to access what could be lifesaving support.
So I thought to myself, why on Earth would she do that? And, well, you know where that tends to lead me:
Esther’s Baby
She learned, when she was very small,
that every mother wants a doll,
and not somebody who desires and dreams,
and seeks a place outside of others’ schemes.
Something to dress and show around,
a bump to bear with beaming pride
and, presently, a bouncing babe!
Not something for itself, no - a thing made,
pure product, matrix-minted issue,
wee feet to fit a dainty little shoe:
a brand new dolly, just for her;
a merit badge proclaiming care,
A sign that she was in the club,
A girl fulfilled. A woman. Mum.
And should her darling fail to settle,
should nights become a sleepless battle,
even her complaints next day
would, to a fellow mum, convey
a maker’s pride in execution.
Her lovely boy. Her job well done.
And if boy became something that child would chafe,
I asked myself the question: what does someone like Wes Streeting do for fun? And then a vision descended on me, as it had before when I learned the horrifying truth about Keir Starmer, and reader: I knew.
The thoughts I outlined about different forms of performance yesterday were on my my mind as I watched The Last Showgirl. It really is as good as everyone is saying, but the thing that struck me the most about it is a kind of performance which is by no means restricted to professional entertainers.
The titular protagonist of Gia Coppola's film, Shelly (Pamela Anderson) is struggling to come to terms with the fact that the Las Vegas revue she's been part of for thirty years is approaching the end of its run, and, in the process, having to reassess her place in the landscape of contemporary employment and gender politics. You realise, as the film goes on, that for Shelly the casino stage is more than just her workplace, it's her safe space, her refuge from a changing world she understands less and less as she gets older. In this respect Shelly reminded me a lot of Mickey Rourke's Randy 'The Ram' Robinson in The Wrestler, and like that character, another major strand of Shelly's story is her attempt to reconcile herself with her estranged daughter Hannah (played by Billie Lourd).
Shelly has a habit of saying things about her show which sound like PR lines from a press release she long ago internalised, which are routinely shot down by the younger members of the cast:
Shelly: We were ambassadors for style and grace...The costumes. I mean it makes you feel like you're stepping out of the pages of Vogue magazine. I think that's why women like to come to the show. The glamour is undeniable.
Mary-Anne: The glamour is undeniable. I think I could deny the glamour.
The most brutal of these takedowns comes from Hannah, in a scene where she confronts Shelly for leaving her 'in the casino parking lot with a Gameboy while you did two shows a night':
Shelly: I mean if you can do what you love for thirty years, you know, and be passionate about your career...
Hannah: What kind of career is this? You're in the goddam back of 80 topless dancers! This was worth missing bedtime for most of my childhood? Was it?
You're in the goddam back. This line sums up the cognitive dissonance Shelly spends the film struggling with. It may be her on the show's poster but it's her from thirty years ago, when she was young. Shelly isn't the star of the show now - she's in the back, just another body on the stage, sewing up her own torn wing-cape so the cost of having it repaired can't be docked from her pay, even as she tells others (and herself) that her job gives her freedom, that she's doing what she loves, and that it's something she is 'passionate' about.
Ah yes, 'passion'. That word began showing up in advertisements for jobs around two decades ago regardless of - indeed, almost in inverse proportion to - the degree to which the job would seem to give workers something to be passionate about. One wonders how many people, by now, have had to pretend to be passionate about ready meals or tennis shoes or ISAs in order to convince a middle manager or a recruitment consultant who surely knows that they're lying that there's no lie they won't tell to get a job. Or, worse, no lie they'll eventually convince themselves to believe.
This popular motivational slogan started life as the title of a searing exposé of the Amway pyramid scheme. These days it's used unironically. It's meritocracy all over again.
I read today that due to a crisis in the broadcasting industry, senior TV producers are having to take jobs stacking shelves in supermarkets. I imagine these producers having to perform 'passion' for the supermarket experience to some retail manager in order to land those jobs. I imagine them sitting in the breakroom, looking at posters exhorting them to perform some version of positivity trademarked by their company's internal advertising department, no doubt with a cutesy acronym devised by somebody who can use the word 'learn' as a noun without feeling an urge to throw up.
They've seen the prices going up. They've seen more and more young men and women with sunken cheekbones trying to sneak food out past security. They've seen more and more goods get security tagged. Meat, when they started, then cheese. And then butter.
The manager, who sat there during the interview and made notes on a piece of branded paper while they tried to demonstrate their passion for hooking people up with skimmed milk or tinned fish, won't hear a word of sympathy spoken for the shoplifters. 'It's organised,' he says. 'They're gangs. They sell it on. I saw a programme on the telly.'
And the producer thinks about explaining that she knows exactly how programmes like that are put together, how press releases and video packages get laundered into a vague simulacrum of fact, but she decides against it because she has a mortgage, she has kids. She needs the shifts. So she just blankly says 'yeah' and makes herself smile once again as she wheels a trolley of white sliced bread to the shelves which face the in-store bakery.
We may not have our tits out; we may not wear sequins and crowns: but, under neoliberalism, we are all the last showgirl.
A bit of self-promotion to start with: on Saturday March 15th I'm performing at Transtock, an all-trans music and poetry festival at The Globe pub in Newcastle. I'm really excited about this one, not just because it's my first proper gig since December but also because I'll get to see Gaydar, which I've been wanting to do for ages. Of course it also means I have to work out and rehearse a set list, which has got me thinking about performing.
Well, that and the fact that, as I've mentioned before on here, I'm in the process of getting an official diagnosis of autism and ADHD. This has led to me thinking a lot about the ways in which I've found certain workplaces so difficult to cope with over the years. And what I've realised is that one of the reasons I found them so difficult was that, as well as getting stressed-out from all the normally anxiety-inducing aspects of those jobs, I was also in a state of perpetual nerves from the aspects of those jobs most of the people around me found relaxing.
Because I can't manage small talk. I can't just chat with people. I can't 'banter' (and indeed, as you'll recall if you're a longtime reader of this blog, I frankly have some issues with the existence of banter itself as a concept). If something which interests me comes up, then I can talk to people about it but I know that, even then, I can come off as weird to a lot of people. It's hard for me to just stay at the surface level on things, to not see connections or go off on tangents. And if a conversation strays into the area of something I feel strongly about, it's hard for me to stay civil or just laugh shit off, because, like a lot of autistic people, I have an intense sensitivity to injustice.
(And not to go off on a tangent here, but why is that pathological and not the fact that neurotypical people seem so much more relaxed about things being unjust? Why is being able to not give a shit about people considered the healthy behaviour? I mean do you ever stop to think about whether or not that might be why the planet is irreparably fucked up? Seriously, if the rule we followed brought us to this, of what use was the fucking rule?)
...and the possibility of not being able to rein in an outburst like the above is why I find myself trying as hard as possible to stay on guard at all times in even the most minor social interaction. Smile politely. Don't be weird. Say the right words. Don't be weird. Oh they said something back. Don't be weird. What do normal people say at times like this? Don't be weird! Why are they looking at me like that don't be weird don't be weird. Wait are they looking as well oh God no don't be weird don't be weird don't be wait what did they just say? Don't react don't react don't, oh God don't don't be weird don't be weirddon't be weird oh SHIT oh FUCK NOW THEY ALL THINK I'M FUCKING WEIRD.
People always used to compliment me, at work, on what a professional sounding telephone greeting I had. And this always used to bother me because as far as I could tell I was just basically saying exactly the same thing as them. I was doing what we were supposed to do - create a sentence we could repeat in our voices with the correct rhythm and intonation a hundred times a day if necessary, and rehearse it until we could say it in our sleep, if necessary (guess what I say most of the time whenever I answer a phone in my dreams, regardless of the context?).
It has taken years for me to realise that most of them had just noted that it said 'polite, friendly greeting' and some bullet points on the call script and would just work on that, instead of devising and refining their own personal antiphon. It's like the time I realised some people weren't lying when they say they had a happy childhood all over again.
And I'm beginning to see now that the reason these people still had energy left over after work while I was completely drained was because they were actually able to relax by spending time in each others' company on breaks and over lunches, whereas I, from the moment I left the house until the moment I got home, was engaging in a work of supreme method acting to play the character of Normal Person.
But hang on, AJ, why should that be a problem for you? I mean, you opened this entry by talking about a gig you have coming up. Why should you have trouble performing, when you're a performer?
Well, indeed I am, but performing on stage and performing in everyday life are different things. For one thing, there's a clear demarcation between being on stage and off. Or rather there's a demarcation between the type of performing I do on stage and the kind I do when I'm hanging out with people afterwards because, yeah, I'm still worrying about Not Looking Weird when I'm at the bar or whatever. In fact, it sometimes feels as if being on stage is the only place where I get to be as weird as I want to be without having to make any excuses (and if you've seen me perform, you know it can get pretty weird).
A stage is somewhere I have full control and total freedom. It's my time. I know exactly what I'm going to say, how I'm going to say it, what movements I'll make with my body, what topics will be addressed. If there is something I feel is unjust I am going to talk about it, and in words I have prepared and refined to have maximum impact. I do not have to worry about taking turns because the audience knows how long I am meant to be on stage for, and I needn't worry that I'm rambling because I have edited down everything I am going to say, even the bits between poems, and I have rehearsed with a stopwatch to make sure I bring things home on time. It is, quite simply, so much easier than LARPing as a Normal Fucking Person.
Brian Kiteley, author of The 4 A.M. Breakthrough, a book of 'unconventional writing exercises' I am currently reading because I am in the process of preparing a creative writing course for students at the Recovery College where I currently volunteer, quotes Fran Lebowitz as having once observed that 'After forty, Christmas seems to arrive every three months.' From this I take it that, at least from her forties onwards, Ms Lebowitz has known sufficient material comfort that Christmas has never been a financial problem for her. I say this because I am 47 years old and, for the past five years, I have not known a year in which I was not crushingly, grindingly aware of the gravity of that festival and the dent it would put in my bank account.
I say gravity because, like a planet, Christmas, for the poor, distorts all the space around it - both the months beforehand, in which money for presents, cards and wrapping must somehow be found, and the months afterwards, in which one must, Sisyphus-like, attempt the impossible feat of stretching even less than usual out until payday, to the point where the brevity of February is experienced as a profound fiduciary mercy. With the advent of March, one can breath again - a little. But by September at the latest the fretting over gifts begins anew.
Last year I tried to follow a saving regime which I thought would make Christmas a breeze. The theory seemed simple: on the first day of the month, transfer one penny from the current to the savings account; on the second, save two pence; on the third, three, and so on. Going up in increments of only a penny a day, and starting anew at the beginning of each month, I calculated that I could save enough money to handily pay for all the expenses associated with Christmas, might perhaps even be able to purchase my relatives something which felt properly special for once.
This did not work. The cost of living increased; my flat flooded; soon enough I found myself forced to empty what little I had saved back into my current account, and Christmas, which had seemed tame, resumed its place as what it had always been: the dragon waiting at the summit of the year, eager as always to exact its crippling tribute. And I resumed, again, my state of knowing, in the depths of my pockets and the pit of my stomach, every single step I would have to crawl up to that summit.
Yes, I know I used this yesterday. I'm going to use it as the actual thumbnail when I record the last entry for my YouTube channel as well. Deal with it.
Let's join some dots. In the preceding entry, we looked at Todd Field's Tàr, and the way in which it has been misread, perhaps intentionally, by many critics as a tale of artistic genius destroyed by cancel culture when anyone who pays attention to the film clocks pretty quickly that its protagonist is both unambiguously an abuser and very obviously faking genius: Lydia Tàr has worked out how to give off the signifiers which allow her to pass as a cultural icon while avoiding any truly challenging artistic engagement. In much the same way that Stephen Fry is a stupid person's idea of a clever person, Tàr is a Radio 3 listener's idea of a contemporary classical artist: committed to the canon, apolitical, dismissive of the avant-garde, happy to trot out an amusing anecdote and make the kind of cultural references that inspire a sensible chuckle in her aging and affluent audience. Happy to flatter the pretensions of that audience - to reassure them that they must be very clever, very cultured people if they consume her content. And thus well-placed, until the revelation of her career of abuse, to function as one part of an edifice of cultural product based around flattering and indulging that audience.
And in the entry before that, I drew your attention to Elizabeth Sandifer's essay The Cuddled Little Vice, which dissects the life and work of the fantasy author and prolific rapist Neil Gaiman. In that essay, Sandifer pretty comprehensively documents the process by which Gaiman, too, learned how to give off and manipulate the signifiers which allowed him to pass as a cultural icon while never producing anything too challenging, anything which might prove too alienating towards a mass readership. While there were moments in his early work where he threatened to do so, most notably in some arcs of Sandman and some of his earlier, more personal works like Violent Cases and Mr. Punch, it was a con Gaiman had perfected by the time of the publication of American Gods, his first prose novel which was not either a collaboration with a more experienced author (Good Omens) or a retread of something he had first approached in a different genre (Neverwhere, Stardust) - after which Gaiman, unlike Orpheus or Lot's wife, never looked back. After American Gods, Gaiman also became part of that midcult edifice, with his own affluent readership to flatter. Until, like Lydia Tàr, his crimes caught up with him.
It is worth thinking, though, about how those crimes caught up with their perpetrators, both in Field's film and in Gaiman's real life. In Tàr, the revelation unambiguously comes from below - from the young women Lydia abuses and tosses aside. The circumstances of Gaiman's downfall were murkier. While, most notably in a thorough (and thoroughly damning) New York magazine article, the voices of the women Gaiman abused are now being heard, the first people who brought the case against him to public attention were very much not bringing the news from those below.
Indeed, one of the people responsible for the Tortoise media podcast that first brought Gaiman's crimes to public notice is Rachel Johnson, the sister of former Prime Minister Boris Johnson, a man whose attitude to sexual assault is, to put it lightly, somewhat concerning, and who attends parties given by the Russian oligarch Evgeny Lebedev, which are reputedly also attended by 'models' who, like Gaiman's victims, are made to sign non-disclosure agreements. As it happens, Lebedev owns the Evening Standard newspaper, which employs Rachel Johnson as a columnist (undoubtedly entirely on merit), and where she made a rather interesting admission about her reasons for exposing Gaiman in a column titled 'I broke the Neil Gaiman story, but I never wanted him cancelled like this'.
In that column, in which Johnson is careful to note that Gaiman 'was a kind, vocal, public ally of all the most worthy, trendy minorities and causes from refugees to trans kids', she claims that it was never her intention to bring about his 'blanket cancellation'. Rather, she wanted to 'probe the greyest of grey areas - allegations of sexual abuse within an otherwise consensual relationship', noting that many cases of intimate partner violence go unreported and that prosecutions can be undermined because the victims 'very often send their alleged abuser loving messages afterwards, that can be used as the crux of any defence', before weakly concluding that 'it's...complicated' and ending by saying 'I hope everyone listens to the podcast', which she links to.
It's almost a nothing of a column, but it's important for what it represents. You'll recall that I ended the Tàr essay by musing on the mechanisms by which that film's protagonist would probably, over time, be able to return to some version of the spotlight. My belief is that in Johnson's column we are seeing those mechanisms operating pretty much in plain sight. A lot of trans people, myself among them, feel that the people behind the podcast that broke the Gaiman allegations did so because they hoped to provoke us into rallying round to protect a prominent ally - the way the transphobes at the Guardian suddenly lost all enthusiasm for believing and protecting women when one of their star columnists, Nick Cohen, was outed as a serial groper. As always, the terverts projected their own behavioural standards onto us (the same way they do when they call us 'groomers'). But we don't roll that way. Trans women had no hesitation in kicking Gaiman into the goddam gutter, never mind the kerb, for what he did. Indeed, the title of Sandifer's essay comes from a series of remarkable, vitriolic sonnets trans author Roz Kaveney wrote out of the sheer rage she felt on learning the truth about a man she once called a friend.
In saying she never wanted Gaiman's 'blanket cancellation', Johnson is, partly, expressing her frustration that we didn't close ranks in the way she expected, but she is also offering the now-disgraced author a quid pro quo. Drop your support for those 'worthy, trendy minorities', Neil. Write something suitably penitent about the 'grey area' you drifted into. Blame it on the trannies, blame it on your trauma, say you got all turned around but now your head's screwed on and looking in the right direction - and you can have it all back. Let us help you.
Cancellation comes from both above and below, but you only stay cancelled if the people with the real power decide you should stay that way. If Neil Gaiman abandons his previous, vocal support for trans rights, some of the very same people who condemn him now will be all to happy to aid him in his return to literary respectability. If he doesn't, then he will stay cancelled and we will know that he does, at least, have some kind of character, some form of moral centre. But frankly: the man is a rapist. I doubt that he does. If The Cuddled Little Vice tells us anything it's that Neil Gaiman, who 'learned about the world from ruthless people', is ruthless in pursuit of getting what he wants.
To be brutally honest, I fully expect him to turn his back on trans people if that's the price of regaining the spotlight he thinks he deserves, and the only reason I'm writing this is so I can say I put it down as a marker for when the bastard does it.
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 TheNew 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.
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 Esquirehe 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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