ZADIE SMITH
Tár
a film written and directed by Todd Field
During the first ten minutes of Tár, it is possible to feel that the critic Adam Gopnik is a better actor than Cate Blanchett. They sit together on a New Yorker Festival stage. Gopnik, playing himself, is a relaxed and fluid interviewer. His interviewee, the (fictional) conductor Lydia Tár, is stiff and self-conscious—actorly, even. As Gopnik recounts Tár’s many achievements, her face remains fixed in its pose of false humility, and when she speaks, she offers her audience a series of eloquent but overly rehearsed bons mots:
We don’t call women astronauts
“astronettes.”
Time is the essential piece of
interpretation.
You cannot start without me. See,
I start the clock.
But Blanchett has it exactly right. She
is doing what the talent is always doing
at these things: acting. Self-fashioning,
repeating witticisms they’ve used
many times before, pretending to con-
sider questions long settled in their
own minds. After which the talent goes
home, to their backstage life.
If the talent is a Cultural Luminary,
backstage is likely to be even more
glamorous than front-of-house. Pris-
tine Poggenpohl kitchens and $30,000
sectionals and discreetly disguised
safes sunk into great expanses of un-
divided wall. A loft that stretches a city
block. Such is the life of Lydia Tár. Her
daughter, Petra, attends a bourgeois
German private school and her wife,
Sharon, is first violin in Tár’s own or-
chestra, the most prestigious in Berlin.
Tár maintains a second apartment in
the city, for those moments when she
needs privacy.
Cultural Luminaries make a lot of
money. Their imperious attitudes and
witty bons mots are in demand every-
where—until they aren’t. As Tár dis-
covers the very next morning, while
guest teaching at Juilliard. Here her
charismatic lone-genius shtick—which
so delighted the gray-haired festival-
goers—falls on stonier ground. Tár is
now speaking to a different generation.
The generation that says things like
I’m not really into Bach. Such state-
ments are calculated to bring out the
hysteric in a middle-aged Cultural Lu-
minary, and Tár immediately takes the
bait, launching into an aggressive de-
fense laced with high-handed pity (for
the young man who dares say it) and
a more generalized contempt for his
cohort.
The young man is named Max.
He has a very gentle demeanor and
a sweet, open face, and seems in no
way to be seeking confrontation. Asked
how he felt about Bach, he simply an-
swered. But now, under Tár’s verbal
assault, he attempts to expand his cri-
tique: “Honestly, as a BIPOC pangender
person, I would say Bach’s misogynis-
tic life makes it kind of impossible for
me to take his music seriously. . .” The
battle lines are drawn. Max is a young
snowflake. Tár’s an Art Monster.1 She’s
also a (self-described) “U-Haul Les-
bian,” although this aspect of her iden-
tity won’t help her much. In Tár, time
is the essential piece of interpreta-
tion, and there’s an awful lot of time
these days between people in their
twenties and people in their fifties.
Sometimes it feels like the gap has
never been wider.
To paraphrase Schopenhauer—who
gets several shout-outs in Tár—
every generation mistakes the limits
of its own field of vision for the limits
of the world. But what happens when
generational visions collide? How
should we respond?
As we learn in her classroom, Tár’s
method is direct combat. For she is
Gen X—like me—and one of the strik-
ing things about my crowd is that al-
though we like to speak rapturously
of emotion in the aesthetic sense, we
prefer to scorn emotions personally
(by way of claiming to not really have
any) and also to trample over other
peoples’. It doesn’t occur to Tár that
sweet young Max may have serious
trouble with anxiety—although we in
the audience certainly notice his knees
bouncing frantically. The power differ-
ential between these two means that
a rant Tár might launch into around
a dinner table in Berlin—to much re-
ceptive laughter—is experienced as
ritual humiliation by a young man ex-
posed in front of his peers. But Tár is
discombobulated also. It’s a long climb
down from Cultural Luminary to Con-
tra, and no doubt a great shock to find
yourself so sharply reassessed and re-
defined by the generation below you.2
Do twenty-five years of glass-ceiling
breaking and artistic excellence count
for nothing? It’s enough to pitch a girl
into a midlife crisis.
What if Tár had taken a deep breath
and tried a different approach? In-
vited Max to lie under the piano, say,
while she played some Bach, then in-
quired after his feelings about that
experience? After which perhaps they
could have switched positions, with
Max playing and Tár lying down. She
might ask him what it felt like to con-
sider the music while simultaneously
considering the man who made it. Can
an A-minor chord be misogynistic? Is
an individual human ever really the
sole source of any particular piece of
music in the first place? Instead, Tár
mounts a familiar high horse:
Unfortunately, the architect of
your soul appears to be social
media. You want to dance the
masque, you must service the com-
poser. . . . You must in fact stand
in front of the public and God and
obliterate yourself.
We of Tár’s generation can be quick
to lambaste those we call (behind their
backs) “the youngs,” but speaking for
myself, I’m the one severely triggered
by statements like “Chaucer is misogy-
nistic” or “Virginia Woolf was a racist.”
Not because I can’t see that both state-
ments are partially true, but because
I am of that generation whose only
real shibboleth was: “Is it interesting?”
Into which broad category both evils
and flaws could easily be fit, not be-
cause you agreed with them personally
but because they had the potential to
be analyzed, just like anything else.3
Whereas if you grew up online, the
negative attributes of individual hu-
mans are immediately disqualifying.
The very phrase ad hominem has been
rendered obsolete, almost incompre-
hensible. An argument that is directed
against a person, rather than the po-
sition they are maintaining? Online a
person is the position they’re main-
taining and vice versa. Opinions are
identities and identities are opinions.
Unfollow!
These opposing sensibilities make
perfect sense to those born into them.
Both appear moronic and dangerous
to the other side. And so Max and Tár
really can’t with each other. It’s almost
comic how precisely each generation
intuits the trigger points of the one
before. To the popcorn-eating boomers
we must seem like so many parents
and children locked in a Jacob-and-
the-angel struggle, neither party will-
ing to concede an inch. Yet what if we
refused to let go until some form of
mutual blessing was conferred?
“You’re a fucking bitch,” Max tells
Tár.
“And you are a robot!” Tár tells Max.
B ack in Berlin, after a long day
bravely combating the youngs and
flying first class, Tár falls exhausted
into her wife’s arms. Tár is off duty in
baseball cap and cashmere, but glam-
our clings to her, and Sharon, dowdy
only by comparison, seems somewhat
in awe. And we are certainly curious
about this marriage, but in these lean
times we are even more curious about
the furnishings. The camera takes us
on a tour of objects, precisely indexed
à la Wes Anderson, but in the subdued
European palette of Michael Haneke.
Perfectly ordered scores bound in blue
cloth with unbroken spines. Immac-
ulate bookshelves. A gleaming grand
piano.
But should we pity our scandal-
ously successful Tár, just a little?
Some of the frostiness of her on-
stage life seems to have bled into
her backstage interpersonal relations.
Even her daughter calls her Lydia. Or
maybe it’s just that her family doesn’t
see her very much. Cultural Luminar-
ies travel a lot. In their brief spells
back home, they have many break-
fast and lunch meetings and proudly
drive their kids to school three days
in a row. In the gaps between work-
dates, they try to listen to what their
put-upon personal assistant is telling
them:
Assistant: I received another weird
email from Krista. How should
I reply.
Tár: Don’t.
Assistant: This one felt particu-
larly desperate.
Tár: Hope dies last.
Hope dies last. Germany has the best
idioms. Americans prefer There’s al-
ways hope! which, though cheering,
is demonstrably untrue. Everything
ends, even hope. But at this point we
don’t know what exactly has ended
or how badly, who Krista is, what has
passed between her and Tár, or who is
the guilty party. We are in Tár’s hybrid
vehicle, watching her drive Petra to
her fancy school. Petra is being bul-
lied by a classmate and Tár is off to do
some helicopter parenting. En route,
Tár and Petra recite “Who Killed Cock
Robin?,” that old nursery rhyme about
the attribution of guilt:
Who’ll toll the bell?
I, said the Bull,
because I can pull,
I’ll toll the bell.
In the schoolyard, the offending eight-
year-old girl is pointed out to Tár, who
bends down to eye level, introduces
herself—“I’m Petra’s father”—then
goes to town:
I know what you’re doing to her.
And if you ever do it again, do you
know what I’ll do? I’ll get you. And
if you tell any grown- up what I
just said, they won’t believe you.
Because I’m a grown-up. But you
need to believe me: I will get you.
Remember this, Johanna: God
watches all of us.
An electrifying scene. We are by now
used to apocalyptic bad guys with the
end of the world in mind, but it’s a
long time since I went to the movies
and saw an accurate representation of
an ordinary sinner. It reminded me of
that extraordinary Sharon Olds poem
“The Clasp,” in which a woman, angry
with her four-year-old daughter, holds
the child too hard by the wrist:
she swung her head, as if checking
who this was, and looked at me,
and saw me—yes, this was her
mom,
her mom was doing this. Her dark,
deeply open eyes took me
in, she knew me, in the shock of
the moment
she learned me. This was her
mother, one of the
two whom she most loved, the two
who loved her most, near the
source of love
was this.
Scene by scene we are learning
Tár, much as the poet’s daughter
“learned” her mother—and a lot of
what we learn is frightening. If poor
little Johanna mistakes Lydia Tár for
an omnipotent God, she’s not too far
off the mark. Conductors are godlike.
You can’t start without me. They are
the first cause of music. But women
as gods, as artists—as first causes of
anything—can still be a tricky prop-
osition, especially, for some reason,
in recent independent cinema. In the
multiplexes, superheroines are busy
flexing their much-celebrated biceps,
but over in the art houses, the concept
of the “independent woman” is being
subjected to a little narrative passive
aggression. In The Worst Person in the
World, a Gen X graphic novelist gets
terminal cancer to offset the destabi-
lizing effect of his ex-girlfriend/muse
becoming an artist herself. In Trian-
gle of Sadness, the modeling industry
is symbolically freighted with all the
many sins of late capitalism—perhaps
because it is one of the few trades in
which women are the first cause of
everything.4
But Tár is not at all like the conve-
nient symbolic females to be found
in those films. She is something far
more destabilizing and radical: a
human being in crisis. And not just
any crisis! The least fashionable on
earth: the midlife kind. I write this
not as excuse or explanation, only as
diagnosis. In any human life there are
several overlapping crises, political
and collective, individual and gener-
ational. It is of course possible to dis-
agree philosophically and politically
on their relative importance, but not
I think to deny their simultaneous ex-
istence. Yet when we are young, how
absurd does the midlife crisis seem?
Pathetic! What is wrong with these
people?
What’s wrong with these people
is that they are going to die, and for
the first time in their lives, they really
know that. In the curious case of Gen
X, we seem to be taking this shocking
revelation both personally and collec-
tively, maybe because the end of our
time and the end of time itself have
become somewhat muddled in our
minds. Our backs hurt, the kids don’t
like Bach anymore—and the seas are
rising! As the kids themselves say, it’s
a lot. Surely there should be someone
to blame for this terrible collision of
the apocalypse and our own cultural
and physical obsolescence—but who?
The millennials? Gen Z? Cock Robin?
In Tár, Gen X’s confusion of cause and
effect is sometimes too baldly stated.
We get that overfamiliar culture war
between Tár and Max. We get Tár won-
dering aloud whether Schopenhauer
can still be taken seriously, given
that he pushed his own wife down
the stairs.
But Tár is at its strongest when
channeling its existential dread
through other, more cinematic means.
When Tár goes jogging through the
Berlin woods and hears a young woman
screaming somewhere, she stops in her
tracks, with a guilty, panicked look on
her face—but is unable to locate the
source. Who is in pain? And who is to
blame? Surely not Lydia Tár? Schopen-
hauer apparently measured a person’s
intelligence by their “sensitivity to
noise”—or so a colleague informs Tár
during one of her many meetings—
and back at the loft she is woken in
the night by strange noises she can’t
identify. Is it the fridge? The air con-
ditioning? Tearing apart her expensive
home, she finds a metronome ticking
in the safe. Ticking like a countdown.
Tár is a very intelligent woman indeed,
but her sensitivities turn out to be lim-
ited in certain areas. Yes, for our Lydia,
time’s (almost) up. The bell is tolling
and it’s tolling for her.
But first, like any bad guy, she at-
tempts to cover her tracks. We
watch her e-mailing everyone she
knows in the music community to
warn them of an unstable young
woman called Krista Taylor, who may
be spreading untrue rumors about
her. Then checking Twitter to see if
said rumors have broken out into the
world. We begin to get the picture.
Krista is a young, aspiring conductor.
Tár was her mentor. Also (secretly)
her lover—although only briefly. For
Tár is one of these middle-aged peo-
ple attracted to youth and inexperi-
ence, the kind who like to be adored
but are perhaps less keen on sticking
around long enough to be “learned.”
We never meet Krista, but from our
glimpses of the many pleading e-mails
she sends Tár’s assistant, we gather
that an affair that proved seismic
for Krista barely registered on her
older lover’s radar. Now Krista can
neither reclaim Tár’s affections nor
advance in the music industry. But
for Tár, it’s as if it never happened
at all. She is already on to the next
distraction.
Spotting a hot young cellist, Olga,
in the bathroom of her workplace, Tár
later recognizes this same young wom-
an’s shoes, peeking out from beneath
those screens orchestra directors use
to preserve the anonymity of “blind
auditions.” Next thing we know Tár
has given Olga a seat in her orches-
tra. Then decides to add Elgar’s Cello
Concerto to the program, and to give
that prestigious solo to the new girl in-
stead of the first cello. And this move,
in turn, allows her to organize a series
of one-on-one rehearsals with Olga at
that apartment she maintains in the
city . . .There’s a word for this behav-
ior: instrumentalism. Using people as
tools. As means rather than ends in
themselves. To satisfy your own de-
sire, or your sense of your own power,
or simply because you can.5
What’s interesting about Tár’s mis-
use of her own power in the ethical
realm is how much it reveals about
her aesthetics. Her own refined mu-
sical sensibility meant everything
when she was arguing with Max, but
now that she’s embarking on a new
flirtation with Olga, she’s less partic-
ular. It doesn’t matter that Olga has
no preferred recording of the Elgar
or that she only knows the piece at
all from watching Jacqueline du Pré
play it on YouTube. With Tár, it’s art
for art’s sake until it isn’t. Until desire
gets in the way.
Why are some older people so at-
tracted by youth, by inexperience?
We are offered a potential answer
when age and hard experience come
a-knocking at Tár’s door. There, on the
threshold of her apartment, stands her
neighbor: a middle-aged, disheveled,
distressed, apparently mentally unwell
woman who is in need of Tár’s help.
This woman is caring for her own sick
older sister, an even more abject and
forsaken creature, whom Tár is then
forced to witness, half-naked, covered
in her own fluids, having just suffered
a fall. The old woman clings to Tár, who
recoils in horror, rushing back to the
curated safety of her own apartment—
and into her power shower—to wash
away the human stain. Later, when the
old woman is taken from the building
by paramedics—off to a nursing home
so that her younger relatives can sell
the apartment—it is Tár who becomes
the very picture of human abjection,
cowering in the hallway, spooked by
this specter of decrepitude. In this mo-
ment she is very far from being Lydia
Tár, that sophisticated, blasé Cultural
Luminary who says things like “Subli-
mate yourself, your ego, and yes, your
identity!” or “They can’t all conduct,
honey—it’s not a democracy.” That Tár
jogs every day to stave off middle-aged
spread, threatens children, and betrays
no fear or self-doubt whatsoever, not
even when poor abandoned Krista runs
out of hope and kills herself. Not even
when the board of the orchestra ad-
vises Tár to lawyer up.
The old are vampiric. The old hoard
resources. They use status and power
and youth itself to distract themselves
from the inevitable. The young are al-
ways right in their indictment of the
old. The boomers were right about the
Greatest Generation6; we were right
about the boomers7; the millennials
are right about us.8 Still, one wonders
how these same millennials, stuck with
a name that seems to enshrine the idea
of youth itself, will now deal with the
imminent loss of their own. Up to now,
when it came to generational combat,
they’ve been right about everything,
as every generation is in its own way,
only ever missing that one vital piece
of data about time and its passing:
how it feels.
Of course, not everyone who reaches
middle age has a crisis or spends
their middle years manipulating the
young or driving anybody to suicide.
But good films are not about “ev-
eryone.” They are about someone in
particular, and Blanchett’s charac-
terization of this Lydia Tár proves so
thorough, so multifaceted in its di-
mensions, so believable, that it defies
even the film’s most programmatic in-
tentions and has reportedly sent many
a young person to googling: Is Lydia
Tár a real person? She is not one in the
eyes of the algorithm, but she certainly
is in mine. She captures so clearly the
self-pity of a predator, the vanity of
a predator, the narcissism of a pred-
ator, and in one remarkable scene
comes to embody the act of predation
itself.
It happens after one of Olga and Tár’s
private rehearsals—in which nothing
remotely sexual has occurred—and
Tár is now dropping Olga outside her
building. But Olga has left her good-
luck mascot, a teddy bear, in Tár’s car
and Tár, realizing, immediately tries to
capitalize, hurrying after Olga down an
alley, which itself turns out to lead to
a filthy, damp, abject apartment com-
plex, about as far from Tár’s real es-
tate portfolio as could be imagined.
Olga is nowhere to be seen, and Tár
can’t find the right door. Now she is in
some kind of bleak inner courtyard. It
is suddenly dark. Water drips. I never
before thought Blanchett had a pred-
ator’s face, but stalking through this
dripping, Tarkovsky-esque wasteland
with those cheekbones, she looks just
like a jaguar—who is now confronted
by another predator: a large hound, in
shadow, barking at her, a symbol of
menace worthy of Kubrick. She runs,
falling over onto concrete, smashing
that beautiful face of hers. But the dog
doesn’t attack. Nobody attacks. Yet
she goes home and tells her wife and
daughter that she has been mugged.
Petra, stricken, looks at her moth-
er’s bruised and broken face and tells
her, “You’re the most beautiful person
I know.” Sorry, Petra: we beg to differ.
But is Lydia Tár the worst person in
the world? When Petra, at bedtime,
asks her mother to hold her feet to
help her sleep, Tár tenderly holds
those little feet by the heels, and by
now we know that Tár’s own Achil-
les’ heel is not love, exactly, or even
desire, but rather a powerful pride.
Where we can just about conceive of
a millennial making up a mugging for
the purposes of pity,9 Tár’s aim is to
further demonstrate that she is an
Art Monster, who refuses to commit
to any arc of trauma. (“You should
have seen the other guy,” she tells
her orchestra.) Every generation has
its fruitful and destructive narratives
of self-fashioning. This Gen X com-
mitment to emotional resilience has
certainly had its utility—for slackers,
we sure got a lot of work done!—but
also its hidden costs. How much in-
timate damage was deflected or re-
pressed when Miss Ciccone became
Madonna? When Mr. Nelson became
Prince? When Linda from Staten Is-
land refashioned herself into the Cul-
tural Luminary Lydia Tár?
I have this sense that every gener-
ation has about two or three great
ideas and a dozen or so terrible ones.
For example, Gen X nudged forward
the good idea that men should be en-
couraged to be fully involved in the
raising of their own children. Also: love
is definitely love. We thought that art-
ists (like Bach) were limited (like all
humans), but that artworks themselves
(like The Goldberg Variations) were
limitless—sites of infinite play and
boundless reinterpretation, belong-
ing as much to their receivers as their
creators. Believing this enabled many
a voracious Art Monster to consume
many an artwork—and to make a lot
of art, too.10 But “no one should pay
for anything on the Internet” needed a
little more workshopping, and it turns
out fame is not the answer to every-
thing—saving the planet is.
Some generational realizations are
world-changing and permanent. They
become almost universally accepted
and are enshrined in law and custom.11
Others get similarly enshrined but are
everywhere ignored.12 Rightly proud
is the generation that manages to get
its ethics enshrined in law. (Although
history demonstrates that one genera-
tion alone is rarely enough to achieve
this kind of truly radical change. Gen-
erational cooperation across time is
crucial.)
There is presently no law that states,
“No middle-aged person should use
any young adult as an instrument or
tool, sexually or otherwise.” But as an
ethical imperative this is one of the
very good ideas of the present genera-
tion, and it would be a good thing, ethi-
cally speaking, if Tár adhered to it. (But
it would make for a much less interest-
ing film.) Instead, she persists. Suffer-
ing from injuries incurred during the
“attack,” Tár goes to the doctor and
gets a diagnosis she mishears as nos-
talgia aesthetica. (The actual diagnosis
is notalgia paresthetica.) Gen X suffers
from aesthetic nostalgia, yes, which
itself has its uses and abuses. On the
plus side, it sometimes enables us to
make beguiling movies like Tár that
allude to Tarkovsky. On the negative
side of the ledger, we have often been
so concerned with aesthetics to the
exclusion of all else that we are liable
to confuse aesthetic failures (making
bad art) or reputational damage (in the
cultural field) with death itself.
So it goes with Tár. She is more
concerned with the death of her own
reputation than with any possible
part she might have played in the
death of Krista. Her self-love is ma-
lignant—catastrophic. But because
this is a midlife crisis, she doesn’t
change course, and even as her con-
nection with Krista becomes publicly
known—and the storm of reputa-
tional death engulfs her—she makes
an ill-advised trip to New York to
give a talk, taking Olga with her.
For her own part, Olga meets a cute,
age-appropriate guy at Tár’s event
and goes out for the evening with
him. (The fact that Olga remains
completely unaware of Tár’s sexual
interest in her provides the few mo-
ments of comic relief in this film.)
Tár is left in her fancy hotel, alone.
Midlife crises are nothing if not delu-
sional. After which Tár has nowhere to
go but back in time, to her childhood
home on Staten Island. We find her
in her old bedroom, feeling sorry for
herself, watching VHS tapes of Leon-
ard Bernstein (Greatest Generation)
talking ecstatically of music: “There’s
no limit to the different kinds of feel-
ings music can make you have! And
some of those feelings are so special,
and so deep, that they can’t even be
described in words.”
On the stairs, on her way out, Tár
bumps into her brother. He doesn’t
look like a Cultural Luminary; he’s
dressed like a man who works with his
hands. He regards his famous sister
with pity and offers a fresh diagnosis:
“You don’t seem to know where the hell
you came from or where you’re going!”
But he’s wrong about that: Tár’s going
home, to face the music. Pictures of
her and a young cellist entering a New
York hotel are all over Twitter; in the
eyes of the public a “pattern of behav-
ior” has been established. In Berlin,
her wife, Sharon, is waiting to hear
the truth, about Krista, about Olga,
about everything: “Because I deserve
that. Those are the rules.”
Every generation makes new rules.
Every generation comes up against
the persistent ethical failures of the
human animal. But though there may
be no permanent transformations in
our emotional lives, there can be gen-
uine reframings and new language and
laws created to name and/or penalize
the ways we tend to hurt each other,
and this is a service each generation
can perform for the one before. When
Sharon accuses Tár of using her, Tár
replies, “How cruel to define our rela-
tionship as transactional!” Now, that
is definitely an example of gaslight-
ing, and how would I know this with-
out millennials explaining it to me?
Similarly, when Sharon shoots back,
“There’s only one relationship you’ve
ever had that wasn’t, and she’s sleeping
in the room next door!”—well, that’s
classic Gen X guilt-tripping, and you’re
welcome.
The moment I saw the poster for
Tár (Blanchett shot from below,
conducting, arms outstretched, look-
ing like Christ on the Cross) I knew I
would want to write about it, but the
film was not quite out yet, so I was
sent by Focus Features to a screen-
ing of one, in what turned out to be
the London headquarters of Google,
that great quantifier of everything.
As a committed Gen Xer, overly fond
of formulating my own aesthetic re-
sponses, I went into this movie with-
out consulting that company’s search
engines, without reading a word about
it—no interviews, no hot takes or
counter takes—and so after the cred-
its rolled, I felt very discombobulated,
full of emotions I had no words for
(yet). Later I messaged some Ameri-
can friends who began to inform me of
the general consensus forming around
this film online and the various cases
for and against it that were being
made, but before they could get very
far with all that, I asked them please
to stop. “Stand before a picture as be-
fore a prince,” suggests Schopenhauer.
“Waiting to see whether it will speak
and what it will say.” A not very dem-
ocratic piece of advice, perhaps, but,
for me, one that remains essential.
Why do female ambition and desire
have to be monstrous? Why choose a
woman to play this kind of monster
when her misdeeds are so common
among men? Or, conversely: Isn’t it
great that women now get to be just
as monstrous as anyone else? I don’t
think these questions are without
merit but I notice the way such prefab-
ricated talking points function inde-
pendently of any particular character
or film. They don’t seem to quite cap-
ture the comical specificity of Lydia
Tár’s stealing that pencil, or looming
omnipotently over an eight-year-old,
or having a manic episode, marching
around her apartment playing the ac-
cordion, singing, “You’re all going to
hell.” (Reputational damage may not
be death itself, but it can certainly feel
like ego death and even break your
brain.) And they don’t come close to
explaining or quantifying the beauti-
ful scene very near the end in which
Tár, having traveled to an unspecified
country in Southeast Asia in search
of redemption,13 stands in a waterfall
and, through a sheet of water, silently
watches a couple of happy young peo-
ple kissing.
For the first time since we “learned”
Tár, we see her stripped bare at last,
with no theory, no defense. No pre-
fabricated arguments. No witty bons
mots. She just has to “sit with it,” as
the youngs say. She is old and they
are not. Her time has passed. There is
no redemption. Nothing to be said or
done except feel it. And in this posi-
tivist world—in which our friends at
Google have indexed everything that is
the case—how I treasure any artwork
that preserves a silence or recognizes
a limit! That gestures to those aspects
of the human animal that “can’t even
be described in words.”
Tár may feel politically inadequate
to those who judge art solely in that
fashion, but I found it to be existen-
tially rich. And those among us who
prefer our baddies to be properly
punished need have no fear of dis-
appointment. In a final scene of pure
schadenfreude, we see Tár directing
what appears to be a great orchestra
once again. But then the camera turns
to the audience: she is conducting film
music, at some kind of Comic Con–
type festival, to a packed theater of
people in cosplay costumes and super-
hero suits. Tár has been relegated to
the realm of kitsch, the lowest rung
on the cultural ladder, which must
mean she has been forced to subject
her own good taste, her own fine aes-
thetic sensibility, to the demands of a
financial necessity, i.e., she has “sold
out.” And that, for a woman of Tár’s
generation—believe me—is truly a
fate worse than death. .
1“My plan was to never get married. . . .
Women almost never become art monsters
because art monsters only concern them-
selves with art, never mundane things.”
From Jenny Offill’s 2014 novel, Dept. of
Speculation, the term “art monster” has
since taken on a life of its own, appear-
ing in many essays and Twitter handles. In
April 2022 Offill appeared with the writers
Jia Tolentino and Sheila Heti in a panel at
Bennington titled “How to Be an Art Mon-
ster.” It proposed to answer the question:
“Has the age of the lone genius, willing to
sacrifice anything and everyone in their
lives for their art, come to an end?”
2This precipitous decline in social capital
has of course happened before. Boomers
went from idealistic flower children cred-
ited with transforming the social and po-
litical fabric of America to out-of-touch
fools you were welcome to roll your eyes
at: OK, boomer.
3 A mode of thinking that had its roots in
our grandparents’ generation of modernists
and New Critics. Our own (minor) innova-
tion was to transfer our critical attention
from matters like the poetry of T. S. EliOT
in movies and pop records
4And consistently paid more than men.
5At one point—in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it
moment—Tár, while trying to bully a col-
league out of his job, steals a pencil from
his desk and hides it behind her back, for
no reason at all.
6Traumatized, emotionally stunted.
7Vainglorious hypocrites.
8Irrelevant, politically obtus
9The most famous case of this kind might
be the 2019 alleged “staged attack” on the
actor Jussie Smollett.
10We inherited and adapted this idea from
the writings of a motley collection of post-
structuralist French boomers.
11Article 4 of the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights: “No one shall be held in
slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave
trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.”
12Article 5: “No one shall be subjected to
torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading
treatment or punishment.”
13Classic Gen X move
NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
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