Reading Tár: Cancel Culture, Historical Change, and Genre Shift

The predominant reading of Tár is that it presents a politically correct and pro-cancel-culture monster who pays the price she deserves for brutally exploiting the people around her. The question is how far we go in this direction: Is Lydia innately an all-devouring monster or is she this way because she has been influenced by the big European tradition of male cis-hetero composers and conductors, from Bach to Mahler? At the opposite end, there are reviewers who found the movie to be a devastating critique of cancel culture and, for this reason, rejected it. For example, Richard Brody described Tár as “a regressive film that takes bitter aim at so-called cancel culture and lampoons so-called identity politics,” accusing the film of “conservative button-pushing” with a “conservative, and narrow” aesthetic, failing to “forge dramatic unity.” Incidentally, for me, it is precisely this lack of dramatic unity, this mixing of genre rules, that makes the film interesting. Then, there are reviewers who also saw the film as targeting cancel culture, but agree with it. George Edelman writes that there are “more than breadcrumbs leading us to the conclusion that through cancel culture, we are canceling culture,” and “the final frame implies strongly that culture itself is what’s on the chopping block.” But then Edelman himself relativizes this strong claim by way of introducing the prospect of historical change: Or is it that culture is simply evolving? And that Lydia Tár’s brutal takedown of a young Juilliard student early on was someone too high on the elitist nature of the craft … ignoring that the new modern popular versions have their own value … one she will eventually come to depend on. You can read TÁR several different ways, and that is its true gift.

This reference to historical change avoids the true problem: Of course there is a change, and today we cannot go on composing like Bach, or even like Mahler, but does this fact in any way affect the absolute greatness and genius of their music? One cannot but agree with the final sentence of the last quote: We can read Tár in different ways. So, let’s move on to yet another reading of the film, according to which, after Tár’s fall and escape from the dog, all that happens (including the vision of the dog) are her hallucinations. There is “the uncanniness of its final act, the supernatural elements and the hints, more than hints: the big, broad pronouncements—that a great deal of what we’re seeing on the screen might just be happening inside Lydia Tár’s head,” writes Dan Kois. Joe Bernstein further provides a very pertinent specification: “A kind of hallucination or dream of personal disgrace, which therapy tells us is secretly pleasurable.” The next (and last) step is to project the content of Lydia’s hallucinations back into external reality, so that we enter the supranatural domain of a ghost story: Reading the “plot” of Tár literally is a mistake. For long stretches of the film, we have exited the realm of realism and are firmly in the world of the supernatural. Tár is not truly a cancel culture movie. Tár is a kind of ghost story, in which we’re so deeply embedded in Lydia Tár’s psyche that nearly everything that appears onscreen is up for debate. The ghost, of course, is that of Krista Taylor, Lydia’s former protégée, with whom Lydia is accused of sleeping and who, we know, was blackballed from conducting jobs through the emails Lydia hurries to delete. Even before Krista’s death by suicide, she haunts Lydia.

One cannot help but note that the circle is thus closed: Lydia is a monster who is haunted by the ghosts of her victims. The shift from one genre or theme to another (docu-report, social conflict of mores between patriarchal tradition and cancel culture, psychological drama of Lydia’s inner decay, direct staging of her hallucinations, ghost story) also affects narrative modes. At the beginning, (too) long conversations and improvisations about “serious” topics of classical music imitate a documentary or biographical approach, giving the impression that even if Tár is not a documentary, it must be about a real person. At the film’s beginning, we see Adam Gopnik (a real person who does interviews for The New Yorker) interviewing Lydia for the New Yorker Festival, simply playing himself.

This complex move from semi-documentary to gothic fiction multiplies parallax into four versions, descending lower and lower into the dark recesses of Lydia’s personality. The shift seems to deliver the lesson formulated a century ago by Rainer Maria Rilke in his Duino Elegies: For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror which we are barely able to endure, and it amazes us so, because it serenely disdains to destroy us. Every angel is terrible.59 However, one should note that Tár ignores this horror that dwells in the very heart of beauty, and reduces the opposition to one between the sublime beauty of the work of art and the dark (cruel, manipulative, exploitative) side of the author of it.