Todd Field’s Tár starring the inimitable Cate Blanchett is unquestionably the top film of 2022 and will undoubtedly soon be sweeping up a very large bagful of awards.

A hyper-reactionary Baby Boomer like myself will find a lot to admire and enjoy in Tár, despite being (as those younger generations say) “triggered” by its acceptance of sexual deviance as conventional and mainstream, of a “BIPOC pangender” identity implicitly conferring a special status, and of life under the tyrannical “sexual grievance” regime as normal.

Lydia Tár may be an arch member of the disgusting Community of Fashion elite, but she is also a highly talented professional and a staunch defender of high culture. We conservatives will appreciate the irony of her ultimate victimhood and pity her tragic end.

Zadie Smith, in the NYRB, published a distinctly brilliant review, appreciation, and analysis of the film whose take on generational differences and cultural change is quite illuminating, even across a partisan differences divide:

“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?”

Cultural Luminaries make a lot of money. Their imperious attitudes and witty bons mots are in demand everywhere—until they aren’t. As Tár discovers the very next morning, while guest teaching at Juilliard. Here her charismatic lone-genius shtick—which so delighted the gray-haired festivalgoers—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 statements are calculated to bring out the hysteric in a middle-aged Cultural Luminary, and Tár immediately takes the bait, launching into an aggressive defense 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 answered. But now, under Tár’s verbal assault, he attempts to expand his critique: “Honestly, as a BIPOC pangender person, I would say Bach’s misogynistic 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.

She’s also a (self-described) “U-Haul Lesbian,” although this aspect of her identity won’t help her much. In Tár, time is the essential piece of interpretation, 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 striking things about my crowd is that although 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 differential between these two means that a rant Tár might launch into around a dinner table in Berlin—to much receptive laughter—is experienced as ritual humiliation by a young man exposed in front of his peers. But Tár is discombobulated also. It’s a long climb down from Cultural Luminary to Contra, and no doubt a great shock to find yourself so sharply reassessed and redefined by the generation below you.

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.

RTWT

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Meanwhile, Adam Gopnik (who appears in the film as himself interviewing Lydia Tár) interviews Cate Blanchett in the New Yorker. (It’s always nice to find something in today’s New Yorker that is not complete merde).

Blanchett describes, for instance, getting the hang of conducting.

I don’t know if I told you this, but I had worked for months with Natalie Murray Beale, my friend, who I brought on just to help me with the conducting. I was in Budapest to work out parts of the Mahler. I sort of could read those four or five pages of the score, so I knew exactly what I was talking about. And so I wanted to get the music that would be playing for Monster Hunter. [At the end of the film,] I stand up on the podium. I’d just been moving through the music in my head in silence. But while I was moving through this, in front of the student orchestra, as soon as I lifted my hand the sound started to come, and then they kept going, and so I kept conducting.

Wow.

And then we just kept making this sound together, beyond the part that I had studied.

It was your vindication, your vindication as a conductor.

It was astonishing, because they were leaning in, hungry for direction.

RTWT