The Damnable Genius of Tár

[Warning: Spoilers ahead for Tár.]

An easy mischaracterization of Tár, the new film from director Todd Field (and his first in sixteen years), is that it’s about “cancel culture” in its depiction of Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett), a brilliant, controversial figure in the public eye, losing her status when her past misdeeds come to light. But Field’s film is doing far more than simply playing out a morality play of our times.

To begin, the term “cancel culture” feels overused as to be rendered somewhat meaningless. As journalist Michael Hobbes has pointed out, accusations of “cancel culture” have all the markings of a moral panic, one where the threat is vaguely defined but is somehow supposed to affect all of us in our daily lives. For my part, I’m not thrilled with the term simply because it removes responsibility from the individual and places it on others. One can only “be canceled” by others, thereby becoming their “victim”—free of both agency and responsibility for their actions. In this construct, the person being canceled is “blameless,” and it is the mob who has taken things too far against a powerful person.1

But Tár isn’t really that story.

Yes, Lydia experiences a social media scandal followed by a public outcry, resulting in her fall from a powerful position. But what the film really looks to explore is the cost of genius. Without ever apologizing or excusing Lydia, Field turns his camera on us and asks if a will to achieve greatness inevitably leads to abuses of power.

Who Is Lydia Tár?

The construction of Tár could lead some viewers to believe that Field wants us on Lydia’s side—but that would miss some key choices (two in particular) that the director makes from the outset:

1. The opening shot of the film has an unknown companion live-chatting with a friend while the phone’s camera records a sleeping Lydia. The companion is asked, “Does she have a conscience?” to which the companion replies, “Maybe.”

2. The opening credits, which look more like closing credits. Rather than simply giving us the major players—director, writer, leading cast members, etc.—Field opens his film with pretty much the whole production team. He wants us to know that art, especially filmmaking, is a collaborative work, and that no should be overlooked or treated as expendable.

You have to keep these two things in mind as the film then goes into its opening scenes—because they’re meant to ground us in reality and keep us from buying into the rosy spotlight trained on Lydia in the film’s earliest scenes.

The first scene is essentially Lydia’s victory lap. She’s being heralded by The New Yorker in an interview that allows her to describe her work as the principal conductor of the Berliner Philharmoniker, arguably the best symphony orchestra in the world, and to show off her masterful understanding of the composition and interpretation of classical music. And yet even here, Field has intercut the scene with Lydia being fitted for a suit. We’re being told that this image that is not simply constructed, but tailor made—precisely cut to her exacting specifications.

After a brief scene where Lydia talks with a young fan, we’re then whisked off to a lunch between her and Eliot Kaplan (Mark Strong), a clearly envious colleague. He knows he doesn’t possess her level of genius and talent, but feels like if he got a look at her notes he could pick up some pointers. He manages the foundation she created, one with a mission to uplift aspiring female orchestra conductors. Yet Lydia is now willing to throw the program’s doors open to all students, arguing that women no longer face the same barriers she did as a young conductor. Essentially, because Lydia no longer needs the foundation to bolster her public credentials, she’s willing to set aside its core mission.

Then there’s the third scene where Lydia goes to teach a class at Juilliard. Field shoots the scene in one take (or at least makes it appear to look like one take), and if you haven’t keyed in yet to what the film is doing, you may think that it’s a dressing down of a young student. The student, Max (Zethphan Smith-Gneist), identifies themself as a non-binary BIPOC who takes issue with a composer like Bach because the composer’s life seems misogynistic. Lydia comes down on Max like a ton of bricks, dismissing their concerns, accusing them of being too wired into social media, and refusing to engage with the music. On its face, it feels like the stuff of a right-wing Facebook post: “Schooled! You won’t believe how this great composer shut down a woke liberal snowflake!” But look at the larger dynamic—Lydia, a celebrated composer, already has all the power here and yet she believes it’s more important for her to exert her dominance and opinion than it is to teach. Lydia argues you have to subsume yourself to the muse, but we can already see the cracks showing in her hypocrisy. An artist always makes choices—as we learned in her New Yorker interview where she described how she chose Mahler differently than her mentor Leonard Bernstein.

If you look across these three scenes (which take some time to play out; they comprise roughly the first 30-40 minutes of the movie), Field is doing several things. First, he’s showing us that Lydia isn’t faking it. Whatever we come to think of her over the course of this movie, she has worked hard for her position, she knows what she’s talking about when it comes to composing and classical music, and what we’re about to witness is not a case of nepotism or simply chicanery.

Field also tells us that Lydia is casually cruel and callous. The first scene we get of her is on a public stage, but in closer quarters, she’s either ingratiating (as she is with the young woman, foreshadowing the abuses we’ll learn about later in the movie) or dismissive. Lydia is powerful and brilliant, but she’s not kind, and yet the culture we’re in doesn’t praise kindness (to wit, another terrific film of this year: “Do you think anyone will be remembered for how nice they was?”).

We laud genius and accomplishment, and Lydia Tár has both. When Lydia dresses down Max, it’s a mistake to think we’re meant to see how cool Lydia is. Rather, this moment signals that she’s ruthless, powerful, and completely sure of herself as long as people are looking at her carefully manicured façade.

The rest of the film invites us to look beyond the public figure.

The Will to Dominate

The remainder of Tár is about unraveling the construction we’ve seen set before us. This is not an undeserved “fall from grace” but rather a house that was built on a foundation of sand.

Lydia may be a musical genius who has worked hard and played the game to achieve her station in life, but she’s also a deeply insecure fabulist who clings to her image as furiously as she clings to her baton. She tells Adam Gopnik in their New Yorker interview that she never reads her reviews, but later we see she has an entire box full of clippings marked “Sundries.” She tells Gopnik that true discovery only happens in rehearsal and that the performance doesn’t matter as much to her, but an explosive scene late in the film, occurring during the much-awaited orchestral performance of the film, proves otherwise.

Lydia is consumed with her public image, but only in terms of what she’s designed. Her symphony is the idea of Lydia Tár, but the truth is messier and inextricable from her abilities.

The trickiest aspect of Tár (and where I imagine some viewers will find the movie distasteful) is that it can appear to argue that what has made Lydia great—her overriding need to control everything—is also what makes her a predator. Everything Lydia does is about exerting her will. Lydia is defined by her will to dominate, and part of the genius of Blanchett’s performance is how she plays the different notes of that. In her scene with Max, she can seem playful (look at how she sits beside him on the piano bench and does different voices), but at any pushback, she’s quick to start tossing off snide remarks and putdowns. When Max storms out of the classroom after being fed up with Lydia, she shouts at him what will turn out to be her favorite insult by calling him “a robot.” Lydia claims she wants people to simply be creative, but that freedom only extends to never questioning or disagreeing with her. You can go where your muse takes you as long as you don’t get in her way.

Lydia’s need to control everything infects every aspect of her life. The clearest violation is how she treats young women. Without ever showing a flashback, we gather everything we need from what happened between her and a former student, Krista, from the present-day fallout. Lydia clearly blacklisted Krista (we’re shown emails confirming this) after some kind of falling out between the two of them. Krista was a threat to Lydia’s image (the genius mentor whose fellowship program was altruistically for the benefit of young female conductors), and so she had to be cast out. In the wake of Krista’s suicide, Lydia’s impulse isn’t guilt or shame, but to start covering her tracks. We also can glean insight into the early stages of Krista and Lydia’s relationship by seeing how Lydia attempts to groom young cellist Olga (Sophie Kauer), even if Olga doesn’t fall for Lydia’s overtures.

Even beyond Lydia’s treatment of young women she looks to seduce, you can see in her professional life how she’s constantly tilting the balance to her own ends. She’s quick to rearrange allies and adversaries to achieve her own ends. People may not be happy with it, but hey, she’s a genius right? Look at all she’s accomplished.

But these accomplishments leave a lot of wreckage in their wake, and Lydia seems unperturbed by the human costs. As my wife pointed out, when Lydia goes into Sebastian’s (Allan Corduner) office to essentially push him out the backdoor of the orchestra, you can see that his office is full of mementos. It’s messy and Sebastian, with his odd pen-clicking habit, is idiosyncratic, but the set design signals a life that’s been will lived, especially compared with the spartan spaces occupied by Lydia. In a world defined by transactional relationships and a desire to dominate, there’s no room in Lydia’s life for the messiness of humanity. Her sweetest relationship may be with her daughter, but it’s also the ideal relationship for Lydia: one where she’s adored and unchallenged.

What Tár argues is that what makes Lydia successful is also what makes her toxic. The film never goes so far as to excuse her behavior, but essentially argues that her overwhelming need to control and dominate has been terrific for her career and accomplishments, but the human cost is extreme. It’s not that every successful person will be a dominating control freak, but our complicity is that when we deem someone a “genius” we fail to appreciate that qualities of accomplishment are not switches that can simply be flicked on and off. If we insist on celebrating artistic greatness, particularly one that’s mythologized around individual accomplishment, shouldn’t we also inquire about the cost?

Monster Hunting

Part of why Tár is so rewarding is that Field is clearly unsatisfied with labels of “genius” or “monster.” To label someone a genius ignores everyone who participated in the rise of an individual, and such a label is as fictitious as Lydia’s name (which we learn near the end of the movie is “Linda Tarr.”)

It may be satisfying (and uniquely American) to believe that that the individual does it all on his or her own, but that’s not true. Yet we continue to indulge this falsehood because we like stories, and stories have protagonists.

The meteoric rise of Lydia Tár is a more exciting narrative than one of Linda Tarr who remade herself and leveraged transactional relationships combined with a single-minded ambition to reach the top of her field. Some may watch Tár and wonder why the film doesn’t look to give her an explanation of why she is the way that she is—that is to say, if Tar is a villain, then surely there must be an explanation for her villainy. Field responds that her toxicity and success are intertwined, and far more difficult to untangle.

He also refuses to simply write her off as a “monster.” If Lydia Tár were a sociopath, then she would be easier to dismiss. But that’s why the film’s opening question is “Does she have a conscience?” We spend the next two hours and forty minutes trying to answer that query. If Lydia is just mad for power and control, then maybe she doesn’t have a conscience. Maybe she’s just rotten to the core and we need to stop upholding the bad people.

But at Lydia’s low point in Southeast Asia, she accidentally goes to a brothel. I say “accidentally” because her earlier behavior in asking for a masseuse and her confusion when she arrives seem to indicate she genuinely just wanted a legitimate massage and not sex. When one of the sex workers pierces her with a look that resembles Olga’s look earlier in the movie, Lydia rushes outside to vomit. In that moment, she is confronted with how she treated young women and how she has (pardon the pun) conducted herself. The hard part of the scene is that while it shows Lydia has a conscience, it doesn’t seem to really matter at that point. Having a conscience didn’t stop her from all the pain she inflicted, and it won’t pull her out of her career nadir where she now resides.

So Lydia goes to what she knows—conducting music. The film ends with her giving a concert of music from the popular video game series Monster Hunter, and the crowd is filled with fans dressed in costumes. It’s a clever ending on several levels. First, it simply shows how far Lydia has fallen professionally in her own estimation. To go from conducting the Berliner Philharmoniker in a cycle of Mahler’s symphonies to conducting a student orchestra in a tribute to video game music is a massive slide in prestige (even though video game music can be pretty great!). Secondly, to use Monster Hunter (as opposed to other video games) signals that the designation of “monster” is fairly cartoonish and one-dimensional. Finally, Lydia is where she belongs—in a room full of people who have dressed themselves up as something they’re not.

If Field wouldn’t take issue, I’d call this ending “genius.”