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. 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. 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’. But what happens when generational visions collide? How should we respond?Īs we learn in her classroom, Tár’s method is direct combat. 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. Sometimes it feels like the gap has never been wider. 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. 1 She’s also a (self-described) “U-Haul Lesbian,” although this aspect of her identity won’t help her much. 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. Asked how he felt about Bach, he simply answered. He has a very gentle demeanor and a sweet, open face, and seems in no way to be seeking confrontation.
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 generation that says things like I’m not really into Bach. Tár is now speaking to a different generation. Here her charismatic lone-genius shtick-which so delighted the gray-haired festivalgoers-falls on stonier ground. As Tár discovers the very next morning, while guest teaching at Juilliard. Their imperious attitudes and witty bons mots are in demand everywhere-until they aren’t. Tár maintains a second apartment in the city, for those moments when she needs privacy.Ĭultural Luminaries make a lot of money. Her daughter, Petra, attends a bourgeois German private school and her wife, Sharon, is first violin in Tár’s own orchestra, the most prestigious in Berlin. Pristine Poggenpohl kitchens and $30,000 sectionals and discreetly disguised safes sunk into great expanses of undivided wall. If the talent is a Cultural Luminary, backstage is likely to be even more glamorous than front-of-house. After which the talent goes home, to their backstage life. Self-fashioning, repeating witticisms they’ve used many times before, pretending to consider questions long settled in their own minds. She is doing what the talent is always doing at these things: acting. See, I start the clock.īut Blanchett has it exactly right. Time is the essential piece of interpretation. We don’t call women astronauts “astronettes.”
ELOQUENT AREAS OF BRAIN SERIES
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: His interviewee, the (fictional) conductor Lydia Tár, is stiff and self-conscious-actorly, even. Gopnik, playing himself, is a relaxed and fluid interviewer. They sit together on a New Yorker Festival stage. During the first ten minutes of Tár, it is possible to feel that the critic Adam Gopnik is a better actor than Cate Blanchett.
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