TÁR is one of the best movies of 2022, not only because it features a magnum-opus performance by Cate Blanchett but because it substantively wrestles with timely, provocative, and ultimately spiritual questions.
The third film directed by Todd Field (In the Bedroom, Little Children), TÁR is ostensibly a rise-and-fall narrative that feeds audiences’ hunger to see cultural elites unmasked and dethroned. But it’s more than that. It captures our cultural confusion about human identity, challenges modernity’s illusion of control, and asks provocative questions about cancel culture.
No Glory for Robots
TÁR’s opening scene takes place at the New Yorker Festival, with Adam Gopnik (playing himself) introducing composer and conductor Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett) by summarizing her litany of achievements. In addition to being the first female chief conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, Tár is a member of the small EGOT club, having collected an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony. This opening scene serves as an efficient exposition, introducing the audience to the film’s central character. But a brief cutaway shot to Tár’s assistant, Francesca (Noémie Merlant), silently mouthing every word of Gopnik’s introduction as he gives it communicates something deeper about Tár’s character.
Gopnik is a mere pawn in Tár’s campaign of hypercontrolled self-creation. In fact, this is true of everyone Tár interacts with—her students, staff members, lovers, friends, and orchestra instrumentalists. They move on her command or are replaced the minute they demur. She’s in total control—or so she thinks.
As Gopnik interviews her, Tár rhapsodizes (in a well-rehearsed, too-polished manner) about the nature of conducting—especially as it relates to time. “Time is the essential piece of interpretation,” she says. “You cannot start without me. See, I start the clock. . . . However, unlike a clock, sometimes my second hand stops, which means that time stops.”
In the brand she’s created for herself, Tár is a genius maestro whose mastery over time itself approaches god-like power. Whether in her bespoke tailored blazers, socially conscious backstory (early in her career she studied indigenous music in Peru), cited artistic influences (Mahler and Bernstein) or best-selling autobiography (Tár on Tár), everything about her image is curated—by her—to present the world with a towering presence of intimidating brilliance. She’s the sort of person who vigilantly polices her Wikipedia page. Even her name, Lydia Tár, is a variation on her birth name (Linda Tarr), chosen to fit a desired mythical narrative.
If it feels as though Tár’s resume is what AI machine-learning would spit out if prompted to “write a fictional story of the most successful female conductor in history,” that’s because Tár’s life and persona does indeed feel inhuman. Even though she derisively declares anyone who falls short of her artistic and philosophical brilliance as a “robot” (“There is no glory for a robot,” she tells one colleague), Tár is the one living less like a human and more like a machine.
Even her name, Tár (conspicuously all-caps in the title), evokes a memorable cinematic robot: TARS in Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar (2014). And while Field’s film is not sci-fi and there’s no twist ending where Tár is revealed to be an actual robot, the undercurrent is clear.
What Is a Human?
In the character of Lydia Tár we have a perfect symbol of contemporary Western culture’s anemic anthropology—our utter confusion about what it means to be human.
In the character of Lydia Tár we have a perfect symbol of contemporary Western culture’s anemic anthropology—our utter confusion about what it means to be human.
Consider Lydia’s relationship to her sexed identity as a female. She’s a woman, yet that matters only insofar as it serves the narrative of her barrier-breaking achievements (“first woman to _____”). In every other way, her gender doesn’t matter. She goes out of her way to say she’s a “maestro,” not a maestra, and she leans into the male-dominated conducting world by dressing like a man, acting like a man sexually (she’s married to a woman and seduces less powerful women right and left), even referring to herself as the “father” of her daughter at one point. It’s not that Tár hates her gender—it’s just, like everything else in her life, only valuable if it serves her ambitions.
At times, Tár seems outright disgusted by humanity’s disorder and messiness. She uses copious amounts of hand sanitizer before interacting with anyone. Her Berlin mansion is a pristine fortress of clean lines and concrete modernism—a lifeless-but-chic domicile an AI interior designer might have dreamt up, having been prompted to mimic the aesthetic of Le Corbusier-meets-Dwell. And in a telling sequence late in the film, she nearly has a nervous breakdown when summoned to help a neighbor lift her deathly ill elderly mother off the floor. The only thing that truly frightens Tár is her mortality: something she knows she can’t fully control. Perhaps this is why she finds transcendence in the act of conducting, where time is her plaything, at least momentarily.
Uncontrollability
To be human is to be vulnerable, limited, subject to forces beyond our control, having been born into a world we didn’t make. Every human relationship is costly and imposes limits on whatever self-made, DIY project we have in mind. This is why Lydia Tár stridently resists giving herself to human connection. Yet to be isolated and independent, unencumbered by the costs of community and the sacrifices of love—beyond utilitarian collaboration—is to be inhuman.
Because of TÁR’s themes of control, coupled with its primary setting in Berlin, I kept thinking of the work of German sociologist Hartmut Rosa as I watched the film—specifically Rosa’s concept of the uncontrollability of the world. Rosa argues the driving force of late modernity is to make the world controllable—an ethos Lydia Tár certainly embodies. “Yet it is only in encountering the uncontrollable that we really experience the world,” Rosa argues. “Only then do we feel touched, moved, alive. A world that is fully known, in which everything has been planned and mastered, would be a dead world.”
Vibrant human life comes not by exerting complete control over all that’s external to us, Rosa argues, but in what he terms “resonance,” a fundamentally relational and porous posture—an openness to receive what is uncontrollable and serendipitous. Resonance is inherently uncontrollable, Rosa writes, and “always has the character of a gift, of something that is bestowed upon or befalls us.”
Tár’s life of total controllability crowds out resonance, in the same way a life of total self-reliance and effort crowds out grace.
Camouflage and Cancel Culture
There are a few scant glimpses of Tár’s humanity in the film, mostly at the end when she’s broken and humbled. For most of the film, her humanity is hidden and suppressed, lest it compromises her powerful position. She says this explicitly at one point, speaking to a group of students at Juilliard: “True power requires camouflage. And if you want to don this mask . . . you must sublimate yourself and your identity. You must, in fact, stand in front of the public and God and obliterate yourself.”
To be isolated and independent, unencumbered by the costs of community and the sacrifices of love, is to be inhuman.
It’s true that the self can be a liability. For Christians, the doctrine of sin leaves no doubt about this. And even if non-Christians reject the category of sin, most would agree we’re our own worst enemies. But is the answer to obliterate the self? Can we succeed—especially in the public eye—only via “camouflage” and “masks”?
These are some of the questions TÁR takes up in its third act, when (spoilers ahead) it becomes a commentary on cancel culture. Lydia Tár’s skill at camouflage finally falters, her hidden self is exposed, and everything she achieved is undone in rapid fashion. She falls from the heights of conducting Mahler’s 5th for the Berlin Philharmonic, ending the film as an exile somewhere in Southeast Asia, conducting Monster Hunter video game music for audiences of cosplaying, role-playing gamers.
The notion of total control, as it turns out, is an illusion for everyone who isn’t God.
As much as today’s digital world enables god-like identity construction and tightly controlled image maintenance, it’s also a double-edged sword. You reap the manipulation you sow. As the #MeToo era has shown, social media’s democratization of power means the most “in control” titans can be swiftly and summarily removed from public society if their private misbehavior is caught. Tár’s inglorious new gig with Monster Hunter is comically ironic: she’s the role-playing monster who, having hunted others to claw her way to the top, is now defeated by the monster hunters on social media. And her dramatic comeuppance is deserved.
The notion of total control is an illusion for everyone who isn’t God.
Or is it? The film’s posture toward cancel culture is complex. Field doesn’t preach; he leaves us with provocative questions. What do we do with the messy humanity of artists, actors, writers, theologians, or any creator? Can we separate them from their work, or do their character flaws render their work corrupted and no longer beneficial? Do past sins always preclude the viability of future contributions? If so, is there hope for any of us?
Hope for Sinful Humanity
Perhaps the question I left pondering most is this: Can you be an artist while also being a robot? Until recently, we’ve answered that question with a firm no. The arts and humanities are the realm of textured, struggling humans, not robots (though that notion is now up for grabs). Movies like TÁR force us to ask, Can artists survive if they’re anything other than robots who sublimate their humanity? If to err is human and yet erring (in ways both big and small) is a cancelable offense, then won’t nonhuman robots, in the end, be the only noncancelable entities?
What does Christian mission and evangelism look like in a world where sin is sublimated and humanity is obliterated—where these “elephant in the room” unpleasantries are such unwelcome blemishes that they’re simply cropped out of view, or canceled, but never confronted and dealt with?
Redemption begins, for Tár or any of us, when we finally come to terms with the person we are beneath the masks and scripts. It’s then that we recognize the monster in the mirror cannot be our savior and—thanks be to God—doesn’t need to be.
The Gospel Coalition