TÁR is not like other girls.
Play Boys Club games, win Boys Club prizes.
A band-aid turns out to be an important symbol in the movie In the Bedroom, Todd Field’s debut feature film that announced his gravitas as a director twenty-one years ago. In the Bedroom goes like this: In a sleepy fishing town in Maine, an older couple has their worlds shattered and pieced together again when their son becomes entangled with a single mother (a stunning Marissa Tomei) and her toppling baggage. Early on, Tom Wilkinson loudly telegraphs the themes of the film, describing how two lobsters caged together will tear each other apart, finding his finger clipped by a lobster — an injury covered with a band-aid that serves as a heavy reminder of the grief and anger he carries until the last moments of the film, where after taking radical action, he removes the band-aid to find himself healed. In the Bedroom is about couples and the way they destroy each other. Perhaps those with a keen eye who can read blatant subtext (“sub-” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here) may even decide the movie points an injured finger at women as a collective driving force of destruction, weaponizing their victimhood to draw men into their worst depths.
In Todd Field’s latest film TÁR (a return to the craft after a sixteen-year hiatus), the titular Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett) — a storm of a woman herself — madly conducts the world-renowned Berlin Philharmonic. On her right hand — the hand that holds her baton, the hand that controls time, as she describes earlier in the film — her finger is clothed with a small band-aid as it presses against her magic wand.
Who destroyed Lydia Tár?
It is unclear if Tár’s band-aid is an easter egg, a character choice, or a carry-over from real life (who knows if Blanchett suffered any profound paper cuts while on set), but Todd Field has certainly carried over his interest in the ugliness that lurks inside the most unassuming of people. Very frequently in his work, the unassuming are often women — complicated and messy women, sure, but there’s always often the question of banal evil. Eve was the one who tempted Adam, after all.
It’s with this context that anyone skeptical of Field’s point-of-view may feel particularly wary of TÁR. Field has foregone the two-handers of his previous films and places this movie squarely on Blanchett’s shoulders, leaving it to her to fill nearly every frame of the 158-minute run time. Even Lydia’s world is almost entirely populated by women: Her partner Sharon and their daughter Petra, her assistant Francesca, her new muse Olga, her troubled and obscured prior mentorship of a young woman named Krista…. Tár, in her own words, is a U-Haul Lesbian. She recognizes her role as a rare woman to helm the positions and to hold the accolades that she has as one of the conducting greats, but she refuses to put any weight onto her identity. As she tells interlocutor Adam Gopnik at the New Yorker Festival, she doesn’t feel that her gender has affected her lot in life at all — and she doesn’t imagine any of the women in her orbit experience much discrimination either.
It’s not uncommon to see quote-unquote “messy women” as protagonists these days, even in movies produced by men. If anything, they’ve become something of a trend. Gone Girl and Midsommar (two films I admire quite a bit) have been memed and re-memed to death. Many contemporary auteurs have felt compelled to tell us that they are capital-A allies by releasing their own #MeToo movies — a categorization that would be reductive and insulting if the movies themselves didn’t feel like they were pronouncing the hashtag as punctuation in every line of their script (Last Night in Soho, Men, and The Last Duel all come to mind). Even a movie like Promising Young Woman (another film I admire, though I certainly have my reservations) tries to win by having its protagonist be both Vengeance and Victim-incarnate.
These (cis)women are symbols. They’re symbols for rage; they’re symbols for power; they’re symbols for whiteness; they’re symbols for matrimony; they’re symbols for original sin; they’re symbols for lost innocence. These movies erase their characters’ womanhood to show gender is irrelevant — see, look, a woman can be evil too! Or these movies become all about the dreaded doom of womanhood, with cruelty lurking behind every corner, and life an endless barrage of severity, loss, and pain. If women are powerful, it is empowering. If women are humiliated, it is humiliating. Maybe these women resemble the women in our own lives or reflect our own relationship to feminity and all the wounds it carries, but don’t dare express your raw reaction to these characters. To love Amy Dunne is to endorse sociopathy, and to weep for avenging-angel Cassie is to ignore her privilege.
And with that, I want to return to Lydia Tár as a woman — as a central woman character who wishes to reject her womanhood, not to run away from it per se, but to ignore the pesky thing all together. If her and I have been watching the same movies, I can see her point-of-view.
But here is the honest truth about being a woman in this world, a truth I was surprised to find TÁR understanding, perhaps even meditating on: Identity matters. It’s not inherently positive (women are superheroes!) or negative (women are doomed), but it never goes away. It shapes everything. It shapes how we move through the world, how people move through or around us, and certainly, how we consume something as personal and visceral as a work of art. — By the way, Art? TÁR? Is there an anagram there?
It is through this understanding that TÁR manages to explore something deeper than its timely topics such as cancel culture or #MeToo (and yes, to call this a #MeToo movie would be an insult). The world of TÁR is not just familiar, it is lived in. It makes no concerted effort to resemble the real world, it simply is a part of it. And Lydia Tár as a character cannot move through this world like the vacuum she imagines herself to be. It is clear through her achievements that Tár has broken into the Boys Club in spite of her womanhood. What does it take for a woman to do that? TÁR could be reduced to a movie about what we do and don’t forgive for the sake of genius, and that would be partially true, but it is also about how no one born an outsider breaks in on genius alone. There are decisions they make, allowances they entertain, and an attitude they must adopt to be welcomed in, to fit in, and to stay in — not out of desperation, but because that’s just what the people who “have it” do. We see throughout the film what “having it” really means, and what happens to people (namely the women in Lydia’s life) who don’t have it. You don’t stay in the Boys Club by extending kindness to other outsiders.
The difference with TÁR compared to the rest of Field’s work is that the only other person “in the bedroom” with Lydia is herself. Her memoir in development throughout the film even suggests it with its title: Tár on Tár. Is the memoir an exercise in masturbation, or the pay-per-view fight of the century? We watch Lydia refusing to see herself in the throes of both. She isn’t on a path of self-detonation, because she sees herself as invincible, as all supposed geniuses do.
Tár’s band-aid disappears, but it is only replaced by greater injuries (both physical and metaphysical) that Lydia is unequipped to tend to, and having alienated everyone else, there is no one left to tend to her. When you reject identity, you reject community, too. The Boys Club isn’t built on solidarity.
I’ll be at the Chicago International Film Festival this week and next and hopefully writing about a few of the movies I catch. Take a look at what I plan on seeing through Letterboxd.