Blanchett embodies Lydia’s roughness and conducts with force. Copyright: Universal Pictures / Photo: IMDb.

Cate Blanchett plays an orchestra conductor called Lydia Tár in Todd Field’s newest movie ‘Tár’. Lydia’s fame and power, in a bone chilling way, starts to unravel and unhinge. She is an absolute psychopath – so why can’t I stop thinking about her?

Content warning: This article contains mentions of suicide, grooming and spoilers for the movie ‘Tár’.

The official trailer for Todd Field’s new thriller, his first movie since 2006 with ‘Little Children’.

The film, in short

The movie follows the life of a famously accredited conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, and we see her rise and fall after her ex Krista commits suicide. She is at the top of her career by the beginning of the movie, conducting Mahler’s Symphony No. 5, releasing a book, and teaching a masterclass at Julliard. At the same time, she is manipulative, emotionally distant, cold, and abusive, and gaslighting members of her orchestra, her wife, and her assistant. She uses music as a bridge – and as a wall.

The movie starts with a detailed introduction of Lydia, alongside all the awards she’s received and every acclaim she’s worthy of. After that we follow her through an interview with Adam Gopnik from the New Yorker, a masterclass at Julliard, an ex-mistress commits suicide, some conducting, a hot new bombshell enters the villa, a new celloist, some drama, allegations, viral videos, she gets cancelled, wife leaves her, she’s fired, goes home to cry, moves to the Philippines, throws up, and she winds up conducting music for videogame cosplayers. The film plays with interesting themes such as sensuality, music, grooming, social media and the lengths fame and power will drive you to. It is a dark movie, easily categorised as a phycological thriller. Let’s look at some reasons why this movie stayed on my mind.

Jewishness

Lydia Tár interviewed by the real life Adam Gopnik. Copyright: Universal Pictures / Photo: IMDb.

Even though it is never openly portrayed that Lydia is Jewish her world is heavily influenced by Jews. She is inspired by Jewish composers; she’s interviewed by the real Adam Gopnik and she discusses Jewish concepts such as ‘teshuvah’ and ‘kavanah’ in said interview. She admits she’s been taught these concepts by Leonard Bernstein, her old teacher, and she connects them to music. While ‘teshuvah’ (meaning ‘return’) and ‘kavanah’ (meaning ‘intention’ or ‘attention to meaning’) are often linked with prayer and repentance, she expands them. She ties ‘teshuvah’, ‘return’, to the concept of controlling time, to how a composer is a human metronome. A composer uses the left hand to shape, the right to mark time.

Lydia’s private collection of albums, many of them Bernstein’s. Copyright: Universal Pictures / Photo: IMDb.

‘Kavanah’, or ‘intent’, here becomes respecting the intent of a composer while also imposing your own. How do two wills complement each other? It seems to me fascinating that she should find such respect for a concept she adheres to nowhere else than in music. She is a steamrolling presence, she always gets her way, yet in music she treads carefully. Gopnik jokes, after her interpretation of the word, that it probably has a different meaning to the people in the audience today. Here he is referencing the scandal of Brett Kavanaugh. Kavanaugh was appointed by Donald Trump in 2018 as a member of the Supreme Court. Kavanaugh was put on trial before the confirmation of his seat because three women accused him of sexually assaulting him. The audience laughs at Gopnik’s comment. By saying this he creates a wonderful synecdoche for the entire movie. Tár views the concept through a historical and artistic lens and Gopnik views it according to its connotations today, i.e., through its connection to sexual assault allegation. Ironically, Kavanaugh or ‘Kavanah’, therefore mirrors Lydia. The one word, interrelates intent, respect, attention, sexual misconduct, and essentially, power.

Insecurity

In the interview she also admits that she ‘doesn’t read reviews’ of herself, even though we can later see her collecting every article that mentions her. This shows that even though she is incredibly accomplished, she is still actually a deeply insecure person, one who orchestrates her image as carefully as she does her music.

Her controlling behaviour is seemingly what raises her above the common layman, such as the student Max at Julliard who, in comparison to Lydia, seems twitching, nervous, and unsure. Lydia moves through the movie with elegantly slow poise. She keeps her pencils in neat boxes, and the boxes in neat drawers. In the introductory interview she explains that her right hand commands time when she conducts, and that the left hand adds the emotion. Yet unlike her conducting hands, Lydia’s is not balanced. The definition of a sociopath is someone who consistently shows no regard for right and wrong, and someone who ignores the rights and feelings of other. Lydia is in many ways unstable, and sociopathic. So, if she’s so imbalanced – why do I still wonder ‘do I want to be her or be with her?’

The beginning of the end

Nina Hoss plays Lydia’s wife, Sharon Goodnow. Even her character’s name suggests that Lydia’s success relies on Sharon’s complacency. It depends on her being “good now”. Copyright: Universal Pictures / Photo: IMDb.

Having established her genius contra insecure nature, let’s review how it spirals. Halfway through the movie an edited, out-of-context video of Lydia’s Julliard class goes viral, along with accusations towards her sexual misconduct and abuse towards Krista. She is met with protesters when she goes to New York to promote her book and attend a deposition for Krista’s lawsuit. Lydia brings the new, young celloist Olga Metkina, played by Sophie Kauer, with her to New York, probably hoping for sex. Yet Olga denies and avoids her. Olga isn’t like her other proteges. She is dominant and sure of herself – in ways Lydia clearly isn’t used to. We can sense that this affair does not seem like one she would get away with. She radiates a secure energy that is constantly betrayed by the camera and its angles.

Love, out of reach

When she reads her book in New York, she says the line:

Noémie Merlant plays the assistant who constantly tends to Lydia’s needs. Copyright: Universal Pictures / Photo: IMDb.

‘The common metaphors to explain music are based on the idea that music is a language, albeit a secret one, and in this way holy and unknowable.’

As she says the word ‘secret’, the camera resides on her ‘newest conquest’. The framing of this sentence shows how love has become something out of Lydia’s reach. The wording underlines it; she finds love to be something holy, like music, but unlike music, true love is unattainable. Affairs and complicated power dynamics between her proteges are attainable. She emotionally tugs them along, like she does with her assistant Francesca Lentini, who is played by Noémie Merlant. Her wife, Sharon Goodnow, played by Nina Hoss, is tired of it, of Lydia’s calculated nature, and she decides to leave her. Lydia is removed as conductor, and attacks her replacement, Eliot. So, she falls.

The end of the end

In the last fifteen minutes of the movie Lydia is advised by her management agency to lie low, so she returns to her Staten Island home, where she follows a retreatist arc. Here we can see the other Jewish concept in practice: ‘teshuvah’. In time, she returns home. She listens to Bernstein, her old hero, and old recordings of him talking about ‘what does music mean’. She is confronted by her brother who scolds her: ‘you never know where you come from or where you’re going’.

Lydia watches an old black-and-white programme of her teacher and mentor Bernstein. Universal Pictures / Photo: IMDb.

The way she describes music when reading from her book is much of the same that Bernstein tirades about in the old clip that she watches in her Staten Island home. Here, one could easily insert a scene of her crying dramatically to a classical piece, but that would be cheap. No, Lydia is more nuanced than that, and she cries to the old clip of Bernstein explaining music. It almost seems like the last and only the comfort she has at this point, like she doesn’t understand people, music, or what has happened to her anymore. Or perhaps she understands it all too well? Her cry intensifies at the words:

‘You must never forget that music is movement, always going somewhere, shifting and changing and flowing, from one note to another, and that movement can tell us more about the way we feel than a million words can’.

Here, Lydia nods, cryingly, and turns off the TV. It feels as if this picture of herself as a genius has collapsed and crumbled. Yet I can’t help feeling that she is very much still in possession of some geniality: maybe she is more music than a person at this point? She is constantly in motion, evading words, people, and even understanding.

An uncertain amount of time passes, and we later see Lydia living in the Philippines. She eats in the street, takes a boat down the river, and conducts the orchestra for the soundtrack of a video game, in front of an audience of cosplayers. Thus, the fall from glory is complete. The way in which she falls makes me think that my impression of her might just be very simple. The Lydia we start off with is who I wish I was, and who we end up with is who I’ll most likely become. Maybe it is a fear of dreariness that keeps her on my mind?

Life in the Philippines

Whilst living in the Philippines we see her go swimming with some strangers. We see a young boy and girl play in the water in front of a waterfall. This scene cuts to the back of Lydia’s head and shoulders as she stands inside the cave, behind the waterfall. She doesn’t come out of the cave.

This scene resembles the dream she dreams early in the movie. In that dream we see Lydia lying asleep, in an exotic milieu, on a bed hovering above the water, with a fire slowly starting in her chest. This could represent how she in theory lets herself indulge in love, in passion, yet never properly in practice. This dream, alongside other nightmares, and apparitions she keeps seeing, shows us just how out of reach to real people she seems to be. Revenge surveillance, the ghosts and the stalking that follows Lydia becomes the eerie pulse of the film. She is paranoid, a master of her craft, a genius, a sociopath, and not even in the end do we see her really change. Where there is passion in Lydia’s life, there is also power and conflict. Standing inside that cave, she looks out at the girl and boy playing. She finds herself unable to open up, unable to ever find love that pure and easy. She has become a discarded, dangerous force. Yet, much like the crocodiles in the river that escaped from a ‘Marlon Brando movie’, she’ll survive.

Something as innocent as playing in the water suddenly seems impossibly cheerful. Universal Pictures / Photo: IMDb.

The serene scene hides crocodiles - just as Lydia’s charm hides abuse. Universal Pictures / Photo: IMDb.

Is she likeable, or not?

She raises something inside of me that feels a bit slightly outside of my reach. She is such a complicated character. She has this control, this mature, almost ancient sense of self, and I can’t figure out if I like her or not. Arguably, yes, she is a sociopathic and abusive. Yet, she looks so cool, so gorgeous and I disgustingly, desperately find myself wanting to be just a bit like her. She is quite masculine presenting and adopts in many ways a masculine personality and sense of self. She wears dark colours, she’s organised and analytical, she doesn’t easily show any sort of emotion, she has a haughty air of superiority, and establishes in many ways herself as a ‘great man’. The orchestra Lydia conducts refers to her as ‘maestro’ and she comments on the absurdity of differentiating between a ‘maestro’ and a ‘maestra’. She calls herself Petra’s dad. Simultaneously, she raises herself above gender – her daughter Petra doesn’t call her mom, but Lydia. She convinces us that she is not the exception to the rule – she is the rule.

Mark Strong shares many of the same features that we see portrayed in the Julliard student Max. Universal Pictures / Photo: IMDb.

Eliot Kaplan, played by Mark Strong, asks Tár for conducting advice and lavishes her with compliments early in the movie. She replies that ‘there’s no glory for a robot’. In doing so she expresses this sense of power, emanating from her, like a source of light. You do not feel much pity or empathy for the man who wishes to copy her style and steal her place. Yet by the end you see that this masculinity, this copying, this ‘roboticness’ is found in a lot of her life, and it leads to people around her feeling used, manipulated, tense and, in the extreme case of Krista, suicidal. When you see the same want-to-be-conductor stealing her most important performance from right under her nose, even breaking into her house to get the papers of her score, you realise that this in a sense is fair game. In another world Lydia might have done the same.

In the end, as a crocodile, as someone who watches love and passion happen, but who violently throws up at the idea of redoing what she’s done, she doesn’t ‘start the clock anymore’. She starts the movie, but she is now diminished as an artist, castrated, not allowed to play God over people, music, and time. She has been ‘cancelled’, reduced to her own nature, her genius ignored – the very thing she warns can happen if we decide to dislike Beethoven for his crimes, or Bach for his misogyny. Does Lydia’s fall from grace then mean that we live in an age where art and artist cannot, at all, be separated?

Cancel culture

The conversation of separating art and artist is a long-winded, and rather fascinating, one. In my opinion the argument that one should separate the two works in a historical context. When taught about what has come before us, we need to keep an open mind. We need to realise and remember the patterns of that time and society, and its prejudices. We need to learn about what has come before, but we do not have to like it, or frankly like them. Yet at the same time, there is a need to respect what place, what power, what genius, they were assigned in their time. That doesn’t mean power and genius looks the same today. Lydia becomes a brilliant lesson on how the ‘separating art from artist’-debate is layered today; you cannot use that same argument as a smokescreen for any shady shit you want to get away with. Are even geniuses constricted to their actions in an age of surveillance? Lydia argues for both sides of the question, in different contexts. She allows Bach the privilege of separating him from his misogyny, but she refrains from doing the same to Schopenhauer. It almost seems as if in her eyes a true genius, like Bach, has more moral leeway than a man like Schopenhauer. But the movie gives us no true answer: it doesn’t take a stance on the #metoo movement, or even on the ‘separation of art from artist’ discourse. No, it sends us wandering into the mist, with a faint denouement.

Look me in the eye and tell me this isn’t the face of someone who is about to sacrifice it all? Universal Pictures / Photo: IMDb.

From the 1967 filmization “Oedipus Rex”. Euro International Films / Photo: IMDb.

The fall from glory

In doing so the film becomes comparable to Sophocles’ ancient play ‘Oedipus Rex’. This classic piece is about king Oedipus who, at the beginning of the play, is married to the queen and well-liked by all. Yet what he doesn’t know is that his mother and father have given him away at birth to be killed, since a prophecy was told that the child would one day kill his father and marry his mother. Oedipus grows up estranged from his real parents, son to another couple. As a teenager he learns about the curse and flees his village, scared to injure his parents. While fleeing he accidentally kills a man in passing, solves the Phoenix’s riddle, and is awarded the queen of Thebes. Without realising it, he has fulfilled the prophecy. The village is then struck by a plague, a response to the murder of the previous king. Here the fall from glory begins. We retrospectively learn that Oedipus accidentally killed his father, the previous king of Thebes, and by solving the Sphinx’s riddle he was then awarded the queen, his birthmother. Attempting to flee the curse, Oedipus falls right into it.

If one is to compare these two works a necessary question to ask becomes: did Oedipus have free will? Is it a situation of “the gods know what the score of the game will be, but we still have to play it”? Oedipus knows that he has met a man by a road, Lydia knows she has been with several women. Their fatal flaw is that they do not realise the full extent of the damage they’ve brought upon the people in their surroundings. Aristoteles analysed tragedies by looking at two elements: the ‘anagnorisis’ and ‘peripeteia’. ‘Anagnorisis’ refers to a sort of ‘recognition’, where the protagonist goes from ignorance to understanding. ‘Peripeteia’ refers to when the plot starts to unravel in the direction of its own opposite. Aristoteles claimed that the best tragedies were the ones that combined ‘anagnorisis’ and ‘peripeteia’ in one moment. This moment collapses into one when Oedipus learns the truth, as if by the end of a murder mystery. This moment is punctuated in the film ‘Tár’ with a lack of poise, and it is awakens both our pity and fright – Lydia goes from ignorance to understanding when she falls on her face. The epitome of Lydia’s ‘shadiness’ can be found in the scene where Lydia restlessly follows Olga, for the inane reason to give her a doll back. This obsession leads to her being chased by a (phantom?) dog and the crescendo of music crashes as she trips running up some stairs.

We see that she hasn’t changed. Again, she jumps at the first opportunity to chase after Olga. Universal Pictures / Photo: IMDb.

Come on girl, your wife is *right there*.Copyright: Universal Pictures / Photo: IMDb.

She lies to everyone in her life that she was attacked. In a sense, she was. She was overwhelmed by her own obsession and followed it until it landed her on her face. This scene, where she is alone, running, and haunted, beautifully mirrors how she has been pursuing and grooming young conductors for years, running after them, and that that behaviour, now finally, has caught up with her. It is all her own fault, and she falls on her face. This is also the moment from whence on she becomes more and more reckless, therefore commencing an unravelling of the story, a colliding, simultaneous ‘peripeteia’.

Lydia follows neatly the ‘obsessed, tortured artist’ trope, like in Aronofsky’s ‘Black Swan’, and Chazelle’s ‘Whiplash’, except that she already has it all. The movie starts with her ‘New Yorker’ interview, her fancy car, and her chic apartments. She is already the king of Thebes. There is no more impossible goal to reach, except a piece she is well on her way with, and perhaps a young, new mistress? The absoluteness of her confidence is what makes me connect her to Oedipus. Not for one moment does Oedipus consider that he could be the murderer as he investigates the crime. Lydia is plagued in the same way Oedipus is, her past haunting her, but not for one moment does she hesitate in her steamrolling, her launch at greatness, at striving for ‘better and better and better’ – it is what rightfully devours her. She refuses to investigate her own crimes, but slowly we still learn of them.

Becoming ‘one of the greats’

As an incredibly charismatic, interesting, simply magnetic character it hurts as a viewer when we start to dislike her. She describes so artfully, after the fearfully long introduction of acclamations and awards, her place in history, her place in the long line of those who precede her. Nevertheless, this seems to render her incapable of understanding her own time. This specific element of her character, obsessing about history and ‘becoming one of the greats’, makes her lose some of her humanity. This may be one of the reasons she entertains her old teacher, Andris, played by Julian Glover. It shows her respect for history.

Does hubris then come with the job? Nietzsche claimed that artists are, by nature, past-oriented creatures who refrain from moving forward. Therefore, a heavy antagonism may appear between an artist and their time, creating a tragical end; a melancholic life and death. Lydia is in some ways unable to indulge in her time. What makes her fantastic, is in the end also what separates her from any true human connection. The transactionality of all her relationships haunts her, and her wife claims the only relationship in her life that isn’t tainted with this poison is the one she has to their daughter Petra.

I think what scares me most is the way her geniality is braided together with her abusive nature. She admits early on that the podium is her only home. So, when she loses her daughter, and when she loses her score, her music, her power, her place on that podium – she loses her home. She calls the orchestra a family at one point, a compliment neatly followed with manipulation to appoint the solo to the beautiful new celloist. Again, charm is balanced, and in play, for the use of power, according to her wishes. Do you need to be crazy to be that good?

The tortured artist

The week after I saw ‘Tár’ I kept wearing sweaters over my shoulders, I, subconsciously, I have no other way of explaining it – bought a black, elegant coat and I couldn’t stop putting lotion on my hands. In the movie Lydia does it in a way that symbolizes almost a washing away of her sins, she obsessively rids herself of blame and fault. Her downfall is so elegant, until it isn’t. Like an animal she leaps at her competitor, devastated at what she’s lost, and as a consequence she is swept up in a quiet removal. It is a different shade of ‘tortured artist’ that we find in Lydia’s character.

Teller’s character Andrew famously states that he’d rather die young and famous than old and forgotten. Sony Pictures Classic / Photo: IMDb.

Photo 1: Copyright: Summit Entertainment / IMDb. Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone in ‘La La Land’ (2016). Photo 2: Copyright: Sony Pictures Classic / IMDb. Miles Teller and J.K. Simmons in Whiplash (2014). Photo 3: Copyright: Paramount Pictures / IMDb. Margot Robbie and Diego Calva in ‘Babylon’ (2022). Photo 4: Copyright: Fox Searchlight Pictures / IMDb. Natalie Portman in ‘Black Swan’ (2010).

We meet here the same complicated relationship to a craft as we do in Damien Chazelles movies: ’Whiplash’, ’La la land’ and most recently ’Babylon’. These movies, alongside ’Tár’ all paint the picture of the great efforts to become great. In ‘Whiplash’, Andrew asks Fletcher:

‘but do you think there is a line? You know, where you discourage the next Charlie Parker from becoming Charlie Parker?’

To that Fletcher answers:

‘No. Because the next Charlie Parker would never be discouraged.’

It’s that simple. There is no line that can be crossed when creating one of the greats, because if you crossed the line, they wouldn’t be one of the greats. In Lydia, that is reversed. Damien Chazelle’s movies constantly ask the question ’at what price?’ At what price do you become the greatest drummer, do you follow your dream, do you chase to be a star? What is the cost of the dreams of an artist? I think that’s the reason anyone who is any kind of creative will weep at the ending of ‘La La Land’, simply because it juxtaposes dreams and love. The movie leaves you with the quiet truth that, for some, you can only have one and not the other.

Julian Glover represents, with a character like Andris, all that has come before Lydia. Universal Pictures / Photo: IMDb.

For Lydia the cost is a price too high. For her, you can have both, but not forever – here we again notice the relevance of time. She is forced to cross the line and simultaneously enter her time. She is a still picture by the beginning of the movie, perfectly painted in every sentence and scene. Mahlers’ five is the only piece of the puzzle missing, and it is the thing that she is at last pushed away from. She is worshipped for her talent, yet she lives in age of surveillance, in the wake of the #metoo movement, in a time of live streams and stalkers. And the worship fades and her followers falter, and not even her skill, what made her one of the greats, can save her. By the end she is, tragically, just a person.

What the ending says about you

Some have argued that the movie’s last fifteen minutes is a bit too on the nose. The film carefully builds this disastrous storm of a character, and if it were to end with her crying to Bernstein, that would be swell. We would be left wondering, what happens next? Does she go on an apology tour, does she self-destruct even further, does she try to mend her marriage? Field could easily have left us there, trusting the audience to speculate. But here we get somewhat of a spoon-fed ending. Now, whether it’s to depict karmic justice, or to adhere to a ‘Hays Code’-esque ending is debatable. To me, it felt relevant because when she moves to the Philippines, we get to see that her hybris is still intact, she still carries herself as a maestro and she is still doing what she loves. Yet now, she’s invisible.

I think the downfall is engaging that way – it shows the anatomy of how she is forgotten. The scene I loved most in this part was with her eating in a noisy restaurant at night, working. It is a short clip, but it reflects what Lydia’s old teacher, Andris said as they lunched together:

‘Schopenhauer measured a man’s intelligence against their sensitivity to noise.’

Lydia answered him with asking:

‘Didn’t he also famously throw a woman down a flight of stairs who later sued him’.

Here, she becomes the middleman between history and the present; he answers that he doesn’t understand what his personal life has to do with his music. What she says to Max and what she says to Andris differs greatly – in her the two schools of thought on ‘separating art from the artist’ collides. Her writing in the rowdy street shows somehow that now, now she has let go of all her might and control, yet now she is also the most genial. Her sensitivity to noise grows, and tragically she becomes more intelligent at the same rate as she becomes more invisible.

Do I want to be her or be with her?

Now, having said all that, I know I should dislike her completely, yet I don’t. I try to dig at that feeling – why don’t I? Is it internalised misogyny, do I want to embody that same sense of “daddy” that she does? Or is it my idea of art that falters if even she can be reduced to who she was and not what she did? Or am I just afraid that there will be a point in our life that will be our prime and that for some the decline from said prime is more devastating than for others?

In Lydia, the painting collapses into a human, it clashes with the world, and she faces her consequences. Fame is not a shield. Separation of art from artist is necessary to understand someone like Plato, but it is different today. And here we are met with a sobering lesson of the day: we do not have to like someone to remember them. I think that that might be my answer. I do not like Lydia Tár. But I will remember her.

Why can’t I stop thinking about Cate Blanchett in Tár?