Soul Searching

Didn't You Feel Triumphant?

Art is restoration: the idea is to repair the damages that are inflicted in life, to make something that is fragmented—which is what fear and anxiety do to a person—into something whole.

– Louise Bourgeois

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Will you look into the mirror?

– Galadriel

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What Zadie Smith saw in Tár was an artist afraid of aging into irrelevance: “Every generation mistakes the limits of its own field of vision for the limits of the world. But what happens when generational visions collide? How should we respond?” Focusing primarily on the scene at Juilliard—in which Lydia Tár fails to convince her student, Max, that Bach’s music is capable of stirring the soul despite the composer’s misogyny—she riffs on Tár’s own claim that “time is the essential piece of interpretation.” There is, Smith says, “an awful lot of time these days between people in their twenties and people in their fifties,” and it’s “no doubt a great shock to find yourself so sharply reassessed and redefined by the generation below you.” The young, Smith goes on, “are always right in their indictment of the old.” She uses millennials as an example: “Up to now, when it came to generational combat, they’ve been right about everything, as every generation is in its own way.” Yet the one thing the young have by definition not experienced is “that one vital piece of data about time and its passing: how it feels.”

What A.O. Scott saw in Tár was its structure. Writing of the same scene at Juilliard—“one of the most talked-about parts of the film”—he notes how it “seems to crystallize the movie’s interest in a familiar kind of clash, one that invites clichés about cancel culture, identity politics and white privilege.” In this scene, Tár is brilliant; she is charismatic; she violates her students’ boundaries; she’s quick to anger; she doesn’t hesitate to humiliate rather than empathize; and she ends up going too far, losing her credibility. “The vanity Lydia displays here,” Scott writes, “which is undeniably seductive, will contribute to her eventual undoing.” At the piano with Max, she focuses on the “questions” in Bach, “illustrated by a rising, unresolved musical phrase that replicates the intonation of an asking voice.” The question, as Scott echoes, “is always more interesting than the answer.”

Scott doesn’t mention this in his essay, but the Juilliard scene is undeniably the film’s overture; it hits all the notes, themes, motifs, and phrases, which the film then deepens and expands as it unfolds. This is the reason, perhaps, that it’s the “most talked-about” scene in the movie: one samples it, in criticism or the classroom, the way one samples Wagner or Rossini by playing a few overtures or preludes rather than hours and hours of opera, or the way one excerpts Proust’s “Swann in Love” as a Search in miniature. All the pieces are there, just not quite so grand.

Marin Alsop, the real-life conductor for the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra who is married to one of the musicians in her orchestra, saw a societal concern: “I was offended as a woman, I was offended as a conductor, I was offended as a lesbian… To have an opportunity to portray a woman in that role and to make her an abuser—for me that was heartbreaking.” She goes further, and suggests that “all women and all feminists should be bothered” by the depiction of Lydia Tár, because it’s not only “antiwoman,” it’s not even “about women conductors, is it? It’s about women as leaders in our society. People ask, ‘Can we trust them? Can they function in that role?’ It’s the same questions whether it’s about a CEO or an NBA coach or the head of a police department.”

Scott, Smith, and Alsop all saw what they saw because Tár, more transparently than any recent film, is a mirror. Shortly after its premier in New York, as Scott notes, “The Cut published an amusing, much-mocked article” whose author seems to have been “under the impression that Lydia Tár was a real person.” In the New Yorker, another author “began his review… with the tongue-in-cheek implication that she just might be” (something Alsop can’t seem to figure out). In Slate, Scott goes on, Dan Kois offered another interpretation: “that the last part of the film—the part that chronicles Lydia’s professional and personal undoing—takes place in her head.” All of these interpretations, erroneous or fanciful, Scott notes, “get at the essential uncanniness of Tár, which seems to call into question the nature of reality itself.” In her own essay, Smith arrives at a similar conclusion: “Tár may feel politically inadequate to those who judge art solely in that fashion, but I found it to be existentially rich.” If it seems so reflective for everyone who sees it—and I’ve watched a lot of people watch this film—this is perhaps why, that it both portrays and denies reality. It holds the real and the unreal together, as if yoked.

At the climax of Proust’s overture, Swann hears the “little phrase” of Vinteuil’s sonata—the “theme” of his obsessive love—and is undone by “all his memories of the days when Odette had been in love with him, which he had succeeded until that moment in keeping invisible in the depths of his being.” Earlier—before Swann even meets Odette—he hears the sonata at a different party, and is particularly struck by its beauty, though unable to determine who composed it or how to seek it out again. By chance, he hears it a year later at the Verdurins’ salon, where he begins to fall in love with Odette. It becomes part of him: “it existed latent in his mind on the same footing as certain other notions without material equivalent, such as our notions of light, of sound, of perspective, of physical pleasure, the rich possessions wherewith our inner temple is diversified and adorned.” In the end, Proust’s narrator goes on, we have to die, “but we have as hostages these divine captives who will follow and share our fate. And death in their company is somehow less bitter, less inglorious.”

In case last week’s newsletter didn’t clue you in, I’m one of those writers who, though irreligious, is nonetheless stricken with a religious temperament. One thing I’ve noticed with this temperament is that music, because of its pure abstraction, is the easiest artform to discuss in “divine” registers. It’s also, I think, why it’s so easy to see Tár as a mirror: music is the film’s language, its vocabulary, even its structure—its metaphor—for something categorically impossible to perceive. In this mirror, if one looks at the right moment, one’s soul is there and is not.

“No one is loved like musicians,” Fran Lebowitz tells Martin Scorsese in Pretend It’s a City—a docuseries that, with its references to Leonard Bernstein’s Young People’s Concerts, its unforgiving and judgmental protagonist, and its sharp discussion of “me too” and cancelling powerful men, one can easily imagine Todd Field having seen before filming on Tár began in August of 2021. “You see how happy and grateful people are for this music, especially popular music of their youth,” Lebowitz goes on. “This is centrally important to people, and they love the person who gave it to them… because they give them the ability to express their emotions and their memories.” Put on a record from your youth, Lebowitz says, and you become instantly happy, instantly transported—perhaps even more alive. It’s a small, harmless way that the old, in Smith’s word, are “vampiric.” It’s also rare to meet anyone who doesn’t experience this phenomenon, who doesn’t have a Vinteuil sonata of their own, which makes music easy to relate to as “that which stirs the soul.” It’s the most universal art form, one might say, that can convince us we even have such a thing, a soul, especially when it transports us to the time in our lives at which our souls were raw, new, and starving for intangibles with which to build our “inner temples.” A less exalted word for this is character.

This seems to me the bar or boundary of art—that it’s “about” having a soul, or at the very least about having an inner life. This is also why I have little patience or interest in talk of art’s supposed societally utilitarian properties—that it “builds empathy” or “makes us better people.” One builds one’s own empathy; one chooses to make oneself a better person, either by approaching art or some other framework for reflection—which is why art and spirituality, to use only one example, are so often discussed in similar registers. And while the availability and accessibility of art (or spirituality) is a societal concern, the capacity to be better, to live better, is the province of the individual will, not the framework. A greater societal concern, if you’re looking for one, is the enormous investment—primarily by corporations but also by lawmakers—in obliterating every individual’s will to be better, to live better.

Is Tár “about” cancel culture and intergenerational conflict? Sure, if The Last Supper is about dinner. What makes this combination in this particular film so fascinating, so tempting, is that it asks the question many young people claim to have answered and put to bed—Can you separate the artist from the art?¹—and knows not to answer it. Its velocity, its understatement, the leaps between its scenes, its dreams, its noises and whispers, its vocabulary—these are all clues we can select or ignore in choosing how to interpret Lydia Tár, both the artist and the person, as well as those around her. In its contradictions, the simultaneity of which, in life, we’re rarely able to perceive, Tár offers the whole of what cannot be whole. It seems to oppose or reject itself at the same time that it embraces itself.

Like so many great works of art, it forgives itself for existing. This seems to me what the soul itself is, a forgiveness of one’s own having to live and die. If you want to believe in souls, anyway. Though if you didn’t, I’m not sure why you’d want to see a film at all, or listen to music, or read and re-read stories about people who don’t exist but who are unambiguously there, alongside you, nonetheless. One wonders (I wonder) why such a film-going audience—such a reading public—is so unable to bear the idea that one’s having-lived, however hurtful, may nonetheless merit forgiveness. As for your own reflection, in those films and songs and stories, how you forgive its looking back at you is up to you, and no one else.

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Thank you for reading! If you’ve been a subscriber for a while, you’ve noticed this letter is now called Entertainment, Weakly. Since social media seems less and less reliable, I’m working toward making this a “weekly letter against feeling absolutely hopeless about entertainment, culture, and politics, and the way art touches all of them.” Please tell your friends if it seems like something they’d like to read. And, as ever, if you enjoyed reading this, you may be interested in my books, Image Control and Some Hell. Talk to you again soon <3

1. As usual, there’s a third, unmentioned, rarely considered thing between the artist and the art: the artist making money from the art, which is the central concept of cancellation as a discursive amendment to corrupt, discriminatory judicial and cultural systems, and which has largely been eclipsed by all the noise, genuine and not, about whether one “can” or “cannot” include a bunch of dead people, however horrible, in one’s canon of “great works”: they’re dead, and unless one plans to judge their family or executor as a proxy for their deeds, one is free to consider their ability to harm others through their actions effectively severed from their art. Wesley Morris and Lili Loofbourow have each written about this more sensitively, more intelligently, than anyone else I’ve read.