TÁR (2022): would Tár respect the work of Shimomura and Sakimoto?
TÁR (2022), directed by Todd Field and starring Cate Blanchett did the outrageous: they made a work of art that places 21st-century identity politics front and center in a serious way that I thought would be political/capitalist suicide for North American creatives. According to my snapshot of the Wikipedia article for this movie:
Despite the positive reviews, to date the film, still in theaters, has grossed $5.5 million against a combined production and marketing budget of $35 million…
Since I like this movie so much, I suspect that it will be “cancelled” with as much enthusiastic ignorance as Cate Blanchett, her fictional character in the movie was ostracized… the movie itself could be the real-world performance art of the action in fiction. And, speaking of cancelled, I think the character name Tár evokes the word star—but the lightbulbs are broken on the s—and it also turns me toward the classic phrase, “tarred and feathered” from the shitty-but-ethnically-coherent American rituals of the 18th and 19th centuries.
To make matters worse for this show, I very much enjoyed seeing an electric car, a Porsche Taycan, featured in the work:
But I fear, based on the character of the car’s fictional owner, the electric vehicle in Hollywood might end up representing a similar aesthetic concocted for the modernist residence which would be a ‘happy accident’ for the petroleum-based-product empires, exploding out of the shitty 20th century.
And, speaking of the 20th-century establishment, Cate Blanchett’s Tár took it on by storm with the help of her first violinist and concertmaster Sharon (played by Nina Hoss). This epic success is immediately framed in the smartphone camera, flying in the cabin of a private jet:
This framing is in the very first scene of the film, making the smartphone (along with email) play a role similar to the one television played in Oliver Stone’s JFK (1991) [IMDB]—the role of what Noam Chomsky calls “manufacturing consent.” The distance—both physically and psychologically—we see in this shot works toward me seeing Tár as no different from a typical male surrounded by a harem of women (rightfully close to a #MeToo moment). When I see Tár in scene after scene, she is mostly lying to the females (or trying to manipulate them) while she is sincere and transparent with the males. This kind of toxic character could easily be played by a self-described “black” male and almost nothing in the story would need to be changed. Yet another reason why I like this work so much. And, by the way, ladies: real Black men hate all forms of slavery, including sex slavery. But Tár here is classically macho—of what my daughter would regard as the ‘old school’ of feminism.
Her confrontational transparency with what she identifies as “male” is taken to the (first) extreme when a gender-fluid youth, representing this shitty 21st century, calls her a “bitch”:
Had she regarded this young person as one without patriarchal masculinity perhaps the events in this story would have been different. But maybe this is the point—or even the turning point—as she hurtles toward a fictional version of the musical compositions of Yoko Shimomura and Hitoshi Sakimoto. Will Tár respect the work of Shimomura and Sakimoto or will it be portrayed as more humiliation from her Berlin downfall? I think, yes.
Respect, yes.