In Tár, Field fashions an improbable representation of power (Hernández, “Top Orchestras”) to advance the idea that power is faceless. But the idea is only to be believed if the specific impact and effect created by other images in the movie are unabashedly dismissed as “not really important” (hooks, “Cultural”). In other words, if one looks critically at the images that are relegated to be mere backdrops of the movie, the disingenuousness of Tár’s posturing becomes all too conspicuous.
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When the movie Tár first aired in 2022, Marin Alsop, the famous female conductor, was outraged. Matching the credentials of the movie’s fictionalized protagonist Lydia Tár to such a degree that made her wonder if she’d been co-opted (Coghlan, “Film Interview”), Alsop called the movie’s premise about a world-renowned lesbian conductor abusing her power to groom, manipulate, and bully those around her to be flat-out “antiwoman” (Coghlan, “Film”). In interviews, Alsop expressed how the depiction offended her “as a woman, as a conductor, and as a lesbian” (Coghlan, “Film”). In response, the movie’s director, Todd Field, defended the movie’s grand gesture – to show that “power has no gender. Power has no race” (Chen, “Is Tár”). The “project” of Tár, then, appears to be to convey a universal notion of power by way of a subversive hook that gives power to a lesbian woman in a notoriously male-dominated field to show that she is as susceptible to abusing that power. But to push back on this tantalizing notion of a faceless power by way of Lydia Tár, as Alsop and other critics have done, is to merely take the bait. Instead, to peel away at Tár’s contradictions, and its flawed premise despite its insistence of “that certain sense of magic” (hooks, “Cultural”), or more explicitly, the veneer of a unifying feeling stemming from a universalized notion of power where the perpetrator becomes an abstraction, one must, as cultural critic bell hooks once implored, look at the “other” images in the film – those that have been deemed to not really matter.
In Tár, Field fashions an improbable representation of power (Hernández, “Top Orchestras”) to advance the idea that power is faceless. But the idea is only to be believed if the specific impact and effect created by other images in the movie are unabashedly dismissed as “not really important” (hooks, “Cultural”). In other words, if one looks critically at the images that are relegated to be mere backdrops of the movie, the disingenuousness of Tár’s posturing becomes all too conspicuous.
The movie centers on the rise and fall of a flawed protagonist, Lydia Tár. As the conductor of the prestigious Berlin Philharmonic, Tár is a cultural icon, sitting at the intersection of “art, expertise and intellectualism” (Laffly, “Making”), and is revered by renowned critics, artists, and the like. Her world and the spaces that she traverses on a day-to-day basis only underscore her impeccable taste and style: She resides in a beautiful, spacious home in Berlin with a mix of minimalist and mid-century-modern furnishings. The home of the Berlin Philharmonic is “a magnificent vineyard-style space in Dresden” (Laffly, “Making”), while the “specific configuration of hallways, terraces, staircases and meeting rooms” (Laffly, “Making”) that she weaves in and out of regularly exude and reaffirm her “art, expertise, and intellectualism.” But these visually exuberant signifiers are deliberately and sharply undercut when she faces her “great fall” near the end of the movie. When Tár is stripped of her status and all of the associated trappings after her pattern of abuse is uncovered, she is seen traveling to an unidentified and lowly foreign location where she resorts to performing a gig that entails conducting an orchestra to a video game soundtrack for an audience dressed as video game characters. These last five minutes of the movie seem to offer a visual synecdoche of her comeuppance, speaking directly to the depth of her downfall.
But how exactly does the movie’s final sequence represent Tár’s fall from grace? The images, despite their lack of identifiers, are quite telling. The notably unnamed foreign country vaguely resembles somewhere in Southeast Asia by the looks of the natural habitat and the people. The visual narrative, however, zooms in on the locale’s dirty walls, murky waters, and rickety buggies. And beyond the ambient contrast, the people of this unknown country are also starkly different from those Tár left behind in Berlin. They are only grateful to receive Tár’s visit, despite or perhaps oblivious to her damning past, welcoming her with bountiful fruit baskets and deep bows. They barely speak but in inaudible whispers. In the few instances when they do speak out aloud, they do so in English and never in their own language. They represent a strange and backward culture in their barbaric treatment of women, as Tár discovers in her visit to a massage parlor; there is a display of young women, each donning a number, like dolls at a toy shop, behind a glass wall called the “fish bowl,” waiting to be selected by a customer. These people and this place are the representation of the Other, the foreign and the uncivilized and thus the inferior. And by extension, to inhabit this space and to interact with these people, the movie seems to say, is to have fallen.
The Palestinian philosopher Edward Said once spoke of “imperial possessions as usefully there, anonymous and collective” (Said 63; original emphasis). It is not hard to see the people in this last sequence of Tár as exactly that. Evacuated of any specific identifiers, they’re devoid of history and serve as “merely representative images” (hooks 333) of the less than. And what “the mind’s eye” experiences from such images – the likes of “the Indian and the ‘great’ white men,” or in this case, the horror in the eyes of a white woman as she stares at the displays of Asian women at a massage parlor – is not unlike “being forced to witness the symbolic reenactment of a colonizing ritual, a drama of white supremacy” (205).
If American movies are thought to have moved far beyond replicating the imperialist racial depictions of the Vietnamese found in the 1979 movie Apocalypse Now, Tár suggests otherwise. And if Francis Ford Coppola’s famous film might be excused as a product of its time, Tár seems to be in search of a different excuse, and finds one in the form of a certain “universal truth” that bears the semblance of being naturally true. This appeal to the “natural,” of course, is also not new. As far back as its teachings about Columbus, America has indoctrinated the idea that “the will to dominate and conquer folks who are different from ourselves is natural, not culturally specific” (hooks 199). And the way to make this dominance “natural” is by replacing “whiteness” with “civilization” (199). In this vein, when Tár walks out of the massage parlor stunned at the sight of the women displayed behind a glass cage and, in disgust, ends up throwing up on the side of the road, the message becomes clear: she is civilized and they are not. And through her revulsion, the idea of a faceless power is revealed to be what it actually is – an obscured or “naturalized” idea of domination that balks at the barbarity of the foreign other, conveniently forgetting that “Europe is literally the creation of the Third World” (Said 197).
The unmistakable imperial gaze of Tár is a direct contradiction to the film’s claim, as it reveals the opposite: that powerlessness is faceless. And in this vein, to question and criticize the intended impact and effect of the movie by focusing solely on Lydia Tár is not only to miss but to deny the “interlocking systems of domination” (hooks, “Cultural”), that which occludes imperialistic racism via a degendered portrayal of power, thereby proving the shoddiness of the entire premise.
Yet, as if to only prove this point, the imperialistic images of Tár have gone virtually unnoticed by the public and critics. The movie garnered critical acclaim, securing nominations for nearly every award and category there is, and winning most of them, including the Critics’ Choice Awards and the Golden Globe Awards. The New York Times said in its glowing review: “Hysteria about cancel culture can encourage artistic timidity by overstating the cost of probing taboos. In truth, there’s a hunger out there for work that takes the strangeness of this time and turns it into something that transcends polemic” (Goldberg, “Finally”). The movie’s problematic racial politics and representation as well as its unabashed self-contradiction are not to be found in mainstream media. Only when one searches online for the word “racism” and the movie title together can one find a substantive article – but only one (the burgeoning online digital magazine called The Emancipator that wrote the article is explicitly focused on anti-racism). Otherwise, the mainstream media has completely bought into the movie’s misrepresentations of power, gender, and race.
In a cringey lecture scene early in the movie, when a student identifying as BIPOC and pan-gendered objects to the transcendental appeal of J. S. Bach, Tár openly asks a class full of young musicians, “who gets to decide” what “exalts us individually as well as collectively?” What Tár makes abundantly clear is that it is not that student. What the movie conveniently forgets is that it’s never been that student.
Works Cited
“bell hooks: Cultural Criticism & Transformation.” Media Education Foundation Transcript. 1997. https://www.mediaed.org/transcripts/Bell-Hooks-Transcript.pdf
Chai, May-Lee. “We Need to Talk About Tár’s Racist Ending.” The Emancipator. Mar. 11, 2023. https://theemancipator.org/2023/03/11/culture/we-need-talk-about-trs-racist-ending/#:~:text=He%20originally%20wanted%20to%20film,scenes%20mix%20different%20Asian%20cultures.
Coghlan, Alexandra. “I’m Offended by Tár as a Woman, as a Conductor, as a Lesbian.” The Times (London). Jan. 8, 2023. https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/im-offended-by-Tár-as-a-woman-as-a-conductor-as-a-lesbian-t22vg7p70
Hernández, Javier C. “Top Orchestras Have No Female Conductors. Is Change Coming?” The New York Times. Sept. 10, 2021. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/10/arts/music/female-conductors.html
hooks, bell. Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations. Routledge, 1994.
Laffly, Tomris. “Making and Unmaking the Upscale, Minimalist World of ‘TÁR.’” IndieWire. Nov. 15, 2022. https://www.indiewire.com/features/general/Tár-costumes-production-design-1234782295/
Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. Knopf, 1993.
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All images are screenshots from the film.
