Cate Blanchett plays a renowned orchestra conductor and composer whose unbridled ego leads to her ultimate collapse in the new film Tár. But the film isn’t wholly unkind to its horrible heroine. In one moment, she leads a master class in which her musical ideals meet with her pupils’ awakened identity politics, with disastrous effects.
Lydia Tár (Blanchett) is shown teaching a Bach piece to her students in the moment. When she asks one of her students, Max, about the work, he says, “Nowadays, white, male, cis composers — just not my thing.”
Tár then puts him on the line, deconstructing his rote-woke response in front of his peers.
“Don’t be so eager to be offended,” she replies before referencing Sigmund Freud. “The narcissism of small differences leads to the most boring conformity.”
“The problem with enrolling yourself as an ultrasonic, epistemic dissident is that if Bach’s talent can be reduced to his gender, birth country, religion, sexuality and so on, then so can yours.
Max rushes out of the classroom at the end of her lecture, calling her a “fucking bitch.”
Tár replies: “And you are a robot. Unfortunately, the architect of your soul appears to be social media.”
Tár, which has gotten positive reviews and is set to be nominated for major Hollywood prizes, walks a narrow line between reviling and appreciating its protagonist. Lydia Tar has undeniable brilliance and intelligence, but her manipulative and self-serving behavior of others is not just psychopathic, but ultimately deadly and harmful.
Tár’s setting is not unlike to the real-life world of classical music, which has gotten infected with awakened ideology.
Academics at the University of Oxford reportedly claimed that Western sheet music is tainted by “its colonial past,” and that it would be a “slap in the face” to certain pupils because of its “complicity in white supremacy.”
Bright Sheng, a renowned composer, was expelled from his University of Michigan class last year for presenting the 1965 film Othello, in which Laurence Olivier wore blackface makeup.