Tar

The Limitations of Cultural Capital

  It is good to see films like Triangle of Sadness, White Noise and Tar insisting on cinema as a presence. These are works like those by Michael Haneke, Lars von Trier and David Lynch, at the turn of the millennium, which demand that film, if not seen in the cinema, must at least be talked about as cinema. When online magazines like Screen Rant and No Film School muse over whether TV is now better than film, the former suggests that “with longer runtime comes longer time spent with individual characters. They face more struggles and obstacles than they would in a movie, meaning they have more room to grow.” The latter says, “the line between TV and movie stars gets ever thinner, and having a recognisable face on a thumbnail is going to be important for marketing in general.” But what if we want from cinema not a character’s growth but a revelation and, even if an actor works in TV, cinema often demands a performance that is bigger, more precise and possesses condensation rather than expansion? A film might also wish to turn the extended time of television into the concentrated visual density of the film screen. If a filmmaker works with an image that is often in the cinema 1370cm, while a TV screen is maybe 50cm, then the amount of material that image can contain on film is immense, even if many viewers won’t absorb all the detail it offers. We could talk about how this works in Triangle of Sadness and White Noise but will focus instead on Tar, seeing in the film as with the others a refusal to allow cinema to become a small form, reduced to imitating the TV screen in its stories, as it insists on asking large questions that cinema claims as its right. If the film’s central character is immensely arrogant, then it doesn’t modestly offer a contrary style to reflect this; it exaggerates her personality in the image as it insists on having a personality of its own. 

     Its director, former actor, Todd Field isn’t quite what we’d call a recognisable auteur, a shrinking category that would still include in the American context, and of Field’s generation, Paul Thomas Anderson, David Fincher, Wes Anderson and James Gray. But he has made a couple of good films and fought tough battles — taking on Harvey Weinstein when making In the Bedroom. “Over the course of several months of inconclusive haggling with Miramax executives ‘you could see Todd wasting away.’” (Down and Dirty Pictures) His only other feature before Tar was Little Children. Looking at Field’s attempt to get projects made might explain why auteurs have become endangered, but that would be, again, for another piece. What matters is that Field wants to make films that are troublesome and even disputatious, offering works that might not have a categorical position, but create out of their making a potential controversy. In The Bedroom shows a sympathetic central character avenging his grown-up son’s murder, and Little Children offers a supporting figure whose paedophilia is presented without immediate rancour. 

       In Tar, Lydia (Cate Blanchett) is a brilliant conductor, professionally conscientious in some ways and not in others, and has an unequivocal love for music. But she is also possibly a sexual predator, undeniably careerist, and sees others as a means to an end.  Playing on the musical pun, Zadie Smith calls her an instrumentalist: “There’s a word for this behaviour: instrumentalism. Using people as tools. As means rather than ends in themselves. To satisfy your own desire, or your sense of your own power, or simply because you can.” (New York Review of Books) Lydia’s long-term partner Sharon (Nina Hoss) says that the only person Lydia really loves is their daughter, the one person it seems who isn’t part of her ambition or part of her sexual desire. That may be so, but Sharon has a reason to say this when she does: Lydia has returned from New York and the press has made much of who she has been with while over there: a student half her age who everybody assumes is her lover. She is in the news chiefly because a young woman mentored by Lydia has recently taken her life, and the press is wondering if Lydia is indirectly responsible. Sharon is unhappy — Lydia can have as many affairs as she likes but there is an agreement; Lydia keeps Sharon in the know.  

          Field refuses to keep the audience in the know, making a film that simultaneously insists on filling out Tar’s Berlin life, allowing her to express numerous thoughts and ideas, while creating a third act that might be actual but could at least in moments be virtual. He even in a later stage of the film takes her back to her humble origins, to a cramped home and a brother who still lives there and looks blue-collar grumpy next to Lydia’s high-flown superiority. Yet how are we supposed to take this woman, or even certain scenes like the one with her brother, and another where goes half-crazy after tripping on her way to the podium? 

Let's put aside the possible indiscernibility of the film's final section (which deserves an essay to itself) and concentrate instead on the complexity of her character and the convolutions of a cultural moment that sees her as a troublesome defender of the aesthetic field, one that is in danger of dwindling as moral capital replaces cultural capital. Here, Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of a field “which is inscribed in past works, recorded, codified and canonized by an entire body of professional experts in conversation and celebration, along with literary and art historians, exegetes and analysts” looks like it might have become fallow. Cultural capital makes art anything but relative even if people might wonder if Warhol, Duchamp or Henri Rousseau make it moot: when art becomes so dislocated from traditional notions of craft how can value be attributed? Bourdieu would say that the field becomes more complex, the demands placed upon a work moving far beyond ready notions of craft as he notes “contrary to what is taught by a naive relativism, the time of art history is really irreversible.” (The Field of Cultural Production)

      However, what if moral capital appears to replace cultural capital, with even so apparently and undeniably brilliant a composer as Johann Sebastian Bach becoming debatable? Smith makes much of the scene between a mixed-race young man who, in a class Lydia teaches at Juilliard, insists that he isn’t interested in listening to, or playing, a cis-gendered composer who fathered ten kids. 

“Honestly”, Max says, “as a BIPOC pangender person, I would say Bach’s misogynistic life makes it kind of impossible for me to take his music seriously…” Within the world of cultural capital, this would be a daft thing to say, and perhaps it is. However, that isn’t quite how the film views it, as though the naivety may well be Lydia’s rather than Max’s because she doesn’t understand moral capital — a discursive field where a young man’s sexuality and his nervousness are more important than Bach’s music. A reasonable position might acknowledge the mastery of Bach and see, too, that Lydia needs to note that bullying people into appreciation isn’t the best way of convincing someone of the composer’s genius. But this is a genius not only Lydia would have taken for granted but also most in her generation; Max is of a different generation and sees the importance of moral capital. Cultural capital is a different field, Lydia thinks, and shouldn’t be sullied by ethical standards. It is partly why literary theory created the intentional fallacy, as if to demarcate the artist from the work, and we have also the long-established term ad hominem to describe arguments that are invalid as they draw on personal attack rather than the discussion to hand. But in moral capital a person’s past deeds are part of their present actions, even their creative work. Lydia is deeply imbued with cultural capital and the film’s opening sequence makes much of it as Lydia talks with the New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik (playing himself) about her work. But can it hold?

        Smith pays attention to the audience demographic in Lydia’s two talks in New York. The first is with an audience close to Lydia’s age and that seems to agree with everything she says: they frequently laugh and warmly applaud. Next, in the class, she meets with resistance and seems flabbergasted that the students don’t see music and life as she does.  Smith says, as “Tar discovers while guest teaching at Juilliard. Here her charismatic lone-genius shtick—which so delighted the gray-haired festivalgoers—falls on stonier ground. Tar is now speaking to a different generation. The generation that says things like I’m not really into Bach.” (New York Review of Books) When Smith says Max “…has a very gentle demeanor and a sweet, open face, and seems in no way to be seeking confrontation”, Smith has a point but it might be to miss a bigger one: that Max wouldn’t be seeking an argument since this is part of his moral capital. He is non-confrontational, should be able to think what he likes and would be so aware that his beliefs are true and decent that why would he wish to get into an argument over them? In contrast, Tar assumes that everything is to be argued over and would find a dislike of Bach an odd position to take. Surely one that needs to be defended, just as she has earlier insisted at the Gopnik talk when she thinks Mahler’s adagietto is best played at a pace of seven minutes rather than around ten or eleven. It is a contestable claim and she well knows it. But it seems Max’s no less arguable position over Bach doesn’t need to be defended, and to expect him to do so is tantamount to abuse. 

     This doesn’t mean Lydia isn’t abusive in this scene as she appears oblivious to Max’s nervous disposition, especially evident in a leg that won’t stop shaking. But while many will be inclined to think if a student studying at Julliard doesn’t care for Bach, that might be ok as a personal opinion, but surely has little place as a moral evaluation, especially when that morality imposes itself on the music. Bach’s place in musical history can be the concern of numerous areas other than musicology, and who would deny there is a place for examining why almost all classical musical is by white males? In a seminar on feminism, perhaps, or in a sociology lecture on gender and class. And yes too, in a music course. Someone might prefer to spend their time with Barbara Strozzi, Marianna Martines and Clara Schumann than Bach, Beethoven and Robert Schumann. But is this because there is something specific in the female composers that can’t be found in the men, a need to boost the presence of generally ignored female composers from history, or with the hope of changing the demographic by noting that there were female composers in the past — and no reason why there cannot be many in the future? Or it might be for any number of other reasons. One supposes Lydia wouldn’t disagree with any of these claims but she may ask the person to defend themselves — especially in a musical, pedagogical environment. 

          However, is this just because she has the sort of personality that lends itself well to defending assertion? Max looks like a young man who wants just to be left alone with his tastes and his judgements, while Lydia is a woman who wants to impose her personality on the world. Someone living in the socio-economy of culture can do exactly that, but what happens when it comes up against a moral capital that says art no longer trumps ethics; it is subordinate to it? George Bernard Shaw’s well-known remark “The true artist will let his wife starve, his children go barefoot, his mother drudge for his living at seventy, sooner than work at anything but his art” (Oxford Reference), may have always been a provocation; however, it possessed an underlying assumption than many a Romantic or Modernist artist would have lived by. When Roman Polanski was arrested in Switzerland in 2009, numerous filmmakers signed a petition asking for his release. “Woody Allen, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, Martin Scorsese, David Lynch, Wong Kar Wai, Harmony Korine, Stephen Frears, Alexander Payne, Michael Mann, Wim Wenders, Tilda Swinton, Julian Schnabel, and Pedro Almodovar are among the 100 and counting film industry figures who had signed the petition.” (Indiewire) Why would such well-known names defend a man who was clearly guilty of a crime and had spent many years in France avoiding extradition to the United States? Were they proposing an equivalent of aesthetic immunity, where Polanski’s status meant it was unfair that he be locked up? The rape of a thirteen-year-old girl may have been in the distant past, Polanski may have been briefly jailed for the crime and was aware that a judge had it in for him, but why should so many defend him except on the basis that he is a great filmmaker who ought to continue making movies? Such filmmakers and actors were close to Shaw’s comment and are defending cultural capital ferociously next to its moral equivalent. At the other end, we have actress Adèle Haenel and others walking out of a Cesar ceremony in 2020 after the best director award went to Polanski for J’accuse. In the former moral capital doesn’t matter; in the latter it is all that matters. Claire Denis, who announced the win, said afterwards “people voted, they found Polanski's film better, worthier than the others, that's it, it's the Cesar. I don't think we should look any further.” (World of Reel) Is Denis’ position contemporaneously naive or a balanced perspective that says even if Polanski ought be in jail, if he isn’t he should win awards if he is still making good films?

      This might appear a long digression but let us bear with it a little longer.  Some would insist that Polanski films should be banned, just as, Jerry Coyne notes, “Savanah Lyon, a theater major at the University of California, San Diego, who graduated in June, racked up more than 20,000 signatures on a petition last year calling on her school to cancel its longstanding 'The Films of Woody Allen' course.” (‘Should Schools ban the Works of Those Accused of Sexual Harassment?’) Coyne wonders: “should we then ban Chinatown and The Pianist from film classes? Not in my book.” Why penalise the films and let the men go free, if it is only the person who is guilty? Why ban the work of people who are surely innocent of any crimes and were merely offering their craft, including, actors, cinematographers and production designers? Polanski’s Chinatown is an important film and Polanski committed a crime. Making the film pay appears not just an acceptance of the intentional fallacy but an absurd extension of it: not only should we credit the artist with the intentions behind the meaning of the work, we should also extend that intention to their private lives — and assume anybody who is deemed criminal must also have made a criminal work. In such an argument, both would be removed from the public domain: the man in prison and the films no longer easily accessible. 

         What we notice is that many want to extinguish the distinction between moral and cultural capital, and partly what Tar wishes to explore is how this is problematic without quite saying that they are completely separate. Individuals make art and this is still deemed an attractive, exclusive and demanding arena of life. Initially, it looks like Lydia is in her position through talent and confidence but as the film progresses we see also that she got there by being ruthless, manipulative and calculating. We see too, much later in the film that her background appears a poor one when she returns to the humble family home. When she sits tearfully watching a few minutes of Leonard Bernstein on an old video tape we will recall that she has talked of Bernstein earlier, but rather than discussing him with the admiration of an impoverished girl dreaming of making it in music, she had spoken of him as a colleague. In the interview with Gopnik she offers the impression of a comfortable insider whose talent inevitably led to her success. What the film increasingly shows is a riches to rags story as biographical unravelling, with the viewer seeing Lydia having become such a success by making sure nobody would get in the way of it. The musical purist would say this has nothing to do with the music; those more ethically inclined might insist that people make music and people have an ethical relationship with the world. The film explores what that means as Lydia influences who gets into positions of power, just as we hear when they were younger, Sharon and Lydia negotiated the classical musical world of Berlin, with Sharon helping Lydia become chief conductor. 

        “I don’t think art and morality have anything to do with each other. Just like I don’t think riding a bicycle has anything to do with morality” (Gold Derby) Field says. But this surely depends on the art form and the given conditions of the debate. Riding a bike might have something to do with morality if someone steals your bike and you can’t any longer ride it, as Bicycle Thieves well illustrated. And it is a question of morality when the central character looks like he will steal someone else’s at the end of the film. If riding a bike does indeed have much to do with morality; what doesn’t? Debates about how few working-class actors are coming through in the UK as the profession is dominated by the privately educated are now common. This doesn’t make the performance bad (though it may if a wealthy actor tries to convey poverty and one senses no trace of hardship in the body language), but it could force us to ask questions about how important morality is to our arts and how best to make sure the people with the most ability succeed in their profession. Indeed, Field’s film is partly about how one such apparently working-class person does go on to make it, but as we increasingly realise acted ruthlessly to get herself into such a position. Nobody is denying her talent but Field makes clear it hasn’t only been talent that has got her there, and his very structure emphasises the moral element involved in that ascension. By instead focusing on her rapid decline, Field shows less Tar's ambition than her unscrupulousness. He might say that art and morality have nothing to do with each other but his film proposes that they do. A work either more focused on the character’s rise to chief conductor or one that would exclusively attend to the performance (as a concert film would do) perhaps needn’t prioritise the ethical. 

            The film wishes to explore is the ethical relationship between a life and a work without saying that the work can be understood, or rejected, by the life: correlation over causation. The music doesn’t become any better or worse because of Lydia’s behaviour, just as Polanski or Woody Allen films aren’t inferior even if they are deemed guilty. But the nature of Tar’s success might be explained more than a little by the choices she makes to protect her career and undermine the work of others. The film takes her ability as given and her character as questionable, and Tar becomes chiefly about that behaviour, incorporating the music into the ethos rather than the other way around. If Max at the beginning wants to talk ethics and Lydia music, the film finally sides with Max, in enquiry if not in principle. The film is both centrally and peripherally about ethical questions. Centrally, we have the understudy who takes her own life. Early in the film the offscreen Krista is troubled, contacts Lydia for help and gets ignored. It seems we later discover that not only was Lydia too close to Krista, Lydia also advised others not to employ her. Krista takes her life and Lydia deletes their email exchanges. Later, Lydia insists on an open audition for a cello player when usually it would go to the orchestra’s chief cellist, and while the person who wins, Olga, is good — it is more that Lydia has taken a fancy to her. And of course we have the scene with Max early on. These three scenes — the dispute with Max, the death of Krista and the promotion of Olga — are all part of the film’s trajectory. The media wonders if Lydia is closely connected to Krista’s death, footage of her behaviour with Max is put online, and she is filmed in New York with Olga, as people start to believe this is what she does: humiliate some students, take advantage of others and even leads people to kill themselves. 

           However, the film is peripherally preoccupied with the ethical as well. The film offers an anecdote about philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer’s behaviour, where he pushed a woman down the stairs and for the rest of her life paid compensation, shows Lydia running in the park and hearing the cries of another woman whom she can’t see, and is called upon to help her neighbour when the neighbour’s ill and ageing mother has soiled herself. What does the film wish to suggest including such moments? Perhaps that there is a distinction between one’s moral behaviour and one’s ethical concern, and that Lydia might view the former as contained by her egocentric need to get on, but where the latter helps create a fraying of that centre. Kant’s claim that we should “act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law” covers moral actions, but maybe we need another philosopher to explain the ethical periphery. “Man would like to be an egotist and cannot, Simone Weil says, “this the most striking characteristic of his wretchedness, and the source of his greatness.” She also notes that “purity is the power to contemplate defilement.” (Gravity and Grace) AR Rozelle-Stone, writing on Weil, sees that “attention includes discerning what someone is going through in her or his suffering, the particular protest made by someone harmed, the social conditions that engender a climate for suffering, and the fact that one is, by chance (hazard) at a different moment, equally a subject of affliction." (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) Lydia more than most looks like she wishes to be an egotist, someone at the centre of the universe. The capacity to treat others as if the laws of decency need not be universalised because of her genius no longer quite holds, and increasingly the film shows Lydia paying attention to those on her periphery as if a refrain she cannot deny — and this is the increasing presence of frailty in her own life that is echoed in the lives of other people.

      Whether it is her partner’s prescription pills she increasingly pops, the fall she suffers that leaves her face badly bruised and cut, or the realisation that she is now a middle-aged woman, the ethical periphery echoes her own increasingly fragile centre. When she visits the neighbour’s flat what we see is the antithesis to her abode. Hers is an apartment she has kept for many years even if she also lives in a bigger space with Sharon and their daughter. While Lydia’s is spare and neat, with a fold-up bed, a wall of books and a piano, the neighbour’s place is decked out as a chaotic care home — a home for a mother who can’t look after herself with a middle-aged daughter who looks like she is struggling to cope. The woman has collapsed on the floor and Lydia and the woman’s daughter prop her back in the chair, a bag of bones covered in poop. A horrible description but this is what Lydia sees, and she can’t get back to her flat quick enough and clean the faecal matter of her body. However, it seems as she washes herself furiously that this is more than trying to clean off another’s bodily waste — it is as if she sees in this very ill woman a human precarity that is also her own. Such an engagement with defilement may be Weil’s definition of purity, but Lydia is far from a pure woman partly because her ego has always been paramount. 

         It is this relationship with the body and with ethical concern that allows the film to escape the platitude of a position, or the platitude of its denial. If the film were to say that Tar’s love of music and her ability to conduct allows for the collateral damage of treating people badly, this would be offering the sort of idiocy that led some very smart people writing a letter insisting that Polanski ought to have a get out of jail card. If the film were to instead insist that Lydia’s work should be ignored because she isn’t a very nice person, that would be an acceptance of cancel culture as an a priori claim. In such a response the culture doesn’t much matter; what counts is the position one takes without entertaining the nuances of the art and the ethics. Moral capital trumps cultural capital. However, the problem lies less in an impossible solution but in a false dichotomy. It isn’t an either or but an entanglement, one that insists acknowledging the complexity of one’s response to a work of art. Were someone to say that Bach’s music disagrees with them, that it contains within it an oppressive tone that the person feels is explained partly by the details they discover about Bach’s life, if they feel that Schopenhauer’s a misogynistic philosopher that the anecdote exacerbates, it isn’t useful to say the person is wrong, nor that the private life justifies the rejection of the art. If the latter position insists that the artist’s life is of no importance, and the former reckons it is of paramount importance, then this isn’t because the argument is irresolvable, but that neither party seeks a resolution. Zadie Smith couches it thus: the young are “the generation that says things like I’m not really into Bach. Such statements are calculated to bring out the hysteric in a middle-aged Cultural Luminary, and Tar immediately takes the bait, launching into an aggressive defense laced with high-handed pity (for the young man who dares say it) and a more generalized contempt for his cohort.” (The New York Review of Books) Max sees art produced by people and wants to know if they are ones he might like humanly before deciding what he thinks of the work. Lydia reckons art transcends people and doesn’t care what they are like. Lydia denies the importance of intentionality and Max insists on it even beyond the work created. They are both idealists, however, taking a position that is a bit like other often useless dichotomies that are unlikely to be resolved: determinism versus free will, the mind versus the body, subject versus object and so on.

        Writing on philosopher Richard Wolheim’s aesthetic perspective, William Gass notes that, “for Wollheim painting is an intentional activity, which means that it is governed by some of the “thoughts” that go on in the painter’s head; and our understanding of the painter’s actions will be correct when we can formulate from those actions his actions’ aims.” Gass notes too that “a representation, for Wollheim, must not only depict some condition of experience or item in the world. It must transmit the artist’s moods and emotions, ideas and desires, to observers (who are themselves uncountable and indeterminately different), in such a way that these spectators become shareholders in another life.” (New York Review of Books) If we don’t need to know the intentions of a person who builds a bridge as we may wish to know those of a Van Gogh or a Cezanne, this doesn’t mean we need always to know the intentions of a painting nor never wish to know the intentions of the bridge maker. It depends on the painting; depends on the bridge. There are pretty tourist pictures and portrait paintings done all the time where we have no interest in the painter’s intentions, and there are bridges built where we might wish to read an interview with the architect to comprehend why they built it the way they did. “In the world of architecture, perhaps nothing is more utilitarian than a bridge….In function, they allow us to reach the other side of the divide. In form, however, they do something else entirely.” (Architectural Digest) As the article shows, there are bridges by Alexandre Chan, Santiago Calatrava and Zaha Hadid that will have far greater intentionality beyond the pragmatics of engineering. Calatrava says in an online interview: “I was proceeding to find my own language….independent from schools,…independent from any dictates…”

           Rather than saying art is intentional or it isn’t, or even that some work is intentionally significant and other types of work aren’t, better to try and understand the specific work under discussion and find the best way of comprehending its purpose. This might sound like a useless rejection of the abstract for the insistence of the singular, and how successful would this be for describing anything from genres to schools, from horror films to westerns, from flocks of geese to herds of cows? Generalisations have their place, but they can also be misplaced, and assertive claims in the general often lead to confusion rather than clarification. When Max says he sees Bach as a cis-gendered male who needn’t concern him, he is falling into a generalisation that probably wouldn’t stand up to much scrutiny. He would have to include all heterosexual males and their work as of little interest when maybe he more specifically has a problem with the Bach adulation and the institutional demand that he attend to this master. In turn, Lydia may think that she sees only the work and has no interest in the life. But she appears very much to have made herself anew all the better to project the image of a cool and composed composer, someone who has nothing to do with the girl brought up in that working-class household in New York. 

      We might come away from the exchange between Max and Lydia believing that the student has overreacted and Lydia is in denial. It isn’t just that they take opposing sides, it may also be that the reason they take the sides they do is reflective of the personalities they have. We should remember Max makes great play of his identity as BIPOC transgender. Lydia is someone who despite her lesbianism isn’t inclined to emphasise her identity when aspects of her life are unlikely to augment the image she wishes to show. Max meanwhile may be a little too keen to see it as the basis for understanding the world even of music. They may be arguing over a broad generalisation that says either an artist’s work should be viewed through the life they live or seen for its creativity aside from its biographical specificity. But when we see the argument from the intentionality of its practitioners, we needn’t say one is right and the other wrong; more that they have reasons for holding the positions they hold, even if they might believe their position is objective. Max would be regarding moral capital as paramount; Lydia, cultural capital.  What we are seeing is potentially innumerable nuances. Field captures the ambivalences in a long take that is the opposite of how the footage will later be used on social media. It is a point Lydia makes when she says how the footage has been cut up to make a clear point and to make her look a monster. 

          Ironically, or aptly, and certainly suggestively, we would seem to be arguing against Field’s stance when he argues that art and morality have nothing to do with each other. Instead, we would be inclined to say who is doing the judging - and what does someone want? If Lydia transforms herself from poor, unknown Linda into wealthy renowned Lydia, who knows if she would have become famous if it weren’t for the image she projects, the expensive suits she wears, and the German that she masters. And behind that, there has been her initial jostling for position, her partner who accepts that their relationship is transactional, and the politics of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. Lydia will insist that the music ought to speak for itself but much of her career has been about the constant behind-the-scenes negotiations. Yet these have nothing to do with the art, some could insist, but that depends on the angle adopted. If Field really believes that art and morality have nothing to do with each other he could have chosen to make a film about a politician where he presumably would believe that politics and morality are interconnected, or a concert film with no interest in how the music was constructed, and with no interest in the personalities involved. 

         One isn’t proposing Field should have made a different film. It is that the film he has made is very much concerned with how art and morality are interrelated. It isn’t only the sequence between Max and Lydia; the long conversation at the beginning of the film between Tar and the New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik includes talk of Mahler and his personal life as well as his music. Lydia will talk about the importance of her life when it suits her and, if it could be argued that the personal life and morality are not the same thing, they are when it comes to intentionality. If you do decide to say the work cannot be seen without taking into account the artist’s life, then part of this existence will be the decisions they make: the affairs they have, the drink and drugs they consume, whether they are early risers or late developers, given to gregariousness or beholden to solitude. Once the life is invoked, it isn’t easy to demarcate what counts or what doesn’t. It is more a question of how or why. Lydia is happy discussing Mahler’s private life with Gopnik, but feels Max is naive when he draws similar links between Bach's music and his existence. Tar talks of Mahler’s love for his wife; Max mentions the numerous kids Bach sired. 

        Our point isn’t that we must take sides; Lydia is probably a lot more naive in her intellectual thinking than she believes she is, and this blind spot is perhaps associated with an upbringing that cannot be countenanced and an ethos that proposes nothing matters but the work, especially if the media comes calling after signs of predatory behaviour and exploitative practices. However, despite Field’s remark, despite many seeing the film as unambiguously presenting Lydia as a monster, Tar is ambiguous in the details and potentially sympathetic to her plight. Field has made a film that resolves its dilemma quite well by leaving it moot just how predatory she happens to be, and how condemnatory we ought to be towards her. 

        For some this makes the film troublesome, its ambiguities are too deliberately allowing us to view Tar as potentially an unfairly put-upon figure, because the evidence against her happens beyond the diegetically categorical.  Richard Brody says: the movie takes the point of view of Lydia throughout. She has lived for so long in the world of private jets and private foundations that anything else seems like a dreadful comedown.” (New Yorker) Brody adds that Field “doesn’t convey what Lydia knows of her ostensible misdeeds, whether with flashbacks, internal monologues, or the details of investigations. The film seems to want it both ways: it sustains Lydia’s perspective regarding music, her professional relationships, and her daily aesthetic, while carefully cultivating ambiguity regarding what Lydia is charged with, in order to wag a finger at characters who rush to judgment on the basis of what’s shown (or, what isn’t).” Yet the film does show her humiliating Max, deleting Krista Taylor’s emails, and favouring Olga. It holds to her perspective of events but also implies that here is a woman who might be capable of all the things that others are claiming. It seems daft to propose that the film’s ambiguities are special pleading on Tar’s part and this is all the better to show her as an innocent victim of a witch hunt. She might be a victim but she seems far from innocent, and the film is quite different from a conspiracy thriller where outside forces set out to destroy an unassuming life. The film is more interested in saying that the sort of behaviour she practices might have been tolerated in the past but is intolerable today. It would never have been acceptable but it wouldn’t have become damaging. The film’s purpose is to show us that times have changed and that Lydia doesn’t appear to have realised this; that the qualities she regards as trumping all the others (hard work, talent, ambition and focus) no longer allow people to claim the sort of immunity various well-known actors and directors were trying to demand for Polanski.               

        Though Field’s comments don’t help, and can give Brody’s argument a bit of bolstering, the film is very good at negotiating the tension between artistic pursuit and moral obligation: our duty to the craft and our duty to others. Tar is in some ways a very old tale of hubris as Lydia believes she is above the humble concerns of other people’s feelings, but it is also a very modern film about the tension between cultural capital and moral capital when someone blindly assumes the former is all that matters. As Bourdieu well knew, much that passes for cultural capital is a form of moral capital transformed, manipulated and controlled. Thus we can agree with Field when he says, it “…is a film about power. What are the compromises that are allowed concerning power, whether you hold it, whether you want to hold it, whether you want to have an association with it? That’s very different from saying, ‘I want to make art.’ She’s sitting on top of this huge cultural bureaucracy.” (Dazed) Or as Bourdieu believed, “workers are under this kind of invisible pressure, and so they become much more adapted to their situation than we can believe. To change this is very difficult, especially today. With the mechanism of symbolic violence, domination tends to take the form of a more effective, and in this sense more brutal, means of oppression. Consider contemporary societies in which the violence has become soft, invisible.” (Doxa and Common Life) Lydia has no doubt been practising relatively soft: using her power, which wouldn’t be easy to distinguish from her charm, and using her status - which wouldn’t be easy to distinguish from her talent. She then finds herself in a world where people are beginning to distinguish these things. 

      Bourdieu would see this initial stage as heterodoxical; with Lydia still caught in orthodoxy. It is this heterodoxy Smith credits to Generation Z, believing “every generation comes up against the persistent ethical failures of the human animal. But though there may be no permanent transformations in our emotional lives, there can be genuine reframings and new language and laws created to name and/or penalize the ways we tend to hurt each other, and this is a service each generation can perform for the one before.” (New York Review of Books) When Smith adds, “how would I know this without millennials explaining it to me?” we might insist that a Generation Z term like gaslighting, is several generations old and that great actress of classic Hollywood, Ingrid Bergman, more than anyone else, depicted its terrors, starring in the 1944 film version of Patrick Hamilton’s play, Gaslight. Gaslighting is nothing if not symbolic violence, if we view manipulation, coercion and lying as central to the term. Yet Smith’s claim is in some ways a fair one, especially if that younger generation has qualities the older generation wants and assumes they can possess them without much resistance. Youth may have beauty but little power and is it fair for them to use what they do have? Who can blame Olga for taking advantage of Lydia in her way when she knows Lydia seeks to take advantage of her in hers? 

          The viewer needn’t come down on one side or the other and, if we feel great weaknesses in Brody’s article and minor weaknesses in Smith’s, it rests on their determination to see the film as one thing or another. Brody insists it is too sympathetic to its central character; Smith reckons it shows up the “monstrousness of Tar", “a bad guy” who misuses her own power, and the film forensically explores her failings. But if we can step back a little from a character who seems to demand that distance, and where Field’s style exacerbates it in a filmic approach that no matter the interiority the director sometimes suggests, also relies extensively on framing Lydia, we will see the film as an exploration of an idea as readily as an examination of character. Stylistically, in the early discussion between Gopnik and Tar, the camera is mainly in longshot. After we see Gopnik speaking, filmed from behind his shoulder and on the right side of the frame with Lydia shown seated on the left, he asks her a question and we might expect the next shot to be a medium close-up of Tar replying. Field instead cuts to a long shot from the midst of the audience with Lydia now in the distance on stage. It steadily moves towards closer shots afterwards but it isn’t only in Lydia’s controlled, perhaps contrived and certainly precise body language that we sense aloofness, but also in the directorial register that implies this is a woman the viewer has no need to create identification with. Even when, in the next scene, it moves into close up and Lydia is talking with a fan about her work, the perspective is removed, with her assistant in the background, usually out of focus but within the same frame as the admirer. Tar is a woman who keeps others waiting; a centre of attention that leaves people on the periphery. Field’s approach to character is to comprehend the periphery more than Lydia, and we see it again in the scene with Max, and later in the scene when Olga comes to her personal apartment and they play together. The latter is a fixed frame shot with Lydia playing piano in the foreground; Olga playing cello in the background, with Lydia moving into the distance when she goes to make coffee in the kitchen. Olga then takes the foregrounded position as she asks to play the piano. Lydia comes back into the shot and stands over her as she plays, before guiding her into the kitchen. The shot remains fixed throughout. In the former scene with Max, the lengthy single take removes sympathy formally from Lydia without giving it to Max either. When Lydia mocks the atonal as the camera retreats from her so that it can re-angle the shot to view it from a side elevation where Max is now seated, with his leg shaking, any humour Lydia offers is countered by the frame which shows her distant against the wall. As Smith notes, this is a far less sympathetic audience than the earlier one with the New Yorker crowd, with Smith emphasising the generational difference that Lydia hardly countenances, but in both instances the film offers the opposite of identification as film form. It possesses almost a Kubrickian indifference to the emotion matching formal expectation, and whatever we may believe the film is saying about how sympathetic we should feel towards Lydia, or how much of a monster she happens to be, Tar proposes chiefly that we remain at one remove from her personality, all the better to understand the dynamic she is working with, one that she seems for all her intelligence oblivious to comprehending. 

      This rests on cultural capital meeting moral capital and Lydia believing that to possess enough of the former is an excuse for the paucity of the latter. Times have changed and Lydia is slow to realise, but perhaps also believes that as a lesbian composer this isn’t her problem — let them go after the fat, white men. Yet moral capital is still in some ways capital, and there is money to be made out of another’s dubious behaviour, whoever is committing it, and Lydia becomes a liability. The film may seem to indicate that she deserves the pariah status that leaves her getting by teaching music in the Philippines rather than at the epicentre of culture in Berlin, but it also might be musing over the voraciousness of a moral capital that eats away at cultural capital, with nobody now safe from disapproval and excommunication. It becomes like an inverse nepotism, where instead of family or friends helping your career, family and friends have to distance themselves from your life to avoid infection. If we have nepotism to describe how people maximise their contacts, contact can now also be a troublesome thing, with the term enabling one possible accusation. Both Field and Blanchett have benefitted from working with Woody Allen; Field got his start in Radio Days; Blanchett won the best actress Oscar for Blue Jasmine. When asked about the scandal surrounding Allen in a CNN interview with Christiane Amanpour, Blanchett believed these are questions for a court of law and shouldn’t be dictated by social media. What she could have added was that, if she weren’t to have worked with him, it should have been based on a court decision: refusing to work with a filmmaker whose behaviour towards Dylan Farrow in the early 90s was grossly inappropriate, if not sexual. But so many actors worked with Allen during the following years (Sean Penn, Billy Crystal, Kristen Stewart, Scarlett Johansson, Jesse Eisenberg) and only after ‘Me Too’ did actors distance themselves, often saying they would never appear in an Allen film again. That was a good business move and maybe a morally righteous thing to do, but it shows how being part of a network that offers numerous opportunities can become toxic if you find yourself accused of enabling a career that some believe ought to have been hobbled. 

    How many working with Lydia would want to keep their distance once the accusations start, and we watch as her assistant Francesca (Noemi Merlant) disappears from her life and the film, while Sharon can see Lydia is no longer an asset but a problem. We wouldn’t want to claim that Sharon doesn’t have very good reasons to tell Lydia to leave, nor that the assistant hasn’t reason to exit Lydia’s life (she treats both badly). But the timing may indicate sudden self-interest after a long period of self-sacrifice. If the film is an ethical work it isn’t because it rejects Lydia but that it questions, too, those who reject her, wondering if they are doing so for the best of reasons, well aware that career enhancement isn’t based on talent alone. Francesca was looking for a promotion; Sharon has long since worked in alliance with Lydia in a way that has also been useful for her career. It isn’t that they should have stayed loyal to Lydia over what has happened, but that they didn’t shouldn’t only be seen as acting decently. Lydia and Woody Allen become scapegoats, a status they may deserve but that doesn’t absolve those who have been around them if the behaviour has been so evident and they have remained silent. That isn’t the same as suggesting guilt by association, but who can pretend that won’t be a factor in many people’s rejection of Allen and others: that they have to avoid the contagion of disapproval?

          Lydia initially assumes art can save her but while that may be true in a culturally capitalised society, it becomes tenuous in a morally capitalised one. Values that seem self-evident to one generation appear self-evidently quite different to another. Ian Buruma was fired from very magazine Smith’s Tar article appears in. The New York Review of Books sacked the editor after “publishing and defending [a] Jian Ghomeshi piece deemed to be at odds with spirit of #MeToo” (Guardian). Numerous writers announced this was detrimental to free speech and robust debate including Ian McEwan, Joyce Carol Oates Lorrie Moore and John Banville. They were defending cultural capital, but perhaps their age belied their beliefs: most who signed the petition were in their sixties and seventies. Maybe they had little to lose except their cultural privilege — most were established figures who could take a position without fear of unemployment. They might be seen as exemplifying the sort of culturally authoritative figures Smith thinks could be going out of fashion. Tar shouldn’t be viewed as a film that takes an approving or disapproving stance on its central character, but muses over what has become a central issue of the last few years and which doesn’t look like going away just yet. 

© Tony McKibbin