#todd fields

—Emmalea Russo, "Lydia Tár, Metrosexual Metronome"

Sorry, do they not teach the formal characteristics of tragedy in high school anymore? (You don't need dead white men as exemplars to do it: Fences will work as well as Hamlet.) Her "tragic flaw"—yes, obvious high school terminology; but let us not be superior to the obvious—is that she does make good points, she's even straightforwardly right, she grasps this intellectually, but she won't live by it. She knows the "self" isn't the source of the art, but still acts as if her own "self" is entitled by virtue of the art to exemptions from ordinary ethics. If she didn't "make some good points" in this scene, the drama would have no tension, no irony, and no tragedy. People blame the superhero genre for this demand that art be flat, moralistic, and didactic, but even Magneto and the Joker are customarily allowed to "make some good points," so Lydia's identification of social media as the problem may be more persuasive.

(A deeply political question about the film, one more advanced than the 101-level "moral or immoral" readings encouraged by social media, would dwell on the division introduced in the opening scene between shamanic and Talmudic theories of art. The Castalia Substack elaborates:

The clue, for me, comes all the way at the film’s beginning in her discussion with New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik on the art of conducting. A distinction is drawn between Tár and her mentor, Bernstein. “Lenny believed in teshuvah, the Talmudic power to reach back into time and transform the significance of one’s past deeds,” she says. But, for Tár, the formative experience occurred in the five years she spent with the Shipibo-Konibo in the Amazon. “The Shipibo-Konibo only receive an icaros, or song, if the singer is there on the same side as the spirit who created it, and in that way past and present converge,” she says. Her way is exactly what her brother is accusing her of—she is a person without a past or future; but the more positive way of phrasing that is that she belongs to an eternal present, to shamanic time. As she says in the Gopnik interview, describing her role as a conductor, “Time is the thing, time is the essential piece of interpretation. You cannot start without me. I start the clock.”

17:30