The Hauntings of Lydia Tár

The first shot of Todd Field’s 2022 film Tár is phone held by an unknown person, filming a sleeping Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett) on a plane. Over the image pop up chat messages: 

—our girls an early riser isnt she

—haunted

—ha you mean she has a conscience

—maybe

—you still love her then

From the beginning then, we have a sense of Tár as haunted, and this haunting is related also to the idea (and question) of her conscience. According to the screenplay, the app used to film Tár and chat about her is TikTok, and the script then explicitly connects this to one of the many repeated motifs through the film: the tick-tock of the metronome counting time. Tár is such a richly, even ostentatiously, allusive film that it would not be unreasonable to think of Cole Porter’s “Night and Day” here, a song from the musical Gay Divorce, with its lines:

It’s a stretch, certainly, but Cole Porter is briefly present in the film when Tár is stuck on a composition and starts noodling with “Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye”‘s famous “There’s no love song finer/ But how strange the change from major to minor/ Every time we say goodbye…”

Lydia Tár is haunted by the spectre of the popular. She has devoted her life to the most classic of classical music, to the great European canon, and anything that threatens that canon with infection or impurity is horrifying to her, it must be attacked, derided, marginalized, erased, wiped out. Her approach to aesthetic is similar to her approach to surfaces: fear of germs.

Yet Lydia Tár is torn. This is what makes her interesting. She is not in any way a “sympathetic character”. She is someone who wrecks at least as much as she creates. She is charismatic, talented, and accomplished — but equally she is haughty, manipulative, fake. She is always lying, always performing. And always, always haunted.

It isn’t until the end of the film that we get to see what most deeply haunts her. In many ways, the single most important scene in the whole movie is one where she visits her childhood home on Staten Island. She watches a videotape of a tv show where Leonard Bernstein talks to children about Tchaikovsky, saying that there’s no need to know anything about sharps and flats and musical notation to be able to appreciate it, that music is about feelings, and it has the power to evoke feelings we don’t even have words for. The message is a decidedly populist one, and also one that at the time was scoffed at by cognoscenti who thought Bernstein was making music too accessible to hoi polloi. (I knew an elderly music professor who loathed Bernstein for exactly this reason.) But this is the message that most deeply resonates for Lydia, the message that she has held onto for all these years, the message she whispers along with in the time-halted home where her secret self still hides. (Hides? Or rests?)

At the house, Lydia encounters her brother Tony, a working-class guy in his 50s who says, “Oh, hi Linda — sorry, Lydia.” The screenplay lets us know his last name is spelled Tarr, no accent mark. Lydia Tár is a self-invention of Linda Tarr.

Lydia is haunted by Linda. At the beginning of the movie, she refuses to visit her mother. The world of Lincoln Centered, foundation-funded high culture must not meet the world of Staten Island — too much chance of infection. At the end, though, her career destroyed by scandal, Lydia Tár has nothing left to lose, no impurity to fear, no masks left to wear, and so she goes home, returns to the point of origin, the place where her brother can barely be bothered by her presence, who sees her as nothing but a person.

Lydia is also haunted by accordions. She has named her own foundation Accordion. We can understand why when she goes home. The pictures of her as a little girl are pictures of her with an accordion. That’s how she learned music. Not at a grand piano, not in some effete salon. She played the accordion. An instrument of folk music, an instrument made popular by Myron Floren on the Lawrence Welk Show, the chosen instrument of Weird Al.

For all her fetishizing of originality, Lydia Tár can’t let anything go. She holds on to her first apartment in Germany in the same way her family holds onto the home in Staten Island, preserved like a time capsule. When she goes to the doctor after a serious fall, he diagnoses Notalgia paresthetica, which she mishears as nostalgia. Paralysis by nostalgia. (The musician hearing wrongly.) And yet, as steeped in nostalgia as she is, she feels nothing but contempt for it in others. She says the older conductor Sebastian has “fetishes”: “Nostalgia for pre-war Kalmus miniature scores, dead-stock pencils he’s seen Karajan hold in photographs. That sort of thing.” Hardly different from her, and yet…

Blanchett’s performance is extraordinary because it is, in fact, multiple performances in one. Cate Blanchett plays Linda Tarr playing Lydia Tár, she plays Lydia Tár playing herself, she plays a stereotypical male gender role playing a woman, she plays the amorphous, ambiguous someone of a self playing Lydia Tár. This movie, too, could be called I’m Not There. Cate Blanchett is especially good in movies made by Tod(d)s. (Tod in German means death. Think Liebestod.) We mustn’t miss the quieter, but equally profound, performance of Nina Hoss, a beautiful woman here made to look frumpier and homelier than she has in any film I can remember. She has her own hauntings, both in the film and outside. Todd Field must be familiar with the 2014 Christian Petzold masterpiece she stars in, Phoenix, a movie about identity, impersonation, reconstruction, ghosts, and revenge. The casting is perfect because Hoss can do so much with so little, and Sharon serves as quiet counterpoint to Lydia’s performative charisma. Sharon, too, is haunted — we see when we first meet her — but how she chooses to live her haunted life is very different from Lydia’s choices.

Lydia Tár is haunted by the past, haunted by time. “Keeping time,” she says to Adam Gopnik at a New Yorker Festival event, “is not small thing.” She is haunted by her actions in the past, her feelings in time. This is where the film becomes a ghost story. Objects mysteriously move around, dead people seem to stalk her. One of the mysterious objects is a metronome, the mechanical version of a conductor, the tool for the keeping of time. Lydia’s past decisions, her indiscretions, slip out of the past and infect her present.

Pursuing her desires leads her to a grimy place where her latest crush, Olga, is, apparently, squatting, a place that feels like something out of Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia or Stalker. Lydia injures herself running up a slippery staircase, then of course lies about it, blames men attacking her.

Her desires lead to her undoing. Her desires are intertwined with arrogance, with a sense of power. She feeds off the wealthy, elite culture she has entered, just as she feeds it. But that culture will always protect itself, insulate itself, and the moment she stops being useful, the moment her reputation and public perception becomes a threat, she is cast out like any of the young women she herself tossed away. For a girl from Staten Island, power is only ever something borrowed, never something owned. Her mistake was thinking she possessed power when in fact she was possessed by it. It was her mistake with Krista, Francesca, and Olga, too. But Olga is different. Olga is more like Lydia. Olga has her own hauntings and possessions, her own ambitions and vampiric needs. Cue Radiohead: We suck young blood.

Though she chases and often destroys women, Lydia is haunted by men. Understandably — the patriarchal control of her chosen field is vividly demonstrated. She is interrogated by smarmy men (Adam Gopnik), funded by rich men she considers of no talent (Eliot Kaplan, played by Mark Strong), the union for the orchestra in Berlin is controlled by a man to whom she must seek approval for any changes in personnel, she is mentored by men, etc. None of these men seem especially bad, but they are all obstacles in one way or another. Obstacles to her power, her autonomy, her goals. And threats to the self-image she has so carefully created.

Threats are everywhere. Reality is a threat to Lydia Tár, because she has so carefully and effectively put up walls between reality and whatever she might identify as her self. She is a constructed image, her everyday life barely different from the images she works hard to create for her album covers.

The scene that gets the most commentary (generally for reasons I think miss a lot of the point of the film) is a scene at Julliard where Lydia Tár humiliates a young man who has what might be called an identitarian or social-justice approach to musical appreciation. HIs is a somewhat parodic characterization of a fairly common attack on the classical canon as being too white, male, patriachal, European, etc. Tár does her own version of a Leonard Bernstein lecture on the Romantic wonders of music, but she doesn’t have Bernstein’s knack for populism and, in any case, it’s no longer the 1960s. She clings to an idea of music beyond identity because she desperately needs to believe in it — her whole constructed self-image is based on the idea. And yet the film constantly undermines her claims. First, the scene in which she makes the claims is filmed in a single, masterful shot, the kind of long take beloved of a certain type of film bro, a technique that, for all its undeniable achievement, in the context of contemporary cinematic discourse feels like prick-waving. The technique itself is innocent and neutral, used historically for all sorts of worthwhile purposes, but the way it has come to be venerated and discussed in recent years has given it an unfortunately macho connotation. It’s a power move, a dick move. Just like Tár’s “masterclass”.

(That the film is not taking Tár’s side should be obvious for all sorts of reasons, but one of them is musical. The music she makes fun of the young man conducting is by the Icelandic composer Anna Thorvaldsdottir, and the film’s own composer is Thorvaldsdottir’s Icelandic compatriot Hildur Guðnadóttir, so the film itself has a real commitment to Icelandic musicians.)

Much as she derides the patriarchy, Tár wants the patriarchal power for herself. When she threatens the schoolyard bully who is bothering her daughter, Lydia identifies herself as “Petra’s father”. Power, to her, is masculine. The ghostly Krista perhaps recognized this, at least if she is the one who sent Lydia a first edition of Vita Sackville-West’s Challenge, in which Sackville-West made herself more or less into a man she might like to have been. (Remember, too, that she was the model for Woolf’s gender-switching Orlando. And that Violet Trefusis, who was so important to Challenge, wrote about both Woolf and Sackville-West in lightly-disguised form in Broderie Anglais.) 

Lydia Tár is haunted by her own actions. When she is in the Philippines at the end of the film, she goes for a massage and is presented with a group of numbered women positioned almost like a chamber orchestra. She is told to choose one by their number. She flees outside and vomits, overwhelmed, it seems, by the utterly bare, transactional, exploitative version of, really, what she did with promising young women in orchestras. This is a new world. She is a new person, haunted now, perhaps, by her past behavior, the behavior that cost her everything she valued.

She is haunted, too, by intentions. Throughout the film, she has strictly advocated for an auteurist idea of the composer’s intentions and of the musician as the interpreter of intentions. Yet her own intentions are mostly inscrutable, and again and again we see her behaving in ways that violate or obscure good intentions. It is one of the few concepts she clings to at the end, though. She says to the young orchestra in Makati, “Good morning. Now before we begin, let’s talk a bit about the composer’s intent with this piece. And what she might be after.” That seems reasonable until we see what kind of situation this is — a live orchestra performance of the score for the Monster Hunter video game, with the audience full of cosplaying people. Is Tár just delusional? Is she taking much too seriously something that not so long ago she would have scorned as popular and shallow? Or … is she onto something? Why not take this composers intentions seriously? Why not take the whole situation seriously? Music can raise new feelings in this space as well as any other. Whatever truths exist in Tár’s ideas must exist here at least as much as in the hallowed halls of Julliard or the Dresden Kulturpalast.

The final scene is enigmatic, bizarre, befuddling, magnificent. Tár’s great love and devotion is to music. That’s what takes her to new worlds. For better or worse, she sticks to what she knows and how she knows it. And everybody seems happy. That’s what strikes me as wondrous about the end of the movie — it is a portrait of joy. The kind of joy Bernstein advocated for. Lydia Tár has found her place, and it’s not in the corrupt and corrupting world of expensive classical music in major cities in the West, it’s a big event for a video game in the Philippines. An event for people whose language she does not speak, and yet they share a love of music, of the feelings music can provide and provoke. And a love of roleplay and games. Perhaps Tár has truly found the place where she belongs, the place where she can feel a kind of freedom and joy unavailable in the smothering halls of culture’s palaces.

This brings us to something else that haunts Lydia Tár: her work in the Peruvian Amazon with the Shipibo-Konibo people, a matriarchal culture that resisted colonization. The film’s credits run over shaman Elisa Vargas Fernández’s “Cura Mente”. Interestingly, the credits are those more commonly put at the end of a film, and they are practically unreadable: in tiny font that is just about impossible to make out even on a big screen (I first saw the film on a huge screen at Dartmouth College) and too quickly changed for anyone but the speediest of speed readers to be able to read it all anyway. I think it is not accidental that the film begins with end credits and those credits are inscrutable. At the actual end, the credits are much more readable, and there’s another interesting effect of them: the composers are equalized. Bach is credited in the same style and font as Fernandez (and the Icelandic composers).

Lydia Tár only briefly mentions her time in the Amazon, and she does so to contrast the musical philosophy of the Shipibo-Konibo to the philosophy of Bernstein — and she seems to take the position of the Shipibo-Konibo over her beloved Lenny, saying that 

the Shipibo-Konibo only receive an icaros, or song, if the singer is “there” on the same side as the spirit who created it. In this way the past and present converge. The flip sides of the same cosmic coin. That definition of fidelity makes sense to me. But Lenny believed in teshuvah, the Talmudic power to reach back in time and transform the significance of one’s past deeds.

Note that she uses the word fidelity. This, too, is an important concept throughout the film — obviously, there is the idea of fidelity to people you love, fidelity as the opposite of betrayal (a fidelity Lydia Tár is notably bad at) but there’s also the fidelity of musical reproduction (note her discussion of direct-to-disc recording, of wanting to hear an mp3 rather than a WAV file, etc.), and fidelity to truth. Are the various video recordings throughout the film providing fidelity, or is their fidelity misleading, warped? Is something called live the same as alive?

And what of Krista Taylor? Does she haunt Lydia Tár? That’s an important question of the film, because it is the question of Lydia’s conscience. Is it Krista — either as person or ghost — who is chatting with Francesca? Is it Krista who sends provocative gifts to Lydia? The question is never answered, but it is strongly implied that Krista is the answer. Krista brings the film closest to Robert Aickman territory. She is the ghost in the movie’s machines.

Lydia Tár is haunted. And that is why Tár is a great and beguiling film.