Tár's Indigenous shadow

Yes, I finally saw the film. No, I didn't entirely hate it.

I finally went to se Tár over the weekend. I hadn’t been particularly interested, but my partner convinced me. I haven’t read any reviews (before or since), and I’ve only seen the film once, so take this with a grain of salt.

I was surprised by the film’s treatment of Indigenous knowledge, which serves as a kind of connective tissue, a through line. And also, I was struck by how it dialogues with another film about a white musician who steals Indigenous songs: Claudia Llosa’s La teta asustada (Milk of Sorrow). I’ll get back to this later.

For now, two points:

1. The film opens and closes with Tár in relation to Indigenous people. In the opening, we hear an Amazonian song, in the closing, she is in Southeast Asia (The Philippines) and she is directing some sort of cosplay film score.

2. The film insists on Tár’s relationship with shamanism. We first see her as her bio is being read in an interview, which notes her time with an Amazonian tribe. We see a photograph of her and the Amazonian shaman hung on the wall of her apartment; she has a number of dream sequences and hallucinations, and one in particular that takes her back to the Amazon, to a blue lagoon in which she is on a bed that catches on fire as a snake wriggles toward her. And the shape that she sees repeatedly may be a type of Indigenous textile design or shamanic imprint.

These two points need to be unpacked a bit, but my idea is that the whole film is predicated on Lydia Tár’s ability to transform that “divine” or “sacred” energy into a singular focus on individualism and genius. And that individual genius is predicated on her sublimation of Indigenous knowledge. Or perhaps not sublimation in the psychoanalytic sense, but on her harnessing of it, her haunting by it.

She is a genius. But look at the cost. Look at how she devours everything around her in order for that to happen.

On the surface, the film seems like an extended debate about the role of the Western canon, and how the appreciation of that canon has shifted as “the culture” has taken greater interest in the subjectivities of those who created it. The scene at Julliard is the most obvious example, in which she eviscerates a young Black genderqueer student for not being able to “identify” with Bach.

As I have been thinking about this scene, the issue is not so much a debate between “cancel culture” and those who would maintain the canon (and by extension white cispatriarchy). Sure, that is one reading, but it is not a particularly interesting one. If anything the film argues that such a debate is futile precisely because in order to create great art you have to be willing to destroy everything around you. Great art is the problem, yes, but so is asking someone to be something they aren’t.

Perhaps this is where the Indigenous knowledge comes in. Because if we take the position that Tár is an intensely flawed figure, not a hero but a self-deluded force, then that delusion is the canon. In her singular desire to perform the canon, she cannot see the power dynamics that made it what it is.

But what if the film is a demonstration of what happens when white people steal Indigenous knowledge?

What if the film is predicated on the shamanistic journey that Tár takes at the beginning?

What if the film is not an example of white genius, but of the consequences of extractivism (colonial, intellectual, artistic) that are required for that genius?

I think this second reading is actually more in line with the cinematography as well as the narrative arc of the film. The fragmentary nature of the perspective—lurching backwards at times, and at others intercalating somewhat dubious (or perhaps imaginary) references. Is the black dog really there? Is the shape really something she sees on the book she is given or in her daughter’s play dough? We are asked to stitch together some of these fragments, but the overall effect is not one of narrative cohesion, but rather a disturbing disjointedness, as if reality were out of sync. And I think this pairs well with the notion that we are not meant to trust Tár as a narrator, and when we see things, we are not always certain what domain (spiritual, physical) we are looking at.

So if this is the case, then not only is the musical genius a product of her time in the Amazon, but the pacing and cinematography also in some way reflect the character wrestling with the aftereffects of her shamanic journey. And I am not convinced it was a good one.

After all, she does not seem to have learned much, and she does not personally mention the Indigenous people with whom she lived, apparently, for five years.

I want to make sure I have this down: Tár is a film that wrestles not with the facile divisions of old and new, or even primarily whiteness versus political correctness, but rather with the possibility of individual genius. In my reading the film is dubious on that count. And it seems like the individuality of Tár’s genius is something that is only possible because of her voracious appetite for the knowledge of others. And that knowledge, in particular Indigenous knowledge, is presented not as a source of inspiration, but a haunting. She is haunted by this past.

And at the end of the film, she seems poised to start the process all over again.

In other words, and as we learn from the PR firm that has advised her after her “fall from grace,” she needs a new story. That story (like all individual genius stories) has to begin with a journey of discovery (think hero narratives, the picaresque even). But in Tár’s case, like that of so many people hyper focused on the achievement of individual brilliance, it does not matter where she comes from, or how many times she has to restart, only that she has a formula for success—and that formula requires the appropriation, consumption, and digestion of Indigenous knowledge.

Which is where the connection to La teta asustada comes in, finally. In Llosa’s film it is Aída, a white Peruvian upper-class pianist who has the drive to consume. And her theft of her Indigenous domestic employee (Fausta) is much more obvious. The colonial implications in the case of Perú are unavoidable. But in Tár, we see a similar type of extraction, set on a global stage. And this is why I don’t hate the film: it is predicated on the drive to take Indigenous knowledge, but as an audience we do not empathize with Lydia Tár, like we do not with Aída, and are in fact pushed to identify with those who enter her wake as collateral damage. If anything, the film is an inditement of the colonial condition of modernity, one in which individual genius is only possible by way of an apocalyptic (or to use the Anishinaabe term, wendigo) appetite. Tár is voracious. She is destructive. She justifies all of this and is aided in her delusions by those around her, but she is also a figure whose appetite will never be sated, and this, in the end, is colonial capitalism. We see how, in the end, she is merely a symptom of that system, a logical extension of it, rather than an individual force with the power to bend reality to her will.