We need to talk about TÁR

now is obviously the time

(The caveat to all of this is the fact that I have seen this film exactly once, three months ago, and am currently riding the emotional rollercoaster of being a month out from book launch while my almost 3yo yells at me hourly.)

I have been thinking about TÀR, a film I loved and will grant the pretension of the all caps and accent, because that is its point. Every so often a tweet goes viral claiming to have the answer to this movie (“it’s a comedy!” “it’s about cancel culture!” “it’s high on its own supply!”) and inevitably I am struck anew with frustration at how reductive we are, how unwilling to sit with discomfort or grant grace to anyone or anything that we don’t immediately understand. To be honest, I think I did understand TÀR. I think it’s a film about a woman who’s so caught up in what she feels she has to be in order to break into a conservative establishment that she’s come out the other side—Linda at her mom’s house to Lydia the caricature—until her internal world boils over with the dissonance. It’s pure Gothic, a tell-tale heart that she buries so deeply everyone at the end is just humoring this lady who let go of her actual self for a gross image of herself that inevitably shattered and she tried to reglue. Also house porn. It is supposed to be pretentious! It is supposed to be sad and funny! We are supposed to think about how we, too, would trade sexual favors for the attention of this woman who is charming and sometimes terrible and wears a killer suit! We are not supposed to try to map a one-to-one correspondence of symbolism and meaning onto every single frame and then complain when we don’t get it.

In a way, the varied responses to TÀR make me feel better about my own work. If a film I respected and loved can be so misunderstood, it stands to reason that people are going to trash my own sapphic orchestra horror story. Not everything is for everybody, etc. etc. My issue is mostly with the declaration that just because you didn’t understand something, it’s incomprehensible. And the opposing—that it’s possible to find the key to art that will unlock all of it’s intricacies and lay them out in small digestible pieces. What I want is to be swept up and slapped in the face, I want art to make me feel. This runs fully counter to the idea that something would be wrapped in a neat little bow. I suppose what I am saying is let TÀR, let films and books and music, be misunderstood. That is the point of them. I bring me and you bring you and a la Barthes we make our own meanings.

Have you considered that your dismissal of something like TÀR says more about you yourself than the film? We aren’t all meant to be critics (more on the death of culture writing coming…possibly never… it’s too depressing on both a personal and societal scale). Don’t worry, I myself have absolutely considered that my frustration with the flattening of discourse says more about me than it does either the magazine critic gleefully lampooning or the social media user pressing retweet. Perhaps this entire conversation is best summed up by one Ramona Singer, queen of the housewives, long may she reign.

Anyway, if you liked (or disliked or felt ambivalent toward) TÀR, preorder my book, it also has Lully call-out.

xoxox.

LETTER OF RECOMMENDATION

• that incredibly stressful episode of Succession that will maybe make a few CNN executives feel dumb

• Supergoop’s Unseen Sunscreen

• taking your kid for a strep test sooner rather than later

• Empty Theatre by Jac Jemc

• Elton John and Tim Rice’s Aida, specifically the part when Adam Pascal sings “a woman who I hardly know at all and will forget” and Heather Headley’s “I don’t want to live like that”

• Ali Slagle’s Turmeric-Black Pepper Chicken with Asparagus, best made while listening to the above