Reupping for Oscár night. Rooting for Tóp Gún, but meanwhile do wish folks would take more seriously the way Tár isn't just "about" classical music, but actually cuts a path from this niche culture to tragedy/possibility of universalism. The movie uses the orchestra as
https://twitter.com/spbrodsky/status/1607843384529485828
something more than just a metaphor for western secular liberalism, the orchestra & all its cultural supports become a real materialization of it, its flesh. & the ending makes a stark claim: the orchestra has always been a dream, a rebus, veiling colonial/imperial domination. 
It does this so subtly or better obliquely—it is itself a kind of dream, seemingly realistic when experienced but when recounted quite hazy & ridiculous—that it's possible to see the whole film as a metaphor, which splits in 2 directions:
either 1) it's front-row-hand-in-the-air timely, a #cancelculture movie, or 2) it's a "timeless tale" of power & abuse; the problem is that it's not great as either, largely bc it supports anything you bring to it. Where it stops being merely a Rorschach test is
when it's allowed to stand in for a historical epoch, the Philharmonic Age one could call it, whose opening anthropological encounter & closing forced exile render that Age from an outside its narrative & camera—which are Tár—otherwise repress at all costs, like tinnitus.
The movie's relationship to repression, in the good ol fashion Freudian sense, is weirdly absent from almost all the discourse, as if it's so obvious it's not worth remarking. But!
It alos draws such an elegant, sometimes virtuosic line bw how Tár represses—people, relationships, sounds, feelings, thoughts, life—& how the orchestra & "classical music culture" generally does the same. In both cases, there is a return, and it's a bitch.
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
