Keeping Tempo but Losing Time: TÁR (2022) Ending Explained
Love it or hate it, TÁR (2022), Todd Field’s sprawling drama about the downfall of a renowned conductor, has inspired quite the back and forth. One camp believes that the titular Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett) is an anti-hero, an enigmatic truth-teller whose undeniable talent tempers her corrosive and morally dubious interpersonal skills. The other camp believes the film is all pretense with little substance to back it up, a murky musing on “cancel culture” overshadowed by Todd Field’s conservative politics – a stance I thought Richard Brody expressed rather succinctly. I fall somewhere in between. I agreeTÁR has little to nothing to say about #MeToo, and what it does say feels extremely backwards. The never-ending discussion on a topic that the film barely seems to comprehend is indeed a product of the film’s own nebulous focus – or simply the result of flawed filmmaking, especially considering how many are interpreting the ending as “it was all a dream.” Which is a shame because it distracts from the themes that TÁR does well, specifically its wry look at the human fragility behind those who hold positions of power.
Lydia Tár is the sort of artistic genius whose intimidatingly long list of musical achievements and accomplishments – from claiming Leonard Bernstein as a mentor to becoming the first female chief conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic – establishes her as the type of cultural icon that crosses over into the purview of both laymen and melophiles. It’s a reputation that can only be achieved through some mysterious mix of talent, persistence, money and, most importantly, timing. Lydia came in at a time when the celebrity playing field was significantly smaller, curated by monied gate keepers who fashioned themselves devine tastemakers. Once you made it, you made it – there was little to no fear of having to keep striving in order to keep your legacy intact, save aging gracefully. At that level all you needed to do was to try and keep busy until death, an inevitability that served to only further canonize your accomplishments.
Lydia’s obsession with legacy is in turn an obsession with control. When she sets out to accomplish something, it’s an all or nothing pursuit; establishing dominance through sheer force of will is the tried and true path laid out by the men who came before her. But in this modern world of populist, social media-driven celebrity, spaces once reserved for the self-appointed elite have shrunk significantly. So focused on her need to achieve an invulnerable standard, reinvent herself in her own perceived image, Lydia becomes blind to the evolving reality around her. In the much discussed Julliard scene, we see Lydia wantonly dismiss what she chalks up to intellectual cowardice in a student. She forces this young man to speak on a topic he’s clearly uncomfortable speaking with her about, and then humiliates him in front of the class for his milquetoast responses. This incident, unremarkable to Lydia and unforgivable to her students, is later refashioned into a Trojan Horse of sorts – finally opening Lydia’s eyes to the fact that her status as “untouchable” is not as sured up as she once thought.
With her control slipping away into unknown territory, Lydia starts to view the passage of time as her true enemy. It’s the force that awes and antagonizes her; whether she’s attempting to tackle a massive recording project, waking in the middle of the night to the sound of a ticking metronome, ruminating on the indelible nature of digital correspondence, or looking to consume the life-force of bright young things. She becomes consumed by obsessive thoughts of aging, seeing reflections of it everywhere while desperate to avoid actually looking at herself. One of the film’s more striking scenes, Lydia is coaxed out of her apartment to help her neighbor move her disabled mother. Inside she finds a stark reminder of everything she fears; this dirty, dimly lit apartment is the opposite of her impeccable and bright pied-à-terre, and this completely naked, nearly catatonic elderly woman serves as a portend of how old age robs us of dignity. In an uncharacteristic move, Lydia helps the old woman back into her wheelchair, but it’s a moment of fear masquerading as selflessness – its clearly unbearable for her to spend more than a few minutes living vicariously through such irrelevance. Her disgust at being forced to even witness this possible outcome later manifests as childish lashing out the next time her neighbors ask for a favor.
It’s this naivety that’s really at the heart of everything Lydia Tár does and says. It’s why she becomes a stalwart for the male power structure despite being a pioneering female professional and member of a sexual minority. Lydia claims to believe that art is more important than the artist – that race and gender are only boundaries if you’re weak and untalented, or that the artist’s personal beliefs, no matter how toxic, should have no bearing on their reputation. She parrots this point to her students, and she uses it to justify her unprofessional relationships with potential mentees. Yet in her professional life, art doesn’t seem to be what inspires Lydia at all – she’s much more inspired and beguiled by the power of youth. It’s not artistic integrity that she follows into that abandoned building, but the desire to keep riding the contact high of Olga Metkina. Instead what she finds is an inaccessible maze; another terrifying reflection of a silly older woman who’s letting her dignity slip through her fingers.
In the end, Lydia’s rigid belief in this system harms not only new talent looking to breakthrough, but herself. She bought too hard into her own mythology, pointing to famous composers throughout history as if greatness somehow naturally rises to the top. But a new guard is emerging, rapidly overtaking the old guard with a digital-driven, populist force and their own rigid set of values. The minute she smells her own blood in the water, Lydia’s self preservation instincts kick in again. Her desperate need to be established quickly overrides her previous belief in artistic purity. It becomes clear that Lydia has no real values other than simply appealing to those she perceives to be in power. She might have been born in the wrong time to play the music that she wanted to play, but she's ruthless enough to not let that rob her of her status at the top. Lydia returns to her childhood home to mourn the death of the woman she was, a symbolic pilgrimage that serves to show the audience how truly hollow her entire image had always been. Then sets out to reestablish herself again – pandering all the way to cultural relevance.
