Tár toddler

[calimac]

After I saw the movie Tár, I posted regarding what baffled me about it.

And now, here's an answer to at least three of my six questions: the latter part of the film is a hallucination or dream.

Sorry, I don't buy it. I've seen movies with hidden hallucinations or dreams in them before, and they usually worked it better than this. Clearest was Brazil, which - uniquely in this set - openly reveals this at the end. But I'd figured this out earlier, from noticing that the plot had lost all coherence and then deducing at what point this had happened.

Best at this was Mulholland Drive. On first viewing I found it fascinating but completely opaque. Somebody had to tell me that the first part of the movie is the fantasy dream of the character from the second part of the movie, but once they did so, everything in the movie suddenly made sense, which is not only brilliant but is why I put no credence in alternative explanations which don't work as well.

(There is also Fight Club, which I haven't seen and - going by what I've read about it - I doubt I would want to see.)

I also have to include Barton Fink, which I've never read analyzed this way but which I was forced to conclude is a complete hallucination once the story leaves New York, because otherwise I can't make any sense of it at all. I did notice a change of moviemaking style at that point, from naturalism to an eerie "Star Trek at the O.K. Corral" style, which contributed to my theory.

Mulholland Drive also changes style - mostly in its use of color and lens setting - at the critical point, and so does Brazil, mostly in story presentation. But Tár doesn't. It feels the same way all the way through. Maybe the whole movie is a hallucination? But that amounts to no more than saying that the whole movie is fiction, which we knew already. But by denying the viewer even the right to secondary belief, it makes the viewer into a patsy for even trying to watch it at all. So I hope the hallucination theory is false, but that still leaves me with six baffled questions.

Comments

[benbenberi]

There's an article on this very subject in Slate today: https://slate.com/culture/2022/12/tar-cate-blanchett-movie-ending-explained-analyzed.html

[calimac]

Thank you, but did you not notice that that very article is what prompted this post and that I linked to it in my second sentence? The whole post is commenting on and responding to the argument in that article.

[benbenberi]

You perhaps imagine that I (1) follow all links in every post (about I movie I haven't seen and don't intend to) or (2) reread the entire post and follow all the links when I find something related to the topic hours later in the course of doing something else altogether? In answer, no, I did not notice, and also no, I don't care that I provided redundant information. Have a very nice day.

[calimac]

It isn't necessary to follow the link: just hover over it. I do that all the time.

You could perhaps have saved yourself a little time if you had stopped for a moment to consider the coincidence that I was writing about an article that claimed to reveal the secret of this movie at the very time that you were reading an article that claimed to reveal the very same secret source of this movie. It's usually a good idea to do so. Have an equally redundant day.

[andrewducker]

Fight Club definitely makes a reveal 3/4 of the way through that recontextualises everything before it. Not quite in that way, but definitely related.

Mulholland Drive I agree did a great job - and once you hear that explanation it all makes perfect sense.

It sounds like Tár did a pretty bad job of it, and the lack of understanding/agreement by people of what it was trying to achieve, and how it was doing it, is pretty damning. Shame!

[andrewducker]

I bumped into this, and found both the review and the comments interesting, hopefully interesting to you: https://www.escapistmagazine.com/tar-is-a-gothic-horror-about-cancel-culture/

[calimac]

Thanks; this interpretation is a lot more coherent than the one I linked to in the post. It goes a little way towards answering some of my puzzled questions: Lydia's past is coming back at her in the supernatural way of Macbeth and "The Tell-tale Heart."

However, I agree with one of the commenters that the article is entirely misinterpreting the argument with the conducting student about Bach.

But I do agree that there's much to chew on regarding references to German denazification and the contrasting fates of Furtwängler and von Karajan, a topic with which I'm familiar but hadn't thought of in this context.

[(Anonymous)]

If my brain is sufficiently recovered from my cold tomorrow then I'm going to have to actually watch it :⁠-⁠)