“I have always described myself as an optimist. But I have to admit that it’s very difficult to be optimistic in the current situation.”
– Mikhail Gorbachev, Celebration of the 25th Anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall, 2014
2022’s Tár is, at its core, a Perestroika film. Not in a literal or political sense, but in a practical sense. Set in Berlin, the fall of the Wall obviously looms large. But beyond the ever-present GDR iconography, there is a near-perfect recreation of the driving animus of late-stage Soviet leadership — that dangerous mix of hubris and paranoia.
Serving as the chief conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett) is at the peak of her career. A successful composer, pianist, ethnomusicologist, and conductor living with her lead-violinist wife Sharon (Nina Hoss) and their daughter, she is working on completing a set of live recordings of Gustav Mahler’s symphonies while promoting a new book on her life and her work. As co-founder of the fictional Accordion Foundation, she serves as a key player in the movement breaking down sex-based barriers in the classical music world, supporting female conductors with a near-perfect placement rate after their involvement with the foundation. The EGOT recipient is on the precipice of becoming recognized alongside the likes of Leonard Bernstein and André Previn.
Despite this massive success, Blanchett’s Lydia is a deeply uncomfortable woman. She regularly sneaks her wife’s anti-anxiety medication and cannot make it through a softball New Yorker interview without fidgeting to the point of distraction. But her discomfort is not one born out of humility — she openly expresses disapproval for the accomplished conductors who previously took to the task of performing Mahler’s work, noting the apparent inaccuracy or dishonesty in their output. By merging Tár with Mahler, she will show audiences the true beauty of the work. In toppling those giants that came before her, she has been fairly successful in remaking classical conducting in her image.
Similarly, when we see Lydia teaching a seminar for a group of liberal-identarian Juliard students, it is clear that her discomfort does not come out of any sense of self-doubt. Rather, it is the discomfort of a woman who can feel the potential for the ground to shift. In Lydia’s unending quest for more — more fame, more influence, more power — she has come face-to-face with the instability of the classical music world, and deftly exploited it. Not out of any lack of love, but out of an abundance of paranoia. She sees the weak points in her world, so she has to strike. What if someone else struck first?
As Lydia’s assistant conductor Sebastian (Allan Corduner) states rather ham-fistedly before being informed of his rotation out of the philharmonic, when the Berlin Wall fell, “the impossible became possible.” Through liberalization and democratization, the most visually repellant edifices of Soviet communism were washed away in favor of a new, open future. To hell with the Soviet model — as Gorbachev himself said, “my conscience was clear. The promise I gave to the people when I started the process of perestroika was kept: I gave them freedom.”1 The ground had shifted, and the Eastern bloc could be remade in the name of this distinctly Gorbachevian freedom. But out of glasnot and perestroika, an explosion a freedom occurred, and a hole opened — a hollowness, aching for a positive vision, mourning a future that would never come. And in this environment paranoia about corruption of vision — wed with Soviet arrogance and an assuredness of their position as deserving inheritors of a new global order — grew.
Gorbachev has been heralded in contemporary times as a liberator. His forceful efforts to turn away from Stalinism and remake the Soviet Union in his own image are spoken of as great mistakes at worst and triumphs of will at best. But when you hear from the man himself, this vision of him as a man who understood the reality of his position begins to fog. His conscience may be clear, but when asked about the outcome of the USSR, he said in 2019 that he “regret[s] it to this day.”2 He repeatedly berated Estonian leadership for straying from the Party line in their independence movements,3 fearing that questioning of his directives would undermine the Union. However, he later stated that he should have abandoned the Communist party outright in favor of forming a democratic party to lead the USSR.4 At various points, he has stated that one of his biggest errors in stewarding the declining superpower was in taking a poorly timed vacation.5 This was not a man who felt he had erred in any serious way: no, this was a man who had admittedly made small errors here and there, but who knew that if he had just been allowed to do what he really wanted, the USSR would never have collapsed. By cracking down on ethnic uprisings and selectively instituting extreme force to enshrine his vision, “[he was] only protecting the process of perestroika, democracy and glasnost against extremism, irresponsibility and demagoguery.”6 He had the right to act as he pleased; people were out to undermine him and his vision, and he needed to stop them. Only he could.
Following her (unilateral) act to remove Sebastian as assistant conductor, Lydia learns that a former Accordion Foundation fellow named Krista (with whom it is all but confirmed Lydia had a sexual relationship) has committed suicide. Krista had been sending increasingly unhinged requests to connect before her suicide, and Lydia’s immediate response to the news is to tell her assistant Francesca (Noémie Merlant) that “[Krista] wasn’t one of us” and demand that she delete all correspondence to or from the former paramour, before herself deleting a series of emails sent in a campaign to intentionally torpedo Krista’s budding career. Now she knows that she has something to worry about.
As her wave of paranoia grows and begins to crest, Lydia retreats back into a pattern of sexual impropriety, sloppily and publicly attempting to recreate the Krista dynamic with the young Russian performer Olga (Sophie Kauer). Krista is dead, and the narrative Lydia created about the young woman is unwinding. In Olga, there is a shot at restabilization, and a potential new target to mold into the Tár vision.
Questioning Francesca’s loyalty, Lydia checks the assistant’s email to find that she had not deleted the aforementioned messages from Krista as directed. As a result, Lydia decides that she will not be making Francesca the new assistant conductor of the philharmonic. Francesca resigns unexpectedly and begins taking action to sabotage Lydia’s career, leaking edited video from her aforementioned Juliard lecture and providing copies of incriminating communication to the lawyers representing Krista’s family in a civil case against Lydia.
At this point, Lydia has begun declining psychically as well as professionally. Throughout the film, we see her experiencing what seem to be low-level paranoid delusions — seeing repeating geometric shapes tied to Krista, experiencing items moving mysteriously around her home, hearing phantom screams and beeps around her — and these begin ramping up, along with an unexplained ambient physical pain. After a particularly worrisome case in which Lydia follows a disappearing Olga into a Berlin apartment complex, she sees (potentially imaginary?) dogs stalking her in the building, and she hurts herself so badly when fleeing that she has to fabricate a mugging to explain her injuries. Having given up all sense of self-preservation in favor of immediate control, she brings Olga with her to New York on a trip to attend a deposition and a book release. Olga’s presence on the trip is publicized by a group of student protestors and Sharon immediately finds out, dealing the final blow to their strained marriage and teeing up her removal from the Philharmonic. From this point on, Lydia is forbidden from seeing her daughter, or from serving as conductor. She responds with the bluster expected of a world historic figure who has become victim of their own inflated sense of self, physically assaulting the substitute conductor during the live recording of Mahler’s 5th. Her career firmly ended, Lydia moves to the Philippines and makes a living conducting live scores to accompany video games.
It is in this final implosion that we see just how obsessed Tár is with Perestroika. In Lydia’s ascendancy, reshaping of institutions, and self-detonation, there is an internalization of the impulse that drove Gorbachev to sprint full-speed into the starting stages of liberalization. It is the drive of the jealous husband who, knowing his wife is cheating, pushes himself to near insanity to find proof. It is the drive of the child who touches the hot stove to prove to her mother that she can choose just how much pain to feel. And it is the drive of the President who, so afraid of being seen as just the child of peasants, becomes instead A Man One Could Do Business With7, sacrificing the very existence of his state without ever being able to see just how much damage he himself did.
Lydia was not wrong that things were at risk. Krista was going to do something drastic; her assistant wasn’t unflinchingly devoted; she could lose her position to someone less skilled; in all the areas she had dominated, the bottom could fall out. And it did.
The mere knowledge of potential failure is not enough to avoid failure, though, and neither arrogance nor paranoia lead to logical action. Yes, the West is trying to destroy you, and the people are losing faith in your legitimacy, and the economic weight of central planning is moving you towards crisis — but pushing the button doesn’t save you from these realities. All it does is make you the cause — you broke up the Union, you tanked your career, and now you get to conduct video game scores and shill fast food.8 You were right, and it cost you dearly.
In her effort to control the decline built into the structures of her life, Lydia did more to upend the Tár-dominated conducting world than Krista, Francesca, Olga, or anyone else ever could. She opened herself up and allowed what once held ambition and grit to fill with sophomoric aggression and neuroticism. Perhaps that will be her legacy — the woman who almost finished Mahler, but just couldn’t hack it. And of course, it wasn’t her fault that she failed anyways — she just gave the people what they wanted. Her conscious is clear.
Jitter 