Let’s compare the movies Whiplash and Tar!
Note: I welcome your comments to this blog. I realize the topics I discuss are sensitive. Whether you agree or disagree with my ideas, I’m very interested to get your take on these two films!
In our classical music world, the movie Tár has generated powerful conversations. I watched it and was struck by similarities with Whiplash, another controversial film about musical genius run amok. Both focus on acclaimed bandleader/conductors portrayed as artistic geniuses who are also brutal and conniving mentors. In Whiplash we experience Terence Fletcher, the top jazz band leader in a fictitious New York conservatory, as he brutally bullies his ensembles to top awards. In Tár we watch Lydia Tár, conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, in scene after scene humiliating and manipulating students, assistants, and colleagues to advance her career and sexual desires. Both Fletcher and Tár justify their abuse as an “end justifies the means” as they produce the highest artistic standards. In both films, the suicide of a past student finally brings both conductors to societal account and they lose their positions. Bizarrely, the climax in both films is a preposterous and violent concert performance. Critics and audiences alike are unsure in both films whether these scenes are actually taking place or rather fantasies in the minds of their characters. For me, both films bring up the same issues: abuse of power, the role of fine art in our culture, our attitude towards genius, abuse, elitism, and the question of tradition itself, whether it is ultimately a stifling or liberating force.
If you’ve read reviews or talked to others about these films, you might notice a Rorschach-test-quality to both of them. It’s a testament to both films that they create sufficient ambiguity to generate diverse conversations that invite deeper readings. People conclude divergent narratives about the characters and their motives.
Last week on my Classical Listening Hangout, I shared my thoughts comparing both films and then invited a free discussion. Boy was I startled and thrilled at the vigorous opposing reactions!
Especially on my very first point: that both films present musical geniuses as abusive monsters. Yes, there was general agreement that Whiplash’s Terence Fletcher was abusive because of scenes showing him yelling and hurling instruments at students (Fletcher’s intentional “echo” of the cymbal thrown at a teenage Charlie Parker that spurred him to achieve greatness). Not so with Tár. Several people asserted Lydia Tár herself was a victim of her ambitious students and assistants!
Here were some chat comments (with my background in brackets):
“Lydia Tár was not a monster. I think this is a one-dimensional interpretation of a multi-dimensional character.”
“Francesca edited and posted the Julliard footage into a complete false narrative of what Lydia did in that master class. She was a devious liar.”
[Francesca was Lydia’s devoted assistant whom Lydia was grooming to replace the older Assistant Conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic. After Lydia told her she was rejecting for a more experienced conductor, Lydia exposed damaging emails of her boss as well as an edited video of a Juilliard masterclass where Tár badgered a student who eventually cursed at her and left the class.]
“I think the poor kid in the masterclass simply pushed Tár's button, to his chagrin. Tár's point was that transcendent art is just that - you can't peg it to gender or sexual identity. Valid point.”
[Tár focused her masterclass on a pangender student who admitted that he didn’t like Bach, or indeed the music of any “cis” composers.]
“But Francesca, in fact, did not erase the emails that Tár demanded.”
[Tár had ordered Francesca to erase all emails concerning a conducting student who had committed suicide. We learn later that Tár had also written to all the major orchestras recommending they not hire this student.]
These comments echoed other opinions that Tár and to a certain extent Fletcher were preparing students with high ambition for competition at the highest artistic levels. If the students couldn’t take the heat, so to speak, they should pursue another profession. This has some truth. The level of competition at the highest conservatories is indeed extreme and requires a strong degree of toughness and emotional resiliency. Further, education this past decade turns the mentorship model on its head, where the mentor is sometimes viewed as a servant of the student, who has the right to never feel offended. Student fragility is a “thing,” where just feeling uncomfortable translates to feeling abused and unsafe. Microaggression is a “thing,” where well-intentioned remarks might be labeled offensive or even racist, if a student simply perceives them that way.
This is all happening—just talk with any educator. Yet the elephant in the room is the widespread coverup of abuse by mentors. Consider the extent of abuse unchecked for decades by those in power in the worlds of sports and entertainment. Olympic sports doctor Larry Nassar, USC gynecologist George Tyndall, film producer Harvey Weinstein, comedian Bill Cosby, and Rap star R. Kelly…the list continues to grow in what is clearly a tip of a much larger iceberg. Recently the fatal abuse by Navy Seal instructors has come to light (Death In Navy Seal Training Exposes A Culture Of Brutality, Cheating and Drugs). We are all aware that the classical music world is having its own reckoning with decades of abuse by great and powerful musicians: conductor James Levine, conductor Charles Dutoit, and tenor Placido Domingo are the celebrity names, but there are whispers loud and quiet of abuse from a legion of others. (Classical Music Has A ‘God Status’ Problem)
Getting back to the films, I had expected a discussion about the lack of checks and balances in the settings of private lessons, group classes, masterclasses, and rehearsals, as well as in the administrations of world class ensembles. Every professional musician I know has stories. As a student, I attended several master classes where students were abusively, loudly berated, and humiliated to an extraordinary degree. Heck, I myself have faced accusations of this as a conductor, so I understand it from both sides. Terence Fletcher for me was a kind of Frankenstein patchwork of all those teachers, an exaggerated amalgamation. His character in Whiplash establishes a brutal military-grade discipline along with an atmosphere of fear that ensures students will obey him without question. He yells and berates his band, actually throwing instruments at them. He plays mind games to humiliate them, one day elevating a drummer to the top position, the next day casting him back to being a page-turning assistant. Like a Navy Seal instructor during Hell Week, Fletcher drives protagonist Andrew to drum at such a frenzied tempo that he actually bleeds profusely over his drum set.
Lydia Tár also berates and humiliates. In a Juilliard master class, we watch her badger a student whose leg shakes uncontrollably. We watch her threaten a young child who is bullying her daughter (“I will get you”). She devises a diabolically rigged solo opportunity that both humiliates her principal cellist and the entire Berlin Philharmonic, all while elevating a new cellist with whom she is smitten. She cruelly denies her devoted assistant Francesca the assistant conductor position that would allow her to have her own career. In an outrageous concert scene, we see Lydia physically bludgeon a rival conductor off the podium.
While the notion of the musical genius as an abusive monster seems to be the lead question in both films, the flip side to that is the nature of the students. Are they in a sense complicit victims, willing to undergo psychological and even physical duress for career opportunities and approval of the teacher? And if not, how can a student determine the line between necessary hardship in mentoring vs. over-the-top abuse? In a powerful scene in Whiplash, student drummer Andrew defends his choice to become a jazz artist to his disapproving, football-loving family. His father points out that Charlie Parker died in his thirties as a heroin addict. Andrew counters that Parker achieved something that people still talk about, so whatever pain he had to endure was worth it.
In Tár, assistant Francesca covers up increasingly questionable behavior of her boss, becoming a willing accomplice of Tár’s abuse of others, until she herself is cast aside. Then she takes revenge, releasing Tár’s emails and publishing an unflattering video of her berating a student in a Juilliard masterclass. Does it make Francesca herself an abuser since she was comfortable shielding Tár from scrutiny up to that point?
What about students who manipulate, bully, or threaten their teachers to either further their own success or destroy their teacher’s career? What protections can be put in place to reliably discern the truth of these elements, given the private and complex relationships of teachers and students? These are vital questions that require nuance, not simple solutions or accusations.
These questions lead to another disturbing one: does fine art devolve ultimately into power politics? For all the talk of creativity and passion, does it just boil down to corruption and politics? Onscreen, most of what we see in both films are characters spending most of their time not creating art, but implementing schemes to intimidate and control. Are these films suggesting that while we fantasize about great artists living for art, they are actually focused on extending power, reveling that those around them don’t dare to tell them “no?” Not pretty, this gulf between life absorbed in creative passion vs. revenge politics and the pecking order of a musical hierarchy.
In Whiplash, Fletcher ultimately seems more thrilled dominating his students than making great music. The bulk of his energy is calculated to humiliate and psychologically destroy his drummers. What at first seems like a casual offer to Andrew to join him at Carnegie Hall turns out to have been a calculated revenge plot. Andrew appears on stage and Fletcher whispers to him that he knew all along that it was Andrew whose complaints had cost him his position at the conservatory. When Fletcher announces that the first piece they will perform is not one that Andrew has ever heard, the revenge seems complete. Tár also uses her talent as a tool in the larger game to maintain and advance her domination in the classical world. She genuinely seems more thrilled in the predatory games she plays to humiliate her conducting colleagues, to manipulate her orchestra by neutralizing their votes, to subjugate her students and assistant, and to seduce other women.
This leads to the “Great Artist” pass, that we tolerate excesses and eccentricities in a master musician because it is part of their work. The end justifies the means. Both movies beg us to ask, should great artists get this “free pass?” Fletcher articulates this rationale to Andrew when he reveals that no one understood his true strategy as a teacher. All the abuse he dished out served a larger artistic purpose, to liberate students so they could transcend their limitations and become the next Charlie Parker. In a golden moment, Fletcher sets the hook back into Andrew’s mouth, saying his strategy didn’t succeed, but at least he tried! Similarly, Tár expected obedience and a free pass for her machinations because she was acknowledged as a better musician than all of them. Here’s an inherent problem in a discipline where knowledge and understanding seems unreachable by ordinary mortals. An acknowledged master is granted agency to work free from conventional limits and rules.
That touches on another subject: elitism in the arts. Real-life music critic Adam Gopnik, who plays himself in Tár, complained about people reacting negatively to all the lingo in the film in his recent New Yorker interview with Cate Blanchette (Cate Blanchette Plays Herself):
“…there are things in the film that seem to be so admirable that have been nipped at on occasion…One is that the conversation in the film about classical music is élitist or difficult. This seems to me to be the farthest thing in the world from the truth. It’s people who are passionately engaged with their work talking about the work that they do.”
Talk about being in a bubble! I’m a composer/conductor myself and Tár was filled with so much classical music jargon, that I wondered aloud whether a non-musician could follow or stay engaged with much of the dialogue. I winced at its inaccuracies (The 5th symphony as Mahler’s ultimate masterpiece, really?) and marveled at its correct intricacies, especially scenes where Lydia (the American) leads the Berlin Philharmonic in rehearsal, effortlessly and continually alternating musical instructions in English and German.
A lingo filled with impressive vocabulary and cascades of “in jokes” helps to demarcate a hierarchy of the artist above the audience. If people can’t understand the language, then they feel incompetent to understand the music and more docile to accept any artist’s decision. As a preconcert lecturer, I constantly hear confessions from listeners that they feel inadequate to understand the music, that it is “above them.” That is the price of elitism, and I think it is a question especially posed in Tár as Lydia expertly runs rapid-fire technical jargon and “inside jokes” in circles around everyone. The irony shouldn’t escape us that she is supposedly a student of Leonard Bernstein, the American maestro known universally for making music non-elitist, approachable, and understandable in his Young People’s Concerts.
One other important issue brought up in both films is the question of tradition. Is musical tradition a strength or a straitjacket on our culture and creativity? Is it the powerful root of a tree of artistic identity, meaning, and purpose continuing to grow, or is it an unhealthy, conservative disease that holds back true creativity and breakthroughs, while suppressing contributions from non-traditional sources and resisting a democratic representation of people “traditionally” excluded—women and minorities specifically.
A pangender student in Tár expresses zero interest in the music of “cis” composers. We learn at the beginning of the film that Tár was known for breaking through the glass ceiling. She herself established a foundation specifically to help other women conductors succeed in this male-dominated field. Yet in a following scene, Tár expresses the desire to disavow that mission and open her foundation to men as well. She herself has now embraced tradition and “joined the patriarchy.” In Whiplash, Fletcher is chained to tradition, molding his own life and that of his students on legends of the great jazz musicians of the past. And with it, the credo that only through suffering can one transcend limitations. In opposition, the student at the Juilliard masterclass scene in Tar declares no interest in any of the classical tradition. It’s an outrageous position to say you don’t like the music of Bach. But can we acknowledge there is also liberation in that viewpoint? We universally admire Debussy, who taunted the tradition of his teachers in much the same way. The tension between tradition and contemporary music still tears apart both the jazz and classical music worlds. Audiences that populate contemporary concerts are not the same as those that subscribe to the symphony. Both films inspire discussion about this very real tension between the pull of tradition versus the imperative to discard it, a universal theme in the arts that I think is worthy of continual discussion. The more experience I have musically, the more connected I feel to Western music tradition, and the more powerful it becomes. Yet I also realize that awareness can become too weighty and close off possibilities.
These fascinating questions lead me to consider the meaning of the preposterous endings of both films. Whiplash concludes in a Carnegie Hall concert where Andrew is first humiliated onstage with important people who could launch his career listening to a catastrophic performance. Fletcher’s revenge is complete as Andrew walks off the stage defeated. But then Andrew turns around, walks back onstage, sits at the drums , and just starts playing to an astonished and upset Fletcher. He succeeds in usurping power and getting the band to follow him. When the piece concludes, Andrew is just beginning. He launches into a virtuoso drum solo that builds to the impossible tempo Fletcher had berated him to achieve in rehearsal, earning Fletcher’s respect and presumably launching a career of musical greatness. Surely a fantasy ending? It leaves open the question, was Fletcher ultimately justified in his brutal tactics to create a genius approaching the level of Charlie Parker? Or was the lesson that usurping the teacher’s power was the only viable path forward for success? Buried in this fantasy was another disturbing idea. Fletcher’s reputation was not greatly diminished by being fired. Here he was a few months later conducting on the Carnegie Hall stage. Not exactly a societal rebuke.
The fantasy ending of Tár sparked the most startling “Rorshach test” moment for me in our Hangout. I described the penultimate scene when Lydia selects and molests an underage girl at a Thai massage bordello, and wow, did I get disagreement! People pointed to the fact that there was no scene showing the two in bed together. I reminded them that we see Lydia with a group of young girls all wearing numbers around their necks, heads down. She is asked to make a selection and we see her point and a particular one with the #5 card her neck looks up (the “5” I suppose being the director’s nod to Mahler’s 5th symphony as the symphony of “love”). To my surprise, one person insisted that Lydia wasn’t actually “pointing” to the girl. She was simply extending her arm. The subsequent scene where Lydia vomits outside her taxicab was not her reaction to molesting the young girl. It was her disgust and shock at the scene she witnessed and left in horror.
I didn’t think of this response at the time, but suppose Tár was instead a male conductor, as promiscuous as Lydia, and the scene played the same. Would it be reasonable to conclude he too was simply recoiling in horror that such a place existed?
Again, that these films invite such a degree of ambiguity is remarkable. For me, the fantasy ending of Tár was actually less disturbing than Whiplash, where we’re not exactly sure if Fletcher’s brutal mentoring was ultimately justified or not, or whether Andrew was a victim or a triumphant success story. The whole notion of winning and losing becomes remained in flux. Not so in Tár. When Tár threw up after the bordello scene, that was a physical manifestation of her inner bestial nature, no longer cleverly hidden. And in the final scene where she conducts a youth orchestra to video with a click track, that was the final subjugation of all her hubris. As one Hangout participant brilliantly noticed, Tár in the first scene proclaims that she as conductor is the master of time. In the final scene, she is enslaved to someone else’s time.
***
COMMENT AWAY!