The funniest part of the movie Tár, which I watched on Saturday, is the part where Lydia Tár, the woman herself, goes into her assistant’s room to find her book manuscript scattered all over the floor. The title of the book – Tár on Tár – has been crossed out, replaced with the words ‘Rat on Rat’.
For a psychological drama – a genre I watch very little of – there are a surprising amount of completely hilarious moments in Tár. It’s been out for a few months (although it only just started showing in Aotearoa), and the whole internet (at least the whole internet that I consume) seems to be talking about it. I got quite freaked out reading this interpretation of the ending on Saturday (spoilers, obviously). For once, all the Discourse I consumed about something culminated in me seeing the thing, rather than having just enough information about it to ask people intelligent seeming questions at social events.
But I’m trying to refresh my blogging muscles! And it turns out I don’t have much to say about Tár, at least not things that are original: I liked the musical structure of it, the reptition of Berlin and New York and orchestra rehearsals, how unapologetic it was about its pretension (that long New Yorker interview at the start!), the very beautiful apartment, the intense compulsion in different directions. It was weirdly car centric for a movie based in Berlin – lots of running but no cycling! I don’t know that it really came to any conclusions about “cancel culture” but it certainly gestured at the complexity and the futility of making decisions about people. The people I watched it with and I discussed it afterwards, and we couldn’t figure out if the movie believed in redemption or not. It was definitely intense. It was definitely absurd. And it definitely made me feel smart.
That’s what I really wanted to write about; the desire to consume cultural products that make me feel smart. I have this quite incedible intellectual vanity – I like knowing about things, and I like other people knowing that I know about things. Is this because I used to place a lot of value in grades and now I don’t get grades anymore and something has to replace them? probably. I think this can make it hard to separate the experience of wanting to watch Tár, which is certainly a rich text, meaty to discuss and digest, from the experience of wanting to have watched Tár.
None of this prevents me from spending far too much time watching lifestyle YouTube videos – or, worse, YouTube shorts – at an accelerated speed while playing Tetris, feeling the little ‘I’m being stimulated’ neurons in my brain buzz happily, until one day the only thing that will satisfy me might be something like this. I find it much easier to read books in their fragments than digest whole things: I pause episodes of TV shows in the middle to look things up on Wikipedia, and almost never watch movies by myself at all.
Cinemas help, I think. Not just because you get to support the film industry, although, as my friend Tim has told me many times, there is something to that. Tere are a whole lot of psychological tricks that the cinema plays on you to make you pay attention. The big screen is bastly nicer to watch that my small laptop, or my screenburned phone. The dark provieds a sense of immersion. My phone is silent. And I’ve paid enough for the experience that I want to pay attention. I’m choosier about films I want to watch in a cinema; I don’t think I’ve ever been to a film at a cinema that I didn’t enjoy, or at least take something whole away from, although I’ve consumed a lot of brainless content on streaming services which passed through me like wind, leaving nothing behind. It feels good to pay attention to the entirety of something, with most of your attention, rather than reply to messages while human voices bubble in the background. It makes you look harder. And at the end of that attention, if you’re like me, you’re rewarded with having more moments that stick to you, which you can pull smart things to say out of.
I’m dreadfully pretentious, as the archives of this here blog probably demonstrate. But I’m trying to go to more cinemas, to see and listen to the things people talk about, instead of just read about them. New possibilities open up. And it might even help people to think I’m smart.
Daylight Differentials 