Tár: An Amazon Woman In Hell - Analysis with Spoilers

Todd Field's acclaimed and enigmatic Tár manipulates sound, images and even time itself in unconventional ways, immersing us in the labyrinthian mind of its plagued anti-heroine. Though the line between reality and perception is blurry, some events seem unquestionably real:  Lydia Tár uses her position to exert a toxic power dynamic over women near her, both professionally and personally; she alienates herself from all the women in her life, including her closest friends, her family and even herself; she spurns one of her closest protégées, a young woman named Krista, who eventually commits suicide; Lydia Tár loses her chance to conduct Mahler's Fifth Symphony, which was to complete the Tár-Mahler cycle and cement her place in music history; and finally, she loses her family, her professional position and esteem, and her self-respect. 

That is the broad outline of the layered, complex story, but it fails to capture what makes the film so intriguing and perplexing; for what is far less certain than all of that is the cause of Tár's downfall, and how much of it is all in her head. I have my own interpretation, which I will discuss below, but there may not be a simple explanation for the unfolding of events. Still, a handful of scenes do suggest a key to unlocking the story's mysteries, and I will use them to build my interpretation.

Who is Lydia Tár? 

Before the opening credits, the film opens with a shot of her assistant's smartphone as she live-streams Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett) asleep on a transatlantic flight to New York. We see part of the chat, as well:

Even though we don't know any of the characters yet, the chat reveals a great deal about Tár and her relationships. First, we are given the suggestion that Tár may be haunted by her sins. Second, we are told that her sins are so grave, you would have to be blinded by love to think she had a conscience at all. Third, we are told that she spends her nights with different partners: It wasn't the assistant last night; it was "S."

We later find out that "S" is her romantic partner, Sharon (Nina Hoss). The assistant is her protégée, Francesca (Noémie Merlant), and we can assume the person on the other end of the chat is Krista. This is never directly verified, but later we find out that Francesca has been in contact with Krista, and that the three of them were once very close. The reference to "our girl" in the chat suggests that sort of intimacy, so Krista is a likely bet.

Tár's intimacy with Francesca is briefly shown in the very next scene, when Tár is preparing for her interview with The New Yorker. We see them standing over a collection of records, all featuring male conductors. The two women are selecting the right look so Tár can have a suit tailor-made for the occasion.

This is the first, but not the last, time we see Tár curating her public image to emulate the great male conductors of the past. She does not want to appear feminine, a point which is reinforced much later when she confronts a school bully by calling herself Petra's "father." While Lydia Tár does not identify as trans (she identifies as a woman and calls herself a "u-haul lesbian" early on), this opening scene helps establish that her relationship to her gender is at best uncertain.

The issue of gender is developed in the next scene, during the interview, when she tells the interviewer that women in her time no longer need to struggle against sexism and inequality. This is dramatic irony, since we know that women do still struggle with sexism.  Of course, plenty of people in the world might deny it, but it is safe to assume that Todd Field's intended audience would not. Indeed, the movie proceeds to show us various ways Tár uses her position to exploit women below her. She exploits the same toxic power dynamics that led to the #MeToo movement, which is part of--and maybe even the heart of--what leads to her downfall.

By denying the struggles of women (and her own role in perpetuating those struggles), Lydia Tár alienates herself from not only other women, but also herself. She must have been a warrior, after all. She must have fought hard and struggled to gain such prestige in a profession so dominated by men. To deny the struggle is to deny who she is. Eventually, we discover the full extent of her denial: even her name is an attempt to hide her working-class American roots.

Cate Blanchett's skilled performance in this early scene makes it easy to see the artifice and affectation of Lydia's public persona. Later, as the story unfolds, we see glimpses of the pained woman beneath the inhuman mask: when she cries after seeking comfort at her family home; in the Philippines, when her request for a massage leads her to a brothel and she vomits--presumably in recognition of her past sins and how they have ruined her. Yet, by the end, it is not clear that she has changed. She is again conducting, again trying to maintain as much affectation as she can muster. But now she is alone, with no assistants or protégées, conducting before an audience all covered in masks.

Keeping Time

Lydia Tár makes another key point in that New Yorker interview. She explains that when she performs, her right hand is responsible for keeping time, and that when she is performing, she knows exactly when each moment will happen. Her art requires a mastery of time itself, which makes the injury to her right shoulder all the more devastating. After her fall, she can no longer keep good time. When we see her conducting after that, she looks pained and out of control. She has compromised one of the basic pillars of her craft. 

It is impossible to say how much of an impact the injury has on her career, but if it made it too difficult for her to keep time, it may have directly led to her needing a replacement to conduct Mahler's Fifth. On the other hand, it is also reasonable to think that she loses her chance to conduct Mahler's Fifth because of so-called "cancel culture." After all, she becomes embroiled in a law suit and suffers many accusations, all of which lead to protests and even, indirectly, the dissolution of her marriage. We do know that her reputation is eventually ruined, though it is likely that her physical attack on the replacement conductor--an assault which occurs on live television--caused significant damage to her reputation, as well. 

The fact remains that we never see how she is fired. We never see the decision being made to replace her. It may have been due to scandal, but it may also have been the injury. On the other hand, maybe those factors contributed to her mental breakdown, but it was the breakdown itself that ultimately led to her being replaced.

While its direct impact on Tár's career may be uncertain, the injury's effect on the structure of the film is striking. After the injury, as if to mirror Tár's loss of control over time, the narrative unfolding of time becomes erratic. The time line jumps, and we are only afforded glimpses into events--Lydia's performance copy of Mahler's Fifth is missing; she attacks her replacement on stage, where the book has apparently found its home; she returns to her family in America; she takes a job in the Philippines. The events are no longer clearly connected, and we have little sense of cause and effect.

The disjointed narrative may be intended to alienate the audience a bit, much in the same way that Lydia is alienated by herself. Lydia's life, like the narrative itself, no longer seems to follow a controlled, rational thread. We can still connect each event to the past and try to interpret it as the natural outcome of what came before; however, we cannot be sure which situations are causes and which are effects, or how all the pieces fit together. This may be because Lydia Tár herself has no answers, either. The fractured film reflects her fractured mind.

A Ghost Of A Chance

If the goal is to immerse us in Lydia's mind, so that we experience her mental deterioration through the film, then the key to understanding the movie is to understand her mind. This leads us back to that very first scene, when Francesca describes Tár as "haunted" in the chat with Krista. It turns out that Tár is very much haunted, and by Krista herself (among others), though we do not know the nature or full extent of the haunting.

The only time we see the real, living and breathing Krista is during the New Yorker interview. The scene opens with a view from the back of the audience, where the stage itself seems far less important than the back of a woman's head:

Her face is never fully shown, but Krista's likeness appears at least three times later in the film. It appears much later in an erotic dream, which suggests that Lydia still longs for her past lover.

 The other two appearances are much subtler and more unusual. The first is in this scene early on in the film:

That scene is remarkable for a number of reasons. Before Lydia enters, our attention is drawn to a picture on the wall which shows her with a Shipibo-Conibo healer. We know she spent many months with that tribe in the Amazon, thanks to the introduction from The New Yorker, so we can assume the smoke and markings on her face are not simply for the photograph. The photo documents a real-life ritual, the significance of which is yet to be determined:

After she enters the room, she performs a sort of ritual with smoke in front of a mirror, reinforcing that the ritual in the photograph was not just for show. Then, when Lydia walks in another room to get sheet music, we see a woman in the next room, behind the piano. It is presumably Krista, but she is half-obscured by a doorway:

Then Lydia enters the room and sits at the piano, and the woman is nowhere to be seen. Lydia begins composing, but is soon interrupted by a mysterious humming sound which seems to echo her playing.

If it was Krista's ghost, then Lydia is quite literally haunted in a way Francesca could not have imagined. 

There is other evidence to support the ghost hypothesis. In addition to the numerous other times Lydia experiences audio hallucinations, we see another, even more ghost-like image of Krista. The apparition is shown very briefly, when Lydia is awoken by Petra's screams in the middle of the night:

Lydia does not seem to notice the figure in the chair with long red hair, which suggests she is not hallucinating, but is rather being watched by a ghost. Still, nobody else ever experiences the haunting, so we cannot be sure if it's all in her head or not.

One might object that it would be too much of a coincidence if it were not a ghost.  After all, why does she start hallucinating about Krista at the same time Krista commits suicide? It's not like she knows about the suicide yet, right?

Well, maybe she has good reason to suspect it. The book Krista sends could be seen as a message indicating her intention to kill herself. 

I had no idea while watching the movie, but the book, called "Challenge," was inspired by an illicit love affair between two women in the early 20th century: Vita Sackville-West, the author, who liked to pass as a man at the time; and Violet Keppel, a woman who often threatened to commit suicide if Sackville-West ever dared to end their relationship. Interestingly, Vita and Violet began working on the novel together, as a way to memorialise their passionate affair. When Vita passed as a man, she went by the name Julian, which is the male lover's name in the novel. However, while Violet only threatened to commit suicide in real life, Julian's lover in the novel actually does it.

Perhaps Krista sends the book to Lydia as a statement of purpose. In that case, Lydia would be anticipating the suicide. That would explain why the hallucinations begin around the time of the suicide. Perhaps Lydia was always haunted, as Francesca suggests at the very beginning of the movie, and it only takes on a much darker, self-destructive turn after she receives the book.

By sending her that book, Krista may also be making a statement about Lydia betraying her own identity, accusing her of trying to pass as something she is not. Perhaps that is what enrages Lydia and leads her to literally tear out its pages. 

The Amazonian Within

When Lydia opens the book, she sees a maze-like drawing which is very similar to the one we saw on her face in the photograph on her wall: 

She sees that same pattern later, on the metronome that mysteriously wakes her up in the middle of the night:

She sees it again in Petra's bedroom, made out of child's clay:

The film does not offer a direct explanation for the metronome or the clay, but we can assume Krista sent her the book. We can therefore conclude that either Krista's ghost is responsible for the metronome and the clay, or these are hallucinations, symptoms of her psychological deterioration. The question is, why that pattern?

On the one hand, since it's the same pattern she saw in the book, it may only serve as a reminder of Krista's suicide note--if that's what the book was, after all. However, we have good reason to think it is more than that. The pattern is connected to the Shipibo-Conibo tribe, which suggests a deep connection between her relationship with women and her connection to the Amazon. The connection is strengthened by the dream seen here, where images of women in her life lead to images of the Shipibo-Conibo and the Amazon:

The film gives us multiple opportunities to associate the Amazon not only with Lydia's identity, but with her relationship to women. It may not be a leap to wonder if we are meant to connect Lydia to the race of Amazonian women warriors of Greek myth. 

Even though she denies the need for women to band together to fight--she does not care to remember when International Women's Day is celebrated, and she does not accept that women need to unite for equality and power--Lydia is, in fact, a warrior. She has fought to attain power, and she continues to wield that power without mercy. Whether the labyrinthian tribal markings are a product of her own mind or haunting reminders left by Krista's ghost, they are at the heart of what Lydia wants to bury, the core of what she is trying to hide: her struggle to attain and wield power in a man's realm.

Lydia dominates women because she views femininity as weak. She wants to hide her own struggle and her own femininity as much as possible. Yet, her struggle as a warrior is what defined her. It is the spiritual core which she must have nurtured in the Amazon. Yet, in her dreams, she sees herself asleep in a bed in the middle of the jungle, a snake encroaches, and her heart bursts into flame. She is spiritually vulnerable and alone. The fire of her own passion, the passion that she allowed to live and breathe in the Amazon, is consuming her.

Unlocking the Mystery

Lydia Tár is driven by a quest for power. Her passion for music betrays a desire for control which shapes every aspect of her life. She views power as masculine, and so she tries to emulate the great male conductors. She leads her life as if it were a symphony where only her tempo, her interpretation, and her vision mattered. She emotionally disconnects herself from all the women in her life, because she thinks femininity is weak. She consumes women to affirm her power, until the fire consumes Lydia Tár herself.

It doesn't matter if she is haunted by a real or a metaphorical ghost. The effect is the same: she is confronted with her inner truth, and it leads to a psychological breakdown. Perhaps we are not meant to know if the ghost is real or not, because she cannot tell the difference, either.

It doesn't matter if her career is ruined by a physical injury or scandal or the psychological breakdown itself. All of those factors combined to produce a singular result: She is burning in a hell of her own creation.

Perhaps she always was in a sort of hell. Perhaps she was always haunted, and it was easier for her to hide it when she had power and everyone fawned over her. When her persona could thrive, it was easy to prop it up with more and more conquests. Once the facade cracked, the hell was exposed.