Tár (2022) and Pinocchio

How to become a puppet (or a robot)

I’ve always been fascinated by music from the 1960s composer, Burt Bacharach. Sweeping and cinematic, full of twists and turns, as if there’s an epic story behind the melody.

Like this one I discovered fairly recently — “How Does a Man Become a Puppet” which is obviously inspired by a story, that of the character Pinocchio created by Italian author Carlo Collodi. The Adventures of Pinocchio (1881), adapted many times in modern media, is of course about a puppet who becomes a real boy. On the other hand, the Burt Bacharach song is the reverse situation: how does a grown, accomplished adult fall from grace and become a puppet?

How does a man become a puppet?

A puppet with strings

Attachments and things

That bind you

Tell me how does a man become a puppet?

You keep running fast

But somehow the past

Will find you

The song’s narrator laments the loss of his boyhood freedom. He grows up and makes his mark on society, but success does not bring the fulfillment he is looking for. He loses agency, being “pulled back and forth” in his search for happiness.

This type of story appears in cinema across different genres: Anakin Skywalker falls to the Dark Side from (unhealthily possessive) “attachments and things”, Charles Foster Kane famously laments for his lost childhood on his deathbed… and then there is the titular protagonist of Tár (2022), a successful orchestra conductor who falls from grace as her past catches up to her and she is preoccupied with not becoming an outwardly controlled “robot” (you could say a puppet).

The Hero’s Journey of a young person coming-of-age is going to be different from that of an established adult character who may have already achieved greatness when the story begins, has to decide what their final legacy is going to be, and may have to take accountability for something in the past that they never adequately dealt with — Don Draper in the AMC TV show Mad Men and Orual in the C.S. Lewis novel Till We Have Faces are examples of this type of character arc.

The original Carlo Collodi novel is quite a bit darker than its most famous screen adaptation, the 1940 Disney animated film Pinocchio which is how most people know the story. In the latter, Pinocchio has room for the improvement needed to become a real boy, but he is a nice and well-intentioned (if naive) kid to begin with. The original book Pinocchio starts out hostile and violent and sociopathic and selfish and manipulative, and Geppetto keeps putting up with him like he’s the Giving Tree. While Jiminy Cricket became a major character in the movie and an icon of Disney itself, the original book version of the talking cricket appears only briefly in the beginning as Pinocchio just straight up kills him for the lulz (and the cricket returns in ghost form here and there). Even when Pinocchio develops some empathy, he has bad impulse control and tendencies to fib and fall for scams against the advice of wiser voices, so he gets into all kinds of wacky adventures. He continues to improve as a character, ultimately showing bravery and willingness to sacrifice, so that he is rewarded with a transformation from puppet to real boy.

There is “willingness to sacrifice”, and then there is “willingness to sacrifice others”, and the distinction is very important! The latter is connected to subverting one’s own humanity to become a puppet. Something that we all do at some point.

Directed by Todd Field, Tár stars Cate Blanchett as a Lydia Tár, a Berlin-based American conductor and composer considered one of the greatest living people in classical music. She has a well-earned reputation for excellence and is accustomed to fawning praise, but a scandal of misconduct threatens to surface and she is haunted by sounds that may or may not be there. She takes pride in artistry and originality — or at least the idea of them — and she is preoccupied with not being a “robot.”

Upon release, the film got a lot of buzz for a scene where Tár counters a woke young music student for dismissing great classical composers like Bach to being just dead white straight males. Back then in the early 2020s, people in the arts were losing their jobs left and right for disagreeing with aspects of critical social justice or even for saying cancel culture was going too far. It was nearly unheard of for major films to have dialogue criticizing identity politics — even from a character who is hardly a role model herself. Even without knowing the context of Lydia’s exploitative behavior, in this scene alone she is somewhat hypocritical — mocking and humiliating someone for having an (initially) calm and respectful disagreement, and embodying cancel culture more than the politically correct student she berates.

In that famous scene, Lydia Tár makes a case for judging great artists on their artistic merit, rather than their identity or personal lives. “And you are a robot,” she says to the frustrated student.

Major spoilers below the video…

However, her words about the importance of judging art on merit rather than identity turn out to not reflect her real-world behavior: the movie reveals she has been engaging in nepotism and promoting young musicians she seeks to have affairs with — subverting the blind audition process rather than promoting the best actual talent.

One of these affairs turned out horribly, as the young protégé she abandoned and blacklisted later committed suicide — and a “Me Too” type of scandal looms over Tár’s career.

Of course, the real-world “Me Too” movement focused on the gender disparity of established powerful men taking advantage of early-career women, and the movie could have easily been about a lustful male composer preying on the young female musicians. Yet, all the main characters of this fictional film are white women who date and marry women, so there’s less emphasis on power dynamics between collective demographic groups. And we get to witness a great role for an older actress, relatively rare in Hollywood.

A great role it is. Lydia Tár is a complex character, neither all good nor all bad. She cares about excellence and bringing great art into the world. She works hard and doesn’t give up. In her personal life, she effectively defends her daughter from bullies. This overall effectiveness is how she gets away with being a controlling person for so long — her standout career and contributions to society mean she is not held accountable to the same degree an average person would, so it takes a lot to bring her down.

The scandal end’s Tár’s illustrious career along with her marriage. The cherry on top of her disgrace involves her flipping out and physically attacking the conductor who replaces her. In the Carlo Collodi novel, Pinocchio got that kind of mindless physical aggression out of his system early on as he is just promoted from shapeless wood — but Tár indulges in it toward the end as she is being demoted to a less autonomous role in the artistic world.

With this demotion, she goes back to her childhood home, revealed to be a old no-frills working-class house where her high school achievement awards are still kept. A band geek from way back, she collected VHS tapes on her interests, and she re-watches a speech from a conductor who talks about the meaning of music. Her birth name was Linda Tarr, but at some point she changed her name to sound more exotic and European and upper class, and remade her whole identity and persona. Her brother chides her that she should remember where she came from.

After that, she travels to southeast Asia (the film isn’t clear whether it is Thailand or the Philippines) for an unspecified conducting assignment. At the very end, the job is revealed to be the score for Monster Hunter, where the gamer audience is dressed in fantasy costumes and the click track means her creative control has been removed (and the transition to “robot” or “puppet” is complete).

The popular, conventional interpretation of the ending appears to be that Lydia / Linda is getting her comeuppance, rightfully canceled, and humiliated, becoming the “robot” with the click track, taking the only job she can get which is in front of an audience of cosplayers. Or, at best, it’s a testament to her work ethic that she is willing to start over at the bottom and take any job seriously.

But I think there’s more nuance than that. How did this woman become a puppet, and how does she begin to rebuild to her real self?

John Calvin, the French theologian who codified the Reformed strain of Protestant Christianity in the 16th Century, taught that humans do not have free will to choose good, because they are enslaved to their desires. So right off the bat, our fallen nature makes puppets or robots of us all.

René Girard, the French philosopher from the 20th and early 21st Centuries, codified the idea of mimetic desire that people don’t even choose their own desires, but mimic the desires of others. They chase after status, prestige, and other scarce things — the same things that everyone else wants, since our desires are not our own anyway. The scarcity eventually leads to open conflict. Then the open conflict needs the death (or banishment or humiliation) of a scapegoat to release the tension and appease the community for a while. Toward the end of his life, Girard described what would be eventually known as “cancel culture” as the current-day scapegoat mechanism.

The scapegoat character in Tár would be the protagonist’s late and unseen young protégé, who was blacklisted from the classical music scene and actually died. Lydia Tár / Linda Tarr herself could be this too, albeit to a limited extent because she is not innocent. Of the various scandals that crop up, the film is not clear on whether she is guilty of literally all of them, or if some of them are made up or exaggerated or driven by professional jealousy or resentment — her own assistant only piled on after not receiving the promotion she had expected.

So you have to look at the ending through the nuance of desire, and were Linda’s desires really autonomous to begin with? What did she want out of life, before she thought she had to change her identity? Like Linda, I was once a nerdy teenage girl of modest background, and so were many in my circle of family and friends and acquaintances. We loved video games, science fiction, fantasy, soundtracks, the idea of traveling to beautiful foreign countries, the long shot ideal of having any job in our area of interest — knowing that very few high school band geeks (or choir singers or visual artists or theatre kids etc.) have the privilege of going on to actually make a living in their favorite activities at all. Traveling overseas to conduct the Monster Hunter soundtrack in front of an appreciative audience in fun costumes? Linda’s ending would have been the absolute dream! Yes, it’s a fall from being the greatest living maestro in the classical music world — but it’s also a high schooler’s vision of an ideal job!

That’s the lens you have to look through — Linda has to go back to her teen years where her true self left off, before she changed her name and image. Restarting that dream, before she lived a lie and became a puppet to mimetic desire. Of course, geek pop culture is mimetic too, but in the context of the movie it is a return to innocence. Linda wants to swim in the river, wants to see the sights of a place where she has never been, and finds exploiting young women for sex (her own past behavior!) to be obviously and self-evidently nauseating.

The video game’s dialogue, which is also the very last line of the film, supports the idea of this new beginning:

“I’ll keep my farewell brief. Never was much with words. Once you board this ship, there’s no turning back. The next ground your feet touch will be that of the new world. If any of you have lost your nerve, then step away now and let no one judge you.”