‘Tar’ Film Shows What Happens When Bad People Are Canceled For The Wrong Reasons

Audiences that are tempted into the theater to see Todd Field’s new film “Tar” — which is widely perceived as Oscar bait — starring actress Cate Blanchett may know little or nothing about Gustav Mahler, J.S. Bach, or Glenn Gould.

In 21st-century America, classical music has become a niche interest with little crossover appeal. Generations raised in an era when schools have discarded the idea that educated people are supposed to know at least a smidgeon about high culture will draw a blank when an endless list of musical figures, institutions, and terms are name-checked in a movie that revels in the inside baseball world of classical orchestras and the imperious maestros that rule over them.

But even if all of that passes over their heads, they will understand immediately what’s at stake when Blanchett’s character Lydia Tar must decide how to handle woke ideology run amok. Nor will they be surprised when that confrontation eventually produces incalculable consequences for the film’s protagonist.

In a key scene in the movie, Tar, someone that we are introduced to as a classical music superstar at the peak of fame and important enough to be the subject of a fawning on-stage interview by The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik (who plays himself), is teaching a conducting master class at the Juilliard School. There she faces the challenge of how to reach a student who describes himself as a “BIPOC pangender person” who believes the music of Bach deserves to be rejected because that 17th-century genius is a dead white male who is the product of a racist system and is also suspect because he fathered 20 children.

Tar is supposed to be savvy enough to have navigated her way through the art world to the point where she has gone from a working-class home on Staten Island to being the principal conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, a post that places her at the pinnacle of her profession.

As such, she ought to understand that calling out the arrogance and ignorance of such an impudent twit at a place like Julliard is a no-win proposition. Ours is, after all, a time when virtually every leading institution of the music world has been forced to bend the knee to identity politics by appointing cultural commissars who supervise personnel and programming decisions according to the woke catechism of diversity, equity, and inclusion.

But Blanchett’s creation is sufficiently full of herself because of her stature as an artist that she thinks the rules of this leftist orthodoxy don’t apply to her.

What follows is a brilliant takedown by Tar of the presumptions of wokeness. It ought to be required viewing for anyone who presumes to opine about the need to reject the classics in favor of the generally awful modernist compositions produced by members of favored minority groups that are nowadays routinely crammed down the ears of audiences who attend concerts by major American orchestras.

Tar’s oration beautifully captures the joy and the love of music that was

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