deux ou trois choses, 27 january 2023
If you want to talk about your last night’s dream - a dubious desire, honestly - in English it’s “I had a dream”. In French, though, it’s "J’ai fait un rêve”, which in a literal sense means “I made a dream”. We must take responsibility for our dreams, people! The French are ordering us to do so.
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At this point it’s close to impossible to endure another take on Tàr. The New Yorker’s by Tavi G had its moments but was exhausting, The Nation’s take was pointless, and Zadie Smith’s was a fun read but the generational angle proved itself to be, once again, a limited one. Smith’s text would be cooler if it would encompass more purely stylistic musings, like this one: “The camera (…) precisely indexed à la Wes Anderson, but in the subdued European palette of Michael Haneke”. Slate’s effort was particularly comical: a pompous headline and an author who was shocked to realize some Basic Truths about Films, for example the fact that they can, and are allowed to, choose uncanniness.
All this is to say that Max Read’s recent Tàr writeup on
was surprisingly good. In contrast with all these aforementioned texts, it skipped over most of The Big Themes and focused on a very small visual detail.I think the movie has one great innovation that pertains to digital culture, which you see in the image above. It’s a close-up shot of a phone, itself taking video of Tár in the middle distance. A red “LIVE” icon on the top suggests the video is being broadcast somewhere. Overlaid on the video is a DM conversation between the anonymous person holding the phone and someone else, discussing Tár. This app is not (as far as I know) “real,” and therefore not “realistic,” but it’s about the most authentic depiction I’ve seen on film of a certain experience of social media for both its subjects and its objects. Field returns to this device twice more (that I remember) in the movie, a different shot and conversation each time, never making it clear whose phone it is (if it is the same person each time), or what they’re up to. The shots are mundane but unsettling, the conversations seemingly vicious but cut off from context, the atmosphere foreboding. Is this a stalker? A passing attendant or fan? Her assistant? What are they talking about? Who’s watching her, and to what end? This kind of lurid exchange of power and paranoia is, of course, the precise attraction and fear of social media: Surveillance and broadcast, sociality and cruelty, anonymity and exposure all wrapped up together, severed from context and enacted mysteriously. Those three shots, as fleeting as they were, are what I’ve been thinking about most in the days since I saw Tár.
Metonymies are great when they work.
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Nike released a pair ‘Montreal Bagel’ sneakers. Usually I could care less but the sesame seeds… What can I do, it’s good stuff.