Thoughts about Tár from someone with an almost invisible credit

Although Tár doesn't get released in Thailand until February, you can watch it on amazon prime for $25 (for that you can own your own copy and watch it offline.) There is no way for me to review this film objectively - or without spoilers - so I will talk about it here and if you want to wait until you see the film to read these comments, please look away right now.

******* MULTIPLE SPOILER ALERT ********

So, I did not get to see the film until yesterday (thanks to Amazon prime who charged me $25). But, I got an inkling when Paul Spurrier returned from the AFM.

He said to me: "So we have here a mad genius conductor, who is kicked out of a major European orchestra after an act of violence, has rather ambiguous dealings with some young prodigies, ends up in Southeast Asia conducting a youth orchestra in a tawdry venue ..."

"Oh!" I said. "You went to a screening of our film?" Because Paul was telling me the exact plot of our own film. "The Maestro: A Symphony of Terror."

"Actually, no," he said. "I just saw TÁR."

Yesterday, I too, saw TÁR. And actually, Paul was not incorrect. In a sense, it does have the same plot as "The Maestro." But alas, I am a poor substitute for the incomparable Cate Blanchett, and our film is wholly different in substance anyway, being a modest little tribute to the horror films of the 1980s. Plus, the fall of the mighty, from Prometheus to the present, is in its very nature the essence of all that we mean by the word tragedy.

I cannot of course write an unbiased review of TÁR because I'm credited as a consultant up front (though my work, such as it is, only graces a few minutes of this 158 minute film) and also because my orchestra, every single one of them credited by name, appears for a few minutes as well.

However, this is one of the only films ever made that credibly inhabits my world, the real world behind the scenes of classical music, and which references hundreds of little things that only truly make sense to people who live in that world. One of the questions I was always asking myself throughout this film was, "Would anyone get this?" Occasionally it was the opposite: "Why would these characters explain something just to the audience in an expository lump, that everyone in the field would already know?" It's a balancing act which to me, succeeds pretty well, on the whole. I think though that for Blanchett's character to have to be told, for instance, something as well-known to conductors as the story of Furtwängler's denazification struggles (there was even a movie about that!) doesn't ring true. I also don't buy everyone talking of Mahler 5 as Mahler's "big one". I mean, in terms of size, there's 2 and 8, in terms of "what is his greatest symphony" most people I know would probably say 6, or 9, were the "big ones" ... 5 is a "big one" the way Beethoven's 5 is a "big one" ... it is just too "popular" to feel that way to practicing musicians. I'd say that this characterization of No. 5 is at best debatable unless you were first turned on to Mahler by the Visconti movie (which she does make fun of in the course of the movie.)

The film also contains the popular Hollywood myth that composers sit at the piano and try out a few notes and say "ah, that's it" and jot it down. That might be true in the pop world, I don't know. I, and every composer I know, writes music in their head and jots it down (or enters it into their software) ... but alas, that's not very visual.

A very interesting question is — how is Cate Blanchett's conducting? It looks very good. It's flamboyantly cinematic. The kids said that they had a spot of trouble because she seemed to be conducting in 7/4 instead of 6/4, but when I watched the movie she didn't seem to be getting it wrong. However, I do understand why they might have thought so. Blanchett's upbeats are not fully realized, like a golfer who hits the ball perfectly without doing the perfect swing beforehand. But this is also true of many famous conductors. That's because orchestras that are as good as the Berlin Phil don't need that much warning. They can play the piece anyway. All the work is in the rehearsal (as the character herself says.). Those dramatic gestures, in a sense, are for the audience — guiding them through the unfolding adventure. It's actually only a problem with a more inexperienced orchestra. So I'd say top marks on conducting the music, and a bit of nitpicking on how she conducts the silence just before the music sounds.

The critics have picked out the amazing scene where Tár bullies a Julliard student in a conducting workshop, and have read into it inklings of the hubris that leads to her downfall. First, this is a scene of staggering virtuosity ... quarter of an hour or so in one take, the camerawork (steadicam?) as seamless as Blanchett's flawless, nuanced reading of every complex line in the scene. This has got to be one of the most technically astonishing monologues in all of cinema. But most critics have focused on the fact that Tár mercilessly takes apart the poor little conducting student who's only trying to cancel Bach for being a straight white protestant. Because they haven't been through the fiery baptism of what it takes to become a conductor, they often miss that what Tár tells the kid are some of the deepest truths about why we do music. Conductors do it all ... persuading, cajoling, insisting, and in the end bullying ... if that's what it takes ... and if the kid can't take it, he's not cut out for it. It's a cruel profession. That monologue, truthfully, is full of things that I have said to my own students, though I'm usually not quite as mean about it. Sometimes, years later, I realize I should have been more mean. Truth is, I am the most mean to the students I care about the most. I guess you'd call it tough love. Lydia Tár, it seems, is a lot more promiscuous in her meanness than me.

The thing is, the TÁR character did the right thing. She may have belittled little Max, may have condescended in her tone, but the substance of what she said did not talk down to him at all.

Much is also made of the ending of the film — where my orchestra appears, as it happens. Because it is read, by most critics I have seen, as the bathetic nadir of Tár's existence ... of the karma coming to roost.

Yes, I personally believe that Mahler (and Bach, of course) exist on a higher plane than "Monster Hunter." I did not know this music. But let me tell you, the kids in our orchestra were familiar with the score. My resident conductor, Trisdee, who is in his thirties, and who is a world expert in early music performance practice, has played this video game all the way to the end. The hushed, religious intensity of the kids in weird costumes is as real as the fervour of the old folks listening to Brahms. I know for a fact that this gaming world is as rich and as real to those who are in it, as the nuances of romantic "sehnsucht" are to those who love "Tristan".

The reason I don't think Todd Field intends this to be purely a fall from grace is that Tár is never shown denigrating or despising this music at all. She's seen studying it seriously, and when she conducts it, she gives it as much her all as in her illustrious Berlin career. Indeed, she subsumes herself ... exactly as she taught little Max he had to do in the Julliard scene.

And we all know there's more money in video game music than in playing Mahler symphonies ... that's just the real world.

I think that we are expected to see this as the classic tragedy — a great figure whose hubris leads to death (career death at least). But the director has pulled a fast one. It's not a tragedy at all. The tragedy is just the top stratum of this multilayered work.

And the clearest foreshadowing of this is in the "apocalypse now" reference ... the crocodiles in the river who were imported to "be in a Marlon Brando movie" and stayed. As the boy from the orchestra says, "They survive."

Crocodiles are predators. In our story, Lydia Tár comes to be viewed as a predator. She's done a lot bad things, sure. Like the crocodiles, she eats people alive. But like the crocodiles in the river, she's still there at the end. Every indication is that she's going to climb her way all the way back again. Before her departure for the old "unnamed Asian country" we learn that she's already reinvented herself once before, dropping her decidedly "white trash" past for the exotic mystique of the name with the funny accent. I am not at all sure that she won't have the last laugh in this story.

The joke is on me, too, because when Living Films, the Chiengmai-based production company tapped me to consult on getting a youth orchestra in Thailand, they didn't tell me much. The only parts of the script I ever saw were a few sides that some of the young musicians needed for their audition. At first, I thought it was going to be a "white saviour" movie ... about some do-gooder musician who brings us benighted Asians to enlightenment through the power of music, or whatever. It turned out to be a movie that really asks questions about the nature of creativity. And whether geniuses can be "bad people" — and whether this matters in the context of their genius and of history.

In a real sense, this could actually be read as a "brown saviour" movie. Arrogant white genius gets canceled by bad acts ... and finds salvation in Asia, because we don't (yet) HAVE cancel culture here. Yes, you can just as easily read this as being about the first steps toward redemption as a film about an artist self-destructing.

I could say a lot more, and will at some stage, because there is a lot of substance to talk about.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugnaught

Thoughts While Binge-Watching “The Mandalorian”

I was finally able to watch The Mandalorian recently in between moments of incredible personal and professional stress. And one of the best things about it, ironically, is that it doesn’t contain a single original idea. I’m not praising with faint damns here — far from it — I am trying to explain why this series is so appealing, absorbing, and generally bingeworthy.

Alexander Pope said of great poetry that is “what oft was said, yet ne’er so well express’d.” The Mandalorian is great because it uses tropes that we know and love, and serves them up in ways that are fresh and surprising enough to please the palate and push our emotional buttons. Everyone knows apples and walnuts — yet a Waldorf salad is an exquisite masterpiece of recombinant DNA.

And when you start disassembling the tropes, you also see a whole history of science fiction and adventure stories — a long line stretching all the way back to Gilgamesh, but this is just a short review so I’ll mostly stick with the last hundred years.

First, it’s the music the telegraphs the milieu. Gone are the lush late-romantic soundscapes of “big epic”. Odd, ethnic sounding wind instruments, rattling percussion immediately bring a particular shade of Ennio Morricone to mind, so before we even see much, we know we’re in a sort of spaghetti western. The lone hero travelling through a desert with a mute child is also inhabiting the world of Jodorowsky’s El Topo … and then there’s the veneer of orientalism — the ronin-like guild, “the way” (and what is the way but bushido?). We are in a very real sense back in the 1970s, the “birth time” of Star Wars — but we have moved in the direction of David Carradine in Kung Fu — a TV series so influential to the culture and to
what came after that we take all its radical influences for granted and have forgotten the show itself.

All of this puts us in the same universe as Star Wars but in a wholly “new” kind of “old” story — the picaresque tale of a knight errant on a solitary quest accompanied by a mysterious fifty-year-old Child.

Calling the companion simply “The Child” and mentioning its age reminds us also The Child, one of the main Jungian archetypes, isn’t just some undeveloped person but in mythological terms is someone infinitely old and wise who appears as a Child.

So, apart from a few red herrings in the middle, this is a pretty clean clear-cut arc of a story and I am not surprised that it’s getting more positive attention than the more ambiguous and perhaps “kit-bashed” films of the final trilogy. The Mandalorian with his thinly disguised bushido code, the miniature Yoda-like alien, the much subtler fansaabisu which reference more obscure minutiae of the canon (and occasionally even things rejected from canon) … all these things keep hitting the right buttons and it’s particularly delicious that this iteration of the “hero with a thousand faces” has no face.

Indeed, how any acting manages to occur at all is a triumph with all that armor. I am assuming its mostly ADR work, meaning that scenes of interactions with others must be particularly hard on the other actors. And yet it kind of works. Perhaps a “Lone Hero” by nature has to act like a block of wood — pace David Carradine. The inevitable last minute face revelation, mandated by the structure of such shows, was almost unnecessary, though it was useful to see that the hero was not some scarred monster — or some surprise celebrity — as men in iron masks are wont to be.

Although it’s clear that “Baby Yoda” has injected an almost unbearable level of cuteness into the show, this little guy’s no Ewok. The Ewoks were somewhat nauseating in their cuteness whereas B.Y. is genuinely adorable. The Ewoks were very obviously toys, as well, and served no actual plot-based purpose, whereas the existence of the B.Y. opens all sorts of doors and asks interesting questions. And puppetry, or whatever this is, seems to have improved a lot since the Ewoks — whose toy-ness one could never actually forget. B.Y. was pretty convincing — this was no muppet.

The best thing about this new series is the very human scale in which it’s set. There aren’t any space battles with thousands of battleships, and there isn’t a super-weapon that annihilates an entire planet, let alone an entire fleet of such weapons. There’s no one who wants to rule the entire universe — just a planet or two is fine. As befits climbing down from the movie screen to the home screen, the operatic bombast is greatly reduced.

When an actor plays one of those rugged, implacable types, we often say that his face is masklike. In The Mandalorian, the face and the mask are one, so acting ability is basically moot. Sexual charisma is moot. Rippling muscles are moot. Hell, it’s all moot. The ability to play a convincing protagonist while completely encased in Beskar is probably quite rare, though we don’t have many antecedents to compare our favorite bounty hunter with. David Carradine probably worked pretty hard to impersonate a block of wood; portraying a hunk of metal comes easy to Pedro Pascal, thanks to the fact that he is his costume.

And yet we’re all in love with him.

It doesn’t hurt that we were in love with Boba Fett when he was no more than an action figure. It doesn’t hurt that Baby Yoda presumably sees his saintly nature beneath his rough-hewn exterior — presumably being a Force user lets you see the man beneath the metal.

So — it’s the adventures of a tin man and a cute puppet, zooming through the galaxy, busting balls. one step ahead of the law, bargaining with jawas, getting chased through sewers, with a healthy dose of scum and villainy — how could one not enjoy it, guilty pleasure though it might be? And when the wicked Moff pulls out a — gasp — darksaber — while our hero finally achieves flight — well, a lot of buttons are being pushed.

It’s not deep, as such, but there’s enough quasi-Eastern philosophy woven into it to create a credible aura of depth. And it asks many questions that Warsies have always wanted answers to. Next season, presumably, there will be answers.

A Speck of Dust in the Wind of Time

In the rain....

A week has gone by since I was asked to put together one of the biggest “sing-ins” in history — the massed performance of our Royal Anthem in front of the Grand Palace last Saturday. I’ve been asked a lot about what it was like, how it felt, how is it even possible to “conduct” a quarter of a million people. Indeed, when I saw all the cameras and the “cast of thousands,” I immediately christened HSH Prince Chatri Chalerm “Cecil B. De Mui” … and he deserves all our thanks and more, because his vision whipped it all together.

I lived in Hollywood for several decades, and I do understand the ego rush that could come from having a hundred-foot crane on a dolly swooping down from the sky and swivelling to a stop right next to one’s face in the midst of a powerful moment of emoting. And as a conductor, I do understand the power surge of lifting one’s arm and eliciting a thunderous chord from a vast ensemble.

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Rehearsing in Korat

And yet, for all its cinematic spectacle, this was not that kind of event, in the end. A film was being made, but we were not there to make a film.

I would like to say something about what I think this moment means to me, to all of us who participated. Because I think this was more than a whole lot of people singing a song, and more than the creation of an epic music video. I think that this may come to be seen as the moment when Thailand began to see herself as one again, when this country began to heal.

Many things have divided us, and the divisions have become bitter. But if there is a single thread that has tied together all our lives in this country, that has connected all the dots of our fractious past, it has always been the special relationship between King Rama IX and the people of Thailand.

There are, in my experience, a minimum of three “Thailands”. One is the Siam of the Hollywood imagination, exemplified in the quaintly racist fantasy of The King and I. Another Thailand is, equally, a fantasy: the Thailand that drives the narrative that many international journalists love — a Thailand fueled exclusively by class struggle or color-coded factions. Then there is the Thailand that we actually live in. It is a country not perfect, but aware of its problems and striving to improve; a country that has come amazingly far in a short time, from an agrarian third world nation to a powerhouse, a journey that has been undertaken not without some terrible deals with the dark side; a country that has yet so much further to go; a country that has chosen to vest its collective sense of identity in the person of a mild-mannered monarch with a massive intellect and a mighty heart. It is a good country, but it is a wounded country.

But when the first note of my arrangement of the Royal Anthem sounded, it was more than just a musical unison, more than just a quarter of a million people all producing the same note. At that moment, many people felt a cold wind arise and blow over their heads. Some stated firmly that it was a supernatural wind, others that it was just the goosebumps, the power of the shared emotion.

But it was also the wind of history, and I and the musicians and the choristers and the crowd and the millions who watched live on television were all motes of dust in that great tempest. In the end it was not how “big” the moment made me feel, but how small.

A few days later we were invited to the town of Korat, and if anything the experience was even more powerful. The rain lashed down as a crowd estimated at 200,000 by the Korat authorities came together. I could barely conduct the music through my tears. In about a week we will repeat the anthem in Yala and to me this is particularly significant because our King is the protector of all religions, Islam as well as Buddhism.

Music can be a powerful metaphor for nationhood. When you perform a piece of music with other people, it is not just about playing well. It is even more important to listen well. A symphony is greater than the sum of what the individuals musicians play. What holds it together is that we listen to one another. And in listening, we become one. What holds true for the symphony also holds true as a life lesson. It is definitely true in the political arena. Too many people have spoken without listening. When we make music, we cannot do this. Our art comes from listening.

A quarter of a million people could not all see the conductor’s beat, no matter how grandiose the gestures. They were forced to listen to one another. And they did. They could feel each other’s heartbeat. They came together and they were one.

On Saturday, children from our music program in the slums of Klong Toey sang side by side with the granddaughter of His Majesty the King. This is a Thailand we may dream of. This is a Thailand that may come to pass, if in our grief we begin to hear the voices of those who share our overwhelming bereavement.

You see, grief counsellors cannot heal us. Psychiatrists cannot heal us. And most certainly, politicians cannot heal us. We must heal ourselves. We must prepare for a long journey. And listening to one another is the first step.