On Lydia Tár's EGOT

If "is Lydia Tár a real person" was the question about Todd Field's movie that sparked the most mirth at the end of 2022 (alongside, naturally, handwringing about The Youth's putative inability to recognize a fiction film, absent superheroics), "is the ending of Tár a dream sequence" was the question that sparked the most scorn. The idea that it is, or at least might be, was given its most thorough airing in an article by Dan Kois, who, collating evidence of strange doings, sights, and sounds throughout the film, claims that the film is "a kind of ghost story, in which we're so deeply embedded in Lydia Tár's psyche that nearly everything that appears onscreen is up for debate", and never more so than in its final third.

Plenty of folks on social media (by which I mean Twitter, by which I mean Twitter as I experience it) were on hand deride Kois and others pushing that line for taking a shallow, puzzle-box approach to a work of art, in which the point of engagement with art is finding out the objectively correct answer to a question, the question being, usually, not terribly interesting.

How curious, then, the reactions that came in in January, when a few interviews with Field appeared in which he was called on to answer questions about Tár, which he mostly, to his credit, phrased as speculation, but sometimes answered definitively, like Rowling making her little pronouncements about what her characters get up to in their off hours: to Michael Schulman for The New Yorker, whose questions were bafflingly irrelevant to the film, he said that Tár won her Tony for work with Ivo van Hove; to Kate Aurthur for Variety, which ought to know better, he said that Tár actually never met, much less studied under, Leonard Bernstein. To these revelations there was no such derisive response; on the contrary, at least a few people were delighted to have their suspicions about Bernstein "confirmed". But—what attitude toward the film as a work of art lies in the impulse to ask such questions, or treat Field as in a position to confirm any such thing? For that matter, what attitude is it, really, that takes a work of art as a puzzle?

Certainly, there are works of art which contain puzzling elements, and getting straight about them is an unobjectionable, if perhaps not always necessary, part of appreciating them. It is not for nothing that Perec's preface to Life a User's Manual discusses the skillful creation of jigsaw puzzles, the imaginary dialogue between puzzle-maker and puzzle-solver involved in deciding what gets cut, or fit, where. We can regard Primer, for instance, as in part an exercise in constructing an extremely minimal syuzhet from which a much more involved and ramified fabula can be extrapolated; that those who attempt to do so arrive at substantially the same series of undepicted events is a testament to the skill with which it's put together. We confront something like a puzzle whenever we begin to suspect that a narrator is not reliable; the suspicion is an invitation to figure out how far and in what respect the narrator ought to be mistrusted: what's being concealed, what misrepresented? At times the text's own invitation to treat itself as offering up a mystery to be solved may become quite overt; think of some of Gene Wolfe's stories, perhaps "Seven American Nights". Such an invitation may always be declined. But taking it up needn't be "treating an artwork like a puzzle" in a derogatory sense; it could be the prelude to a deeper appreciation. If it seems too cold-bloodedly rational—if you prefer, perhaps, to let the feel of the work wash over you—recall that it was the arch-Romantic Schlegel who not only reminded us that a text teaches its readers how it is to be read, but also mocked his contemporaries thus: "If some mystical art lovers who regard every criticism as a dissection and every dissection as a destruction of pleasure were to think logically, then 'wow' would be the best criticism of the worthiest work of art".

Regarding an artwork as a puzzle in the derogatory sense can't simply mean, for instance, noticing, and trying to interpret, the apparitions in some shots in Tár. It means something more like treating the work not merely as being, in some respects, puzzling, and trying to make coherent sense of those aspects in light of the whole, but as being exhausted by those aspects that present a puzzle, and approaching it solely in those terms: it has a solution and the point is to find it; once you've found it, you're done and can move on. Once the jigsaw puzzle has been finished, who pauses to appreciate, in any sense, the image they've assembled? That's not the point. The point was to figure it out. It becomes mysterious, with this attitude, why anyone should hold art or particular works of art in any particularly high esteem, why the encounter with art is so important in anyone's life, how it could offer intellectual and emotional satisfactions beyond those (which are real!) of finding the solution.

Kois actually made sure to say explicitly that a work of art is not a puzzle box, but since he doesn't really do anything with the result of his analysis, one can forgive his accusers somewhat for ignoring that declaration. (A much superior piece in Collider by Martin Millman was concerned with many of the same aspects of the film as Kois, but used its observations to make thematic points.) Having put the clues together that, he thinks, show the unreality of the concluding sections of the film, he ends the piece. What are we to make of this newly assembled picture of Tár? Who knows—that doesn't seem to have been the point. But what Kois is up to, the relation that the puzzle-solving attitude bears to the artwork-as-puzzle, is still preferable to what Schulman was up to in The New Yorker.

A well made puzzle might be extraordinarily difficult, or fairly straightforward. It might require obscure or specialized knowledge; it might require very little beyond what the audience of potential solvers to which it addresses itself can be presumed to have. If well made, though, it should be self-sufficient, first, in the sense that it should contain within itself what is necessary to solve it. This will naturally be relative its audience; the more difficult linguistics olympiad puzzles are apt to stump those with no linguistics training, and if you've never heard of an épée some lazy crossword clues may simply be beyond you. These are, if you like, hermetic (as Ted Cohen called certain jokes hermetic), but nothing in them is secret; nothing is hidden. You may not know the thing that solves it, but you could have known it. You may need to appeal to the creator for hints, but if the puzzle is really well constructed it shouldn't be necessary for everyone to do so, in order to make progress; it should be tractable by at least some solvers. It should be self-sufficient in the further sense that if you have solved it, you should be able to recognize it as solved, to defend and explain your solution to the satisfaction of another. Obviously, sometimes this task is fairly trivial: these previously entangled rings are now separate; what more do you want? But that's not always the case. There really is a puzzle about what's going on in "Seven American Nights" and one can't simply present one's answer and expect it to be accepted without showing how it works—how it is a solution that fits satisfactorily with the whole. One may think that there has to be a single answer to a puzzle, but there's no reason to insist on that. Crossword constructors occasionally make puzzles whose single right answer will be determined by an event that hadn't yet taken place when the puzzle was published; the outcome of an election or sports game, say. Such a puzzle could easily be made to enjoy multiple solutions by changing the schematic clue "victor in such-and-such a contest" to "contender in such-and-such a contest". This would be a neat if perhaps not very interesting trick. But it is useful to cancel the idea that interest in puzzles implies an aversion to multiplicity. The puzzling events of "Seven American Nights", or for that matter of Tár, may admit of multiple interpretations without that meaning one can't regard them as well made puzzles. One wouldn't be able to tell that someone else was wrong just because they had a different answer, but one would expect that other person, as well as oneself, to show how each answer is an answer, how it fits together with the information given and how it answers whatever one takes the question to be. The essential point is that in taking something to be or pose a puzzle, one takes the process of finding and justifying a solution as something it is in one's power, at least in principle, to do. If the solver must appeal to the author to find out if they've answered it correctly, or must appeal for a hint because the puzzle is simply missing information, it's at best flawed. Gollum was right to object to "what have I got in my pocket": that's no riddle.

Interest in a puzzle, or something treated as a puzzle, is interest in something public. Some people may be better positioned to make a go of it, but in principle anyone else could be in the same position; no one has a special kind of relationship to the puzzle that makes them more authoritative than anyone else. Even creators of puzzles are well positioned only by knowing the same kind of thing that successful solvers will know; they're familiar with these things because they made the puzzle what it is. But their knowledge is of the puzzle, and they can even learn things about it they didn't already know; there may be other routes to a solution than they had envisaged. (Think of the Gordian Knot.) Moreover, whatever hints they give or announcements about the solution they may make are answerable to the puzzle; if the creator announces later "the solution is such-and-such", that had better actually fit with the starting points and declared goal of the puzzle. If they say "here's a hint: …", that hint had better be such as to help someone make progress. If, that is, the puzzle is "what actually happens at the end of Tár, and in particular, is it all a dream of Lydia Tár's?", and Todd Field himself announces that it is, then a fair rejoinder is "on what basis might anyone be able to tell that?"; if he says "you can tell from careful attention to a, b, and c", then a, b, and c had better actually support his contention, in the first place, and it's open, in the second, for anyone else to say "when you consider x, y, and z as well, this other interpretation of a, b, and c becomes compelling, which points away from 'it was a dream' solution toward this other one". There may be another solution, for all Field's goals when (as we are pretending) he constructed the puzzle. Whatever else may come with regarding a work of art as a puzzle to be solved, it at least takes the work, or some aspect of it, as the object of interest, and it takes the audience as able to do the solving.

What sort of attitude does someone have who asks whether Lydia Tár really knew Bernstein, or how she won her Tony? Michael Schulman, who wrote the New Yorker piece about her EGOT, referred to his confirmed-by-Field conjecture as "CANON", in all caps, on Twitter, suggesting that the basic orientation emerges from fandom, and it does seem to have a certain fannish deference and passivity. (Of course fandom has its own forms of activity, but with respect to what really happened, what's canonical, it shows a great deal of deference to whoever seems to be running the show.) But how does Field come to be in a position to confirm that Lydia Tár worked with Ivo van Hove? Nothing of the sort is suggested in the movie. If Tár were a real person, we could imagine that Field is just better acquainted with her than we are, but, alas, she isn't a real person, and there would seem to be no more to know about her than one can learn from the film, where she has the only existence she does have. If Field has an authority here any attentive viewer does not, then what the artwork is cannot simply be the film anyone can view attentively; Lydia Tár's existence must extend beyond the film. How else could Field know more about her than we do?

As with puzzles, Field could simply be more reliable as a guide to what's depicted in the film, both in the sense of what can be gleaned from it and in the sense of what's on screen to notice in the first place, than the average viewer, in virtue of his more intimate acquaintance with it. Even professional reviewers, who might be supposed to be good at watching movies and getting their gist, get basic facts of plot wrong surprisingly often; maybe it's better to put our trust in someone who's got a firmer grasp on the whole affair. But that isn't why someone asks Field whether Tár really knew Bernstein, or worked with van Hove. Those questions presuppose that Field has some special, esoteric knowledge, knowledge that we just can't get except by asking. After all, didn't he invent Lydia Tár, and everything we do see? (Ignoring for the moment the fact that movies are not created by just one person.) Why not suppose that he also invented a few more things, things that just didn't make it on screen, for one reason or another? It hardly strains the imagination. Perhaps he charted her career in great detail. Tár exists onscreen, yes, but also in Field's imagination, pages of notes, a private archive, whatever. We all see what's on the screen, which is public, but that only gives part of the story—whatever Field imagined in service of, or along the way to, creating the film also counts. And only he knows those things.

If you think that Field is uniquely authoritative and can confirm speculation about things that are only suggested, or not even suggested, in the course of the film, then the film, the only thing the public has full access to, is incomplete, eked out by something inaccessible to the rest of us. The epistemological deference we grant Field has, alas, metaphysical import; sitting in the theater, we audience members are even more like the wretches in Plato's cave than the projectionist's art suggests. It's not that understanding the film requires it to be supplemented by further things that are in principle also accessible to the public, even if not actually known, as in the case of the hermetic puzzle; that which completes it, that Field uniquely has knowledge of, are Field's own private thoughts and fancies, of which the thing we see is but the imperfect, incomplete manifestation. An artist who thinks of their work along these lines has in a sense never published it—they wish to retain a proprietary interest in it, keep it on a leash, rather than sending it on its way to become what it will be in the eyes of its public. Such an artist asserts the primacy of what they wanted to do over what they actually did. If the audience of a work thinks of it along these lines, it abdicates its role as appreciator and interpreter, wishing not only that there should be an answer, but someone who can give it the answer, and in fact setting things up so that someone has to give it the answer. For critical appreciation and assessment as an independent activity is all but impossible.

That conclusion may seem melodramatic when faced with trivial examples—guessing games about awards of no moment at all in the film. (Whether Tár was a fabulist all along about Bernstein is of greater interest.) There we have something firmly in "what have I got in my pockets" territory, but which is, at least, beside the point; potentially playful in the same way "who would win in a fight, Batman or the Predator?" is. (Which—this is admittedly petty—makes it all the more unseemly that Schulman chose to use his time with Field to pursue those questions.)

But the deference shown to the creators of works goes beyond the trivial and extraneous. It is easy, for instance, to find defenses against the obvious antisemitic reading of They Live claiming not that the reading is the crude, unilluminating application of a template whereby any tale of a sufficiently large conspiracy deceiving and exploiting the masses is congruent to any other, but that it's incorrect because John Carpenter says it's not what he meant—an act of bald ipsedixitry unproductive of critical insight, in addition to being somewhat flimsy if one thinks the availability of an antisemitic reading is important: "he may not have thought of it before", as Stanley Cavell wrote in a similar context, "but he had better think of it now." (I should add that I don't know in what spirit Carpenter himself has said these things.) Our knowledge of the film that we can watch contains the same potential for interpretation; what's changed is our knowledge of the film-cum–Carpenter's mind, and we are asked to disregard our lying eyes in favor of Carpenter's assurances.

Granted, we will not accept just anything from the creator of a work—"actually, this was funny" will not fly. (Or so one hopes. There do exist statements by artists about their work that amount to an announcement that their joke made you laugh, actually.) And perhaps claims that such and such a reading is, or is not, definitively correct, would also not fly, if they seemed to go against too much of what anyone can see in the public face of the work. But even regarding the creator as having the power to settle open controversies, or add, post-publication, to the store of facts, has a deep impact on how we can relate to an artwork.

My point is not that we've known since Barthes, or Foucault, or Cavell, or Nehamas, or or the New Critics, or the Romantics, or whatever style of critical autonomy you like, that this sort of attitude is wrong. (Perhaps, to pick up on its apparent fannish sympathies, it has reasonable application in the case of long-running serialized works with a master plan.) My point is that it's stultifying, and stultifying in a way that looking at a work of art as a puzzle is not. It makes our interest in a work of art into a sort of pretend appreciation. No matter how searching or sophisticated a reading, how compelling, productive, or interesting it is to others, it is always in principle hostage to someone else, the author or whoever it may be, coming along and saying, "no, that's not right"—and there's an end on it, because they know. It's disappointing if someone regards a work of art as a puzzle to be solved, because such an interest in art seems trivializing. It seems incompatible with the significance many find in their engagement with art in reducing such engagement to the finding of clever solutions, after which the work can be set aside. But at least such a person thinks that they can find the solutions. They have not mystified the nature of the artwork, or made it someone's private property. Someone who thinks Todd Field, uniquely, can say whether Lydia Tár really studied with Leonard Bernstein still thinks there's a single answer to be had to that question, but they don't even think they can find it out.

POST SCRIPT

As it happens, while I was sitting around deciding what to do with this here piece of writing you've nearly finished, Aaron Bady, on Twitter, posted a link to a paper (in some kind of draft state) on Teju Cole's Open City. It's good and I recommend it. I mention it here because, in it, Bady makes use of Cole's personal statements, about the novel, about its reception (praising Alyssa Rosenberg's review), and about rape culture in general (ie not in connection with his novel), and I couldn't help but feel, as I read the pertinent sections, as if the apparently most important uses were in fact the most extraneous. (Partly this is done in service of arguing for against the identification of Cole and Julius, the novel's narrator, in which some critics, eg James Woods, indulged, and I have no objection to that, but that aim can be (and is!) prosecuted by producing a reading of Julius's character in the novel, and contrasting it with the real-life Cole, and setting them aside each other, not by taking Cole as privileged insight into the novel. Another citation of Cole has him suggesting a "plausible" (NB!) way of thinking about the novel as "a series of visits to [Julius's] psychiatrist", a suggestion redeemed by its fruitfulness, not its source.) This apparent extraneousness is especially interesting since Bady not only quotes Cole but also casts in a negative light the "New Critical impulse to avoid the 'intentional fallacy' [and] reluctance to give Teju Cole's opinion of his novel any interpretive weight", and connects that impulse to the impulse that led critics to essentially (and astoundingly) ignore even the possibility that Julius is a rapist.

The specific opinion most important statement of Cole's is that Julius did, in fact, rape Moji, as Moji asserts, an assertion that Julius more or less (as I remember it, anyway) ignores. One reason to be a little cautious here—to embrace the most anodyne possible version of an "intentional fallacy", the reminder that what one intends to do is not always what one does in the end—is apparent in the part of the interview Bady quotes: the book would end with "three vicious thwacks of the hammer, and then a soft exit to strings. I'm attracted, in art, to things that trouble the complacency of the viewer or reader", Cole says. But—manifestly, since otherwise there would be no need for Bady's paper—the complacency of many reviewers, at least, was not troubled. Bady remarks that Rosenberg hits a false note when she says that the ending of the novel "forces" us to reevaluate Julius. Cole, too, seems to have hit a false note; he may have intended to trouble our complacency, but this intention seems not to have been brought off. The hammer thwacks weren't vicious enough; maybe the hammer wasn't even really there. But this is after all an intention about the effect the ending should have, not an intention about what takes place within the world of the narrative, however implicit it may be; perhaps that makes the difference.

Suppose that Cole had said, of Moji's accusation, not "it's absolutely true" but "no, it's false" or "It's inconclusive on purpose" or nothing, declining to address the issue. And then suppose that we read Bady's paper, starting from the part beginning "in the remainder of this essay", wherein he develops the reading that "Julius works to forget [his rape of Moji], through his narrative, in ways which can be (and must be) read back into the novel". Would that reading be less convincing? It doesn't depend on taking Cole at his word regarding Moji's assertion. Indeed, although Bady says that "the novel's frustratingly limited first-person narration does not allow us to answer with any confidence" the question whether Julius raped Moji, in my eyes his reading allows us to conclude that the narration does allow us to answer the question with confidence in the affirmative: it is an argument that the affirmative answer, read back into the novel from the beginning, is present in the novel from the beginning, that while Julius does not narrate his consciousness of his rape as such, it nevertheless pervades and shapes his actions and his narration: "the reading is present in the novel, a pattern of references and associations which organize the stream of Julius's consciousness." (What, one has to wonder, do the critics who think it up in the air whether Julius raped Moji or not, or those, if there any, who think that he simply did not, think the episode is doing in the novel? Is it a prank? A warning—look, these accusations can come even for the learnèd flaneur?) Such a reading also reveals the book as better—more artfully and cunningly constructed—than it would otherwise seem; this is a dimension of its attraction.

It is ironic that Bady, in (aptly) describing his reading as "felicitous", ie, as one which "simply works or does not", contrasts that view of readings with a view of fiction as "a constative utterance", "a set of propositions about an objective reality which can either be confirmed or denied", after having previously cast suspicion on the "New Critical … reluctance to give Teju Cole's opinion of his novel any interpretive weight". Absent a compelling, felicitous reading, Teju Cole's opinion of his novel could only play the role of confirming or denying a supposition about what has happened within it, precisely as if it were an objective reality of which he has knowledge. But in the presence of such a reading, what need have we for his opinion in particular? It's not that there's a reason not to give Cole's opinion any weight: it deserves all the weight it can support. But he supports it the way we all do.