Tar

How to approach this?

Ok: coffee table books on Scandinavian interior design. I have a repulsion/desire relationship with these images.The rooms they depict are clean and calm, yet not cold. Warmed up just a bit by the brown wool of the upholstery, the blue-toned grey clay of the dishes holding something steaming and Japanese - very umami. Blond wood everywhere, all is comfortable and ergonomic. Nothing superfluous, and certainly no clutter.

The humans, when pictured, are well groomed but you can tell they don't use perfume. Maybe they smell of some hand harvested essential oil in their goat milk soap. No visible makeup. No visible plastic surgery. And certainly no synthetic fibers in their clothing (past the necessary 2% spandex, but we don't have to mention that.)

The floors are polished concrete - ever heard of that? I hadn't! Now I know that it's what you use for flooring when you like white walls, high ceilings, industrial windows with sashes painted gloss black (or maybe grey, maybe white) and you prefer to display all your pictures at floor level, leaning at just a slight angle onto the wall.

Man, I am a sucker for this shit!

It implies a sort of academic sophistication, appreciation for GOOD THINGS. Quality things. Kentucky Fried Chicken would have no place in houses like these.

"What a douchebag," that's me talking to myself inside my own head - I'm looking through the coffee table book, sitting crosslegged on my "reclaimed" couch that is still a little wet from where the dog was lying. "Look at these assholes," I shake my head and wrinkle my nose, "that one looks like a real dick." I silently potty-mouth them, simultaneously devouring their living spaces with my greedy eyes. It's messed up.

So my husband and I were on the same couch tonight, watching the movie Tar.

From a purely stylistic perspective, this movie was like a Scandinavian design coffee table book, but let's say I typically rate the interiors as a 9 and the humans as a 4? This movie shifts the niceness level down 10 points, so the interiors are at negative 1 and the humans at negative 6. Or like a Scandinavian design book produced and populated by bad people (and not just people who incite my judgmental pique.)

This movie made me feel disgust at the phenomenon of large wine glasses, aversion to neutral color pallets and natural fabrics, distrust of mid-century modern chairs, and total hatred for expertise of any sort. I wanted to slap every single person in the film, with the exception of the child, who I wanted to put in another film just so she would be safe. The dialogue was oppressive, the facial expressions were excruciating. It was a grim journey from start to finish.

I'm not saying it was a poorly done film, as I think it was meant to deliver precisely what it was serving. And Cate Blanchett acted her part (I just wrote "fart" and had to correct it!) perfectly. As a result I now dislike and distrust her as well.

This movie left me with the feeling that the world is maybe not such a nice place. "Grim," I said to my husband, and he nodded, "Yes, "grim", that's the right word for it." We closed up the house, trudged upstairs. The boys are at sleep-away camp - a very rare period of privacy and quietude for us - but now the house just rang empty. I felt homesick for them. A sort of loneliness that can begin to feel inescapable...

But wait just a minute - let me look something up. I haven't felt this desolate after a movie since that other one, like twenty years ago... what was it called? Bedroom something - In the Bedroom. I wonder...

Same director. Bloke made three feature length films, and now I have seen two of them. In the Bedroom is my movie anecdote that I pull out of my pocket when I want to convey an example of a movie that I experienced as an ordeal, and that left me with no life lessons in return. Just a feeling of emptiness, but more than that, bad emptiness. Well, I have learned a lesson now. Which is, I am not going to waste energy, time or thought dwelling in the movie-land headspace of the film Tar. Littered as it is with red herrings, Easter eggs, potent symbolism and heavy dialogue, it certainly invites speculation, but no thank you.

I will, however, indulge in a bit of meta-analysis. Years ago I did classroom (nude) modeling for Massachusetts College of Art. I learned the hard way, in my first 3-hour sit, that any, even slight, twist to the posture can produce punishing pain when held for more than five or ten minutes. One day, a female graduate student wanted me to take a preposterous pose - twisted, leaning backwards, arms beneath me. "I make art about the oppression of women," she explained. (I refused the gig.)

It occurs to me that all art is manipulation, to one degree or another: of materials, actors, models, the audience. This manipulation can result in catharsis (the raw humanity of certain Mike Leigh films), revelation of internalized societal constructs that stand in the way of catharsis (almost any Kazuo Ishiguro novel), uncontrollable laughter (Norbit - wanna fight me on that? Step up!) If I were to credit Tar with anything, I would genre it (and In the Bedroom) as psychological horror in the vein of Roman Polanski's Repulsion (another film that I could have done well without seeing.) It suggests a world devoid of both humanity and meaning, but instead of delivering it as the horrific punch line, it asks that the audience accept it as the mundane backdrop to the narrative.

The real question is, will I ever be able to enjoy Scandinavian design coffee table books in the same way again? Well, maybe the director has done me a favor with that one...