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What “Tár” Knows About the Artist as Abuser
What “Tár” Knows About the Artist as Abuser
By creating a character who can’t be written off as another predictably problematic man, “Tár” draws our attention to how Lydia learned to become one. And, by following Lydia closely, the film relieves the audience of a neurotic cultural obsession with the artistic legacies of real-life powerful figures, focussing instead on their tools. In lieu of asking “Can you separate the art from the artist?” or “But what will happen to these poor, bad men?,” “Tár” asks, “What does power look like, feel like, not only within an institution but within an individual psyche?”
At nineteen, I wrote in a private journal that “the knowledge that anything I feel has already been expressed in a work of art” was my version of feeling watched over by a higher power.
I do not mean to suggest that art works can be divorced from social context, only that our reactions to them are not, in themselves, public statements, acts of harm, or good deeds.
·newyorker.com·
What “Tár” Knows About the Artist as Abuser
The Hollow Impersonation in Blonde
The Hollow Impersonation in Blonde
The trouble with being a woman and making your art look so natural is that the world believes you unaware of your own magic; you’re less skilled artist than unaware naif merely happening upon great talent.
The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe author Sarah Churchwell argues that storytellers too easily evade the ethical question about Monroe’s representation. “Marilyn was not only a fiction; she was not simply an icon,” she writes. “And it is wishful thinking to believe that focusing exclusively on the surface does anything but make her superficial.” Blonde, for all its posturing and virtuoso stylings, shores up a mythology — in death, Monroe remains a vessel into which directors and actors can pour their ideas about the entertainment industry and the broader patriarchy, female beauty and female image-making.
·vulture.com·
The Hollow Impersonation in Blonde
The Subversive Brilliance of “A Little Life” | The New Yorker
The Subversive Brilliance of “A Little Life” | The New Yorker
Yanagihara’s rendering of Jude’s abuse never feels excessive or sensationalist. It is not included for shock value or titillation, as is sometimes the case in works of horror or crime fiction. Jude’s suffering is so extensively documented because it is the foundation of his character.
For the first fifty or so pages, as the characters attend parties, find apartments, go on dates, gossip, and squabble with each other, it is easy for the reader to think he knows what he’s getting into: the latest example of the postgraduate New York ensemble novel, a genre with many distinguished forbears, Mary McCarthy’s “The Group” and Claire Messud’s “The Emperor’s Children” among them.
As the pages turn, the ensemble recedes and Jude comes to the fore. And with Jude at its center, “A Little Life” becomes a surprisingly subversive novel—one that uses the middle-class trappings of naturalistic fiction to deliver an unsettling meditation on sexual abuse, suffering, and the difficulties of recovery.
In this godless world, friendship is the only solace available to any of us.
Like the axiom of equality, “A Little Life” feels elemental, irreducible—and, dark and disturbing though it is, there is beauty in it.
·newyorker.com·
The Subversive Brilliance of “A Little Life” | The New Yorker