The Cinema of Cancellation: Tár

On Narration, #MeToo, and Narcissism

I watched Tár when it first came out, didn’t like it all that much, but resolved to rewatch it with more attention before writing about it. I rewatched it for this series (and for a possible In Bed with the Right episode down the line), and liked it quite a bit more than the first time around. I think it’s a more interesting window into the #MeToo era than I first supposed. Though I remain unclear whether that’s the movie’s own doing.

Tár was directed by Todd Field and came out in October of 2022. Given its topic, it was quickly connected — for better or for worse — to the then-buzzy problematic of “cancel culture”. "A tense thriller and thoughtful study of cancel culture", the Daily Express titled its review. And the Telegraph headlined "A searing Cate Blanchett — and the first cancel-culture thriller?" As is so often the case, the movie’s stars and director, in promoting it, were prompted to sound off on the culture war issues the film was reflecting on, and their takes in interviews were – as interviews tend to be – perhaps not as thoughtful as what’s on screen. In its framing of an interview with Blanchett, The Australian even seemed to imply that she was thinking of retiring from acting because of “cancel culture”.

To get this out of the way: there’s a lot to love here, especially for a gay German guy with a collection of about 3500 CDs (turns out they have become very cheap when everyone started abandoning them). Great Berlin locations, an amazing Cate Blanchett acting up a storm (and literally speaking my language — her German is excellent), lots of Mahler and the Elgar Cello Concerto. This movie was made for me. But I have to say I’m very ambivalent about this movie. To the extent that I find it interesting and suggestive, it is not the movie described in the reviews I just cited. So let me first talk about the movie Tár that some critics seem to have seen. That movie is contained somewhere in Tár’s jagged, two and a half hour runtime. But it is, I think, not Tár.

That movie has a thesis, and it’s a thesis about the need to “separate the artist from the art”. At the same time, the movie seems oddly confused about which artists need to be separated from their art. It’s a movie about conductors — the then-recent forced retirements of Charles Dutoit and James Levine are name-checked —, but it spends a lot of time defending the idea that we shouldn’t treat Bach’s or Mahler’s gender politics as a reason for not playing their works. Which … sort of feels like responding to a question nobody asked. Note that while people acknowledge that Bach and Mahler had some problematic gender politics, no one in the film outside of a single caricature of a SJW seriously suggests we stop playing them or listening to them. And even Lydia Tár finishes the movie still conducting. Her voice is still being heard, she’s still making music.

What has fallen away, it seems, are the private cars (she’s reduced to cabs), the fancy dinners, the Saville Row tailor and the gorgeous brutalist house outside of Berlin. So, okay, are we asking whether great art should no longer be listened to or referred to just because of what we know about its creator? Or are we asking whether we need to be subsidizing sex pests in order to listen to it? As a classical music person, I have not personally taken any of my recordings done by Dutoit or Levine out of rotation. I listen to Richard Wagner, Richard Strauss and Alfredo Casella with just as much joy and profit as I always have. It feels genuinely weird to me to act like these are somehow persecuted individuals. Would I pay money to go hear Dutoit conduct if he came to town this week? Probably not.

If we take it to be a thesis movie (which, to repeat, I don’t), the movie also sets up a bunch of equivalences that don’t really hold up. There’s this nimbus of sexism around many famous composers, but the idea that this should influence the repertoire seems — at least at the orchestras whose schedule I follow — absolutely marginal. Separating the artist from the art may be something the chattering classes find difficult, but those of us who have to study or perform these people, it’s simply business as usual.

“Cancel culture”, as those who have read my book will know, was initially not about purging people from the canon — it was about not giving more money to someone. These were fans (of a certain wizarding saga, say) who weren’t going to throw out their books, but who maybe weren’t going to invest their hard-earned cash into subsidizing a raging transphobe’s second Scottish castle. So as a “thoughtful study of cancel culture”, this film is less-than-successful. But that’s not an argument against the movie, it’s an argument against the Daily Express being allowed to see movies in general and then typing words about them into the newspaper.

Lydia Tar (played by Blanchett) is the first female conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic (played by the Dresden Philharmonic). She’s an absolute genius, but also — we gather — a very difficult person, and possibly an abuser. Krista Taylor, one of her former protégés (and likely lovers), who we learn has been blackballed at her instigation, kills herself; the orchestra revolts because they think Tár is playing favorites to benefit the attractive women around her. An edited cellphone video of a master class goes viral and protestors dog her public appearances. One after the other, everyone in her life turns against her — her team, her wife, her daughter. At the end, she finds herself in Manila, conducting video game music; and going to a massage parlor that turns out to be a whorehouse.

I think the starkness of that contrast makes it very clear that the movie has a point of view on what happens to Lydia. Which is: it shouldn't have happened. I say "the movie" and not "the filmmakers", because we don't quite know what's real and what's not in the movie. And what's not real is almost certainly a representation of Lydia's point of view. So there's a chance that what we're seeing are the self-pitying self-justifications of a brilliant but abusive artist. But it's worth pointing out that, if so, then that's the entire movie. There is no moment when we step outside of Lydia's increasingly claustrophobic perspective.

We’re watching Lydia Tár’s descent into hell — hell in this case meaning going from being interviewed by Adam Gopnik at the New Yorker Festival to conducting the Monster Hunter soundtrack in front of an audience of Filipino cosplayers. In other words, it’s a movie about that incremental professional adjustment of status often described as cancellation. And of course there’s the question whether she deserves or does not deserve her success (which the movie, in a pretty classic gesture, underlines by having her return to her very lower middle class family). At the end, she’s back on the outside looking in: looking at Juilliard, looking at Lincoln Center, looking at the performance of Mahler’s 5th she was meant to conduct. It’s clear that this is supposed to be an injustice. She’s moved from the center (Berlin/Manhattan) to the periphery (Manila) and her childhood home (on Staten Island).

For much of its runtime, the movie hews closely to the real world: almost all of the people Tár name drops and refers to are real, even the character of the Mahler-obsessed amateur composer Elliot Kaplan (Mark Strong) is clearly based on Mahler-obsessed financier Gilbert Kaplan. All the labels, album covers, and, yes, famous #MeToo cases mentioned and shown in the film (minus Tarr herself, of course) are real. The camera work, with its long tracking shots and over-the-shoulder shots gives the film a fly-on-the-wall feel.

Except. Except that the film doesn’t sustain that realism throughout. As the film goes on there are more and more scenes that we suspect cannot literally be true. In some cases they are resolved by having Lydia wake up, implying it was all a dream — for instance, when she finds a ticking, spookily backlit metronome in her office in the middle of the night. In some cases they are left fully ambiguous, as when Lydia hears a woman screaming in terror while jogging in the park. But then there are the scenes where you can’t tell: is the film being sloppy, or is … is this not real?

Well, you might say, it’s a psychological drama movie, of course it’s gonna have moments that look mostly inside the protagonist’s head. But in the end, it’s also – or at least was widely read – as a “cancel culture” movie. A movie, then, presumably about the consequences of actions. A movie about the real life consequences that come for a flawed woman. If the film were to be instead about what that flawed woman imagines or hallucinates (or desires?) her possible downfall to be like, well, then that would be a very different movie.

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There are a lot of structural reasons to think of Tár as typical of what I’ve described as “the cinema of cancellation”. Which is another way of saying, the story of Lydia Tár has a lot of parallels with a typical cancel culture anecdote. There are the class anxieties running throughout the film, which I discussed in detail in my essay on David Mamet’s Oleanna. The cinema of cancellation is always also about PMC fear of falling. Though her transgressions seem modeled on those of male conductors like James Levine and Charles Dutoit, the film heightens the surface irony of a woman being accused of sexual harassment – something I discussed in detail in The Cancel Culture Panic. It’s always the last person you’d think would get canceled, which is a sign of how bad the whole thing has gotten.

The screenwriter has Gopnik recite her CV. And that CV doesn’t just emphasize her credentials (a lot of big orchestras, she’s EGOTed like Tracy Jordan), he also gives her serious SJW credentials: she lived among a native tribe studying their music for five years, she performed for a bunch of refugees, and has championed women composers (still a rarity in concerts), including the film’s own composer Hildur Guðnadóttir! It even has a genuinely reprobate old school white guy (retired conductor Andris Davis, played by Julian Glover) who complains about Dutoit and Levine in the same breath as Furtwängler and Karajan: “Surely you’re not equating sexual impropriety with being an accused Nazi?” Lydia shoots back. See, she’s pushing back agains the sexists and reactionaries!

The second reason I think it fits the canon is: the generic compact of cancellation cinema is all about the uneven distribution of ambiguity. The film is admirably interested in gray areas, about the ambiguities that open up around powerful people and around towering works of art. Which is all the more interesting when the movie isn’t nearly as ambiguous as the screenwriter seems to think. Whenever she’s being flippant or cheeky, it’s immensely charming. And it’s usually to swat down some SJW nonsense or other. The way we find out she’s a deep thinker is that she makes a complaint about language. And she sort of rejects gender as a category in thinking about conducting, which is certainly a choice.

The third reason is that this is another movie about frustration. About something that we and the protagonist want to have happen, but the movie is about that something being stymied and foiled by a censorious mob. Lydia Tár is about to complete her Mahler cycle, which will be put out by Deutsche Grammophone in a boxed set. Weird how the 5th is supposed to be the Everest here. It’s also one of those things that foreshadows that obviously she won’t get to complete the cycle. But it also builds in the narrative frustration of a goal not being accomplished.

Nevertheless, returning to that opening sequence with Adam Gopnik, there are some nice thematic bits woven in that suggests that this movie will — for whatever reason — exceed its brief.

The first is something the screenplay has Lydia say, which is I think central to how this movie wants to interrogate #MeToo: “But time is the thing. Time is the essential piece of interpretation. ” This is the overall interpretation this movie brings to cancel culture: it’s about sequences of events, and about how events and their meanings can slide apart over time. I don’t necessarily agree with that, but it’s an interesting and suggestive position for a character to be taking at the beginning of this story. Gust as Tár accuses Bernstein of making the Adagietto in the 5th mean something it didn’t when Mahler wrote it, it matters what things mean in the moment. Resurrecting those moments at a later time exposes their fragility to misinterpretation.

(Just as a sidenote, there’s something kind of funny about this exchange because it has an extremely subjective understanding of musical meaning — most conductors and musicians, I think, don’t just ask “how was this person feeling when they wrote this?” when preparing a piece. The genius aesthetic in this movie can be a little immature, tbh, but the bigger problem is that it needs that genius aesthetic in order to get to what I think are its politics.)

The second lovely theme the screenplay has Lydia spell out in that first exchange is about Leonard Bernstein. Bernstein, Tár says, treated conducting as teshuvah, “the talmudic power to reach back into time and to change the significance of one’s past deeds.” This is of course also what the movie is asking about, or at least thinks it’s asking about. But isn’t it also what the movie is doing? It fan fictions something like the James Levine case, but this time decides to make it about a YouTube video and being an asshole as a mentor. Dutoit had half a dozen accusers; Levine had 4 or 5. (Both conductors were relieved of their duties in 2017/18). And Lydia’s main provable offense in the movie seems to be telling “a BIPOC pangender person” to shove it. It feels like a rewriting of history. Which is fine if you’re making a movie about music; but the movie was taken to be one about #MeToo.

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There’s a scene early in the movie that I think emblematizes this problem. Lydia Tár is teaching a master class at Juilliard. To the connoisseur of this type of movie it feels very of this type of movie. She is badgering the students, talking down to people, incredibly abrasive. You can see her comeuppance spelled out in the individual beats. You are watching them squirm and recoil and you think “it’s easy to see how this would be misunderstood”. This has always seemed to me so fake and vaguely exculpatory, because it presumes something that – if we presume it – seriously prejudges things for the viewer. Which is: it insists that misunderstanding is going to be at the heart of the downfall we’re about to see.

Anyway, Lydia gets into a prolonged exchange with a student named Max who says things straight out of a Atlantic cover story. It’s a scene that is supposed to feel evenly matched, I think, but doesn’t. Max barely talks, and when he does, he comes across as a complete idiot. “Honestly, as a BIPOC pangender- person, I would say Bach’s misogynistic life makes it kind of impossible for me to take his music seriously,” is not what you have someone say who is supposed to make some good points. It’s what you have a sock puppet say. Or how about: “You play really well? But... nowadays? White, male, cis composers? Just not my thing.” Throughout it all, Max is bouncing his knee, which – even before reading in the script that it is “now on overdrive, unignorable and intolerable to Tár” was unignorable and intolerable to me. I guess every viewer is different, but my creaturely response to this scene was identical with Lydia Tár’s. When Max is put in his place and storms off calling her a “fucking bitch”, I felt relief.

Meanwhile her lines, which frankly don’t always follow from his – admittedly inarticulate – objections, are just these crystalline zingers you get in anti-PC/cancel culture screeds. And which are so crystalline because they don’t argue with any actually existing person, but instead shadowbox brilliantly with a person the writer just recently made up. “Can classical music written by a bunch of straight, Austro-German, church-going white guys, exalt us individually, as well as collectively?” Tár brilliantly asks the students, and us, an audience that has paid money and is sitting through 150 minutes of a movie about classical music written by a bunch of straight Austro-German, church-going white guys. You know, the kind of person who would think of ““The architect of your soul appears to be social media” as a hell of a zinger.

The scene reoccurs during Lydia’s downfall in the shape of a YouTube video of her class posted on Twitter/X. It is, as the screenplay says, “aggressively edited, in the most damning way”. There are “at least two angles here implying that there was more than one person involved with its creation.” This reoccurrence is deeply interesting for two reasons: on a plot level you always knew it would, it’s what gave the exchange its queasy tension the first time around.

The choice to have it be not just edited from a single point of view, but apparently from several seems kind of remarkable. On just a diegetic level, you don’t see a bunch of cell phones out during the first scene. How did this video supposedly come about? On an aesthetic level, having seen these types of gotcha videos in the wild, it just feels far too well put together. And on a logical level, it makes the thing feel less like an object that could exist in the real world and more like a fantasy object. What if people watching you teach also had the camera skills of an academy award winning cinematographer, the editing skills of Walter Murch, and cameras and boom mics distributed perfectly throughout the room? This is about the camera as an idea, not about an actual cell phone video.

What do we make of this? Is it a slippage on the movie’s part? Doesn’t seem like it, since it’s in the script. It’s a paranoid fantasy, but is it the movie’s? This gets to another aspect of Tár: that, as the film goes on, I kept wondering whether the things I saw represented on screen were literally happening in the world of the film. Some of this is pretty minor: the sound starts doing something interesting at about 36 minutes in. Things are louder than they should be, something that intensifies as the movie goes on. For instance, in the hypermodern home Lydia shares with her wife and daughter, the elevator doors sound like an infernal screech.

It takes a while for their significance to be explained: Lydia is developing a sensitivity to sound. But there’s of course a greater significance to it: it’s the film signaling that what appears like an objective staging is actually focalized through Lydia. In other words, we’re seeing what she perceives, not some observer’s/camera eye’s idea of what’s happening. “You cannot start without me. I start the clock,” Lydia tells Gopnick and the varying ways in which time and causality work or can be said to work, are at issue in a lot of Tár. There’s Lydia’s persistent need to control and conduct her environment, right down to a scene in Manila where a group of “masseuses” face her behind glass as though a messed-up kind of orchestra, and she instinctively raises her hand. But there’s also director/writer Todd Field’s control over time: we just don’t know the timeline of events entirely.

But not only are there moments where we don’t know whether what’s being represented is literal reality; those moments get more frequent the longer the film goes on. In one scene, Lydia is threatening her daughter’s bully in frankly terrifying terms. It’s filmed with a fish-eye lens and you wonder: is that what she’s saying or is this what she would like to say to this punk kid? (You can see why this would matter for a movie in which the protagonist gets in trouble for what she said to another punk kid.) When Lydia first spots an attractive cellist in the women’s room, it’s shot similarly. It’s a wide shot, which creates fisheye effects at the margin. Lydia is at the center, meaning that she is undistrorted, but Olga (the cellist) stays to her right and thus is distorted. Meaning, I think: are we sure this is happening?

When exactly does this start? Is there a moment when the film leaves behind realism for something more surreal, or possibly supernatural? In the opening scene at the New Yorker Festival, Field cuts away several times to “the back of a redheaded woman” in Seat 140, Row V — she is, at least in the screenplay, “centered in frame like a fact”. “Like a fact” is a little like Mahler once notating that a passage is to be played “without any irony”... it really begs the question. Is she a fact? Or like a fact? We later are positioned against the redheaded woman again when she appears to be observing Lydia’s comings and goings, and editing her wikipedia page — something Lydia will later accuse Krista Taylor of.

The redheaded woman reappears in the script (and in the movie) when Lydia returns to the austere, brutalist Berlin apartment she shares with her wife. “We may glimpse the redhead in BG [background] out of focus,” the script notes. We may indeed. The script doesn’t say that this person is Krista, at least not yet: much later, Lydia is asleep, and “the Hamburg Steinway offers the appearance of a casket containing someone lying in state.” “Tár wakes. Sits up, as she leaves we glimpse Krista in a chair across the room staring back at her.” There’s the Derridean coinage of “hauntology”: when did Krista become a ghost? She clearly ends up as one. But was she really in the theater during the opening scene? Or was she a vision even back then? But here’s the thing: if she’s flesh-and-blood Krista in that first scene, then she would seem to lend credence to Lydia’s characterization of their relationship – that Krista was a crazed stalker.

That’s the tricky part of making a movie with unreliable narration around a she said/she said scenario. Because in some way the movie has to draw the viewer into trusting some of what they see and other things they’re told as not squaring with what they saw. Remember that the main inflection point in Tar’s trajectory comes from a video that misrepresents what she said during a master class. It’s a common trope in these kinds of movies: we know what really happened, but social media misrepresent it or take it out of context. But do we know that, if what we’re seeing the first time around is basically Lydia’s edit of the exchange? Notice that the most creepy thing we see Tar doing during the film is deleting all the evidence of the affair/blackballing. She is an editor.

That's one possibility. The other is that the movie simply shares Lydia's point of view. We get two versions of the confrontation between Lydia and the Juilliard student who calls her a "fucking bitch". We get the heavily edited (as in many cuts) version on social media, and the languorous long takes of the movie. The movie, I think, wants us to believe that its version is "better", whatever that might mean -- truer to life, more patient in chronicling the interactions, more revealing of character. It’s definitely more patient. There are moments when the movie clearly accommodates itself to Lydia's perception of the world. But just as often, its perception of the world is simply hers. The movie, like Lydia, believes that her demotion to conducting a video game score is an outrage, that her fall from grace is tragic. Like Lydia, the movie might harbor worries that she deserves it, a sense that it was coming. And like Lydia, the movie seems to think that Elliott Kaplan working from her annotated score of the Fifth is essentially an act of plagiarism. The movie, as the phrase used to go, shares her values. Not about #MeToo or power or sexism, but something more basic which #MeToo has always also been about: where attention is due, where recognition is deserved, where ambiguity is important and where it is faintly irritating.

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Tár is a funny movie. As you can tell, I like large parts of it, perhaps in spite of myself. Maybe in spite of the movie too. I feel like it takes some getting there, for the simple reason that this is the kind of movie that congratulates itself (and you) for originality, but is ultimately a little bit staid in how it deploys its tropes. Tár is a pretty standard tortured genius, when it comes down to it; her downfall has all the beats that we’d get in this kind of “public hounding” movie. You’re being larded up with so much Mahler and Boulanger and The New Yorker and Karajan etc etc., it honestly feels like the film’s austere surface is supposed to hide the fact that this film is working like hell to ingratiate itself to you. You, watching this movie, are smart and thoughtful. Other people, including some of the very specific types you see on the screen, are not.

This gets worse when we get to the actual #MeToo passages, where the film is both super selective in what it shows us and seems content to paint with the broadest brush. It’s also where the film seems to strategically abandon its pose of ambiguity, and suggest that, in the end, there is something deeply illegitimate in what’s happening to Lydia, even if she’s not innocent in what’s happening. Someone ought to take this lady down a peg, but not those people.

Or what do we make of a scene like this?

But this is where it really matters whether what we’ve seen of Lydia’s life so far is meant to be straight-up reportage, or whether we’ve been seeing some unreliable version of it. Because either the scenes are so recognizable and queasy because they are clichés and, as several reviewers note, seemingly ripped from various op eds or thinkpiece headlines. Or they are so clichéd because this is in fact our protagonist’s imagination. This isn’t what’s actually happening to her, it’s how she perceives what’s happening to her, or what she imagines might/could/should happen to her.

Look at Anthony Lane’s (quite good) review in the New Yorker. Note where he locates ambiguity and where he doesn’t:

“To what extent she is a proven predator; how much she deserves to be preyed upon, in turn, by the gluttons of public indignation; and why, despite everything, she should enjoy our lingering sympathy in a way that a middle-aged man in her position would not: such issues will, no doubt, be aired and contested in due course. Field is wise enough to reserve judgment.”

So we don’t know whether Lydia is “a proven predator”. And the film wisely “reserve[s] judgment” on the second question, “how much she deservers to be preyed upon, in turn, by the gluttons of public indignation.” I think this part is tricky, because Lane seems to think that this preying is all too factual. The ambiguity is whether she deserves the punishment. I think I’ve laid out the aesthetic reasons for doubting the facticity of that part of the movie; but it’s also worth making the political point, that deciding someone has been punished, sufficiently punished, etc. etc. is something that people were all too ready with during #MeToo, even when there was little evidence that any punishment of any kind had taken place. The facticity or imaginariness of the punishment is the central issue in how #MeToo was metabolized (it is also where “cancel culture” is born: from the idea that someone who hadn’t actually been punished had been metaphorically punished).

But in some way, Tár exemplifies the inherent danger of what I have called the cinema of cancellation: that it conflates an existential point and a political one, and that it is then taken mostly to have made the political point. To be blunt: Tár isn’t about the public, the audience, the internet, the institution. Tár is about Tár. Everything else is epiphenomenal. Now, you might say that for a movie supposedly not about these things, it sure features a lot of people, a lot of finely observed workplace interactions, etc. But here’s the thing: I think they’re here insofar as they matter to the transcendental solipsist at its center.

I think the film dramatizes something a director like Todd Field and an actress of Cate Blanchett’s caliber instinctively understand and find interesting. The experience of suddenly finding yourself at the top of your particular game, at the center of this world that revolves around you. Not only are you good at something, but people are recognizing you for being good at it; yes, it gives you power, but it gives you something else – a recognition that, like the conductors whose LPs Tár studies at the beginning of the movie – you might get to endure in ways other people around you do not. In the interview with the Australian with Blanchett I cited earlier, she’s not saying she’s gonna retire because of cancel culture. She appears to be saying that there is an indignity to having this amazing connection with material, roles, and an audience, and to be destined to lose that connection eventually. I think that that’s a better reading of Tár than “Lydia got cancelled”. Lydia’s position in her world at the beginning of that movie is wish fulfillment; but so is her downfall.

Because here’s the thing: unless (and even if) you’re a sociopath, this recognition, this adulation, this willingness on the part of other people to center you in their lives, will feel like a miracle, incapable of being justified by any possible action on your part. You don’t deserve it for the simple reason that no one can genuinely deserve something like that. It is a stupendous, incomprehensible gift. And so the recognition is always shadowed by its other: by that recognition being universally, hyperbolically, cruelly, needlessly, wantonly withdrawn. Withdrawn, in other words, the same way it was once bestowed. There’s something deeply cringe about Gopnik’s words at the beginning of the film (even more so once we realize Lydia’s assistant Francesca (Noémie Merlant) wrote them for him). But they also contain a threat: an adulation this irrational, this dizzying, can easily, yes, can only turn into its opposite.

There’s something the movie gets very right, I think: in following Lydia, you really sense how endlessly she has to talk about what she’s doing, and how much everyone keeps expecting her to say something surprising and vaguely controversial. The tension comes from the fact that her saying something shitty at some point becomes almost inevitable, especially as we keep getting visions of her being metabolized by social media, wikipedia — including, it is implied, by her possible stalker/possible victim Krista. But it also seems kind of made up – part of what makes every utterance of Lydia’s feel so fraught is that we’re watching them happen in a movie that is obviously about someone’s downfall.

This is the fantasy. This is the fantasy at the heart of the cinema of cancellation: What if everything bad you’d ever done came out at the same time? What if you had to answer for all of it – for your choices, your value system, etc. – all at once? What if all the things that life has given you were taken away? What if everyone decided that everything that always felt too good for you to deserve it, you did not in fact deserve? During the Juilliard masterclass exchange, Lydia accuses the student of the “narcissism of small differences”. I think the movie she’s in suggests something different about the cinema of cancellation: in order to make the points these films want to make, there is a price of admission. Which is: you have to stipulate to a narcissism so colossal and so solipsistic it swallows the entire film. The results can be exhausting, as in Oleanna, or they can be intriguing and sort of campy, as in Tár. But it’s the price all the same: you headfake towards making a point about the social, but end up with just your own psyche.