RUTHFULLY YOURS

The announcement of the Academy Award nominees is usually a day of mourning for conservatives, mindful as we are of the dictum that ‘politics is downstream from culture’ and American culture has taken a decidedly leftist, ever more frightening turn in recent years, with Hollywood leading the charge. Yet this year we have something to cheer about from one of the odds-on favorites for the night’s biggest awards: Best Actress and Best Picture.

The movie I speak of is Tàr. And no, Tàr is not the latest cinematic installment of the Jurassic Park theme ride, but a serious movie about a paragon of traditional western culture — the conductor of one of the world’s leading orchestras, the Berlin Philharmonic — played to pitch perfect perfection by Kate Blanchett as the fictional but biographically realistic Lydia Tàr.

Right from the movie’s outset, we see some solid jabs landed by the redoubtable Blanchett cum Tàr. Interviewed by the New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik, she blithely refuses to take the proffered bait of feminist victimhood, telling him that she had no complaints about the trajectory of her career and that the ‘Pauline’ awakening toward the acceptance of female conductors proceeded apace. And this was just the warmup for the real fireworks that follows when Blanchett leads a class for aspiring conductors at the fabled Julliard School of Music.

Here she’s confronted by the wokest of woke snowflakes; a young male who eschews, as a matter of principle, any consideration of JS Bach. He tremulously announced that, as a pangender BIPOC he has nothing to learn from a dead white European male who despoiled the planet by fathering 20 children. Initially, Blanchett admirably took the high road. She overlooked his calumny and invited the indoctrinated cur to sit right next to her on the piano as she plays and narrates Bach’s “Toccata and Fugue in C major,” drawing for him in the manner of her mentor and idol Leonard Bernstein of the Young People’s Concerts series the billowing range of emotions that flows like a torrent from this masterpiece. This scene brought back my own youthful memories of the Bernstein series and I was flooded with emotion in sensing how great music, like nothing else, has the divine power to bring us together around what is truly best and brightest in us.

It was an exquisite moment. Yet the moment quickly sours as the BIPOC, after praising Blanchett’s piano skills, would not be moved from his prejudice, saying that nowadays white male cisgendered composers were just not his thing.  At that, a furious Blanchett shot back at him: “Don’t be so eager to be offended.”  She then addresses the auditorium at large, levelling an Old Testament-like imprecation: have it your way; persist in your arrant ignorance; demonize the individual genius of the wrong skin color and reduce everything to the lowest levels of superficial collective identification. But see what comes of it creatively and furthermore, be prepared to have your own works and persona judged by the same vicious pack of rabid baying dogs when it comes your time to face the music.

Whoa! Had the battle finally been engaged? Did we just hear the clarion trumpet blast from an A list Hollywood director and super A list actress that will mark the opening rounds of our civil war and restoration? One the one hand, we could point to the meager box office of this artiest of arthouse flics and say that’s unlikely. On the other hand, we could point to the larger arc of history which instructs us — pace Malcolm Gladwell’s ‘law of the few’ — that major cultural changes are always instigated by a small vanguard elite who have the courage of their convictions and the outsized drive to move mountains.

Whatever the larger impact of this movie, can we conservatives and believers in the greatness of western culture not take satisfaction that at least for a sparkling, sterling moment, a fierce, unapologetic and reeling blow was struck for our side? And I mean ‘our side’ in the largest sense. For we’re not simply talking about a vigorous takedown of some pathetic woke college students. At the heart of this movie is a great conductor championing the great musical works of the western canon. Composers like Bach, Mahler, and Elgar, who created immortal music that elicits the most sublime human emotions, over and against the soulless, chaotic modernism that came in its wake. Music that Tàr sneeringly dismisses as something that sounds like the orchestra is still tuning their instruments during performance.

In this regard, the movie is a thunderclap, coming not as ‘emanations issuing from the penumbra,’ but right from the heart and center of Hollywood’s vital core. Back in the day, Tinseltown knew how to create a popular culture that celebrated rather than degraded the human spirit. Maybe they’ll build on this start and begin that painful, glorious restoration of showing us who we are, and at our best, what we can truly be.

Leonard Bakker is an ASCAP-affiliated songwriter. He holds a Master’s Degree from the University of California at Berkeley.