Stanley Kubrick – Ash Clifton, Writer

Perfect Films: Tár

Author’s Note: I first posted this essay a few years ago. I’ve decided to repost it now due to some recent interest.

When I finally watched Todd Field’s 2022 movie Tár, starring Cate Blanchett. I really didn’t know much about the film, except that it had been well received (Blanchett received an Oscar nomination) and that it was about a female orchestra conductor named Lydia Tár. From this scant information, I assumed it would be a worthy but standard drama about a woman artist’s struggle to thrive in a male-dominated world.

Boy, was I wrong! Tár is a great movie. So great, in fact, that I became temporarily obsessed with it, so much so that I tried to figure out what the name Tár means. I ran it through Google translate and got a hit: tár is Icelandic for tear (the verb, as in “to tear to shreds”). I don’t know if this was Field’s intention, but it fits well—Lydia rips everything and everyone around her to shreds. And in the last part of the film, she faces an almost literal tear in the fabric of reality.

Put simply, Tár is a monster movie. Lydia is the monster.

French intellectual Charlotte Aïssé is credited with saying, “No man is a hero to his valet.” This is certainly true for the character of Francesca (Noémie Merlant), Lydia’s apprentice conductor, personal assistant, a general factotem. As one would expect, Francesca knows all the skeletons in Lydia’s closet. And there are a lot of them. Lydia Tár, we soon learn, is a bit of a sexual predator, in the Harvey Weinstein model. She uses her influence and fame to seduce young women in her orchestra, then keeps them silent with threats. When one of her former conquests, Krista, commits suicide (she was depressed because she couldn’t get another orchestra job; Lydia made sure of this by writing bad recommendations for her), Lydia orders Francesca to delete all their emails regarding the matter. Thus begins the intrigue that will constitute the main action of the film.

But Tár is not just a clever twist on the #MeToo movement narrative, or a meditation on the corrosive effects of fame. Rather, it’s more like a descent into hell, albeit a coldly beautiful version. Filmed in desaturated grays and blues, the first two acts reminded me of Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, in its brutal, almost clinical exploration of intellectual high culture (transposed from Manhattan in Kubrick’s movie to Berlin in this one). Lydia is shown as an ultimately tragic character, a female MacBeth—brilliant, gifted, and strong but hopelessly in thrall to her ambition and darker impulses.

In other words, she is a nasty piece of work, sadistic to her enemies and overbearing to her friends. (And that’s without even considering her sexual predations.)

But it’s in the final act that the movie really becomes something otherworldly. When Lydia’s misdeeds finally catch up to her, and her carefully controlled world of power and influence begins to unravel (to tear apart, as it were), the film’s tone and pacing becomes less like Eyes Wide Shut and more like Nicholas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now. Both films climax when the main character locks eyes with an even greater monster (literal, in Roeg’s horror masterpiece; metaphorical in Tár), one that manifests the hitherto unseen evil of the story.

In fact, the last third of the film can be read as a supernatural horror tale, complete with ghosts, as Dan Kois does in his excellent essay for Slate. I would go even further and suggest that the entire move is best interpreted as a David Lynch-style surrealist nightmare. A descent into hell.

I’ve often thought that if hell exists, it’s probably not eternal, and it’s probably not a lake of fire. My bet is that hell looks almost exactly like earth, and the people trapped there do not know they’re in hell. Instead, they are forced to re-commit their sins over and over, but with a twist: this time, the victims get revenge.

Regardless of how you interpret it, Tár is a great movie. Check it out, if you dare…

Classic Sci-Fi Book Cover: “A Clockwork Orange”

The most important novel in the dystopian science fiction sub-genre is George Orwell’s 1984. The second most important is Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange. I would go so far to argue that Burgess’s book has, in some ways, been even more influential and culturally significant than Orwell’s, especially for those generations that grew up in the 1970s and later.

It was in 1971 that Stanley Kubrick adapted the book into a landmark film, which was how I first discovered the novel. By the time I was a teenager, in the early 80s, Kubrick’s movie had taken on cult status—almost as much as 2001: A Space Odyssey. My friends and I all loved the movie. And I, being a particularly bookish kid, decided to check the novel out, too.

The secret to A Clockwork Orange’s success, topping that of almost all other dystopian novels, is that it has a great, exciting twist. Its protagonist, a fifteen-year-old delinquent named Alex, seems more like a villain than a hero. He is, after all, a thug, a thief, a gang-member, a rapist, a drug user, and a lover of all things violent (“ultraviolence,” as he and his gang friends call it). Yet, in comparison to the oppressive, authoritarian, end-stage-Capitalist society in which he lives, he is a kind of hero. Against that iron-grey backdrop, his better, human qualities come to the fore—his intelligence, his ferocious courage, and his absolute dedication to personal pleasure, the state-be-damned.

This twist is one of the greatest, central ironies in modern literature, and it’s the reason teenage boys (and probably a few girls, too) continue to find themselves drawn to the book, just as they have been for sixty years. Conversely, this is also the reason that social conservatives have hated the book for just as long. In fact, as I recently learned from openculture.com, A Clockwork Orange was the most banned book of the 2024-25 school year.

I have no doubt that Burgess would have been very, very proud.

Kubrick’s film version was so powerful that it influenced the cover-design for most subsequent editions of the book. Many of these covers were thinly-veiled riffs on the movie poster or on Malcolm McDowell’s brilliant performance, wearing his singularly perverse, false-eyelash. I really like this cover from 1995 by Robert Longo because it bucked that trend and did something new.

Also, I think it really captures the madness of the book—the ferocity of Alex’s character as he rages against the machine. Yes, he’s an evil character, but that’s sort of the point of the whole book. Alex has a God-given right to be evil, if that’s his choice. Evil is an implied, but not a necessary, product of his free will, and he fights valiantly against being “programmed” by the cold authority figures of the story.

Just like most teenagers. Even the ones that aren’t psychopaths.

What I’m Reading: “I am Spartacus”

(Author’s Note: this post originally appeared on my old blog, Bakhtin’s Cigarettes.) I don’t want to jinx the man, but the fact that Kirk Douglas still lives is an unmitigated source of joy for me. If you believe, as I do, that movie stars become movie stars because of some internal life-force, whose aura is palpable even when projected onto a silver screen, then Kirk Douglas seems like the best proof of this theory.

At 101, Douglas is a living bridge to Hollywood’s second Golden Age—the 1940s to late 1950s. A bone fide movie start by 1949, Douglas was, along with other mavericks like Burt Lancaster, one of the first major actors to become a power-player in his own right. In an era when the Hollywood studio system traded actors like cattle, he formed his own studio and made his own films. He fostered young writers and directors—most notably, a brilliant, aloof young filmmaker named Stanley Kubrick.

Whatever Happened to Open-Form Films?

Author’s Note: a slightly different version of this post first ran on my old blog, Bahktin’s Cigarettes.

It’s hard to believe, but the 40th Anniversary of the Watergate break-in is fast approaching, on June 17. The day will be commemorated by Chapman University and many others. It will not be the most uplifting of anniversaries, surely. I would much rather commemorate August 9, 1974, the anniversary of Richard Nixon’s resignation, brought about by the heroic reporting of Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward.

I have already commemorated the event in my own, couch-potato way: I re-watched All The President’s Men on Netflix. It’s still a great movie—smart, tense, dramatic, and well-acted. Alan Pakula loaded the cast with great American actors: Dustin Hoffman, Robert Redford, Jason Robards, Jack Warden, Hal Holbrook, etc. And he manages to tell a vast, complicated story with the breathless pacing of a crime drama (which, of course, it is). As I was watching it, I was struck by something that I hadn’t thought of before.

What ever happened to open-form films?

Open-form (sometimes called open-frame) refers to a style of filmmaking where the camera is placed at a medium distance from the action, creating a sense of realism and narrative objectivity. The action is not limited to the visible frame. Much as in real life, important things are happening off-screen. What we are looking at in any given moment is not, necessarily, the whole story.

Many of my favorite movies from the 1970s are open form, including 2001: A Space Odyssey, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and (of course) All the President’s Men. But the master was Robert Altman. Watching one his movies like M.A.S.H. or McCabe & Mrs. Miller (one the greatest films ever made), you get the feeling that you are an invisible guest, somehow transported into the action. Characters come and go in and out of the frame. They talk over each other, and external forces (weather, sound, bullets) often intrude from the outside world.

Another, less obvious effect of open-form is that it makes a movie feel more like a documentary. This is, in part, because most documentaries are shot in the medium distance, with stationary cameras. The films of Michael Moore are a classic example.

However, as far as I can tell, open-form has pretty much been abandoned by fiction film directors. The only recent examples I could think of are portions of Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic and Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights. Both are very fine films, but they are the exceptions, aberrations in a modern film aesthetic that is dominated by closed form, immersive narration. Specifically, it is dominated by film expressionism.

Remember that famous, virtuoso tracking shot in Goodfellas, when the camera follows Henry and Karen through the nightclub? This is the epitome of closed-form filmmaking. Scorsese reduces the distance between us and the main character to essentially zero as Henry leads us through his princely world of sensual delights. It’s a great movie, and a great moment. But the style itself has come to dominate movies so completely that they have almost become a dead art form, at least in the U.S. When practiced by less masterful directors than Martin Scorsese (and, let’s face it, who isn’t less masterful than Scorsese?), closed-form can become meretricious, slick, and boring.

So why has open-form disappeared in favor of closed-form? The simple explanation is that closed-form is a more intuitive mode of narration, much like first-person point-of-view in short stories and novels. Open-form is more like third-person omniscient. It’s more challenging, both intellectually and visually.

The more insidious explanation is that closed-form expressionism allows the filmmaker to manipulate the viewer more directly. And manipulation is something we Americans know a lot about.

In his landmark essay, Hollywood: The Ad, Mark Crispin Miller wrote about how motion pictures have adapted many of the film techniques of TV commercials—fast-editing, propulsive music, slow motion—in order to keep the viewer bathed in stimulus. Not only are commercial products carefully featured in motion pictures (with characters slurping coke-a-colas and nibbling Doritos), the movies themselves have become commercials. As Norman Mailer might have put it, they have become advertisements for themselves.

When did the transition take place? Sometime in the 1980s, with the advent of MTV. The horror classic Alien, directed by Ridley Scott in 1979, is an open-form movie—realistic, gritty, and provoking. The sequel, Aliens, directed by James Cameron in 1985, is a hyped-up, kinetic, closed-form movie—exciting, entertaining, and ultimately disposable.

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with entertainment. And there’s nothing inherently better about open-form versus closed-form filmmaking. But it does give one pause that we expect so little from our movies these days. Are we so used to being told what to feel, and how to think, in every moment of our waking lives?

Which leads me back to my original topic: Watergate. The reporting of Woodward and Bernstein marked a triumph of intellectual freedom in this country. And so does the movie made about them, All the President’s Men. Is anyone making movies like this today?