Two years ago, I attended an especially raucous screening of “TÁR” that almost broke me. If you’ve seen “TÁR” — a quiet movie, painted in sleepy earth tones, where Cate Blanchett plays the hard-nosed conductor of a Berlin orchestra — maybe that will give you a chuckle. It’s hardly a place where someone could be forced to their wits end. Yet, to me, it was the equivalent of going to the DMV without an appointment or a Wegman’s grocery store the day before Thanksgiving: an experience to make me wish I had never been born, so that I wouldn’t be alive to see humanity reduced to its most barbaric state.
I’m leaning into hyperbole, but in the moment, it felt like bedlam had been set on fire. I wrote about that screening back then, and was sure that most people who read the piece would agree with me. But the curse of being a perennial optimist is that you’re regularly reminded that “most people” would rather shoot your rose-colored glasses off with a Red Ryder Carbine-action 200-shot Range Model Air Rifle than let you maintain a little bit of hope for the world. Angry emails and social media replies followed. People read my humble request to be quiet in a movie theater like a ransom note cobbled together from magazine cut-outs, demanding that they have respect for their fellow man if they ever want to see their beloved mother again. I’m not interested in a suitcase full of unmarked bills, only the sweet joy of seeing a movie without constant interruptions.
