It’s a profound compliment to everyone involved in making Tár that its titular protagonist has frequently been mistaken for a real person. So persuasive is Cate Blanchett’s performance in all its incredible nuance and shattering humanity that some viewers of Todd Field’s masterwork of a film came away Googling Tár assuming she really was a recent conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra.
There is no risk of that happening, however, with young Max, one of Tár’s opponents, who emerges (through no fault of his terrific actor, Zethphan D. Smith-Gneist) as such a caricature that he could only have emerged whole from someone’s fever dream—or from Tumblr. During a conducting class that Tár is teaching at Juilliard, Max confesses that they don’t much care for Bach because “as a BIPOC pangender person,” they find Bach’s “misogyny” to be repellent. This is a majestic scene filmed in a single take, and Max’s complaint allows Tár to launch into a soaring—and at times cruel—soliloquy about the need to “sublimate yourself” to music, leaving identity behind.
Yet I felt cold about Max’s part in provoking this majestic speech. Unlike Tár, whose heroic arrogance and dry cruelty leaps off the screen with assaultive realism, Max’s presence felt almost parodic.
My fiancée put it best when she observed, as we walked out the theatre, that Todd Field’s writing of that scene “understood the vocabulary but not the grammar” of how young activists talk about issues such as representation and the sins of mainstream heroes. I’ve heard plenty of criticism of Wagner for his virulent anti-Semitism, say, but precious little of Bach for having 20 children; it seemed almost a bizarre point for Tár and Max to argue about, as if carefully crafted to make the student look as pettily small-minded as possible. It was, indeed, almost an insult to Blanchet’s magisterial Tár, who could easily have handled an argument more substantive than this anemic strawman.
A similar failure to grasp the grammar of young activists comes from the otherwise excellent Sandra Oh–led Netflix series The Chair, which chronicles her character’s experience as the first woman of color to chair a nameless Ivy League–esque school’s floundering English department. A colleague gets into very hot water for making an ironic Hitler salute when criticizing authoritarianism (in a scenario eerily redolent of real-life events), and the emergent meditation on campus “cancel culture” turns the college’s students into a kind of Greek chorus who all speak with the same voice and hurl imprecations at our beleaguered leads.
Both productions, it should be said, have sympathy for the students. But they’re portrayed from a strange and distorting distance that blocks the viewer from empathizing with them. Media mocking the young written by the generation that immediately preceded them is nothing new—but the current manifestation seems to be driven by taking social media much too seriously and treating the impressions of some tendentious interpreters as literal reports.
I related deeply to Sandra Oh’s Ji-Yoon Kim but saw nothing of my erstwhile student self in her students; I also saw nothing of my own students there. This portrayal of contemporary college students bursting at the seams with a deadly eagerness to take offense, censorious and intemperate, irreverent in the worst ways, and yearning to be a neo–Red Guard with a Tumblr account in no way reflects my own experiences as a TA or a lecturer.
I teach at a public university in a highly selective program, and even my most politically engaged students are unfailingly polite and respectful, eager to learn, and share their opinions in thoughtful ways. I don’t shy away from challenging them, nor am I simply some font of leftist pieties; I teach the work of people who would’ve doubtlessly hated me personally—for instance, Immanuel Kant or St. Augustine. I show up to class wearing a suit and pretentiously quoting Russian poets to justify invoking Confucius or Arendt while waxing grandiloquent about the importance of a classical education. If anyone should be a target for these vicious snowflakes, it should be me. Yet, in half a decade of work, engaging with now thousands of students of all backgrounds and views, I haven’t experienced a single auto-da-fé. Having watched these TV shows and films, I feel a bit cheated!
I suppose I’m a sample size of one, but then not a single one of my colleagues has ever reported anything similar. No member of my committees, no fellow grad students, no tenured professor I’ve ever worked for or sat down for coffee with. And that’s just at my campus. None of my colleagues elsewhere report anything even remotely like the Revenge of the Snowflakes narrative that seems so popular in mass media these days.
I’d humbly propose that writers of a certain age would benefit from actually reconnecting with the campuses they left behind so long ago, instead of getting all their information about them through whining op-eds in legacy news outlets that exaggerate half-truths and rumors about what’s really happening on campus.
But why is this such a problem to begin with? Social media has a way of distorting us into an imago of our worst, most extravagantly emotional selves. The dominant idiom on so many platforms is one of soi-distant irony and disaffection. One’s speaking register begins to shade into insouciance and mockery; indeed, you speak bitterly and more cruelly than is otherwise normal, because that is the rhetoric of the platform. Sarcasm, snark, and silliness are the cartoonish horsemen of our shared social media-pocalypse. It looks different on Twitter and TikTok, or on Tumblr versus Instagram. But wherever you go there is always some degree of detachment, because the worst thing you can be on social media is yourself.
Instagram is everyone’s favorite culprit here, a platform whose very norms condition you into making yourself look more glamorous and successful than any person can reasonably claim to be. But this is only the most obvious form of the problem. On Twitter you have to be your snarkiest self. Sincerity is a crime—or at least an invitation to get trolled by the savvy and suitably ironic. TikTok, despite its more youthful sheen and video-heavy culture, is very similar. Your Tok’s ability to achieve escape velocity is directly proportional to your distance from your true self. Sexier, funnier, more ironic, more bitter, more over the top than you could ever sustain for a protracted period—performing as surely as the wealthiest movie star does, but for a considerably lower reward.
What does this have to do with Sandra Oh’s Greek chorus of angry university students, or Max’s curious complaint? The students are depicted as how some of them must look on a social media platform. They leapt out of a witty TikTok or snarky Tweet, living and whole, ready to call you out. Or just to be silly. They’re the kind of person who’d irreverently tweet something like “do not walk away from omelas while the stove is on, you may accidentally burn them,” because it’s kind of hilarious.
In such a culture, there are indeed moments when even the most sincere leftie activism on social media borders on the parodic, where one can watch the most serious of issues get boiled down either to a witty joke, a meme, or a hyperpersonalized callout that seasons private beef with all the importance of a collective political issue.
In almost every case, the speaker appears to be both more and less than what they really are. Of course, this affects almost everybody—could there be anyone more Terminally Online than, say, Elon Musk? Piers Morgan and Richard Dawkins suffer from terminal poster brain, for certain, while Donald Trump is more tweet than man at this point. But only young activists truly get rapped by the mass media for being Too Online, with their portrayals in so much mass media being little better than this much-parodied political cartoon—indeed, the parody is far more authentic in its way, while also typifying the OTT humor of these spaces.
Of course men like Trump are mercilessly satirized for being Terminally Online, but they’re satirized as individuals rather than people of a certain class. Neither Max nor the students in The Chair are based on specific people, but instead a broad idea of what “the youth” must be like.
Because even if we sometimes parody ourselves on social media, portrayals like those in Tár still don’t quite track with reality, even at its most authentically exaggerated. After all, no one refers to themselves as “a BIPOC.” They may refer to communities or groups of people as “BIPOC,” but it’s not generally a self-identifier. If Max were real, they would’ve identified themselves as a person of color, or by their actual ethnic/racial background, even when making the most tendentious identity claim.
Indeed, Max would’ve likely had stronger reasons for his conducting preferences, ones that affirmed the value of modern composers rather than simply dismissing Bach because of his personal life, and he would not have asserted a desire to never conduct the works of white male composers. As a woman of color who’s worked in similarly competitive environments, let me tell you: You simply cannot get away with saying you’ll ignore all the old dead white men in your field. Not only is it bad intellectual practice, but if you’ve made it that far, then you already know that the doyens of your discipline or your profession simply won’t allow it.
The grammar and syntax of an authentic Max would be far more careful, even in its most strident register. Snark at Bach’s and Tár’s expense, perhaps, cutting the pretensions down to size, but never an outright dismissal. Spend enough time on social media with the most iconoclastic social justice types, and you quickly realize they know their classics better than their most bitter critics.
What might these Boomer and Gen-X writers learn from actually reading the words of their younger counterparts and listening to how we use language—especially offline? Verisimilitude, and how to create the kind of character that an audience member could truly lose themselves in. This stereotype of a Tumblr-ified youth, viewed through the fish-eye lens of an Atlantic magazine op-ed, comes from spending too much time on social media and then only reading each other’s “takes” about what the damn kids are up to. Instead, as a writer, go to these campuses, go to community centers, sit in on a few classes, or attend student-led fairs. Interview real young people about what matters to them.
This matters for reasons beyond creating slightly better art. How people see the young reflects their own sense of possibility. And it can just as often expand or contract their views of how we speak out against or combat prejudice in the world. There is a nuanced story to be told about the challenges of representational politics or identity-based organizing or epistemology, but this is not that.
As Twitter appears to go down in flames, with nothing on the horizon to rise in its place as the polestar of the media firmament, there is some hope that people in the press or in Hollywood may have to update their priors once more about how young activists actually talk and behave. It’s just one of many reasons we have to stop pretending that our social media ghosts are the beginning and end of who we truly are.
