Do we have a better world than the West?

Cate Blanchett in the much-discussed Tarr, which follows an accomplished conductor, and the famous conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, as she falls off her pedestal.

“Dear people, since you entered the ship there is no turning back. The land you will set foot on again will be the New World. If you do not have the courage, leave now and no one will judge you…”

In these words concludes the much-discussed film Tarr, which follows an outstanding female conductor, the first of the classic EGOTs – a rare combination of all four awards, Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony – but also the first female conductor of the famous Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, a “lesbian house cat” by declaring, “Father — also by her own announcement, of one child and marriage to the first violin in the orchestra…to be promoted from the rostrum.

A new world with #metoo movements, self-determination demands of all kinds, political correctness and quotas on female employment, paves its way, crucial to its downfall, with the traps into which it falls with characteristic ease throughout a film that everyone can do. Choose something from the rich thematic range offered by the director, to critique it. or attached to it. With the ease of a man who dismisses as “noise” anything unrelated to his ultimate goal, he seems to have marched as a potential victor rather than as a victim.

Lydia Tarr is the abuser in the context of her behavior and the power her position as conductor gives her over collaborators or a student who chooses to reject Bach because a musician’s life goes against the ideals of a multiracial person. He becomes a victim “with the help” of an arbitrarily edited video that spreads on social networks in the context of “cancel culture”, the modern form of social and even professional ostracism that falls to those who do not keep up with the principles of political correctness, fairness and profit.

She becomes the final “victim” of all her “victims”, perhaps leaving the benevolent viewer wondering: but… where did she go wrong? Is it not as absurd to reject Bach because he “was macho” as to demand that white philosophers, including Plato and Descartes, be removed from university curricula because they were “too pale males”? “As it has been and is happening. At the major universities of the Western world? Beckett’s show was canceled because … the shows were all men? “They were serious,” wrote the British Daily Mail.

In the thematic scope that includes cancellation culture, the abuse of social networks, and claims to self-determination of identity, the “women’s issue” has a central role. Tar is betrayed and abandoned mostly by women.

Krista, her former student, after being expelled from the college—“She was deeply agitated,” Tarr told the Scholarship Foundation representative and secondary leader—claims interest in Tarr after the breakup of that relationship with motions that he acts, knowingly or unconsciously, as emotional blackmail and eventually kills himself. . Francesca, her assistant and would-be leader who follows and tolerates – according to one interpretation – the conductor’s violent characteristics, keeps emails with Krista while Tarr tells her to delete them and when the Maestro does not give her the position she had hoped for, abandons her by betraying her with these. But aren’t you a little suspicious of your own motives when you put yourself at the service of your boss’s every whim in anticipation of its own benefit and betray her when you don’t? His wife accuses her of only acting in her own interest all her life and turning her back on her. But, do you not bear at least a share of the responsibility when you bear and tolerate as a husband, and as a wife’s wife, all that prompts you to leave her when she is too old to eat?

They all find the kind of strength that comes with cruelty when Tar is now on her knees. The manipulation and exploitation of which she accuses her is opposed by those who tried to exploit her but without the maestro’s apparent self-confidence. Those who claim when external circumstances make it easier. When a good social wind blows.

“The rise of the power of victims” and the absurdity that arises in the birth of just demands and claims.

“When it comes to the issue of gender bias, I have nothing to complain about,” says Tarr of Blanchett. And for that matter, neither should Natalie Stutzman, Lawrence Equilbe, Maren Alsop, or Joan Valletta. There have been so many amazing women who have come before us, women who do the real work.”

“The movie touches me as a woman, as a conductor and as a lesbian,” says Maren Alsop, the closest thing to Blanchett’s character in real life: Both are “children” of Leonard Bernstein, married to fellow musicians and conducting distinguished orchestras. “I had the chance to play a woman in that role and make her the abuser — for me, that was heartbreaking,” Alson said. “I think all women and all feminists should be upset by this kind of portrayal. There are so many men — real, documented men — that this movie could have been based on, but instead, it casts a woman, but gives her all the characteristics of those men. This It looks anti-feminine.” He is; Feminism is not an elitist club that allows the bearers/carriers of guaranteed characteristics of norms to enter its bosom but rather a social necessity. Can the internal conflicts and internal motivations of the people in the film be interpreted as movement or even “forbidden” because of it?

René Girard writes in his book I See the Devil Fall Like Lightning that there is a value that “dominates the entire culture of the planets”, far more than technological progress or economic development: “concern for the victims”. “Globalization is only a secondary economic phenomenon,” he said. Basically, it is being driven by what he calls the “rise of ‘victim power’.” In other words, “victim power.”

“Dear people, since you entered the ship there is no turning back. The land you will set foot on again will be the New World. If you do not have the courage, leave now and no one will judge you…”

Let’s go but… where do we go? Whatever questions the “rise of victim power” raises and the absurdity that arises in the birth of just demands and claims, this, Western, world of entitlements and demands is the best we have. On the other side … the side that Putin voiced.