Sotto Voce
Cate Blanchett as Lydia Tàr in Todd Field’s Tàr (2022)
“What if instead of simplifying comms until it’s explainable to a five-year-old, we made comms (and ads) more complicated so understanding them became a gentle challenge with a payoff?
Humans love games, puzzles and riddles. Or more precisely, we crave accomplishment.
Why do we so often insist on treating people like morons?
We applaud emotional communications, but what about smart ones?”
I’ve been trying to work out why after nine months and at least five viewings, I keep on coming back to Todd Field’s Tàr. I’ve tried and failed several times over the course of the last few weeks to write about why I’ve found it so magnetic and keep getting stuck. So much has been written already that alighting on a viewpoint that was both interesting and novel has proven tricky. (TLDR: the examination of cancel culture, that modernist apartment, Blanchett’s wardrobe, the opening credits….)
That was until I came across the quote above in Matt Klein’s brilliant Zine newsletter. Whilst he’s talking about advertising and communications, the same is true of Films and TV too. The on-going strikes and industrial action in Hollywood have shed light on just how reductive the entertainment business is in danger of becoming. This, from Justine Batemen who is a SAG-AFTRA negotiator, is quite enlightening:
“I’ve heard from showrunners who are given notes from the streamers that this isn’t second screen enough.” Meaning, the viewer’s primary screen is their phone and the laptop and they don’t want anything on your show to distract them from their primary screen because if they get distracted, they might look up, be confused, and go turn it off. I heard somebody use this term before: they want a “visual muzak.”(Goldberg, 2023)
The reason Tàr works is because it is like a puzzle. It is the opposite of visual muzak. It deals heavily in ambiguity. It’s marketing, quite successfully, managed to raise the question of whether or not Lydia Tàr was a actually a real person. Electing to place a women at the heart of this story, rather than a man, further disorientates the viewer.
The film gives so very little to the audience for free. There are gaps which the viewer needs to fill with the things they have observed or noticed. Even as the film concludes, answers are not forthcoming. The audience have to apply their own judgement and their own beliefs in arriving at their conclusion.
Compare this with Barbie, the biggest film release of the year. This is a film that is loud. It is so loud visually that it’s production designer has claimed the film was responsible for ‘the world running out of pink’ (Cain, 2023). It is loud thematically too. At the heart of the film is an important message. What I was struck by was how explicitly that message was delivered. The script took every opportunity not to just hint at the film’s intent, but to spell it out, literally. And frequently. The audience was required to do no work, whatsoever. All shades of grey or indeed any form of nuance were stripped away.
It could be argued that a comparison of an arthouse-ish film and a summer blockbuster is an unfair one. Of course these films will choose different modes of communication and choose to address their themes and their respective audiences in different ways. But, in the context of the discussions driving the on-going strike it is an interesting comparison to examine.
I have worked in media planning for over 15 years. During that time, all of the lines on nearly all of the graphs we could care to look at concerning the media landscape have gone upward. More media channels. More minutes spent with those channels. More devices. During that time the only number which hasn’t changed is the number of hours in the day. A figure which has proven utterly intransigent compared to the other data we choose to monitor.
Given the fragmentation in the media landscape, perhaps this sort of ‘attentive cliff edge’ was always inevitable. That even content on the biggest, most immersive screens would have to sing for it’s supper sooner or later. How we choose to deal with this dynamic will be the interesting part.
We could adopt the path of least resistance, creating content and communications which are louder, more explicit and more left brained in their approach, working to the assumption that brute force is the only option. Or, alternatively we could take the view that when we create things that are interesting, stimulating or novel we can still earn - rather than just rent - our audience’s attention. This is the more optimistic and energising position to take. That there is room for challenging the audience to solve problems, that there is room for media with a more ‘quiet voice’. That perhaps the consumer isn’t a moron, we’re just not engaging them in the right way.
Bibliography
Cain, S (2023, June 5). Barbie film ‘required so much pink paint it contributed to worldwide shortage’. Retrieved September 2023, from The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2023/jun/05/barbie-film-required-so-much-pink-paint-it-contributed-to-worldwide-shortage
Goldberg, L (2023, July 21). Justine Bateman: Pulling AI Into the Arts Is “Absolutely the Wrong Direction”. Retrieved September 2023, from The Hollywood Reporter: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/tvs-top-5-podcast-justine-bateman-ai-dangers-hollywood-1235540858/
Klein, M (2023, September 19). Social Commentary vol.3. Retrieved September 2023 from Zine: https://zine.kleinkleinklein.com/p/social_commentary_vol3
Olsen, M. (2022, November 30). Why are the end credits at the beginning of Tar? Todd Field explains. Retrieved September 2023, from Los Angeles Times: https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/movies/story/2022-11-30/why-are-the-end-credits-at-the-beginning-of-tar-todd-field-explains
