The first big scandal of Oscars season is under way

We are at that stage of the Oscar campaign when scandals whisper up from the underworld. It is, perhaps, appropriate that this week’s bad word should threaten to undermine the protagonist of Todd Field’s Tár. That film is, after all, partly about the perils of cancel culture. The story prompts us to wonder if directors should worry about their protagonists setting a good example for others. Should we be presenting the best version of any character who triumphs against prejudice?

Here’s what happened. Speaking to the Sunday Times, Marin Alsop, perhaps the US’s most celebrated female conductor, went full fortissimo on Cate Blanchett’s abusive maestro. “Once I saw it I was no longer concerned,” Alsop said. “I was offended: I was offended as a woman, I was offended as a conductor, I was offended as a lesbian.”

Her initial “concern” seems to have sprung from worries about elisions between the entirely fictional Lydia Tár and the entirely real Ms Alsop. Both were among the few women to conduct big orchestras. Both are lesbians. Only Tár was accused of sexual and professional impropriety. In the filmmakers’ defence, the script, by explicitly mentioning Alsop, puts some distance between the real conductor and Blanchett’s fictional tyrant. Speaking to me, Todd Field brought up Antonia Brico, the late Dutch conductor, as one of several influences on the character.

There is a lot going on here. Alsop is making two separate, but linked, objections. She is proposing two alternative films Field might have made

When Alsop finally got to see the film, her offence was more broadly distributed. “To have an opportunity to portray a woman in that role and to make her an abuser – for me that was heartbreaking,” she said.

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She went on to argue that the film could give an unhelpful impression of woman in all classes of authority. “There are so many men – actual, documented men – this film could have been based on but, instead, it puts a woman in the role but gives her all the attributes of those men,” she said.

There is a lot going on here. Alsop is making two separate, but linked, objections. She is proposing two alternative films Field might have made. He could have made a film about a woman in a position of power who was not an abuser and did not become “hysterical, crazy, insane”. He could have made a film about a man – perhaps based on a real person – in a position of power who was an abuser. (One might facetiously remark he could also have made a film about a DeLorean that can travel through time.) But Tár is about more than abuse. The character has multitudes. Make any of the transformations above and you no longer are working on the same film. It is not incumbent on any filmmaker, upon settling on a project, to consider all the closely related projects he might make instead.

This is without getting into the traumas one would encounter with a drama focused on a male abuser. The world can take films such as Women Talking and She Said that deal with the victims. But just ponder the reaction to The Reckoning, the BBC’s still unseen study of Jimmy Savile starring Steve Coogan. Shot more than a year ago, it was pilloried on social media before any independent eye had viewed a frame. The Daily Mail reported recently it had been pushed back to 2024 due to “sensitivities”. Josh Olson, Oscar-nominated writer of A History of Violence, tells me: “In the current environment, centring a male sexual abuser – no matter how powerfully unsympathetic you make him – will be received as an endorsement, and the fact that it doesn’t centre his victims will be held as a failing.”

[ Tár review: Cate Blanchett in full symphonic mode in role tailored to her strengths ]

Anyway, the argument that really sticks out here is the suggestion that Field was wrong to portray a “woman in that role” as an abuser. One has sympathy for Alsop’s position. After the struggles she must have gone through to survive in a male-dominated world, it must be uncomfortable to watch a female character in her area – perhaps the first on film – turn out a prime-cut wrong’un.

But there is no responsibility on Field to offer good examples to those coming up. Cinema is teeming with various grades of artistic monster. Michael Powell’s The Red Shoes would not have been improved if Anton Walbrook’s Lermontov had been kinder, gentler and less prone to demonic jealousy – even if that might have made the world of ballet seem less intimidating. The notion of a cuddlier Margo Channing in All About Eve doesn’t bear thinking about – even if that would do less to foster the myth of the theatrical diva.

The writer needs, as Graham Greene famously said, a splinter of ice in the heart. That is useful when fictionalising your awful family. It is just as handy when creating a character that may do ill to the reputation of perfectly decent people in the same line of work. It’s a tough business.