As the pandemic draws to a close, people are returning to the movie theatres. Here’s a review of an award-winning film from an unusual perspective.

Centering the Shipibo-Konibo in Tár (Todd Field, 2022)

Photograph courtesy Focus Features / Everett

My musician friend was curious what I would get out of seeing the movie Tár, seeing that I don’t have a music background. But as someone who has studied the cultural worlds of the Amazon River basin, I left the theater wondering how much of the movie would be lost to those unfamiliar with Shipibo-Konibo shamanism.

If director Todd Field’s aim was to generate lively conversation with his award-winning film about an acclaimed lesbian maestro’s fall from grace, he has achieved it. People cannot stop talking and arguing about the meaning of Tár, whether it’s the greatest cancel-culture film, a regressive take on the abuse of power and the presence of colonial hierarchies in contemporary art, a refreshing reflection on #MeToo or a ghost story in which guilt does the haunting. What all of the reviews share is a penchant for interpreting the film as a direct reflection of our human society.

Very few reviewers have addressed what the Shipibo-Konibo, who figure front and center on the first screen of the much-discussed opening credits, have to do with the narrative, other than as one more example of Lydia Tár’s extractive relationship to power.

But Shipibo-Konibo cosmovision is not merely decorative in the film. It organizes the narrative’s internal conflicts and reveals Tár as a tale of shamanic justice in a world where the global North continues to take from the global South.

In the opening scene, we see a text-message exchange suggesting that Tár might be haunted by her conscience. Then, the film cuts to ambient jungle noises against a black screen. We hear Tár, presumably in a recording from her ethnomusicology fieldwork in the Ucayali region of Peru, demanding that someone sing as if the microphone were not there. The voice of the Shipiba artist and healer Elisa Vargas Fernández then carries us through the credits. She is singing an ícaro, a shamanic melody learned from sacred power plants such as ayahuasca or piripiri. When sung, an ícaro calls forth the spirit of the plant teacher who imparted the song for assistance in healing, hunting, or harming. Maybe Lydia Tár is haunted by her conscience, as the texts suggest, or maybe she is the object of shamanic retribution. When Vargas Fernández stops singing, we hear a soft but sinister laugh. Is it Lydia or Vargas?

Toward the beginning of the film, the New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik plays himself in a long, mesmerizing interview of Tár before a live audience. When he asks about the conductor as a translator of time, Tár pauses and suddenly clutches her left ear. The camera, though focused on Gopnik, is behind her head, allowing us to notice how she fidgets with the ear in discomfort. She reaches for her ear two more times during the scene.

In many Amazonian cultures, shamans shoot invisible darts sometimes called tsentsak or virotes to introduce sickness and death into bodies. Is Tár’s ear grasping another of her many neurotic tics, or have we just witnessed her being hit by a shamanic dart?

If it is a dart, who shot Tár? The scene closes with a view of the stage where Tár and Gopnik sit that anticipates how we see Tár for much of the film: from behind, before a stage, conducting. In the New Yorker scene, though, we see the back of Tár’s disgruntled former lover and apprentice, Krista, sitting in the last row of the auditorium, centered before the stage. Krista, too, spent time among the Shipibo with Tár, before Tár cut her out of her life and blacklisted her from employment in the classical music world. In this final shot, Krista, whose later suicide instigates Tár’s undoing, is in the conductor’s position, orchestrating. Did she learn about shamanic sorcery in the Amazon? Is this why Tár was trying to warn other orchestras about the danger of hiring her?

Tár’s ear continues to bother her throughout the film. She touches it when she sits at lunch with the conductor Eliot Kaplan and in her infamous Julliard master class. Later, strange sounds, paranoia, and the Shipibo-Konibo designs known as kené begin to intrude in Tár’s life. Kené—inscribed on the front matter of the book she is gifted, presumably by Krista; sketched on the metronome that mysteriously wakes her in the middle of the night; on her book manuscript at the abandoned apartment of her rogue assistant, Francesca; and on the face of a Shipibo shaman in her dreams—are spiritually and materially linked to the opening ícaro and Lydia’s dart affliction.

According to Shipibo creation stories, kené first emerged in the world when the cosmic serpent, Ronin, sang the designs on her back: the first ícaros. The word “ícaro” comes from the Quechua verb ikaray, to blow smoke to heal, something Lydia does in her apartment while lighting a candle with the ghost of Krista in the background. Does she know she is being hunted? Is she trying to heal from her projectile wound?

Because shamanic duels take place beyond ordinary reality, it matters little whether what happens in the film is in Lydia’s head. Either way, the catalyst for her demise—real or imagined—is a magical dart. Krista may be the bad shaman who delivered the blow, but Lydia was the one who took her to the Amazon in the first place, and while there, stole sacred plant knowledge for personal gain.

Tár suggests that there is a cost to disturbing the cosmic order of things. On the one hand, the film serves as a metaphor for how drawing power from heteropatriarchal hierarchies rooted in colonialism harms those in positions of privilege, too. On the other hand, it suggests that we cannot think our complex human dramas separately from nonhumans anymore. Tár uprooted plant knowledge from its entanglement with the more-than-human Shipibo world and attempted to instrumentalize it for her petty human concerns. Those of us who watched Tár heard the ícaro at the beginning of the screenplay, but did we listen to it, or, like Lydia, did we notice only what we wanted to and make it all about us?