Cancel That Culture: Will Cate Blanchett Be Film's Dave Chappelle?

The “Tár” star shines on screen and off

If and when cancel culture goes down the tubes, we might one day point to Dave Chapelle’s Netflix saga as the beginning of the end. Also important was the fact that Netflix execs found their spines. 

Things got spicy. Activists wailed. Twitter lost its mind, and then … business as usual happened. 

Netflix zeroed in on password cheats and documenting the lives of murderers in excruciating detail. 

The “monster under the bed” that has had execs at so many companies so spooked did not devour Netflix. The monster did not even show himself. Perhaps the monster does not exist. (Skittish university presidents might take note.)

But let’s not lose focus—this profile in courage is brought to us by Dave Chappelle. 

Execs stood up to Twitter because Chappelle is Chapelle. He attracts a massive audience (money makes courage easier) and an influential one (Dave is the club member with enough chutzpah to criticize the club). 

The Blue Collar Comedy guys don’t have Chappelle’s pull. 

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Now here’s another artist at the top of her game, Cate Blanchett, who’s pushing back against herd thinking in the film world. 

In an interview with the Radio Times (via CNN), the two-time Academy Award winner says it’s important to have a “healthy critique” of historical works of art, regardless of the artist. 

“If you don’t read older books that are slightly offensive because of what they say in a historical context, then you will never grapple with the minds of the time [and] we are destined to repeat that stuff,” she said.

“Look at Picasso. You can only imagine what went on in, outside and around his studio,” Blanchett went on to say. “But do you look at Guernica and say that is one of the greatest works of art ever? Yes, it’s a fact. It’s important to have a healthy critique.”

Her latest work, “Tár,” is itself an exploration of cancel culture, but with a twist.  

Blanchett scored another Oscar nomination for her depiction of the fictional Lydia Tár, a lesbian conductor at the peak of her powers who is accused of abuse by a young woman. 

That plot did not sit well with Marin Alsop, who, like Tár, is a celebrated lesbian composer, married to a fellow orchestral musician.

"So many superficial aspects of TÁR seemed to align with my own personal life. But once I saw it I was no longer concerned, I was offended: I was offended as a woman, I was offended as a conductor, I was offended as a lesbian."

"To have an opportunity to portray a woman in that role and to make her an abuser — for me that was heartbreaking," Alsop said. "I think all women and all feminists should be bothered by that kind of depiction because it's not really about women conductors, is it? It's about women as leaders in our society. People ask, 'Can we trust them? Can they function in that role?' It's the same questions whether it's about a CEO or an NBA coach or the head of a police department."

She called the film anti-woman. "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. That feels anti-woman. To assume that women will either behave identically to men or become hysterical, crazy, insane is to perpetuate something we've already seen on film so many times before."

Alsop’s concerns seem to mirror those of film festival programers, who balked at the chance to showcase “Waking Up Dead,” a film in which the gay lead is initially transphobic. 

Terracino, the film’s one-name director, is gay himself. He was interested in exploring transphobia within the gay community, but says festival programmers didn’t share that interest. Prominent LGBTQ festivals avoided this offering from the director they had embraced so many times before. 

It’s encouraging that the Academy Awards chose to celebrate a film that might have been dubbed “problematic.” No doubt Blanchett’s talent on and off the screen helped pacify the monster under the bed.

Note how she responds to Alsop. First she brings down the temperature with a compliment. 

"I have the utmost respect for Marin Alsop," Blanchett said during an appearance on BBC Radio 4. "She's a trailblazer of a musician and a conductor.”

But she doesn’t grovel or apologize. She stands her ground and offers a thoughtful response.

"I don't think you could have talked about the corrupting nature of power in as nuanced a way as [director] Todd Field has done as a filmmaker if there was a male at the center of it because we understand so absolutely what that looks like. I think that power is a corrupting force, no matter what one's gender is. I think it affects all of us," she explained.

Kids’ movies often overcorrect for past stereotypes by depicting female characters as unimpeachable leaders who are super brave and really great at math. But SCOOB! doesn’t just deliver boring female characters, it creates a wooden view of humanity where good and bad qualities track pretty closely with immutable characteristics. 

Cate Blanchett realizes that audiences deserve better. She understands that no group has a monopoly on virtue or vice. If gatekeepers continue to follow Blanchett the way some have followed Chappelle, we’ll have better art and better conversations. 

Ted Balaker is a filmmaker whose recent work includes “Little Pink House starring Catherine Keener and Jeanne Tripplehorn,” “Can We Take a Joke?” featuring Gilbert Gottfried and Penn Jillette, and a forthcoming feature documentary based on the bestselling book, The Coddling of the American Mind by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt.