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On July 1, after several months of dormancy, the actor Kevin Spacey made a rare post on X. He announced to his 3.5 million followers that he had created a “limited-edition collectible ring,” which he was now selling in celebration of America’s semiquincentennial. The jewelry comes engraved with the Latin bromide Per ardua ad astra (translation: “Through adversity, to the stars”). It retails for $120, but for $130 more, you can purchase one that comes packaged in a black collector’s box bearing Spacey’s signature. The rings are not smelted with any precious metals; instead, they are made of “gold-toned stainless steel,” and in the center of the signet—where you might expect to find a gemstone—you’ll instead see two glinting capital letters: an F and a U.
To celebrate America’s 250th birthday, I created a limited-edition collectible ring engraved with Per Ardua Ad Astra—”Through adversity, to the stars.”
Each collector’s box is personally hand-signed by me at https://t.co/eC2qeE0T9T
Very limited quantities available for 3 weeks… pic.twitter.com/9XrlulB92V
— Kevin Spacey (@KevinSpacey) July 1, 2026
The jewelry appears to be in loose dialogue with the elephant in the room: that Spacey was one of the most vivid offenders unmasked during the #MeToo movement, fomenting an era-defining cancellation. Spacey never did admit to much wrongdoing, and a civil trial in 2022 found him not guilty of the most heinous charge levied against him, the alleged molestation of actor Anthony Rapp when the boy was 14 years old and Spacey 26. (He also faced criminal charges for sexual assault in England, though he was acquitted there as well.) Nevertheless, the stench of the accusation clung to Spacey, effectively ending the American Beauty actor’s mainstream career, and he has spent the intervening years since engaged in a series of low-grade grifts and increasingly whinging pleas for attention. He has posted a series of YouTube videos in which he reprises his House of Cards role as Frank Underwood, leveraging the character to defend his own honor. He has been graciously feted on the podcasts of politically unaligned gadflies, most recently a lengthy sit-down with—who else—Bill Maher. He has starred in some minor European movies, produced well outside the bosom of Hollywood, including a Croatian film where he plays the country’s first president. All the while, Spacey has watched his legal bills mount and his houses get foreclosed, and now he is selling ugly signet rings, ostensibly to fend off the creditors a little while longer.
There’s something remarkably familiar about Spacey’s sad course onward as the rest of us watch from the sidelines. The man’s public life ended in 2017, when the first of more than a dozen sexual misconduct allegations came out, but, as it tends to go with these things, he must continue to live anyway. So live he does—but in a strange, shaded way, operating from the detritus of an Oscar-winning career, a past so far removed from his current circumstances it might as well be a dream. It’s familiar because it’s, in essence, the ending of the 2022 psychological drama Tár. To my mind, no piece of media better describes the grotesque state of affairs of the 2020s—long-canceled pariahs roaming the earth, engaging in countless shabby scams, reminding us over and over again that they do still exist, even if that existence is tortured, humiliating, and difficult for the rest of us to think about without wincing—than Todd Field’s prescient film about a renowned figure’s fall from grace. As I stare into the likely A.I.-generated visage of Spacey—poreless, neatly coiffed, and punching forward with panache—attached to his signet-ring tweet, the feeling comes to me: We are living in the end of Tár. And we have been for quite a while.
To quickly recap: Tár’s finale occurs after the title character—the brilliant and troubled classical music conductor Lydia Tár, played with flawless severity by Cate Blanchett—has been banished far from her monastic Manhattan apartment, chased out of professional life due to several cascading scandals centered on her propensity to groom lovers out of her pupils. Tár faces no legal repercussions, but once her covered-up indiscretions go nuclear in the public sphere, she is sufficiently exiled. Her celebrity is diminished beyond repair, her access points to mainstream credibility are sealed off for good, and any outward association with her is rendered toxic. In the final scene, we find her back where she feels most comfortable: in a baroque concert hall, at the helm of an orchestra. But rather than drumming up the symphonies of Mahler, Tár instead brandishes her baton, and we hear the notes of soaring anime music. She has been relegated to southeast Asia, where she presides over an audience of cosplayers tuning in for a live performance of the score for the video game series Monster Hunter.
The reveal is abyssally grim, so much so that I found it almost puke-inducing on first watch. Some aficionados interpreted the end of Tár as something you could call absolution: that the pretentious conductor has been thoroughly humbled, and thus reborn, and can now find joy in bringing her art to the proletariat she once looked down upon. But that’s never been my read. It was always clear to me that the video-game concert represents the deepest caverns of hell Tár could ever conceive of, but in a cruel irony, she isn’t yet dead—this is just her life. No matter how humiliating the endeavor, she still needs to make a living, and she can do that only by being a conductor, for that is the one thing she knows how to do.
When Tár first came out, the country was still adrift in a late-COVID haze. Cancel culture, and its various reckonings, had rocked the social contract, and Lydia Tár was a stand-in for the many esteemed public figures who watched their reputations become decisively tarnished, usually due to an alleged history of sexual coercion and misconduct that was finally coming sharply into view. Justice, or some social-shunning form of it, had been served, but the long-term ramifications of the moment remained up in the air. Therein lies the brilliance of the film’s closing moments. What has been proved since its release, in the wake of #MeToo, is that no matter the degree of degradation, no matter how fundamentally disgraced an offender might be, the canceled figures in our midst have not been put to death. Whole decades still stretch out before us. Through hubris and inertia, these figures will reappear again and again, in ways that are distressing, shameful, or uncanny, because these days, nobody is deplatformed forever. There is all the incentive in the world for a silenced star to speak into the void once more—all it will cost them is their dignity.
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Today there are end-of-Tár examples everywhere for those with the eyes to see. Anthony Weiner trying and failing to energize a political comeback after spending time in jail for sexting a minor is end-of-Tár. Harvey Weinstein emerging as a semiregular guest on Candace Owens’ podcast from his prison cell is end-of-Tár. James Franco settling a sexual harassment suit for $2.2 million and, afterward, spinning up a minor news cycle by claiming to have footage of real-life extraterrestrials is end-of-Tár. Armie Hammer’s acting comeback culminating in a leading role in an ultraracist German action movie is quintessentially end-of-Tár. The same goes for Woody Allen making an elliptical return to the spotlight through the soft-focus confines of a chummy Bari Weiss interview. What is that funny feeling in your stomach when you see Kevin Spacey hawk a kitschy, defiant ring? That combination of secondhand embarrassment and bone-chilling bleakness? It is the exact same feeling I had after watching Lydia Tár play a concert for Monster Hunter fans: This is end-of-Tár shit.
The contours of this phenomenon aren’t new. O.J. Simpson, after his acquittal for murder, spent several ignominious years as a tabloid creature, partying in Las Vegas for the covers of the National Enquirer. Some of these comeback tours turned genuinely redemptive; it will always blow my mind how beloved Mike Tyson is today, given the sexual-assault conviction that sent him to jail. I suppose you could say that the same logic applies to Donald Trump, whose private-life scandals are no secret, and who was ushered out of politics after attempting a coup, only to be reelected into power four short years later. But Trump, and the era he dominates, is also thoroughly suffused with hustles and con jobs, reeking of professional wrestling–style artifice and performative grievances. Really, it is his cultural standard that has given these post-#MeToo sagas their wan, sickly end-of-Tár texture. It feels as if there has never been an easier time in American history to make a quick buck off a meager plot of fame, to rebrand personal failings as conspiratorial victimhood, to rally whatever fans one has left in poorly defined solidarity. Cashing in, impudently, by any means necessary, has become the default, scraps of pride be damned. (After all, what is pride worth—a paltry few cents?) In 2026 it’s never been harder for someone in the spotlight to disappear, because to disappear means to forgo all the streams of income and eyeballs that aggrieved supporters and shitposting lol-ers will readily supply.
Cashing in, impudently, by any means necessary, has become the default.
We’re a long way from where we once were during the height of cancel culture, when contrarians fretted about the ethics of destroying someone’s career for past behavior. In retrospect, we had that all wrong. All of those careers would struggle onward, harried and diminished but stubbornly resilient, because in the 2020s, our collective tolerance for shame has grown truly boundless. Louis C.K. is back on Netflix. Rush Hour director Brett Ratner made a Melania Trump documentary that Amazon reportedly paid $75 million for. Rachel Dolezal, best known for pretending to be a Black woman, is selling Cameo videos for $49.99, and her description of herself reads “Trailblazer-Activist-Artist.” Yes, my friends, we are deep in the end of Tár.
Sometimes I wonder what becomes of Lydia Tár in the months and years after that Monster Hunter concert. Will she start a podcast? Or drift into various right-wing grift orbits? I can imagine her teaching courses on classical music at Jordan Peterson’s fugazi online university, or participating in conservative salons about wokeness in public schools—all, of course, to distract from the actual reasons she has found herself on the outside, looking in. More likely, though, Tár will simply find ways to resurface, over and over again, in ways that makes the rest of us feel clammy and strange—a gnawing hunger for attention that overcomes the fear of any further humiliation. I guess you could call that the human experience.
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source slate.com ’
