#34 TAYLOR SWIFT’S APOTHEOSIS

Taylor Swift: playing to the upper tier.

Last year I addressed Taylor Swift’s divahood in this space, but with her “Eras” tour that’s dominated the music industry and media this year, she’s raised herself via apotheosis to pop goddess.  What else can you call her, as the camera descends on the roof of the state of the art SoFi Stadium in LA, coming to rest where she strides in on stage, filling the screen in skin tight sequins, knee-high, glittering Louboutin boots, all blonde hair and supermodel looks, ready to kick ass, take names, and entertain.

Maybe that’s something cinema’s supposed to do, right?  Make an ordinary human mythical, immense, not purely in our imaginations but tangibly on our screens.  Nevertheless, you’ve got to be able to hold the screen, or Hollywood and its audiences won’t love you.

But that she does in Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour, a movie meant to give you that concert experience, up close and personal, wide angle and spectacular.  Eschewing the backstage footage, interviews, and the like, it sticks to its performer and the experience she’s crafted for taking you through the ten albums of her career.  Some have commented that the movie moves in a brisker rhythm than the concert itself, and still nears three full hours.

Swift is having a moment, all right, like when Bruce Springsteen got cover stories in Time and Newsweek coming out on the same day.  An artist starts to overwhelm the art and become something further.  The mere fact of her dating Travis Kelce, the superstar tight end for the Kansas City Chiefs, did not raise Swift’s profile, it raised the NFL’s!  It provoked Saturday Night Live to run a skit where the Fox NFL commentator team can’t seem to talk about football—all it can talk about is her.

How to make sense of this?  Maybe I should start with myself.  The stereotypical Taylor Swift fan projects as a screaming teenage girl who bursts into tears when Swift goes into one of her favorite numbers.  I’m 64 fucking years old.  What brought me to this movie?

Almost ten years ago now, I read an enthusiastic review of 1989 (2014), and in possession of disposable income, I bought it for the helluvit, just to defy my own patterns of taste.  I’d never listened to her, but I knew her to be a country pop singer.  Here’s how you know you authentically love a recording, sans any bullshit storylines: you play it over and over and over, and that’s what I’ve done with 1989.  My only issue with it has become that I’ve heard it too many times.

I noted back then that her sense of romantic distress at that point included acknowledgement of her own neuroses: “I’m a nightmare dressed like a daydream” (“Blank Space”).  As a poet, I was taken with the lyrics–their intelligence, depth, and wit–and you could sing along with any of the songs.

She’s a pop artist, pure and simple.  That’s what she’s aiming for: the big crowd.

Against the stage trees.

That view, of course, doesn’t explain her two pandemic albums, where after three drum machine/synthesizer efforts, she went acoustic.  She sloughed off the autobiography and confession, and started telling stories—sharp, felt, like she lives in her characters.  Though we’re treated in the movie to a lot of flashy spectacle, the back dancers (more on Swift’s dancing below), the back up singers and band, the shifting sets, costumes, even mics customized to match her changing outfits, the creative lighting and big screen images, it’s the moments we’re brought into woodsy and cabin imagery of evermore and folklore (2020) where maybe we’re given some deeper access to Swift the artist, the thinker and feeler, with her quill pen, as she describes, writing it all out on parchment.

But here’s one thing that has got to be central to her filling 70,000 seat stadiums like SoFi three or even six nights in a row (!), whatever she’s tried, wherever she’s gone as a musician, she’s succeeded splendidly.  She does a song on acoustic guitar she wrote in ninth grade in the movie (“Our Song”), and it’s great!  That’s certainly one thing so extraordinary about her—the continual excellence of her work.  I’m not exaggerating to say that, though there are some big hits in this movie, like the ginormous “Shake It Off” and the recent “Anti-Hero,” she could easily have chosen an entirely different three hours of material without any loss of quality.

The continually transforming stage sets help set the tone for different periods of her sensibility from each album.  It kind of gets the short-shrift with only three songs, but Fearless (2008), her second record, won four Grammies, including “Album of the Year” and “Best Country Album.”  She’s in the prime of her teens with that one, and in the movie goes pure teen girl romantic with “Love Story,” that climaxes with Romeo finally offering Juliette a ring, and, presumably, “happily ever after” bliss to follow.

A while later we’re in the Reputation (2017) era, and she comes out dressed in skin-tight black writhed with red snakes, full on siren mode.  Romeo and Juliette become “Don’t Blame Me”:

Don’t blame me, love made me crazy
If it doesn’t, you ain’t doin’ it right

Who’s to blame for all this dangerous, addicted passion?  We’re out of the victimized, teen-girl-got-her-heart-trashed thing:

I’ve been breakin’ hearts a long time, and
Toyin’ with them older guys
Just playthings for me to use

In siren mode.

Now she doesn’t seem quite so safe, with plenty of erotic sizzle getting traded on in this mode.

In between these two, comes evermore, possibly more bucolic (trees come out of the stage mist), but here she goes more theatrical, singing the quiet, intense “Tolerate It,” as she sets the dining table beautifully for the unhappy domestic melodrama she’s describing.

So what I’m trying to get across, despite all the splashy big numbers meant to arouse an arena, is that she goes to many of the places her songs explore, and maybe (I’ve got to say this) all the many ways we make ourselves miserable with love or something that resembles it.  Swift’s our dauntless explorer, always returning to tell the tale, nailing it to the wall, and getting us to sing along.

Spreading her wings as she sees fit.

I should mention highlights, though frankly, it’s more an overwhelming, dazzling onslaught.  The ten minute version of “All to Well” does stand out, benefiting from its focus down on her alone (versus back dancers, etc.).  An appropriately vituperative “Vigilante Shit” also stuck out (a favorite of mine), but really, it was an embarrassment of riches.

I landed a lot on Taylor Swift the Performer.  While she doesn’t quite cut it as a full on dancer—singers like Beyonce, Britney Spears, or maybe Megan Thee Stallion all have great dance moves, both instinctive and well-trained—Swift gets a lot out of strutting and skipping around the stage, and has her gestural language developed for expressing the songs and playing off the performers around her.  It’s an indomitable chi that doesn’t seem to flag, despite the lack of intermission.  She doesn’t just play to the first 20 rows; she extends herself to the upper tiers.

The movie puts you on the stage with her, effectively getting across what it might be like to stand in front of 70,000 people as they roar and shriek with love for nothing but you.  She’s thoroughly feminine in every mode, including anger, and expresses it without dilution, exuding sexiness and overflowing with self-confidence.  It’s breathtaking.

When I got back outside the theater with my friends, Tracy and Beka, I commented that nothing seemed more sexual in her performance than the moments Swift stood paused on the stage, glittering and statuesque, taking in all of that love and radiating it back to the crowd.  I bet no drug can touch that high.  Practically multi-orgasmic.

Tracy and Beka went into the show as Swift neophytes and came out fans.  As we stood there, Travis Kelce’s name came up.  I wanted to say that I hoped he had some idea what he was up against with Swift, and a guy in white hair and beard introduced himself as a to the marrow Kansas City Chiefs fan (he’d been to a different movie), confounded yet again overhearing total strangers discuss his team thanks to Taylor Swift, someone he had no interest in at all.

Well, I guess it doesn’t matter when you hit the crest of an epic wave like she has, living a one in a billion life.  It just washes over everyone.  Where does she get the spine to take on all that attention and hold it rapt?  I’ve got no idea.  I know her, though, as the person who shares her thoughts and envisions her world, one I commune with alone much of the time, just like countless teenage girls in countless bedrooms around the globe.  If she wasn’t such a genius at sharing her passionate humanity, I’m sure I could care less, like that Chiefs fan.  Instead I’m grateful for getting put in her getaway car.

Singing to a lovelorn planet.